Greenpeace

In a stunning instance of what can only be called collective cognitive dissonance, a small working group of the International Whaling Commission has just proposed we reinstate commercial whaling in order to save the whales.

UPDATE: Click this link to tell President Obama, Say no to commercial whaling!

Make no mistake: This proposal has nothing to do with saving whales, but is instead all about protecting the whaling industries of just a few obstinate countries who insist on destroying these amazing creatures. This proposal is the most serious threat to the moratorium on commercial whaling that we’ve seen since Greenpeace fought for and won the moratorium in the 80s.


Greenpeace activists witness the killing of whales in the Southern Ocean by the Yushin Maru and the Kyo Maru No.1 ships of the Japanese whaling fleet. © Greenpeace / Jeremy Sutton-Hibbert

While some US officials have been insisting that they are not supporting the proposal, we are very concerned about reports that the U.S. IWC Commissioner is not only supporting it but in fact pushing other countries to support it as well. The US position will be clarified at a meeting of the International Whaling Commission in St. Petersburg, FL next Tuesday and Wednesday.

Greenpeace vehemently opposes the proposal because:

1. It would allow whaling to take place in the Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. Not only would the killing of whales there continue, it would be legitimized.
2. By legitimizing all whaling, the proposal would secure the future of whaling instead of seeking to phase it out. With a single stroke, this proposal would reverse nearly three decades of progress in protecting endangered whale species.
3. It will set interim quotas – the number of whales each country is allowed to catch – based on political need, not scientific evidence. Nothing could be more disastrous to fragile whale populations than caving to political pressure rather than listening to scientists about the best way to protect healthy whale populations.
4. Adding insult to injury, the proposal would pass the costs of regulating whaling on to all members of the IWC, meaning that the taxpayers of even anti-whaling countries will be forced to support whaling operations.

You can read the full proposal for yourself online here.

We’re aiming to kill this atrocious, unscientific proposal before it even gets voted on, which will be at the IWC’s annual meeting in June. We’ll need your aid and support if we’re to achieve that goal, though.

The first step? Get the word out about this proposal to reinstate the slaughter of whales for commercial purposes. Post a link to this blog on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or on your own blog.

We're working on an action alert that you can use to fax President Obama and tell him you expect him to reject this proposal and help save the whales instead of the whalers. The ironic thing about all this is that the United States has a long history of advocating for whale conservation. If you really want to send the president a message right away, you can sign our petition urging the Obama Administration to continue the U.S.'s legacy of protecting whales.

Rest assured that we'll have more for you to do very soon. This is an all-hands-on-deck moment, no doubt.

UPDATE: Click this link to tell President Obama, Say no to commercial whaling!

Vinuta Gopal, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace India, just sent the following out in an email. I think it lays out the issue quite well, and figured I'd share it here.

The media has been buzzing about the IPCC's Himalayan glacier controversy.

The international climate panel headed by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for a ground-breaking report on climate change. Several small errors have now surfaced in the 3,000-page report.

If you're wondering what the news reports mean for climate change, here are some answers. Please spread the word to your family, friends, and co-workers.

1. Do the U.N. climate panel's errors mean there is no threat from climate change?

No, the dire threat from climate change is not in question. The panel's errors were only related to the intensity of climate change. There are in fact only two real mistakes that have been found so far and neither necessitate any change to the basic premise of human-induced climate change.

For over two decades, scientists have consistently found that climate change is happening, and it's caused by human activity.

2. Why is there so much furor about these errors?

Over the past 20 years, the U.N. climate panel has been attacked again and again by the fossil fuel industry and by politicians who are determined to discredit climate change science and continue on an unsustainable development pathway which would ensure dire consequences for this earth.

3. Are the Himalayan glaciers melting or not?

In 2007, the U.N. climate panel reported that Himalayan glaciers might vanish by 2035. The specific year turned out to be based on a flawed study, and the panel has corrected the error.

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating, but the exact rate of retreat is still uncertain. India's Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh was one of the first to argue that the 2035 forecast was "not based on an iota of scientific evidence," but he confirms the Himalayan glaciers "are indeed receding and the rate is cause for great concern."

4. Who will be impacted by climate change?

Everyone. Lesser developed countries and small island states will be hit hardest and fastest.

But rich nations are not immune to the violent weather, drought, disease, famine, mass migrations, and wars that will be caused if we don't stop climate change.

5. What is Greenpeace’s call on climate change?

The science is clear. Climate change is real, is happening now and is caused by people. The solution is clean energy, smart use of our power and forest protection.

Since lots of people are wondering about the media stories, please forward this mail to your family, friends and co-workers.

Thanks a billion!

Vinuta Gopal
Climate Campaigner
Greenpeace India

P.S. If you want more details, check out this thorough analysis at RealClimate.org.

Maybe you read the post the other day by anti-nuclear activist and Greenpeace senior advisor Harvey Wasserman entitled "Obama's atomic blunder." In case you missed it, or have always been more of an auditory/visual learner, you can watch this video of Harvey on Democracy Now! discussing President Obama's misguided plan to fund new nuclear reactors.

We launched our new PolluterWatch project to expose the work our elected representatives are doing at the behest of polluter lobbyists and their clients in the big oil, big coal, and other big polluter industries.

And as you might have seen, we launched PolluterHarmony.com a couple days ago — just in time for Valentine’s Day! pHarmony, as we like to call it, uses “a unique compatibility algorithm” that matches polluters and politicians based on their love of dirty energy, their past environmental violations, and their ability to ignore the public health interests of real people.

Now we need your help to hold climate criminals accountable.

Big corporations know that the public doesn’t trust them, so they funnel millions of dollars to front groups who do their dirty work for them. And no one plays the front-group-and-junk-science game quite like Exxon Mobil and its CEO Rex Tillerson. That’s exactly why we started PolluterWatch: to hold people like Mr. Tillerson accountable.



We can’t outspend a company like Exxon on fancy ad campaigns and promotional blitzes, but we can educate the public about polluters’ influence-peddling and propagandizing. Then we can demand accountability for them and the lobbyists and politicians who’ve worked with them to confuse the debate on climate policy and undermine attempts to regulate emissions in the U.S. — all to protect Exxon’s profits at the expense of the planet.

Help us get started by putting up “Wanted” posters for Mr. Tillerson in your hometown.

The idea is a simple one: Download our short one-page toolkit and print out a few copies of the Wanted poster we’ve created for Rex Tillerson. The toolkit contains a black and white version of the wanted poster, to make it easy to print. But you can download the color version as a PDF, if you want that one. And remember to use recycled paper!

Put these posters up around your town, then take pictures and post them to your Facebook, MySpace, or Tumblr. Or TwitPic them, or put them on your blog, or start a blog right here on our site and post them there to share with our activist community. Just make sure you use the keyword “polluterwatch,” or put the hashtag #polluterwatch in your tweets, so we can find them.

We need to make sure that everyone in our communities knows who is really responsible for stalling progress on global warming. Because until people start putting names and faces with the groups who are undermining our future, we’re not going to be able to separate their propaganda from the truth and stop global warming. Take action today!

Despite the tough economic times we’re living in, wind power continues to expand around the globe. According to the Global Wind Energy Council, the worldwide wind power capacity grew by 31% last year, adding 37.5 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy to the global mix. This just points out all the more clearly that it ain't just the answer to our climate woes that is blowing in the wind.


Spain's Maranchon Wind Farm is the largest in Europe with 104 generators, and is operated by Iberdrola, the largest wind energy company in the world. © Greenpeace / Daniel Beltrá

As we continue to search for ways to foster an economic recovery, the incredible growth of wind power capacity around the world shows that wind energy is not just the right choice for saving the climate, but also for creating jobs and putting folks back to work.

The American Wind Energy Association reports that the US didn't do too shabby itself, installing a record-breaking 10,000 megawatts (MW), or 10 GW, of new wind power capacity in 2009. This brings total wind capacity in the US up to 35 GW. But according to the GWEC, China contributed a third of the global wind power expansion last year, marking the fifth straight year in which the country at least doubled its capacity for generating power from the wind. China is now producing more than 25 GW of power from the wind, up from just over 12 GW the year before. Kinda puts our 10 GW increase into perspective. For a country that prides itself on innovation and forward-thinking, the US can and should do better.

Here we are in America still fighting for our first large-scale offshore wind project, Cape Wind. If you haven’t already, sign our petition calling on Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar to approve Cape Wind and help get us on the path to a clean, green future.

But even if we were to go all in for wind power tomorrow, how would we get that clean energy from the point of production to the point of consumption? Glad you asked! It just so happens we have just released a report describing how global electricity grids can sustain high levels of renewable energy. The report is called Renewables 24/7, click that link and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.

Hard as it is to believe, Cape Wind still faces an uncertain future.

But Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has said he will decide whether or not the project goes forward by February 12th — and he wants all of us to weigh in. You can sign our petition calling on Secretary Salazar to approve the project and show your support for Cape Wind right now. We'll send our petition with all of your signatures (over 12,000 so far — let's hit 15,000!) over to the Department of the Interior.

In case you don't already know all of this by heart, here's why you should support Cape Wind: The offshore wind project would be great for Massachusetts. Its 130 wind turbines would generate up to 420 megawatts of clean, green electricity – enough to replace the current power plant, which burns oil. This would reduce the region’s greenhouse gas emissions by 734,000 tons per year, which by some estimates is equivalent to taking 175,000 cars off the road.

Cape Wind would also be great for the United States of America. As the only offshore wind farm likely to be approved and built during President Obama’s first term, the completion of Cape Wind would go a long way toward showing the world that we're serious about cleaning up our act and converting to a clean energy economy. America needs to lead the world in solving global warming, and projects like Cape Wind are exactly how we can begin to do that.

The most recent snag is the concerns about the historic and cultural value of Nantucket Sound. These concerns obviously need to be properly addressed, and it seems like they can be met while still allowing this vital clean energy project to move forward. Because the thing is, the impacts of unchecked global warming — including sea level rise that would all but erase the region’s current coastline — are the far greater threat not just to Cape Cod but to the entire world. Building this first-of-its-kind wind farm in the US will be an important step towards tackling the climate crisis we’re facing right now and saving Cape Cod.

So please take a minute and sign our petition to Secretary Salazar and let him know that you support clean energy and Cape Wind. When you're done doing that, there's a link directly to a form on the Department of the Interior's website where you can submit a personal comment (or go here).