Greenpeace

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has just issued a report declaring 2000 to 2009 to be the hottest decade on record and the evidence of man-made global warming to be "undeniable." Around 300 scientists from nearly 50 countries contributed to the NOAA report, which tracked 11 different indicators of climate change and found that seven of them – including air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, sea level, and humidity – are indeed rising.

Moreover, according to Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK's Met Office, one of the agencies participating in the NOAA study, “The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”

Yet within this context, a flak from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Myron Ebell, still has the gall to say, "It's clear that the scientific case for global warming alarmism is weak. The scientific case for [many of the claims] is unsound and we are finding out all the time how unsound it is."

This is what the climate deniers’ tactics basically amount to: Covering their ears and singing. “La la la I can’t hear you everything is fine we need oil and coal lalala.”

The worst part is, it works. That’s why we have to push back.

The science is settled: Global warming is happening and human activities are causing it. But the reporter who wrote this article on CNN's website didn’t bother factchecking Ebell whatsoever, meaning Ebell got away with repeating the Dirty Lie. We need you to help set the record straight.

Why would Ebell be willing to go on record ignoring hard scientific data with blatantly false talking points? Hm, let’s see… His employer, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has taken buckets of money from oil companies like Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, and Texaco. CEI has also hosted events sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute and Arch Coal. Think that maybe has something to do with Mr. Ebell’s skepticism? At the very least, these egregious conflicts of interest should be pointeded out to readers, as they should invalidate any “impartial” or “expert” opinion Ebell may have been able to provide.

Here are a few links you can drop in the comments of the article on CNN to make sure future readers know the full story about Myron Ebell and the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

Competitive Enterprise Institute – Koch Industries Climate Denial Front Group
ExxonSecrets.org Factsheet: Competitive Enterprise Institute, CEI
Competitive Enterprise Institute on SourceWatch.org

Aurthur JD writes from Dalian in China...

I arrived in Dalian on the day of the funeral for firefighter Zhang Liang, who drowned beneath the thick crude when his crew jumped into the ocean — without safety gear — to attempt, in vain, to fix an underwater pipe. Our lead photographer, Jiang He, who by now has reached legendary status globally for capturing the final seconds of Zhang's life, continued to cover the very emotional moments of this oil spill disaster.

Colleagues described how over 30,000 people lined the streets of Dalian to honor Zhang. And judging from Jiang He’s photos, there were many outpourings of grief for his untimely death, at the age of 25. People talked about whispers of anger from Dalian residents and firefighters against the corporations responsible for this tragic human and environmental disaster. And of their utter callousness: in the evening of the same day, a fancy celebratory dinner was held in one of Dalian’s classiest hotels for the leaders of Dalian PetroChina. A large banner with grammatically incorrect Chinese welcomed them to the “fire rescue live event.”



See more images from the Dalian oil spill

--Aurthur

The spill in Dalian is yet another reminder that oil is a dirty business, and the only way to stop future spills is to leave the oil in the ground. Enough is enough. Sign our petition to Congress telling them that now is the time for a permanent ban on ALL new drilling.

I'm back home now after nearly two weeks of working as a boat driver for Greenpeace in the Gulf.  This was my second time in the Gulf to help with work related to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster.  What I experienced this time was entirely different from my first trip last
month.

Last month, I saw deeply-oiled marshes and mangroves.  There were lots of oiled birds; entire nests were slathered in oil. I witnessed hundreds of dolphins swimming in oil-slicked waters.  Now this time, a little over a month later, the oil slicks are nearly gone!  In traveling the Gulf from Louisiana to Alabama, I hardly saw an oil slick at all. All I saw was an ever-present light sheen in the water. What happened?

BP has poured about two million gallons of Corexit oil dispersant into the Gulf.  Obviously the stuff works, because it's hard to see the oil visually any more.  As a result, the Gulf states are reopening their beaches and recreational fishing, and the pressure is on to reopen
commercial fishing.

The thing is, the water is now toxic.  Here's a clip from a local news station showing the amount of oil that's in the water as a result of Corexit:

The effect of using Corexit is that the oil doesn't float on the surface of the water now. Instead, it's dissolved into the water. This means it can't be skimmed, and also that it flows with the water current in addition to the wind. The oil is now spreading around the Gulf in such a way that it can't be collected.  In addition to all that, Corexit has never before been used in any quantity approaching this level. The Gulf is now one massive experiment.

It was particularly disturbing to me to see children playing in the water while oil clean-up crews were on the same beach a few hundred feet away, collecting tar balls. It's hard to watch because the water looks safe, but isn't.

Because of all this, how we witness this tragedy has now changed. Instead of seeing oiled shorelines, we'll now see the effects through water sample testing. It's a more difficult message to convey, because things are starting to *appear* okay. To the contrary, the disaster is
only beginning. We'll be living with a fundamentally-changed Gulf ecosystem for decades to come.

Let's work together to create a better future for our children by supporting an Energy Revolution!

Check out today's New York Magazine article on the second richest man in New York, and richest climate denier on the planet, David Koch:

The Billionaire's Party: David Koch is New York's second-richest man, a celebrated patron of the arts, and the tea party's wallet.

The best pull quote is this:

Global warming could be good for the planet, Koch says. "A far greater land area will be available to produce food."

...from this paragraph, which shows Greenpeace got his billionaire attention this spring:

David Koch is deeply antagonistic to the Obama administration. He fought the health-care bill, and the financial-regulation measure that was passed last week ("Everyone I know in the financial world is terrified by the powers it gives the federal government"). He also opposes the president's climate-change proposals. In his office, Koch showed me a photocopied flyer Greenpeace had produced with sketches of him and Charles below the words wanted for climate crimes and shook it in the air. Koch Industries' emissions, Koch told me, are far less than legally required. "And yet they're attacking us as environmental criminals," he said. "Wanting to put me and Charles in jail." Koch says he's not sure if global warming is caused by human activities, and at any rate, he sees the heating up of the planet as good news. Lengthened growing seasons in the northern hemisphere, he says, will make up for any trauma caused by the slow migration of people away from disappearing coastlines. "The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because a far greater land area will be available to produce food," he says.

Wow. What a load of... And it goes uncontested by the NY Mag author, Andrew Goldman, who seems to write mostly "people" pieces for the magazine — on Bette Midler, Martha Stewart's daugher, Annie Leibovitz — so he can't be expected to know a big ol' global warming lie when he hears it. But we know it's a Dirty Lie — and if you want to do something about it, please go to the article right now and call Mr. Koch out for his attempts to downplay the seriousness of global warming just so he can keep raking money in hand over fist.

Here's a video about the Greenpeace campaign Mr. Koch was referring to:

Greenpeace issued a report on the Koch Brothers in March 2010 (Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine) and another report last week on Bill Koch, David's twin brother who is waging a campaign to kill Cape Wind, which will be the first offshore wind farm in the nation, just because he doesn't want to look at it from his mansion.

By the way, Greenpeace has relaunched our PolluterWatch website with profiles of all of the Kochs.

New York Magazine got trusted inside access to David Koch (who rarely gives interviews), and provides a detailed biography of the three twisted billionaire Koch brothers. Allowing the magazine such access may have been a PR attempt to do some damage control and fend off the increasing attention the Kochs are receiving for their association with Americans for Prosperity and the radical Tea Party movement. Rachel Maddow has driven this story hard for months. Koch fought back with preemptive press releases that they have nothing to do with the Tea Baggers, but it just got them more bad press on Maddow.

Its great. The Koch legacy of shrouded political action, global warming denial and free-market, anti-government, anti-regulatory radicalism is finally, slowly being dragged out into the sunlight... Accountability is a wonderful thing, especially when it involves the filthy rich.

This post originally appeared on Huffington Post.

This morning, starting at 5.30am, teams of Greenpeace volunteers shut down 50 BP stations across London.

The teams - each named after an animal threatened by BP's reckless oil exploration - fanned out across the capital in their electric and hybrid cars, going station to station and disabling the pumps.

Why today? Because BP is expected to announce later the appointment of Bob Dudley as the company's new head to replace the gaffe-prone Tony Hayward, who led BP during the disastrous Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

Check out the live updates from the activists over the the Greenpeace UK site.

We want to send a strong message to BP's new boss to ditch the spin and actually move 'beyond petroleum'.

But there's more. This is also about realizing what we can achieve if we set our minds to it.

We can end the oil age. We already have the tools we need to leave it behind and move towards a clean energy future. All that's missing is the determination to make it happen fast.

Tell Congress: No new drilling, period!

ABOVE: The safety switches from the BP Stations in London that were shutdown today by Greenpeace volunteers. These were removed, operating the safety shutdown and and closing the pumps. We're going to return all the switches later but until they fit new ones at the stations, the pumps will be out of action.

This blog post comes from Lisa Vickers, a webbie at Greenpeace International.

We’ve all heard the arguments from Big Oil and King Coal: “Without coal and oil, energy and gas prices would go through the roof;” or “We have to use domestic coal and oil reserves to ensure our energy security;” and “Renewables can’t do the job, so we have to keep using fossil fuels.”

That’s the Dirty Lie: The idea, heavily promoted by coal and oil industry lobbyists and their friends in Congress, that there is no remedy for our addiction to fossil fuels. But the truth is that with today’s technology, we can continue to grow our economy while phasing out fossil fuels altogether.


Our Energy [R]evolution report lays out a roadmap for achieving a clean energy economy. It also shows that we could create over a million American jobs in the renewable energy sector alone by 2030.

So if we have the means for kicking our dirty energy habit and moving to clean, green energy, and most Americans are more than supportive, why isn’t it happening? The reason is simple: Big industry has an incredible amount of influence over our energy policy, thanks to decades of campaign contributions to the politicians who make the rules. These companies and politicians defend their planet-killing actions by saying that we need coal and oil. It’s time to call out the Dirty Lie, and break their stranglehold.

That’s where you come in. We need help watchdogging the politicians and talking heads who take money from the fossil fuels industry and then push the Dirty Lie on the American public. Whenever you catch the Dirty Lie being promoted without challenge, or find a case where someone is regurgitating fossil fuels lobbyist talking points as if they were fact, let us know. In turn, we’ll let you know when and where to help set the record straight.

There are a variety of ways you can plug in to our work to call out the Dirty Lie:

3 Ways to expose the Dirty Lie

Facebook

If you have a Facebook account you can immediately mobilize your friends to expose the dirty lie. When you find an article that repeats the lie, post it to your Facebook with a status message that says something like:

“This article claims that we can’t live without fossil fuels. That is a dirty lie! Please go to the article and leave a comment saying so.”

Twitter

If you spot the Dirty Lie in the media and want to report it via Twitter, just use the hashtag #dirtylie and make sure you link to the news piece in question. We’ll be searching for this hashtag regularly, so we’ll be sure to find it. You can regularly search for tweets with this hashtag as well, we'll use it to let you know how you can help call out the worst offenders.

Delicious

Delicious is a Social Bookmarking service that allows you to bookmark and save web pages online, share them with other people, and see what other people are bookmarking. It's perfect for the work before us of calling out the Dirty Lie!

Delicious also allows you to tag your bookmarks with a keyword. That makes it a great tool for collaboration because we can easily look up all web pages tagged with the key word “DirtyLie.”

Here’s how to help:

1) If you’re new to Delicious, the first thing you need to do is create an account. Go to https://secure.delicious.com/login and follow the instructions. If you have a yahoo account you can use that to quickly create one. If not you’ll need to create one of those too.

2) Add a bookmarklet button to your browser’s bookmark bar. This way you’ll be able to bookmark and tag articles anywhere on the web with just a click. Go to http://delicious.com/help/bookmarklets and follow the instructions for your web browser.

3) Now it’s time to start exposing the Dirty Lie by bookmarking and tagging articles. When you read articles that repeat junk science like “We’ll never have enough renewable energy to replace oil,” click your “Bookmark on Delicious” bookmarklet button you added to your browser. A pop-up window will appear. Add the tag “dirtylie” (important: keep “dirtylie” as one word) and any other tags or info you think is appropriate and click save.

4) Find other articles tagged with “dirtylie” at http://delicious.com/tag/dirtylie. You can read and comment on these articles and find other Delicious users that are exposing the Dirty Lie.

Greenpeace staff and volunteers will be keeping an eye on all of these social networks for the instances of the Dirty Lie you report. We’ll prioritize the worst offenders and let you know how you can help set the record straight.

Of course, you can also stay tuned right here on this blog to find out when and where you can help push back on the Dirty Lie. Stay tuned.

Friends at Greenpeace asked me to visit Washington this week to meet with some key Senators who will be voting soon on chemical plant security.

While admittedly only one on a list of many potential terrorist targets across this country, chemical plants must be given greater attention since from a terrorist's perspective chemical plants offer a maximum kill rate for a minimal effort. Studies have shown that just one chemical facility can place up to a million people at risk.

The facts illustrate that virtually every major populated area has one or more of the 5,000 most lethal, "high-risk"chemical facilities. Sadly, many of these facilities suffer from lax oversight, poor perimeter security, and vulnerable operating technologies.

Such facilities are open to: aerial attack (a terrorist flying a small, private plane into the facility); cyber-attack (a terrorist logging in and overtaking an operating system from a net café half way around the world); internal attack (a disgruntled employee deciding to push a button); and/or mere human error (BP's Deep Horizon oil spill proves that catastrophic accidents can and do happen).

Short of handing out HAZMAT suits and masks to every individual living within the zone of danger, there are other feasible ways to make such lethal facilities safer. One simple way is to use smart security. Smart security essentially means substituting the lethal variety of a chemical with a non-lethal alternative so that if an accidental release occurs nobody dies. Here is a list of 500+ success stories.

Admittedly, using such alternatives will initially create a nominal cost increase to the chemical company but perhaps, more importantly, smart security means no dead people for the surrounding community. Seems like a no-brainer, right?

Nope, it's not because for some in Washington it remains business as usual.

Read more at Huffington Post >>

Kristen Breitweiser, 9/11 widow and activist, is known for pressuring official Washington to provide a public accounting to the American people of what went wrong on the morning of September 11 and in the months leading up to the disaster that claimed the life of her husband and more than 3000 others.

110 million Americans live with the risk of a large-scale chemical disaster, and many of those are the brave citizens who respond when the worst happens. Ed Schlegel is a retired Fire Captain in California who has first-hand experience with responding to a chemical disaster. He was one of the brave citizens who marched into a chemical plant leaking deadly chlorine gas when the employees were running out. He is proud to protect us, but he knows than many chemical plants don't have to pose this risk.

It's hard to believe that in a post-9/11 world we are not doing everything we can to reduce terrorist targets. All over the country there are chemical and water treatment facilities that are like sitting ducks, unnecessarily storing large amounts of toxic gasses that put thousands to millions of people at risk of a disaster. As we watch the unfolding tragedy in the Gulf we should realize that hypothetical worst-case scenarios can be frighteningly underestimated when they become a reality.

The Senate Needs To Act

Congress has been wrestling with chemical security standards for over a decade and it is now the Senate's turn to pass common-sense measures that reduce the risk of a catastrophic release of poison gas. Senator Lautenberg of New Jersey (a state riddled with chemical facilities) introduced a package of legislation last week that would protect millions of Americans. Once again, though, industry is putting profits over disaster prevention by spreading unsubstantiated claims of economic disaster and job loss.

Read the entire blog at Huffington Post

We released a report back in March that exposed Charles and David Koch, the billionaire oilmen who control Koch Industries, as a chief source of funding for the climate denial machine. Well, turns out doing everything possible to delay the clean energy revolution actually runs in the family. Today we’ve released a report on Bill Koch, David’s twin brother and the principal funder of opposition to Cape Wind, the project to build the nation’s largest wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts.

A Greenpeace boat in front of the Offshore Windpark Egmond aan Zee off the Dutch coast. America is falling behind in the race to develop renewable energy technologies and utilize renewable resources. Cape Wind would be the first major offshore wind facility in the US.

Bill Koch made his fortune through his privately-held, carbon-intensive company, Oxbow (or, I should probably say, he founded Oxbow with the fortune he received from suing his brothers in 1983 after they ousted him from the family business). Oxbow Corporation, with $3.7 billion in yearly sales and over 1200 employees, sells 10 million metric tons of petroleum coke and 8 million metric tons of steam coal annually.

After making a killing peddling dirty energy, Bill Koch turns around and uses his immense personal wealth to fund the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, the primary group that finds every possible way to undermine and delay Cape Wind. Even worse, he pays lobbyists through his Oxbow corporation to try and quietly kill the wind farm project altogether.

We compiled the full story behind Bill Koch into a brief dossier which you can read below or righ-click this link and choose "Save Link As" to download the PDF: Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition.

Bill Koch: The Dirty Money Behind Cape Wind Opposition

Greenpeace UK organized some serious brand damage to BP with its "Rebrand BP" logo competition and now they want us to vote on the most powerful redesign of the Big Polluter's logo. The winners will be used in Greenpeace's ongoing efforts to hold BP and the rest of Big Oil accountable for the destruction they've wrought on the Gulf and the planet.

With almost 2,000 logo submissions, the competition was an amazing success! But luckily you don't have to weed through hundreds of images to make your pick. Just check out the top picks from Greenpeace staff and cast your vote today! 

The categories are Best Rebranded Logo, Best Illustration, Best Wildlife, Best Slogan, and (my personal fav) WTF?!.

My picks are:

For Best Slogan

This design shows the spill in the context of the whole planet and our interconnected oceans. It reflects how the sea floor has been literally cracked open by thousands of oil rigs and how dangerously deep many companies have drilled. Recall that the Deepwater Horizon rig broke a record for drilling the deepest well in the world at one time. Are we at "breaking point"? Most definitely.

For Best Wildlife

No words... can do justice to the impact of this design. BP CEO Tony Hayward's phrase, "I would like my life back," juxtaposed with the oiled bird is utterly unforgettable. No wonder it's currently #1.

For Best Illustration

While not BP-specific, this design shows what drilling for oil and gas is ultimately doing to the planet better than any other, in my humble opinion.

And lastly, drumroll please... for Best Rebranded Logo (and the new face of BP) I choose: 

The Gulf and its inhabitants, from people to pelicans, will never really recover from this catastrophic oil spill. We can't spread our oiled wings and fly into a clean energy future until we kick our oil addiction, stop offshore drilling, and get our government to end subsidies for oil and coal and invest in renewable energy.

But don't just listen to me, vote for the logo redesigns you think are most powerful. Please vote for your favs and share them widely -- what better way to contribute to BP's 'image problems'?

There are many contradictions in America’s Energy Policy.  One that’s come down the pipe recently is just how little we as a society rely upon aggregated costs when determining how expensive coal is.

You’ve heard the talking points: “Coal is cheap and we’ve sure got a lot of it;” “Coal is energy security;” “Coal work provides good quality jobs for lots of folks.”

Well, not exactly.

There is a tremendous human, environmental and governmental cost to coal that is not reflected in its market price. Instead, these costs are borne by society.


Coal is only cheap if you externalize costs. For example, some externalized costs include: air quality costs (like increased rates of asthma, air opacity, poor air quality, coal fires, etc.), the costs of unsafe mining conditions (deforestation, soil erosion, black lung, and the human cost of tragedies like what we recently saw in West Virginia, and the environmental costs of disposal (leaching coal ash ponds, leaking waste destroying fish stocks and agriculture, acid mine drainage).

This is a short list in what is a very large problem. The true cost of coal is in fact very, very high.

Importantly, the debate has heated up recently on one very important aspect of the coal chain of custody: coal ash disposal.

On June 21st, the EPA gave us, the people, 90 days to comment on a federal rule for coal ash disposal. For those that don’t know, coal ash is the residue captured from the chimneys of coal-fired power plants. It contains dangerous pollutants like arsenic, mercury, lead, and a host of other heavy substances and heavy metals. In short, it’s filthy and its never been regulated.

Coal ash impoundments are routinely placed close to schools, residences, and some of the most pristine and beautiful spots in this nation. We have to tell the EPA to act responsibly for both human and environmental health and safety.

To that end, the EPA has given us two choices for its federal rule. One proposal is good and the other is very bad. The first proposal would classify coal ash as a hazardous waste, which it is. The other would classify coal ash as non-hazardous. To classify coal ash as non-hazardous would run contrary to the EPA’s own findings, playing right into the hands of polluting industry.

We need to tell the EPA that we support regulating coal ash as a "special waste" under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Coal Ash is hazardous waste; it destroys communities, destroys our ecosystem, and, unless regulated, will continue to do so in increasing amounts.

The time to act on coal ash is now. Help us get to our target of 10,000 signatures by signing our petition telling the EPA to regulate coal ash as a hazardous substance.

Discussing the plight of the Steller sea lion (SSL) can be a very emotional issue because of how it impacts both the subsistence and commercial activities that Tribal Communities (TCs) may be dependent upon. However, it is worth noting that the listing of the SSL as an endangered species on the Endangered Species Act was an action taken by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and not Greenpeace.

ExxonMobil gave approximately $1.3 million to climate denial organizations last year.

This has been reported by The Times (London) after being provided information by the Greenpeace Research Department.  (The Times is unfortunately a subscription-only paper online, but a version of the story can be found syndicated at The Australian).

Greenpeace tabulated this figure - as we have done every year - from Exxon’s annual corporate Worldwide Giving Report. This year's Giving Report was way late on arrival, only published online in late June rather than the customary delivery in May before Exxon's annual general shareholders meeting. Download pdf of Worldwide Giving Report here

The Times concluded that Exxon had broken its pledges dating back to 2005 to stop payments to climate change deniers. After significant pressure from numerous bodies including ExxonSecrets, the Royal Society of London and Senators Snowe and Rockefeller, Exxon admitted its campaign of diversion.

In its 2007 Corporate Citizenship Report, published in May 2008, the oil giant stated,

“In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy groups, whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure energy required for economic growth in a responsible manner.”

And indeed, over the past four years, Exxon has reduced its grants to prominent climate change deniers from the peak spending in 2005 of over $3.5M. Greenpeace’s research shows a $2.2 million reduction in annual funding to these organizations, down to roughly $1.3 million in 2009.  The number of groups known to be funded has dropped from 51 to 24 between 2005 and 2009. 

So they are down to about half the organizations and about one third of the funding.  But is that good enough?  Does this mean Exxon gets credit for finally ditching the deniers?

Clearly not. 

In 2009, Exxon was still giving significant contributions to organizations such as the Heritage Foundation, the Annapolis Center, the American Enterprise Institute, the National Black Chamber of Commerce, the Harvard- Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Washington Legal Foundation, each of which has a long history of climate change denial. (see complete list of 2009 funding below).

Exxon has told The Times that it is no longer funding Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Pacific Research Institute and the Media Research Center, the former nest of Marc Morano (ex- Sen. Inhofe staffer and now CFACT blogger). 

 The 2009 funding to these groups was:

• $100,000 to Atlas Economic Research Foundation
• $75,000 to the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy
• $50,000 to the Media Research Center

We'll report on the veracity of that statement NEXT year when Exxon publishes this year's funding.

Exxon drops denial groups, but picks up denier scientists instead

Importantly, during the same period where Exxon bent to the pressure on its campaign of denial and cut all funding to hard core deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute and others...

Exxon began funding (at least publicly) the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in 2005. 

The 2009 ExxonMobil funding to SAO was $ 76,106, for a grand and odd total of $417,212 since 2005.  SAO is the home of Dr. Willie Soon and Dr. Sallie Baliunas, two scientists who have worked both together and as individuals on publishing junk science for nearly two decades.  Both have been heavily involved with many of the groups running denier campaigns today. 

For example, Soon and Baliunas’ article “Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1000 years,” concluded (incorrectly) that the warming of the globe experienced today is not at all unique and that the twentieth century is not the warmest on record, contradicting well established science. This paper was partly funded by the American Petroleum Institute.  The flawed peer review process that led to its publication caused several editors at Climate Research (where it was published) to resign.

In 2007, just ahead of a crucial decision by the US Federal Government about whether to list polar bears as "endangered" from climate change, Soon was funded by ExxonMobil for his work in a paper that argued that polar bears were not under threat (because climate change wasn't happening).  Soon is an expert in astrophysics, not polar bears, but Exxon saw fit to fund this work. 

Baliunas has individually authored a 1994 report entitled “The Ozone Crisis,” claiming that science denies CFC’s affect on the ozone. She has been a resident expert at the George C Marshall Institute for years, alongside other serial deniers such as S Fred Singer. 

So much more is detailed in our "Dealing in Doubt" report. It is a campaign of denial that goes back some 20 years.  It continues to this day as the stakes get higher and higher.  2010, so far, has set global records for high temperatures.   Corporate and private funders of the organizations who continue to deal in misinformation about climate science and climate policy will someday be held accountable for their destructive actions.

24 organizations in ExxonSecrets database were funded in 2009:

• AEI American Enterprise Institute     $235,000
• Atlas Economic Research Foundation     $100,000
• National Taxpayers Union Foundation     $80,000
• Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory     $76,106
• Annapolis Center     $75,000
• Communications Institute     $75,000
• National Black Chamber of Commerce     $75,000
• Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy     $75,000
• Heritage Foundation     $50,000
• Manhattan Institute     $50,000
• Media Research Center     $50,000
• ALEC American Legislative Exchange Council     $47,500
• Mercatus Center, George Mason University     $40,000
• Washington Legal Foundation     $40,000
• Center for American and International Law    $33,50
• Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment     $30,000
• American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research     $25,000
• American Spectator Foundation     $25,000
• National Association of Neighborhoods    $25,000
• Texas Public Policy Foundation    $20,000
• Federalist Society     $15,000
• Pacific Legal Foundation     $15,000
• Landmark Legal Foundation     $10,000
• Mountain States Legal Foundation     $10,000

Good news!  Thanks to people like you and the hard work of some dedicated orangutans, HSBC – the world’s largest banking and financial services company – has dropped forest-destroyer Sinar Mas from its investment management funds.

While this is bad news for Sinar Mas, which has seen a growing list of companies like Nestle, Unilever and Kraft distance themselves from the company, it is good news for Sumatran tigers, orangutans and other wildlife that call the Paradise Forests their home.

HSBC banks from California to New York were visited by activist orangutans in June.  As described in a previous post, the furry red apes monkeyed around at bank branches, amusing onlookers and drawing attention to the fact that HSBC had been passing the buck on forest destruction.  They helped flood HSBC headquarters with phone calls and email messages, adding to the excellent work of Greenpeace activists in the UK (where HSBC is headquartered).  You can read about this victory in a story published by the Guardian newspaper.

And, check out this video put together by a superstar activist in Los Angeles:

There’s still a little to be worked out with HSBC.  For example, the bank should make sure its forest policy applies to all areas of their business to avoid loopholes.  HSBC has a review scheduled for September to decide whether to exclude other palm oil companies from its Climate Change Fund, where some of those Sinar Mas shares were held.  We'll be keeping tabs on the process and will let you know how it turns out.

In the meantime, pat yourselves on the back and take a moment to enjoy a bit of good news.

For the forests,

-Rolf

Since the Deepwater Horizon offshore rig exploded and sank in April, BP has devoted inadequate resources to the oil spill response, withheld information from the American public, and denied access to spill sites to journalists. So our ship the Arctic Sunrise is heading to the Gulf to do an independent assessment of the impacts. We believe it’s way past time the full, unabridged truth about the extent and nature of this oil catastrophe was told to America and the world.


The Greenpeace ship MY Arctic Sunrise was in the Mediterranean Sea in June to help protect endangered bluefin tuna. © Gavin Parsons / Greenpeace

The reports coming out of Louisiana about cleanup workers and even local police helping BP enforce a media blockade have been nearly as frustrating as watching the oil spew into the Gulf without cease for almost three months (a hat tip is most definitely deserved here to Mother Jones’ Mac McClelland, who has been chasing this story all along and doing a great job of reporting what’s happening on the ground).

It’s in BP’s best interest to limit media access to oiled beaches and wildlife, as the more they can contain the truth about just how much damage has been done, the more they can limit their liability to pay for that damage later on. We released our ScamWow video last week to highlight this very sad and galling state of affairs.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

We’ve also had a team on the ground since the start of the disaster, tirelessly investigating local beaches and coastal ecosystems to take measure of the extent of the damage. Our team has taken copious photos and posted numerous oil spill updates on our blogs to make sure folks can see for themselves just what BP has done to the Gulf.

But BP is cracking down on public access more than ever, so we’re stepping up our efforts. The Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise is on its way to the Gulf for a three-month expedition to document the true impacts of the BP Deepwater Disaster on the Gulf’s marine life and unique ecosystems. This tour is especially crucial now because even if BP has finally capped the leaking well, the crisis will continue for some time, endangering wildlife and ecosystems, destroying the region’s fisheries, and affecting the ocean for decades to come. It’s important that we not let the focus shift away from the truly extensive catastrophe that is still unfolding in the Gulf, whether more oil is spewing out of BP’s well or not.

The Sunrise will leave Tampa, Florida during the week of August 9th and visit the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas before approaching the wellhead during the first month of the expedition. The crew aboard the Sunrise will be examining everything from the plankton on the surface to the subsurface plumes and the deep-sea corals on the floor of the Gulf.

The Arctic Sunrise is a 50-meter long, icebreaker ship that was purchased by Greenpeace in 1995. Since then, it has peacefully protested whaling in the Southern Ocean, documented climate change and glacier melts in the Arctic, and was the first ship to circumnavigate James Ross Island in the Antarctic, which was  an impossible journey until a 200m thick ice shelf connecting the island to the Antarctic continent collapsed.
 
Throughout the expedition, the Arctic Sunrise will host independent scientists and researchers who will be looking for oiled marine mammals, turtles, fish, and sea birds. Charles Messing and Jose Lopez from Nova Southeastern University will be on board looking at sponges, which filter large quantities of water and are therefore useful for looking at sub-lethal impacts of oil and dispersants. We’ll announce other on-board scientists in the coming weeks.

So keep checking back on our blog for live interviews with our onboard campaigners and scientists, video and still photography from the Gulf, and an interactive, web-based Virtual Ship Tour that lets supporters come along for the journey. You can grab an RSS feed of our blog posts dedicated to the tour by going here: Greenpeace Gulf Oil Disaster Expedition blogs.

We’ll also be posting lots of ways you can help call for a moratorium on new offshore drilling and for Congress and the White House to come clean, get rid of campaign contributions from dirty energy, and stop subsidizing big oil and coal.

In the meantime, help us promote our Energy [R]evolution report, which shows how it’s possible to phase out fossil fuels and reach 96% renewables in our energy mix by 2050. The US consumes 25% of the oil produced globally but has only 3% of the world’s oil reserves. We will never drill our way out of being dependent on foreign oil. The only way for the US to achieve energy security and stop oil spills before they happen is to invest in its huge renewable energy potential.

Today the big news is that BP thinks it has finally managed to cap the well that has spewed as much as 184 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Now, of course, we’re all waiting anxiously to see if the cap BP placed over the well will be able to contain the oil, or if it will spring a new leak and begin gushing even more oil into the Gulf.

It’s great that BP might at last have stopped the bleeding. But compare this to another less-noted bit of news: It was announced today that China has officially overtaken the USA as the world’s leading investor in renewable energy.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Nothing could paint a starker picture of the state of energy in America. Fossil fuels companies and their lobbyists have a stranglehold on our energy policy, and we’ve failed miserably to move off of their dirty product even as reckless companies like BP and Massey Energy have destroyed lives and livelihoods across the nation in their pursuit of profits. We’re reduced to hoping a thoroughly negligent oil company has finally managed to contain a disastrous leak — which nonetheless has already done untold damage that will affect the Gulf region for decades — as our global competitors quietly pass us by in ushering in the coming clean energy revolution.

We’re falling behind. Renewables are the way of the future, no matter how many fossil fuels lobbyists there are trying to convince our elected officials otherwise. China knows this, and is aggressively pursuing renewable energy.

When will we wise up?

Sometimes doing nothing is a good outcome and this is exactly what the IWC did at it’s June meeting in Agadir, Morocco nothing.  There was a real possibility that the decades old moratorium on commercial whaling could have been over turned at the recent IWC meeting, that did not happen. The outcome from the IWC meeting was minor a victory for the whales as no new conservation measures were adopted either. The killing by Japan, Norway and Iceland continues. However the world did not step back into the failed policies of past with the IWC again regulating commercial whaling. We won one battle in Agadir but the larger battle to save our planet’s great whales goes on. Greenpeace will continue the fight to end all commercial whaling. One positive result of our advocacy is that we now have the Obama Administration working along side us, an outcome we can all be proud of.

“First and foremost, the United States continues to support the commercial whaling moratorium. We strongly oppose lethal scientific whaling – we strongly believe it unnecessary for modern whale conservation and management. In particular, the United States is concerned by whaling in the Southern Ocean Sanctuary, and by the increased international trade and black market trade in whale meat and whale products.”  Delivered as part of the USA opening statement at the June 2010 IWC meeting in Agadir, Morocco. This statement is a direct result of all of the great advocacy work done by Greenpeace and other NGOs prior to the June IWC meeting. We now have a solid policy position from President Obama. WELL DONE EVERYONE!

Another surprise from our recent advocacy arrived this week in the mail, a thank you letter from President Obama. I want to share with you the thank you letter we received from the White House. Over the past couple of years Greenpeace’s whale campaign delivered a variety art work created by school children and others to the White House asking President Obama to “save the whales.” The whale art took many different forms including post cards, photo contest album, oragami whales and a large the pile of crayon drawings from elementary school kids. Along with the thank you letter we also received a photo of the First Family (link), one of President Obama and one of their dog. Thank you everyone who took the time to create and send your whale art to the President. The whale art was obviously noticed by the White House.

In the embattled world of sustainable seafood, it's always nice to see positive change in a major public venue. As heartwarming as it is to hear from someone who has pledged to stop eating Chilean sea bass or unagi, it feels even better when a restaurant — or even better, an entire seafood distributor — drops it altogether in the name of environmental preservation.

In this vein, I’m thrilled to see a spark of light appear in the otherwise relentlessly dismal saga of the bluefin tuna.

Many readers are likely familiar with Food Network’s Iron Chef America, a culinary contest wherein a visiting chef races against time to prepare an assortment of gastronomic delights for a panel of judges. At the same time, one of the resident masters — a star-spangled group known as the Iron Chefs — embarks on the same task in an effort to defend his or her title against the upstart challenger. The dishes are linked by the requirement that they must all involve the day’s secret ingredient, which is revealed only moments before the contest begins. The entire exercise takes place in front of dozens of cameras and a few quirky announcers in a regal arena known as “Kitchen Stadium.”

Iron Chef America is a interesting show, to be sure, but it has historically concentrated on strict gastronomic hedonism — it seems that no ingredient is too expensive (or too endangered) to be included in the Stadium’s massive inventory. I remember one particular episode of its forerunner, the Japanese TV cult smash Iron Chef, where a chef cooked down half a dozen lobsters with a few stalks of asparagus only to subsequently serve the lobster-infused vegetable and throw the crustaceans themselves in the trash.

Anyhow, the reason I bring this up is to highlight what I consider to be significant shift towards ocean conservation in the highest levels of the modern American foodscape. Iron Chef America has catapulted any number of victorious challengers into the spotlight — perhaps it can now do the same for a fish.

On Monday morning, a well-known food blogger and sustainable seafood enthusiast named Richard Auffrey threw his cyber-gauntlet at the feet of culinary celebrity and TV personality Alton Brown. Mr. Brown, the host of Iron Chef America, is known to be a vocal advocate for seafood sustainability. He has, in fact, gone as far as publicly announcing that until sushi kingpin Nobu Matsuhisa removes bluefin tuna from the menus of his eponymous restaurants, he will not set foot in any Nobu anywhere.

So why did Auffrey take aim at someone who seems to be a natural ally in this “Battle Bluefin”? (apologies to the Chairman)

Last week, Kitchen Stadium was visited by Makoto Okuwa, the former sous chef of Iron Chef and sushi icon Masaharu Morimoto. Over the course of the contest, Chef Makoto prepared five dishes, all containing the day’s theme ingredient (which, auspiciously for the sushi chef, happened to be sea urchin.) One of Okuwa’s offerings was his “uni surf and turf”: urchin-kissed wagyu beef paired with a ribbon of otoro, the belly flesh of a bluefin tuna. Brown did not raise any objections or offer any comments on the unsustainability of the dish, and Auffrey reamed him for it.

I’m proud of Auffrey for sticking up for the flagging bluefin, but that’s not why this is so interesting to me. The fascinating thing about this is what happened immediately after Auffrey posted his rant: Brown responded. Like, right away.

Brown fenced with Auffrey a bit over the aggressive and accusatory tone that the blogger had adopted, but he also admitted that the use of bluefin in Kitchen Stadium was lamentable and unnecessary. The two traded barbs and questions for a bit, but in the end, Brown took action and the oceans got what they needed. According to Brown, bluefin tuna is now banned from Iron Chef America.

This is fabulous. Iron Chef America is both one of the pioneering shows behind the recent explosion of food porn in the United States as well the American rendition of a classic Japanese TV program. To have the pseudo-traditional otoro excluded from the Kitchen Stadium arsenal is an extremely powerful statement about the reality of our ailing oceans and the need for immediate action if we are to save them.

There are so many things about this story that I like. I like how Auffrey stood up to Brown and called him out. I like the prompt, gentlemanly, and constructive response Brown offered in spite of his indignation. I like the quick decisive action that Brown took to rectify the situation. I love the fact that bluefin tuna is now pisci non grata on a major Food Network television show. And the icing on the cake? Chef Makoto decisively lost the battle to Iron Chef Michael Symon, who didn’t use any bluefin at all.

Score one for the oceans.

Almost 3 months after BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster began it’s devastation to the Gulf of Mexico, we are finally seeing movement by President Obama to investigate what exactly went wrong after the explosion, what can be done to help the communities affected by this unnecessary disaster and how to make sure it never happens again.

A panel put together by President Obama that is co-chaired by Senator Bob Graham (former two–term governor of Florida) and William K. Reilly (head of the EPA under President Bush), and includes the likes of NRDC’s presidents and the Dean of the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), will come together over the next few months to try and figure out what went wrong and how to move forward. They are set to make a recommendation to the President in 6 months, and one can only hope that they will endorse a plan that includes the only thing that makes sense to make sure this never happens again: an end to offshore drilling.

View more images of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve been in the Gulf region for the last two weeks helping to document the devastation that the communities are feeling and bearing witness to the impact of the disaster on wildlife. The impacts are worse than the pictures can convey, the scope of the disaster feels wider than any map can show, and the stories are more saddening than any news program can capture.

Yesterday, the first day the commission met, I struggled through a presentation from Kent Wells, Senior Vice President of BP North America, explaining how sorry they were and how hard they were trying to make it better. I listened as Rear Admiral Peter Neffenger, Deputy Incident Commander for the Coast Guard, described the efforts to contain and clean up BP’s disaster and the struggles they are facing.

I also listened to firsthand accounts from the people that are living the reality of this disaster. Sal Sunseri, the owner of P&J Oyster Company, and Jeff Angers, President of the Center for Coastal Conservation, spoke of the impact of the disaster, the unknowns of dispersants being used during the attempt to clean up the Gulf, and how the Gulf will be changed for generations to come. These communities can not measure the impact this disaster will have on them. They can not tell how their cultures will be impacted or when life will return to what can be considered normal.

I was back this morning as the commission heard from federal government officials on the status of the cleanup efforts, from local elected officials on their communities, and from local leaders about ecological impacts. All this was followed by a 2 hour period for public comment. Stay tuned, I’ll have more updates.

There’s no way to clean up an oil spill. We’ve seen this time and again — in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, for instance, where oil from the Exxon Valdez spill is still having an impact on local ecosystems. Corporations like Exxon or BP that find themselves responsible for an oil spill — or, as was the case for Exxon and now is the case for BP, an oil disaster — are really left with only one option to handle the problem: public relations, damage control and fierce lobbying.

It’s clear BP knows this all too well, and is determined to spare no expense on the cleanup… of its image. We put together this "ScamWow" video to highlight this sad state of affairs:


We decided to spoof the original late night infomercials for the ShamWow miracle clean-up towel, which is touted as a quick fix for any cleaning problem (it's made in Germany and "You know the Germans always make good stuff"), because BP is attempting to use PR damage control as a miracle cure for its sullied image. Except, unfortunately, PR has no miraculous cleaning powers. The company's image may be less soiled as a result of the millions BP is spending on PR, but the Gulf of Mexico will be reeling from the impacts of the company's negligence for decades.

Consider the estimated $50 million BP has spent on an all-out media blitz, complete with a TV ad featuring an earnest Tony “I’d like my life back” Hayward looking into the camera and assuring us “We will make this right.” What he means is, "We will do anything to make you think we will make this right" — anything short of, you know, actually reporting the true size of the spill, allowing journalists unfettered access to spill sites and oiled beaches to provide independent coverage of cleanup operations, stopping the damn leak in a timely manner, or god-forbid taking worker and environmental safety concerns seriously in the first place so that this spill never even happened.

“The Gulf spill is a tragedy that never should have happened,” Tony “The size of the spill is small in relation to the size of the ocean” Hayward tells us in his TV ad. We can agree on that, at least, Tony!

BP has engaged multiple PR and lobby firms to help wage its PR assault, which spans all conceivable media. According to our calculations, BP spent almost $6 million through the end of June on ads in newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today, while also purchasing Google and Yahoo ads that will display whenever people search for “oil spill” — surely an extremely pricey keyword at the moment that is generating a lot of clicks.

Considering the spill cleanup costs (estimated at $16 million a day), why would BP do this? Because public relations and lobbying is one way BP can turn public opinion in their favor and soften the blow from lawsuits, regulators, and Congress.  If the public could somehow be made to feel sympathetic toward BP, or to feel that BP is really going “to make this right,” the ultimate financial pain to BP might be lessened. So from where BP’s sitting — a place where the bottom line is the ultimate concern, not Gulf Coast residents’ livelihoods, not Gulf Coast ecosystems — the decision to give their image the vigorous scrubbing they can’t give the Gulf Coast ecosystems befouled by their oil is a no-brainer.

BP made $66 million a day in profits in the first quarter of 2010. If they want to keep raking it in hand over fist like that, they gotta do some damage control. It’s just that simple.

Oil spills are an inevitability of the supremely dirty oil drilling business, especially as companies are forced to dig deeper and take more outrageous risks to reach what’s left of the world’s oil reserves. Heard about BP’s plans to drill 2 miles deep and as much as eight miles horizontally from a gravel island the company built in the middle of the Beaufort Sea up in the Arctic? No, that’s not just a sick joke.

The Exxon Valdez spill is not our only example of how impossible it is to clean up spilled oil: Ask the villagers down in Ecuador who are still battling with Chevron to try and get their traditional lands cleaned up, or the people over in Nigeria who suffer from companies like Shell spilling the equivalent of a Valdez-sized spill every year. Oil is wreaking havoc on communities across the globe, and the companies responsible always seem to treat these disasters as little more than the cost of doing business. The Ecuadorian Amazon, the Niger Delta, the Gulf of Mexico — these are collateral damage in Big Oil’s relentless pursuit for reckless profits.

The real way forward is of course to stop drilling and invest in clean energy, but oil companies cannot be depended on to drive society toward clean energy. They are OIL companies after all.

The only way to stop oil spills once and for all is to leave it in the ground where it belongs. President Obama and Congress need to ensure we kickstart the clean energy revolution and stop drilling for oil. Check out our blueprint for how America can achieve 96% renewable energy by 2050 and create over a million jobs by 2030: Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable USA Energy Outlook. Help promote our vision for the sustainable future! Then take action to tell Congress No New Drilling, Period.

On July 6th, the Brazilian Forest Code, the law which regulates the use of the Amazon rainforest, has suffered the most serious setback in recent history. For years NGOs like Greenpeace, scientists and civil society have been fighting to protect the legislation from being hijacked by corporate interests. Those efforts were threatened when a major revision of the laws was proposed earlier this year.
With the final vote by the Special Commission set up for this purpose being 13 to 5 in favor of the changes, the bill is now set to be discussed in the Brazilian Chamber of Representatives later this year. However, the fact that this will delay the process until after the Presidential elections in October is hardly a reason to celebrate. In fact, the upcoming Presidential elections could have disastrous consequences for the passage of the bill. Several politicians are expected to trade approval to the proposed legislation for votes and political support from the powerful agricultural sector during the upcoming campaign.

Those political realities put the Forest Code in immediate danger. Under the existing law, landowners are required to set aside 80% of their lands as Legal Reserves in the Amazon. This protection is now at stake. If the proposed bill becomes law, that area would be reduced to a mere 50% which would legalize the clearing of enormous amounts of forest. For more on the history and importance of the Brazilian Forest Code, check out our recent blog post and watch Greenpeace's Amazon Campaign Director Paulo Adario speaking on the issue:

Agribusiness, the energy sector and producers of biofuels have been pushing for more deforestation in the future. But it is not their future business prospects alone that these interest groups are worried about. They also are concerned about their past crimes. One of the most outrageous changes is related to the prosecution of those who have broken the existing Forest Code. The new bill includes a clause granting amnesty to environmental crimes like illegal deforestation committed in areas of permanent preservation before July 22nd, 2008. This means that fines and other penalties imposed before this date will be suspended if the proposed legislation passes.

Although pressure and actions by Greenpeace and others have lead to some last-minute changes, the bill remains more than just flawed. While it does not leave the regulation of deforestation completely in the hands of the states anymore, it still contains several loopholes. State governments, which have always been more receptive to pressure groups, will be able to allow deforestation when they believe public interests to be at stake or when they think that the environmental impact is considerably small.

The overall impact of the proposed changes, however, is anything but small. This is why Greenpeace is urging politicians to repeal the proposed changes and not pass the new Forest Code.

Next Tuesday is the fourth annual Hansen Day – or HD4 – how do you plan
to commemorate it?

What’s “Hansen Day”? Hansen Day – or what should be known as Hansen Day — is July 13. It was on that date in 2006 that NASA scientist and leading climate change expert James Hansen wrote in the New York Review of Books: “…we have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions. Our previous decade of inaction has made the task more difficult, since emissions in the developing world are accelerating.” The entire article is worth reading, or re–reading.

Statistics in the article still surprise me. How could I have forgotten? Warmer isotherms — the bands in which given temperatures dominate — are moving toward the poles at 35 miles per decade, while species that depend on those isotherms are migrating at four miles per decade. If we don’t change our ways – and we haven’t since Dr. Hansen published the article — isotherms will be moving at 70 miles per decade by this century’s end, a recipe for mass extinction.

The same business-as-usual scenario may yield an increase in sea levels of 80 feet (!) by the end of the century, wiping out every coastal city in the world, sending hundreds of millions of people scrambling and setting off global warfare. It seems too impossibly catastrophic to be true, so we ignore it and do nothing.

(I’m typing this at 6:30 a.m. It’s 82 degrees in northwest Vermont, the only time of day when I can be in my office without dissolving into a pool of sweat. It was 99 at 10 p.m. last night. It’s been above 90 for the last five days in this, the land of no air conditioning.)

None of this is inevitable. We have the technology in hand to substantially reduce our use of fossil fuels and their creation of greenhouse gas. We had those technologies four years ago when Jim Hansen wrote his article. We have not mobilized the political will to use them.

We need to tax carbon. Now. What’s happening so graphically in the Gulf of Mexico is exactly what we’re doing to our atmosphere each and every day, except it doesn’t look the same. The consequences, however, will be worse.

In his article, Dr. Hansen writes about Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina discovering, in the 1970s, the damage done to the Earth’s ozone layer by chlorofluorocarbon chemicals (CFCs) and how the global community reacted, via the Montreal Protocol, to phase out CFCs and reduce the damage and eventually, the threat posed by these chemicals. He calls for a similar effort on fossil fuels. 

Second, the fossil fuel industry learned from the ozone crisis. It did not learn how to be a good global citizen and save humankind from the worst effects of our excesses. It learned how to undermine scientists and environmental organizations. It learned how to protect its short-term profits and executive compensation, even at the cost of our civilization. We see that playing out in Congress today as the “representatives” of those most damaged by the latest oil atrocity scream loudest for renewed deep water oil drilling.

This year marks the fourth Hansen Day — there are only six left. Hansen Day should be recognized as a day to take stock of where we have come since July 2006 (the wrong way, really) and think about how far we’ll have to go to avoid the hazards Dr. Hansen outlined in his article.

Maybe the global recession has bought us some time, maybe not. Certainly not enough for us to make up for four years of doing the wrong thing. Since Dr. Hansen’s article was published, China has become a world leader in renewable energy technology, but it has also become the world’s number one greenhouse gas emitter. Not good news at the end of the day — or century.

How many more Hansen Days with pass with no action taken? How many can we afford? As he wrote, we have ten years, not to decide, but to fundamentally alter our trajectory.Hansen Day is not for celebrating, but it should be noted.

As a result of the oil spill in the Gulf, people are beginning to question our dependence on oil. Though the massive leak was an catastrophic environmental tradgedy, it may have been the push we needed towards a renewable energy future. In the meantime, we personally, can take baby steps away from oil.

This entry comes by popular request. A lot of people have been asking what they can do to use less oil, and reduce demand for the sticky stuff ruining beaches everywhere. Here's my top ten, feel free to add to it in comments:

1. Carpool, cycle or use public transport to go to work.

2. Choose, when possible, products packaged without plastic and recycle or re-use containers.

3. Buy organic fruits and vegetables (fertilisers and pesticides are based on oil more often than not).

4. Buy beauty products (shampoo, soap, make-up) based on natural ingredients, not oil.

5. Choose when possible locally produced products (less transport involved).

6. Buy clothes made out of organic cotton or hemp - not from oil derivatives.

7. Use non-disposable items in picnics and summer festivals.

8. Quit bottled water.

9. Fly less.

10. Demand that your government encourage renewable energy instead of subsidizing oil.

Take action! Tell Congress that a ban on all new oil drilling is the only way to avoid another spill disaster

If you're a fan of forests, you've probably heard a lot recently about the Greenpeace Paradise Forest campaign.  In particular, you may have heard about the giant conglomerate Sinar Mas which dominates the palm oil industry in Indonesia.  Greenpeace has documented Sinar Mas repeatedly breaking industry guidelines, Indonesian law and its own public statements, razing rainforests to the ground in its race to produce palm oil.  The growing controversy around their role in destroying rainforests crucial to endangered wildlife like orangutans and Sumatran tigers has led companies like Nestle, Kraft and Unilever to start cutting Sinar Mas palm oil out of their supply chains.

Sinar Mas is a huge conglomerate, and palm oil is only one of its businesses...and only one of the ways it destroys rainforests.  Asia Pulp & Paper – it’s giant paper branch – is one of the largest paper companies in the world, and one of the worst threats to rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands in Indonesia.

A new Greenpeace report released today exposes the destructive practices of APP and shines a light on the companies that are still doing business Sinar Mas.  The report also counters recent APP greenwash, including its claim that its suppliers “only develop least valuable degraded forests and denuded [barren] wasteland.”  Pulping the Planet shows that the company is still sourcing from critical orangutan and Sumatran tiger habitat such as the Bukit Tigapulu Forest Landscape and Kerumutan Peat Forest.  The report details how that rainforest and peatland destruction is also causing huge amounts of climate pollution. 

You can read the report here (you’ll need Adobe Reader and some patience to download the report since it’s a pretty big file).

 

The report has already earned a lot of international attention and been reported on in with media outlets such as the New York Times, CNN and Time Magazine.

 

The report also draws attention to companies like Pizza Hut, Burger King and Dunkin’ Donuts that Sinar Mas listed as key global customers in 2009.  With leading food companies like Nestle, Kraft and Unilever taking action to sever business ties with rainforest-destroying companies, you have to wonder what fast-food companies are waiting for...are they waiting for activist orangutans to show up at their door?  That could be arranged!

 

Give fast food companies a wake up call.  Click here to tell them to stop serving up rainforest destruction!

 

For the forests,

 -Rolf

David Helvarg is an author and president of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a marine conservation group. He recently went out with our team in the Gulf on board our boat the Billy Greene.

By the end of the summer, it could be raining oil along the Gulf of Mexico. 

Hurricane Alex is the first of a series of 14 named storms predicted for the 2010 hurricane season. The Gulf is warmer than it's been since before 2005 when unusually warm water super-charged Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and also led to massive coral bleaching and die-offs across the Caribbean. Even as it makes landfall 600 miles from the main oil slicks, the waves and winds generated by Alex have forced skimming operations to be cancelled and threatened to push oil farther onto the shores and into the marshes that include 40 percent of America's coastal wetlands. 

During this potentially devastating storm season of 2010, the Gulf's massive fields of oil could be swept ashore, mixed in the water column, or even lifted into the storm clouds to rain out in oily downpours, like some Biblical plague, on the coastal communities of the oil-producing Gulf. 

In 2005, just after Hurricane Katrina, I remember stopping in Biloxi, Miss., by an 8,000-ton, 600-foot-long casino barge that the 25-to-30-foot storm surge had driven half a mile across Beach Drive. Somewhere underneath its barnacle-encrusted black hull was a historic mansion. Another casino barge had gouged a hole halfway up the stately six-story yellow brick yacht club before coming to rest next to it. The beach was covered for miles in plastic buckets, insulation, mattresses, furniture, chunks of drywall, and Styrofoam pellets that the seabirds were eyeing as potential snack food. I felt like an eco-geek being more concerned about the gulls and wetlands than the lost revenue from the casinos that everyone else seemed to be obsessing about. 

On June 28, 2010, tar balls started coming ashore on Biloxi's cleaned-up white sand beaches just as they had been on the squeaky sugar-white sands of the Florida Panhandle for days and weeks. Far less dramatic than what I'd seen after Katrina, these are the first signs of what promises to be a far more persistent and continuous fouling of beaches for months and possibly years to come. With 95 percent of the oil still offshore, these first small tar balls represent a dire threat to the economic drivers of the Gulf states that are its coastlines, particularly for the state of Florida, where they could be scraping oil off the sand till there's no sand left. 

Even after the most visible oil is cleaned up by a living wave of work crews and skimmers, much of it remains behind, infiltrating into the backwater wetlands or the sand itself. 

In Grand Isle, La., Greenpeace marine biologist (and Ocean Campaign Director) John Hocevar takes me out on Greenpeace's 27-foot diesel jet-powered rigid hull inflatable, the Billy Greene, named for a filmmaker who loved the natural world but was cut down by an urban predator.

We zip across to Grand Terre Island, which had been hit by oil two days earlier. The water on the crossing is full of pods of dolphin workboats and oily rainbow sheens. Just as New Orleans after Katrina looked like a Woodstock for first responders, the waters around Grand Isle now look like a boat show for oil-spill response vessels.

The beach on Grand Terre is boomed off and relatively cleaned off, though there's still some heavy oil left between a rock jetty and the marsh behind it. I stumble and climb on the side of the boulder-pile break wall to where the oil is thick and brown on the rocks and along the marsh grass. The tidal swell between the rocks slowly lifts and lowers the thick sludgy oil, reminding me of a brown diseased lung rising and falling in an open chest. It seems like a living thing and keeps me mesmerized for some minutes till I get a call from a CNN producer asking if I think the Coast Guard has the resources to meet this latest disaster. The media presence is heavy as the humidity on these bayous and hopefully won't go away once the exploding oil bore is sealed.

On our way off the beach, there are two dolphins swimming by some yellow blackened oily boom. "Some oil became pebble-like interacting with the sand," Hocevar tells me. More oil appears as red spots on the surface of the sand, though he says it has also sunk below the surface. I take a stick to dig with and see more copper-like spots appear along the edges of the hole I've created. After confirming what he's said, I throw the sandy stick away and brush my hands against each other, only the sand won't come off. I try again. When I rub my hands on my jeans, they leave an oily brown stain on the denim and thin brown streaks of oil on my palms. Now multiply that one million times or more and add wind fetch and storm surges.

I seriously doubt that we can "make it better than it was before," as President Obama promised he would do for the Gulf region in his recent White House speech on the disaster. BP also makes promises in radio ads that play every day around here: "We may not always be perfect but we will make it right." I love the calculated tone of the ad. Hell, we all know nobody is perfect. I may have killed my grandma and shot my dog, but I'll make it right. 

Meanwhile, we continue to hope for more luck than we're likely to get during this hurricane season.

This post also appeared on Grist.org.

As the temperature rises here in Washington, DC and all over the country, people flock to beaches, pools, and anyplace we can find to splash around and cool off.

My son loves the water. He’s happy to run right in without a care in the world. But, as he plunges his face into the cool water and plays with little “treasures” he finds, I start worrying about what he’s being exposed to.

Our oceans, though vast and deep, are fast-becoming polluted from land-based sources. And, sadly, it’s turning our once-pristine ocean into a dumping ground. There’s an increasing number of beach closures due to pollution, not to mention the oil in the Gulf of Mexico that is still spewing and contaminating the Gulf and well-beyond.

Awareness and “action” is so important! We can’t sit around and let our oceans become contaminated cesspools. Instead, we have to work together to spread the word and speak up about ocean conservation.

One of my very-favorite bands has taken on the cause of protecting the oceans. Pearl Jam has launched a new website and dediced their “Amongst the Waves” video to ocean awareness and advocacy. The goal of this new venture is to provide all of us with a handy resource and an avenue to get involved. I crawled around this site and was happy to find easy ways for people to really help make a difference and take action to save the oceans.

Pardon me for switching songs, but I’d like to close with a line from my favorite Pearl Jam song, Rearview Mirror…

“So it feels so much clearer, once you look in my rearview mirror.”

It’s my hope that the disaster of the Gulf Oil spill and constant “spew” is that it serves as a rearview mirror for all of us. We look in the rearview mirror and say, “Never Again!” It’s a constant reminder that we’ve gone awry and will work together to set a new, “greener” path for our future. Our oceans deserve better, future generations deserve better and we can make it right by deciding to never let it happen again.

--Michelle

"The basis of a democratic state is liberty." — Aristotle

On Sunday we celebrate the Fourth of July and America's independence from tyranny and injustice. But we go into this weekend with a tangible reminder of our continued dependence on fossil fuels.

Hurricane Season is here. Oil continues its advance unabated into the Gulf. We don’t know how much oil is flowing. BP is incapable of solving the problem. Congress is soon to recess. Neither the Federal nor State governments have the ability to remediate the damage.

Yet how many of us will jump in the car this weekend? Isn’t this complicity in Big Oil’s stranglehold on our lives? Why are we buying the "dirty lie" that oil is the crux of our transportation energy mix?

America can generate 96% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2050, and create over one million renewable energy sector jobs by 2030. Read more and download the Energy [R]evolution report (PDF)

BP has spent millions on advertising in USA Today, The New York Times and the Washington Post. Don’t worry, we’ll clean it up, they say. Stay calm everyone. They’re on top of it. Nothing to see here.

In fact, BP has obscured the truth at every turn. Now, they are in the process of christening their horribly misnamed “Liberty” drilling operation (Happy Fourth of July, right?) in Alaska.  They will drill two miles beneath a small, man-made island, and then drill sideways for six to eight miles so that they can reach an offshore reservoir.

But what about the moratorium announced by President Obama? Well, since they’ve built a 31-acre artificial gravel island, they're able to register it as an onshore rig, effectively green-lighting their operation.

At what point does outrage spark our elected officials to put aside partisan bickering and get the job done? This is about ecocide in the Gulf of Mexico. This is about Big Oil gaming the system so that they can profit off of our public lands.

Punching a hole in the ground and extracting super-heated, highly pressurized oil and natural gas is dangerous and messy. There is one way to prevent this from happening again. We must have a permanent ban on all drilling.  There must be unlimited liability for polluters. We must end all direct and indirect fossil fuel subsidies and transition public investments to clean, renewable energy sources and energy efficiency technologies.

Drilling moratoriums are not permanent and can be easily circumvented. Liability escrow accounts are not policy. As long as it is exceedingly lucrative to drill for oil these companies will continue their operations. Indeed, one month before the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster began, a BP presentation from March 2010 identified expanding deepwater drilling as the company’s “key sources of growth” beyond 2015.

Too much time has passed since the oil has started flowing into the Gulf. How much suffering need be inflicted upon the people of the Gulf for the rest of America to act?

I say enough is enough. We need to channel the spirit of the Fourth and declare independence from Big Oil. An Energy [R]evolution is necessary.

This Fourth of July, declare your independence from Big Oil’s big deceptions.

Eleven weeks ago, BP's Deepwater Horizon oil platform exploded into the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 workers. Since the explosion thousands upon thousands of barrels of oil have spewed into this precious ecosystem, hundreds of wildlife have been affected, the fishing industry has been decimated, and an entire culture is being threatened.

Greenpeace scientists and volunteers have been in the Gulf since week one collecting data and exposing the largest environmental disaster of our time. Using our boats, planes and expertise we've helped reporters gain access to hard to reach areas and documented the disaster ourselves every step of the way. Here are some of our most powerful photos, along with those of others, to share with you what we've seen in the past 11 weeks. On Independence Day this weekend, let us remember that we have yet to achieve energy independence from dirty and harmful fossil fuels.

 See the full post and slideshow on the Huffington Post

 

Millions of Americans, like myself, are preparing to celebrate Independence Day with backyard BBQs and picnics. As people flock to supermarkets and shopping centers to stock up, those ending up at Costco Wholesale might be surprised at what they find.

In the Costco warehouse you'll find freezers and coolers full of unsustainable fish. Greenpeace surveys found that Costco continues to sell fifteen of the twenty-two red list seafood items.

Costco is the largest wholesale club operator in North America. While Costco continues to grow bigger and bigger, so does its footprint on the environment. Did you know that Costco is destroying our oceans through its harmful seafood purchasing practices?

 

It's time to shine a spotlight on Costco and expose the truth behind their destructive seafood policies. Costco can be a leader in ocean conservation, not a contributor to ocean destruction.

Costco can and must do better!

Greenpeace is urging Costco to implement a sustainable seafood policy, to offer transparency in its seafood labeling, and to stop selling red list seafood starting immediately with orange roughy and Chilean sea bass.

Sign our pledge telling Costco that our oceans deserve better.