Category Archives: Fossil fuels

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“Sandy Senators” Call for Swift Action on Carbon Limits

In a letter sent to President Obama today, five Democratic Senators from states most effected by Superstorm Sandy called for “swift action” on carbon pollution standards for power plants.

There’s been much discussion lately about infrastructure improvements that could help protect communities from extreme weather events caused or made worse by climate change. Those measures, which, wrote the Senators, will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, “demonstrate the urgency of squarely addressing the causes of climate change and its effects.”

The Senators wrote that Congressional failure to take action on climate change makes executive action “setting carbon pollution standards for existing power plants… a necessity.”

The letter, below, was signed by Senators Robert Melendez (NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), Charles Schumer (NY), Christopher Murphy (CT), and Richard Blumenthal (CT).

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Has Keystone XL Fight Rebooted the Environmental Movement?

The Keystone XL pipeline is a very real threat to the environment. If burned, the Canadian tar sand oil the pipeline is meant to carry will pump tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, increasing the devastation of climate change. Pipeline leaks of dilbit (diluted bitumen) could contaminate the vast and vital Ogallala aquifer. (Read the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning series on a dilbit leak in Michigan to get a sense of what’s at stake.)

Dilbit pipeline leak in Arkansas forces evacuation, March 2013 (Photo credit: EPA)

The fight against Keystone XL also has a symbolic component, Bryan Farrell argues over at Slate.

The greatest environmental threat of our era, global climate change, has lacked the kind of focus and specificity that allows organizers to, well, organize. The problems are so varied. Rising ocean levels, forest fires, flooding, the death of coral reefs from acidification. Paradoxically, climate change is hard to fight in part because the threat is so large and multifaceted. Overwhelmed, many people simply throw up their hands and give up.

That, says Farrell (editor at the excellent site Waging Nonviolence), is where the movement against the Keystone XL comes in.

[The anti-Keystone movement] was never about just a pipeline. [Bill] McKibben and a handful of others had another, less talked about goal—to remake the environmental movement into something far more active, creative, and formidable for years to come. The gap that once existed between mainstream environmental groups and grass-roots activists has now largely dissolved, resulting in widespread action that has not been seen in the United States for decades—perhaps even since the first Earth Day in April 1970.On that day, mainstream environmental groups with roots going back to the conservation movement of the early 20th century united with grass-roots activists for a day of teach-ins, influenced by the burgeoning student anti-war movement. Amid the thousands of demonstrations that took place across the nation, there was at least one major act of civil disobedience, in which 15 people were arrested for holding a mock funeral inside Boston’s Logan Airport. Interestingly enough, it was a sort of proto-climate protest against a supersonic plane and its accompanying release of water vapor—a major greenhouse gas.

via Bill McKibben’s fight against Keystone XL: The movement against the pipeline was always an attempt to bridge the divide between mainstream environmental groups and grass-roots activists. - Slate Magazine.