MASS CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE TO DEFEAT “FALSE” CLIMATE BILL
• Climate SOS Tours to "Kill The Bill" and push tougher laws
• Nonviolent civil disobedience, office occupations, and protests on both coasts
• "Worse Than Nothing is Not Good Enough"
(Sept. 8, 2009) Climate SOS, a grassroots network of environmentalists, scientists, and social justice activists, is launching a nationwide car-free tour
to defeat the climate bill now being considered in the Senate -- and to demand that any new legislation be grounded in science instead of politics. www.ClimateSOS.org
Capping the tour on September 22, Climate SOS plans mass nonviolent civil disobedience, office occupations and protests in San Francisco, Seattle, Boston and New York. Climate SOS will occupy California senator Barbara Boxer’s office in San Francisco and Senator John Kerry's Boston office on that day.
The Climate SOS Heartland Tour will feature meetings with senate staffers in North Dakota, Indiana, Arkansas, and Ohio. Climate SOS organizer Duff Badgley, traveling exclusively by bus and train, will touch down in Bismarck on September 8, in Indianapolis (September 10-11), Little Rock (September 14-15), and Cleveland (September 17-18). His message? "Kill the Bill—Worse Than Nothing is Not Good Enough!"
Leading Climate scientist Dr. James Hansen has personally endorsed the Climate SOS campaign. According to Hansen, if the Senate climate bill is based upon the House-passed American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACESA), it will be "worse for the environment than doing nothing."
Climate SOS maintains that cap-and-trade will be ineffective in forestalling climate change, while risking the next and biggest market crash, and that ACESA falls far short of the emission reduction targets required by science. The group supports safeguarding EPA authority over greenhouse gas emissions regulation, opposes the use of carbon offsets, and believes that polluting coal plants should be phased out rapidly. Climate SOS asserts that incineration technologies must not be categorized as “renewable,” and targets loopholes in the bill that allow unlimited carbon dioxide emissions from biomass and trash burners. (Call to Action here)
Climate SOS holds that social justice concerns must be central to any climate legislation, and maintains that the federal climate bill currently under consideration would:
• Prevent the U.S. from making its fair share of greenhouse gas reductions—reductions necessary to forge an effective global strategy on climate stabilization and to avert catastrophic climate change.
• Lock the United States into a complex cap-and-trade scheme that benefits fossil fuel industries, utilities, Wall Street, and agribusinesses. Cap and trade will be prone to Enron-style market manipulations, while doing nothing to save the climate.
• Use public money to subsidize the most polluting industries, drawing much needed financing away from real climate solutions.
• Add more polluting smokestacks, especially in backyards of the poor, people of color, and indigenous communities across the U.S., by grandfathering dirty old coal plants, permitting numerous new ones, and subsidizing incinerators as a form of renewable energy.
• Trigger forest destruction domestically and abroad, by ignoring carbon emissions from biomass incinerators, and through its failure to incorporate indirect land use change provisions in the Renewable Fuel Standards (RFS) for biofuels.
Contacts:
Duff Badgley, Founder, One Earth Climate Action Group,
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
206.283.0621
Rachel Smolker, Co-director, Biofuelwatch
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
802.482.2848 (o), 802.735.7794 (m)
-- Climate SOS - www.ClimateSOS.org
No dirty climate bill, no false solutions! email:
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
* * * * *
Editor's note: What might happen with these tactics? Dr. Rachel Smolker, involved in the new campaign described above, was also involved in the takeover of the offices of Environmental Defense Fund late last fall in Washington, D.C.: see Climate Activists Invade DC Offices of Environmental Defense. She is the daughter of a co-founder of EDF.
Culture Change mailing address: P.O. Box 3387, Santa Cruz, California, 95063, USA, Telephone 1-215-243-3144 (and fax). Culture Change was founded by Sustainable Energy Institute (formerly Fossil Fuels Policy Action), a nonprofit organization.
Some articles are published under Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107. See Fair Use Notice for more information.
