Greenpeace

In last night's State of the Union address, President Obama said that "(t)o create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." Despite his statement, the President knows better.

Nuclear power is neither safe nor clean. There is no such thing as a "safe" dose of radiation and just because nuclear pollution is invisible doesn't mean it's "clean." For years nuclear plants have been leaking radioactive waste from underground pipes and radioactive waste pools into the ground water at sites across the nation. Mr. Obama was prompted to address the issue when radioactive contamination was found in drinking wells and off the nuclear plant site at Exelon's Braidwood nuclear plant.

In 2006, when the President was serving as a senator from Illinois, he introduced the Nuclear Release Notice Act to address the radioactive contamination of groundwater at several nuclear reactors in his state. Unfortunately, the bill never became law.

Rather than hold nuclear power plant owners accountable for the uncontrolled and unmonitored leaks, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) handed the problem over to the nuclear industry's lobbyists. Despite the fact that tritium releases to groundwater violate the terms of the nuclear plant's license, the NRC has failed to exercise its regulatory authority. Instead, NRC has allowed the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) to create a voluntary industry program to deal with the tritium contamination.

Since then, the trickle of operators of nuclear plants acknowledging that they've contaminated the ground water at their sites has grown into a deluge. The nuclear plants that have admitted leaking radioactive hydrogen or tritium into the groundwater include: Braidwood, Byron & Dresden in Ilinois; Indian Point & Fitzpatrick in New York; Yankee Rowe & Pilgrim in Massachusetts; Three Mile Island & Peach Bottom in Pennsylvania; Callaway in Missouri; Oyster Creek in New Jersey; Hatch in Georgia; Palo Verde In Arizona; Perry in Ohio; Point Beach in Wisconsin; Salem in Delaware; Seabrook in New Hampshire; Watts Bar in Tennessee; Wolf Creek in Kansas; Connecticut Yankee and most recently Vermont Yankee. This NY Times article explains it all.

This list is likely incomplete and still growing. It remains difficult for the public to track which nuclear plants are leaking radioactive contamination because the NRC has failed to update its website since October of 2007 when it abdicated its authority to the industry's voluntary initiative.

The President was then less than pleased with the industry's voluntary regulation of radioactive leaks. Then Senator Obama responded that "(w)hile it's encouraging that the nuclear industry recognizes it has a special responsibility to keep communities informed of tritium leaks, the voluntary guidelines recommended by the Nuclear Energy Institute would still allow tritium leaks to occur without the public ever finding out about it. The nuclear industry already has a voluntary policy, and it hasn't worked."

Obama's comments now seem prophetic. Recently, just one week after the government regulators extended the operating license for the 40-year-old Oyster Creek reactor in New Jersey, the plant owner admitted leaking radioactive contamination into the plants ground water. This most recent revelation has prompted several members of Congress to ask the U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate the leaks and how regulators at the NRC have mishandled the issue.

According to Congressman Ed Markey, who over sees the NRC, "(u)nder current regulations, miles and miles of buried pipes within nuclear reactors have never been inspected and will likely never be inspected." Markey concluded that "(t)his is simply unacceptable. As it stands, the NRC requires-at most-a single, spot inspection of the buried piping systems no more than once every 10 years. This cannot possibly be sufficient to ensure the safety of both the public and the plant."

If President Obama truly wants a clean energy economy and the jobs that come with it, he should abandon the failed policies of the past. Nuclear power is a dirty and dangerous distraction from the clean energy future the President has promised America.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

The announcement of Apple's new iPad, made today by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at an event right here in San Francisco, included a report on the tablet device's environmental stats: Happily, the iPad will be free of PVCs, BFRs, arsenic and mercury. It's very exciting to see that Apple is continuing its industry-leading policy of eliminating toxic chemicals from its products, once again proving that these dangerous substances don't belong in our electronics.

But while Jobs also made the claim that Apple is the industry leader in mobile technologies, he didn’t mention that mobile devices are growing increasingly dependent on cloud computing power, or the fact that the energy powering the cloud can have a big impact on the green cred of mobile devices like the iPad.

In case you’re not familiar with the term, “cloud computing” refers to devices that have little or no processing power and storage of their own, but instead connect to the internet and run web-based applications and access media stored on web servers (as opposed to applications and media stored on your computer's hard drive). Google Docs and Gmail, photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube – these are all part of “the cloud.”

While the rise of cloud computing means we get lots of cool new toys – more powerful smart phones and other high-tech gadgets like the iPad – data storage and cloud computing power are the single largest driver of new electricity demand worldwide. We launched our Cool IT Challenge precisely because tech companies have a huge impact on greenhouse gas emissions, not just in the sense that they're responsible for emitting lots of greenhouse gases but also because they have the potential to play a big part in solutions to climate change.

You can see how all the consumer electronics stack up against each other in terms of green cred on our latest Guide to Greener Electronics.

As a leader in mobile technology, Apple now joins the ranks of big data center users like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM. These companies are building data centers around the globe at alarming rates, and where they choose to build these new data centers can have a huge impact on important decisions about energy policy. For example, we're seeing Google and Apple build data centers in places in the US where there are fights over coal power expansion, and their data centers are being used as justification by politicians and utilities to expand dirty energy power stations.

It's great that the iPad is green. Now Apple and other players in the cloud computing sector must be aggressive advocates for renewable energy to ensure that the cloud powering their products is itself fueled by clean, green energy, not the dirty fuels of the past.

We don't want our fancy new green iPads to be connected to a brown cloud.

Image credit: Gizmodo (via Flickr)

Kert Davies, Greenpeace Research Director and the Director of our Polluterwatch project, sent a letter today calling on Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) to come clean about his post Senate plans.  Senator Dorgan announced earlier this month that he would be retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, and that afterward he would like to "work on energy policy in the private sector."

As Davies writes in the letter;

As a longtime member of Congress I am sure you are aware that, regardless of your actual intentions, this language is often code for legislators who have begun trolling for an influence peddling job after they leave Congress. And, the path from public servant to influence peddler is a sadly well-worn one: Rep. Bob Livingston, Senator John Breaux, Rep. Billy Tauzin, and Senator Trent Lott.

I recall seeing you as a speaker at the oil industry’s controversial, pay-to-play forum on December 1^st, just five weeks before you announced your retirement. As you will recall, this highly questionable exercise was one in which Newsweek was caught renting out its name, credibility and top pundit to big oil’s influence peddler, Jack Gerard. We were able to document Mr. Gerard’s unwillingness to answer basic questions about the purchase price of Newsweek’s credibility, and you can see the results at youtube.com/polluterwatch.

Indeed, Senator Dorgan was the lone senator appearing beside American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard at the API sponsored Newsweek "Energy Forum," as shown in the photo below from that event.  Greenpeace called on the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate the Big Oil sponsored panel held inside the US capitol.

Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) appears with American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard at the API sponsored Newsweek "Energy Forum"

Greenpeace is calling on Senator Dorgan to:

• List the dirty energy lobbyists and their respective clients with whom you have had contact about your next job.
• Release all details of phone calls, emails or meetings you have had with prospective employers from energy interests who have lobbied you or your office. Of particular interest are Washington-area lobbying and public relations firms.
• Pledge that you will wait until after an energy bill is passed this year to engage in any further discussions about future employment with interests that lobby you.

You can read the full text of the letter to Senator Dorgan here.

It's a great day to be a fish!

In an unprecedented policy shift, the Target Corporation – one of the largest retailers in the United States and a direct competitor with Walmart – has just today announced the elimination of all farmed salmon products from its stores.  Fresh, frozen, shelf-stable, and smoked items will from here on out exclusively be made with wild Alaskan salmon — no exceptions.  Even its sushi department, which is notoriously the most stubborn part of this industry when it comes to change (thus the existence of this website), is in the process of phasing out the last bits of its farmed salmon.

While this act is truly staggering in its magnitude and its implications for the seafood retail industry, of equal importance are the reasons behind Target’s decision.  The company does not mince words when it comes to why they have made this transition — Target’s communications department clearly states that the company is not interested in supporting an industry that has done such harm to our marine ecosystems.  Their press release spells it out quite simply:  “Target is taking this important step to ensure that its salmon offerings are sourced in a sustainable way that helps to preserve abundance, species health and doesn’t harm local habitats… Many salmon farms impact the environment in numerous ways – pollution, chemicals, parasites and non-native farmed fish that escape from salmon farms all affect the natural habitat and the native salmon in the surrounding areas.”

This move will undoubtedly shake the salmon farming industry to its very core.  Target, after all, is not exactly a high-end gourmet market – rather, it’s a price leader that specializes in providing quality products for low prices.  How, then, does a market that worships price-driven competition manage to eschew an item that embodies the very concept of bargain seafood?

With help from Greenpeace and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Target has opened the door to a new era of seafood – one that dares to question tired old paradigms that cannot withstand this kind of innovation.  Retailers which have parroted the weary excuse of farmed salmon filling an otherwise unattainable price point will now be exposed as complacent rather than pragmatic.  If a low-cost hypermarket like Target, which needs to sell salmon for $6.99 a pound, can manage to transition entirely to wild, sustainable product, how can the Whole Foods clones of the world defend their reliance on environmentally dubious farmed products that sell for over twice the price?

Conventional farmed salmon is caught between a rock and a hard place, and it is not a moment too soon.  Salmon farms have been the source of countless problems over the past decade – diseases in Chilean farms rip through penned animals like hot knives through butter; parasite swarms in Canadian farms threaten the very survival of co-habiting wild salmon runs, not to mention the essence of Pacific Northwest cultural integrity.

Salmon are the backbone of who we are here on the west coast.  It is the wild salmon runs that bring nutrients from the sea to the land, that fertilize the river banks and feed the yawning bears.  If we allow this, our greatest legacy, to perish at the hands of a small group of cash-blinded eco-criminals, it is doubtful that we will ever find another source of such selfless bounty.

We need courage, innovation, and foresight if we are to create a wise and responsible seafood industry that can steward our oceans in the coming decades, and it’s companies like Target that are leading the charge.  Remember this day — this was the day that we took our salmon back.

Ensuring polluter profits are safe from pesky environmental regulations sure is hard work. Just ask Senator Lisa Murkowski, who had to have polluter lobbyists and former Bush administration officials Jeff Holmstead and Roger Martella help write the Dirty Air Act, which she introduced yesterday in an attempt to block the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse gases.

Greenpeace activist and “PolluterWatch TV” correspondent Aliya Haq thought that Murkowski and her polluter lobbyist allies might be too busy devising new ways to gut the Clean Air Act and protect pulluter profits to properly thank one another for the roles they each played in getting the Dirty Air Act introduced on the Senate floor yesterday. So she dropped by their offices with flowers and cards:

There’s more about Murkowski’s working relationship with big polluter lobbyists, and the $50,000 she had their clients donate to her campaign fund even while Martella and Holmstead were helping write her legislation, over on PolluterWatch.

 

Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski is switching tactics in her attempts to gut the Clean Air Act on behalf of big polluters. Her amendment to strip the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act caused an uproar when it was revealed that two polluter lobbyists had helped write it. Now Murkowski has introduced a resolution to roll back the EPA's endangerment finding altogether, and she has the support of 35 other Republicans – as well as three Democrats.

Murkowski offered a “resolution of disapproval” yesterday that, if passed, would essentially be a Congressional veto of the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare, which was a necessary first step before the agency could begin to regulate those emissions. The Murkowski amendment would have stripped that regulatory capability from the EPA, and per the Senate's rules would have required 60 votes to pass. The resolution, on the other hand, only requires 51 votes.

The "resolution of disapproval" Murkowski has now introduced may be a different tactic, but it’s just another attempt by the Senator and her polluter lobbyist pals to gut the Clean Air Act and let King Coal and Big Oil off the hook.

The three Democratic Senators who have supported the resolution Murkowski offered on behalf of big polluters – Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska – have all taken substantial campaign donations from the same polluter lobbyists who helped write the Murkowski amendment and their clients, as we detailed in a report issued earlier this week.

As you can see from these latest developments, it’s extremely important that we keep reminding our Senators that they were elected to represent us, not big polluters. Take action right now to tell your Senators that you expect them to protect your health and wellbeing, not the profits of polluters.

Last week it was revealed that Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska worked with big polluter lobbyists to draft the Dirty Air Act — a.k.a. the Murkowski amendment — which would strip the EPA's authority to regulate global warming pollution from stationary sources like coal plants, oil refineries, and factories, authority granted to the agency by the Clean Air Act. This move to protect the profits of polluting industries instead of the planet is unaccpetable, and we are asking everyone to write to their Senator now to urge them to vote against Murkowski's big polluter amendment.

Murkowski’s spokesman, Robert Dillon, is now claiming that they have secured a Democratic cosponsor for the Dirty Air Act. Kate Sheppard, an investigative reporter from Mother Jones, speculated that five Democrats were the most likely to have partnered with Murkowski on the amendment.

All of these Democrats have a history of taking polluter campaign cash, so today we sent a letter to each of them asking them to make it clear where they stand. We also released a report detailing the campaign contributions that these five Democratic Senators have taken from the lobbying clients of Jeffrey Holmstead and Roger Martella, the DC influence-peddlers accused of funneling campaign cash to Senator Murkowski at the same time that they were pushing and helping write the Dirty Air Act.

• Mary Landrieu of Louisiana (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Mary Landrieu has directly received $152,668 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Blanche Lincoln, who is the Chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee and has jurisdiction over clean energy legislation moving through the Senate, has directly received $139,766 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Jim Webb of Virginia (letter PDF)
  Since 2005, Senator Jim Webb has directly received $25,700 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Byron Dorgan of North Dakota (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Byron Dorgan has directly received $119,446 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.
• Ben Nelson of Nebraska (letter PDF)
  Since 1997, Senator Ben Nelson has directly received $65,770 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees.

All told, these five Senators have directly received $503,350 from these two lobbyists, their firms, their climate legislation clients, their PACs and employees, since 1997. Read the full report here.

We can’t let polluter lobbyists and their allies in Congress gut the Clean Air Act. Take action now to tell your Senator to vote NO on the Murkowski amendment.

*Note: All data for this report comes from FEC records obtained by www.opensecrets.org. Contributions received from Jeffrey Holmstead, Roger Martella, the PACs and employees of Bracewell Giuliani, Sidley Austin, the National Alliance of Forest Owners, the Alliance of Food Associations, the Ameren Corporation, Arch Coal, CSX Corporation, Duke Energy, Edison Electric, the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, Energy Future Holdings, Mirant Corporation, the Portland Cement Association, Progress Energy, the Salt River Project, and Southern Company were all included in this report.

The flurry of the end of the year is over. Looking back, 2009 was an incredible year for the environment. The Boreal Forest now has Kimberly-Clark on its side, the House has agreed to make our communities and earth a safer place, and Nike and Timberland said "No" to Amazon destruction. And that's just a handful.

So, thank you everyone, from the people on the streets to the folks in the board room and all of you in between that helped the earth in 2009. (Yours truly at 2:21.)

 

 

Here's looking forward to 2010!

When I wrote "big polluters are now on the offensive to protect their profits, and their allies in Congress are only too happy to help them," I was actually under the assumption that Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski was just taking her cues from polluter lobbyists. But it turns out that she actually worked with lobbyists who represent "some of the worst polluters in the nation" while writing the amendment she was planning to propose next week that would strip the EPA's authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, according to Brendan Demelle over at DesmogBlog.

Update: Politico has some new revelations about how deeply involved the lobbyists were in writing the Murkowski amendment. According to the article, they "led" a meeting in which they "walked Senate staffers through the details of the amendment."

Our own Kert Davies has a great quote in Demelle’s post, which also sheds some light on just why Murkowski might be in bed with corporate polluters whose interests are definitely not those of the people Murkowski ostensibly represents:

"This Murkowski rider should be called the Protect Dirty Polluters amendment, especially since we now know that it was written by polluter lobbyists," Kert Davies, Director of the new PolluterWatch project at Greenpeace, told me today.

"If this amendment passed, it would be a get out of jail free card for the worst polluters from Big Oil and Big Coal," Davies said.

And who better to deliver this gift to the carbon barons?  A darling of the Carbon Club, Sen. Murkowski has received $470,000 in campaign contributions from dirty energy and mining interests since 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

This just points out the obvious: Big polluters hold an inordinate amount of influence over our elected representatives. Our pockets may not be as deep as theirs, but we have the numbers – and we need to push back hard. Only overwhelming grassroots demand for climate solutions can overcome corporate polluters' money.

Sign our petition to call on the Senators who were elected to represent you to vote in your interest, not in the interest of corporate polluters.

We sent a letter to Senator Barbara Boxer, chair of the Senate’s ethics panel, stating, “We think the public deserves at least an inquiry from the Senate Committee on Ethics into the depth of the relationship between Senator Murkowski’s staff and these two lobbyists.” So there’s obviously more to come on this story. Stay tuned. And in the meantime, sign our petition and help us push back against the polluter lobbyists.

The History Channel's Life After People: Toxic Revenge airs tonight at 9pm eastern. We're all excited that it includes an interview with Greenpeace's toxics campaigner, Rick Hind.

If you find yourself in front of the TV this evening, flip to the History Channel and check it out.

You can go to their website for show information and times.

--Michelle

 

Jasper Teulings, general counsel at Greenpeace International, writes about the release of our "Red Carpet Four." He says the restriction of peaceful protest against a problem as pressing as climate change is a serious threat to democracy. An edited version of this article was also published in the UK's Guardian Weekly.



Whether the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Summit has dealt a mortal blow to the process of international climate negotiations in their current form is an important question currently under debate. A broader issue that is receiving attention in a handful of European countries is the future of civil disobedience, especially in the fight for climate justice.

On December 17, three Greenpeace activists made a special appearance at a banquet hosted by the Queen of Denmark for Heads of State attending the UN climate summit in Copenhagen. Juan, dressed in a tuxedo, and Nora, decked out in an H&M red floor-length gown, were waved through the high security cordon in their three-car convoy. They were ushered up the red carpet and, arriving inside, unfurled two banners reading "Politicians Talk, Leaders Act". They were arrested, along with two other activists, Christian and Joris. On January 6 – after substantial international public and diplomatic pressure – the "Red Carpet Four" were finally released.

The theoretical roots of civil disobedience are usually traced to Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience". Thoreau believed that the individual, who grants the state its power in the first place, must follow the dictates of his conscience in opposing unjust laws. (His ideas on civil disobedience reflected time he spent imprisoned for his refusal to pay a poll tax that supported the Mexican-American War and slavery.) Today civil disobedience is generally defined as a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies.

What the Red Carpet Four did was classic civil disobedience.

Before her arrest, Nora told an interviewer that she was aware of the possible consequences of what she intended to do: "It's a personal risk of spending a couple of days in prison.... You have to compare it to people who are affected by climate change and if we can do just a little to support them in this way then I am happy to do it."

Nora assumed, as did we all, that in Denmark the law would play by the law. She would be arrested, charged, released until trial and then, if convicted, perhaps sentenced to a fine or some time in jail.

Nora, charged but not convicted, was held for twenty days in a prison cell. For most of this time she was permitted to receive no letters, books or family visits. From arrest through Christmas and New Year she was not allowed to meet with her husband and two young children.

Over the nearly four decades of Greenpeace’s history, the organisation has abided by its core values of bearing witness and peaceful protest. The protest for which the Four were arrested was a piece of political theatre in line with this tradition. It relied entirely on simple, readily available materials and included several elements of farce. For instance, Greenpeace logos in the windscreens of cars rented by the activists were in one case wedged in place by a pair of socks. One of the car number plates included "007" – a reference to James Bond. Blue flashing lights were bought for a few dollars off the internet.

After the arrest, Greenpeace guaranteed that, if the activists were released, they would voluntarily return to Copenhagen to stand trial. To further facilitate the police investigation, Greenpeace immediately offered its full co-operation to Danish police and provided them with comprehensive details of the activity. A request from Greenpeace asking the Danish police to specify what additional information they required in order to complete their investigation was met with two weeks of silence. While the police claimed their detention was necessary for the investigation, it turns out that the Four were only questioned briefly on their first day in custody and for 15 minutes shortly before their release.

History shows that civil disobedience has been an effective method of instigating social change and ameliorating unjust laws. While it involves breaking the law, it also makes laws and has been at the heart of many of the great social advances in modern historical times; from the Boston Tea Party, anti-slavery and civil rights, to womens’ right to vote.

Examples set by Gandhi, King and Mandela represent the kind of disobedience aiming to guarantee legal protection for the basic rights of individuals. Contemporary civil disobedience as seen in the fight against climate change focuses not solely on individuals' basic rights, but also on broader issues of justice.

In the case of the Red Carpet Four, civil disobedience was clearly used as a mechanism for repairing a democratic deficit. Civil society had been shut out from the climate negotiations and it was clear that on the evening before the final day of the conference a credible deal was nowhere in sight. Via a harmless peaceful protest, the Four aimed to impress on world leaders the urgency felt by citizens to act against global warming. While the Red Carpet Four were willing to accept legitimate legal ramifications, they were subjected to an unwarranted and unjustified detention.

In the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore: "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience..." NASA’s Chief Scientist Dr. James Hansen and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer have made similar calls for civil disobedience to save the climate in recent years.

British human rights lawyer Richard Harvey has questioned whether this detention is in line with European and international norms stating that, "The Danish authorities must regard legitimate protest as an essential element of democratic discourse and freedom of expression. Such prolonged pre-trial detention appears to be a flagrant violation of key articles of international human rights agreements requiring those awaiting trial to be released when they guarantee to appear in court and for them to be entitled to trial within a reasonable time."

Let me give you two recent examples of how civil disobedience ideally works. The first is from late 2008.

Six Greenpeace activists, known as "The Kingsnorth Six", were accused of causing £30,000 of criminal damage to the Kingsnorth power station in the UK. They scaled a smoke stack and painted "Bin it Gordon" on the side. They were arrested and then released pending trial. In a victory for climate justice, their defence of "lawful excuse" – taking direct action to protect the climate from the burning of coal - was accepted by the jury.

The second example is a court verdict from 4 January 2010. Last July, 11 Greenpeace protesters unfurled an enormous banner on Mount Rushmore national monument, in South Dakota. Positioned just next to the head of President Lincoln was the face of President Obama and a slogan that read, “America Honors Leaders, Not Politicians: Stop Global Warming.” The goal was to challenge the President to take a strong stance on climate change in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate summit.

The court in South Dakota allowed the activists to return home pending trial. All duly returned for their day in court, including an activist resident in the Netherlands. In sentencing the activists on 4 January, the judge in South Dakota noted the care they had exercised with regard to the monument, their motivations and the tradition of peaceful protest in the United States. The sentences involved fines of $460 each. One activist spent two days in jail, the others received 50-100 hours of community service.

Restriction of peaceful protest against a problem as pressing as climate change is a serious threat to democracy. Given the failure of the Copenhagen climate summit to come up with the fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty necessary to avert climate change it will take the will of the world to make politicians act.

Civil disobedience is one of the few tools that remain for civil society to participate in the conversation. It is an ultimate act of citizenship. In the words of historian Howard Zinn: “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”

It is in the interest of all of us to make sure that prolonged preventive and pre-trial detentions are not used to stifle freedom of expression and that they remain the exception.

-Jasper Teulings
General Counsel and advocaat
Greenpeace International

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Image
Switzerland
A Greenpeace volunteer holding a candle in front of the Royal Danish Embassy at a candlelight vigil. With the peaceful protest Greenpeace appeals to the Danish authorities to release the Red Carpet Four.
© Greenpeace / Nicolas Fojtu

In July 2008, Greenpeace and Cascadia Wildlands Project filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Forest Service alleging that the agency had violated environmental laws in the planning of four logging projects in Alaska's Tongass National Forest, one of the chief habitats of the rare Islands wolf. Today, the two groups, along with the Tongass Conservation Society, have again filed suit to protect the Islands wolf. We're asking a federal court to stop the so-called Logjam timber project from moving forward.

The Logjam project would allow logging of 3,422 acres on Prince of Wales Island, which has already been subject to heavy logging since the 1950s. In order to move an estimated 73 million more board feet of timber out of the area, 22 miles of new roads would be built. This means that yet again the Forest Service is allowing an ill-conceived timber project to move forward despite the fact that it greatly imperils wildlife like the Islands wolf, the wolves’ primary prey, Sitka black-tailed deer, and local salmon populations.

The following series of images shows the character of the forest already impacted by previous logging (plus natural fragmentation and lower quality forest), followed by the same shots with logging unit boundaries drawn in by hand by our own intrepid Alaska-based forest campaigner, Larry Edwards, as accurately as possible from project maps.



You can check these images out in a larger format here. Read a whole bunch more about the lawsuit and the environmental laws that are violated by the Forest Service's flawed environmental impact statement (EIS) here.

"The Climate Killers" is a great feature in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine that profiles some of the most powerful polluter lobbyists and what they've been doing to derail efforts to address global warming. A few of the seventeen guys might surprise you, but a lot of them are the same old CEOs, politicians, and industry-paid deniers that have spent so many years blocking progress toward a clean energy future. Here's what it says about Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute:

According to an internal memo leaked in August, Gerard directed API’s nearly 400 member companies to mobilize their employees to attend “Energy Citizen” rallies in 20 states to protest a cap on carbon pollution. To ensure the success of the fake grass-roots protests, Gerard bragged that he had also enlisted a bevy of polluting allies — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. “Please treat this information as sensitive,” Gerard cautioned in the memo. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan.”

Greenpeace has been taking on the American Petroleum Institute, Big Oil’s top lobbying group, and other powerful corporate interests with a vested interest in keeping America addicted to fossil fuels for years. After we exposed API’s astroturf campaign to fake “grassroots” opposition to climate legislation, we’ve kept up the pressure as the lobby group paid Newsweek to host an energy forum with lawmakers inside the Capitol Building. On his way out, we confronted Gerard, demanding to know how much he paid for access to the halls of power:

Last month, even as the Copenhagen climate talks were sinking further and further into chaos, a bit of welcome climate news came our way when the EPA finally issued its official ruling that greeenhouse gas emissions endanger human health and welfare. This finding compels the agency to regulate those emissions.

Predictably, big polluters are now on the offensive to protect their profits, and their allies in Congress are only too happy to help them.

The Senate will soon vote on the “Murkowski amendment,” so called because it was proposed by Alaskan Senator Lisa Murkowski on behalf of big polluters. (The vote is currently scheduled for January 20th, but that can change.) The amendment was proposed as what’s called a “rider” to a completely unrelated bill – a bill that has nothing to do with the climate whatsoever, but instead is intended to raise the ceiling on US public debt. This is a blatant and concerted effort by polluting industries and their allies in Congress to gut the Clean Air Act and delay efforts to reduce GHG emissions. We’ve got to stop them.

We can’t let polluting industries lock us in to several more years of dirty fossil fuels. We need policies that will move us toward taking the actions necessary to stop global warming and kickstart an energy revolution, not policies that strip us of one of the key tools we have available for reining in emissions. You can help by writing to your Senator and letting them know that you expect them to represent you, not polluters, and that you expect them to vote against Murkowski’s big polluter amendment.

As I look forward to 2010 and embrace the year ahead, I can’t help but get a little nostalgic. I find myself looking back at the last year and reminiscing about where we’ve been and what we’ve accomplished together.

It was my first year as Greenpeace’s Executive Director, and I started my job in typical Greenpeace style - by locking myself to a crane ladder high above Washington, DC to call attention to world leaders about the dangers of global warming.

That was just the first of many actions Greenpeace took this year to highlight the dire urgency of global warming. We “installed” wind turbines in "the Windy City," hung banners off of bridges in Pittsburgh, created a climate crime scene outside the Chamber of Commerce in Washington DC, and unveiled 50,000 of your signatures in a giant banner underneath President Obama’s helicopter as he returned home from Oslo.

And of course, Greenpeace activists scaled Mount Rushmore to hang President Obama’s face alongside the faces of the former presidents with the message that read, “America Honors Leaders, not Politicians: Stop Global Warming.” The eleven brave activists recently convicted of climbing Mt. Rushmore will each pay a fine of $460 and will perform community service in the National Park system. One activist, Matt Leonard, served two days in jail because of his past civil disobedience work.

I’m proud of our activists and everything they did in 2009, but as I look back over the year, I’m even more impressed by what YOU have been able to accomplish this year:

•    Kimberly-Clark agreed not to cut ancient forests to make Kleenex and other products and set a new standard for the global paper industry.
•    The House of Representatives passed landmark chemical security legislation.
•    Timberland and Nike, after receiving hundreds of comments from you, helped force cattle and leather industry giants to protect the Amazon Rainforest.
•    Clorox Company announced plans to convert all of its U.S. factories from dangerous chlorine gas to safer chemical processes.

I can’t emphasize enough the enormous impact of these victories, or thank you enough for helping to achieve them.

I know that 2010 will bring many challenges our way, and I’m confident that Greenpeace is uniquely equipped to deal with them. But we can’t succeed without your help!

My New Year’s resolution is to close the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, pass chemical security legislation in the Senate and to convince Trader Joe’s to listen to their customers and adopt sustainable seafood policies. Will you help me make my New Year’s resolutions come true?

I can’t thank you enough for your support in 2009, and I’m really looking forward to all that 2010 has in store for us.

--Phil

Greenpeace just released the 14th edition of the Guide to Greener Electronics. The guide looks at the 18 top manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones, TV's and games consoles and ranks them according to their policies on toxic chemicals, recycling and climate change.

In the 14th edition, some companies did better, some did worse and a bunch continued to do nothing to improve their score.

A big thumbs up for Apple, Sony Ericsson and Nokia. They are leading the way for product ranges free of the worst hazardous substances with HP following their lead. HP just released the Compaq 8000f Elite business desktop, it’s first completely PVC and BFR free product, at CES 2010.

Two thumbs down for Samsung, Dell, Lenovo and LG Electronics (LGE). They pick up penalty points in the Guide for failing to follow through on a promised phase-out of toxics in their products.

What may seem like a toxic alphabet soup, PVC and BFRs, are actually very dangerous substances that are found in many electronics products. PVC contaminates humans and the environment throughout its lifecycle; during its production, use, and disposal it's the single most environmentally damaging of all plastics, and can form dioxin, a known carcinogen, when burned. Some BFRs are highly resistant to degradation in the environment and are able to build up in animals and humans.

You can get involved by joining in our twitter petition. We're calling Samsung out on twitter with this petition: petition @Samsungtweets to follow Apple SonyEricsson and HP, and eliminate harmful chemicals like PVC http://act.ly/1l1 RT to sign #actly

To learn more, you can check out the report or read our web story that gives you a shortened overview of the report (it’s 37 pages long).

--Michelle

CES 2010. The lights, the sounds, the greenwash. Greenpeace analysts are once again here at the "World's Largest" consumer electronics show to help consumers and the throngs of industry media to see through the haze of both positive green news and industry misinformation.

While some electronics makers have moved to eliminate toxic chemicals in their products — Apple, for instance, which has phased out both PVC vinyl plastic and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) — others lag behind. Samsung, Dell, Lenovo, and LGE stand out as laggards, but HP had made news today by bringing to the market the first desktop PC to be free of both PVC and BFRs.

So, if both Apple and HP have shown the way, why is the rest of the industry behind? That’s a question we hope those at CES will ask of the companies as they tour around looking at all the hot new gadgets.


What are PVC and BFRs?
PVC contaminates humans and the environment throughout its lifecycle; during its production, use, and disposal it is the single most environmentally damaging of all plastics, and can form dioxin, a known carcinogen, when burned. Some BFRs are highly resistant to degradation in the environment and are able to bio-accumulate (build up in animals and humans).

With the growth of electronic waste, workers who deal with e-waste and the wider community are at significant health risks. Burning of e-waste to recover valuable resources, as routinely takes place in the backyards of China, India and much of the South, can form dioxins. Eliminating the substances will decrease exposure and increase the recyclability and reusability of electronic products.

Greenpeace at CES
Greenpeace will be all over CES for the next three days. At 10am Thursday in the Venetian Hotel, we’ll be having a press conference to debut version 14 of the Guide to Greener Electronics, a ranking of the top consumer electronics companies based on both their commitments and actions to phase out toxic chemicals and other important green criteria.

We’ll also be handing out awards at 3PM everyday for the “Best New Green Products” as well as the “Worst Greenwash.” On Saturday afternoon, we’ll give the big prizes for the best and worst for the whole week.

In 2010, we should see significant developments, with products free of PVC and BFRs in the PC and TV markets. Any company failing to achieve this goal is taking a big gamble with its green reputation.

The eleven climate activists who made history when they pulled off a banner hang at Mount Rushmore last July appeared in court today for sentencing. They all pled guilty to the charge of "Climbing Mount Rushmore" and received a fine of $460 each. They will also perform 50-100 hours of community service in the National Park system depending on their individual sentences. The judge requested that some or all of that service be performed at Mt. Rushmore.

There had been three additional charges originally brought against the activists – Basil Tsimoyianis, Brian Jenkins, Cy Wagoner, Hope Kaye, Jessica Miller, Joe Smyth, Madelaine Gardner, Mary Sweeters, Matt Leonard, Noah Mace, and Simran McKenna – but those were all dismissed. The charges against Greenpeace were also dropped.


One of the activists, Matt Leonard, was sentenced to 2 days of jail time because he has a history of standing up for what he believes in through civil disobedience. It's disappointing that he'll be going to jail for standing up for the climate, but all the more reason not to let the message the Rushmore Eleven were trying to send to President Obama get lost in the noise. I'll let Matt tell it as he told Democracy Now! right after the event: