Chicago students tell President Obama: stop Keystone XL!
This post was written by Dylan Amlin, a member of the Chicago Youth Climate Coalition, and the leader of the RU Fossil Free divestment campaign at Roosevelt University
Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of activists gathered outside the Chicago Hilton, where President Obama and other key political leaders attended a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. As a part of an international campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, we were there as a reminder that our movement will not back down on this issue—that the president’s decision on KXL could determine the fate of our climate and our future. Attendees represented a number of groups, including Chicago Youth Climate Coalition, 350.org, #IDLENOMORE, Sierra Club, CREDO, Chicago 350, Friends of the Earth, Center for Biological Diversity, and many more.
As a student at Roosevelt University, and a member of the Chicago Youth Climate Coalition, I attended the first Chicago birddogging rally at Argonne Laboratory. It was inspiring to see many of the same faces, but even better to experience the growth of this movement.
Australia and New Zealand: The New Frontiers of Divestment and Maths
Just yesterday, Bill McKibben was announced as this year's recipient of the Sophie Prize for his work in "building a social movement to preserve a sustainable planet." In receiving it, he joins the ranks of legends like Wangari Maathai, James Hansen, and Sheila Watt Cloutier. Meanwhile, Bill is about to start a two week tour of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji, bringing his Do the Maths message Downunder. Before he even lands in Australia, the Australian Coal Association has come out biting at his ankles...
"Foreigners coming to Australia to campaign against our national economy can do a lot of damage if their claims go unchallenged" - wrote the Australian Coal Association (ACA) in The Australian last month, attacking Bill McKibben in advance of his Do the Maths Australia tour.
The tour begins on Monday, and the ACA is doing its best to discredit and rubbish Bill McKibben, but they're nervous and full of bumbling attacks. Just last week, their CEO, Nikki Williams gave an address here in Sydney in which she took aim at activists who are challenging the might of the coal industry. She took particular aim at Bill for calling the Australian coalmining industry a 'rogue industry', saying "This sinful image is widely promoted by the self-styled planetary saints. The authors of such views are rarely seriously questioned about how they arrived at the view or whether the ‘facts upon which they rely’ are facts at all."
It's standard issue communications practice of the fossil fuel industry - discredit and make the oppostion sound unthruthful, and then over-inflate their own importance (for another example of William's bumbling efforts to discredit Bill, see the bottom of this article).
Last week Bill gave a taste of his upcoming tour on a live cross to the ABC's Lateline show. He also crushed arguments laid out by climate deniers. Well worth a watch - just click here.
In that interview, Bill gave some insight into our plans for bringing divestment campaigning to Australia. Although it has to be said that The Guardian did an even better job in announcing our plans for divestment campaign in this article. So things are hotting up here in Australia, and with many of the venues nearly sold out for Bill's Australia tour, you'll want to get in quick to get a slice of the action! For more info and tickets, visit maths.350.org/australia
Announcing: Summer Heat – Mass Action Across the US!
A letter from Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Winona LaDuke, Sandra Steingraber, and Rev. Lennox Yearwood
For the last two years, all across the country, people have said the same thing to us: “We’re ready to fight.”
And as the planet lurches past 400 parts per million concentrations of CO2, the moment has come, the moment to ask you to do hard, important, powerful things. The last two weeks of July are, statistically, the hottest stretch of the year. This year we want to make them politically hot too. Which means we need you, out on the front line. We need some of you to risk going to jail, and all of you to show up and speak out. And since it’s a hard thing to ask, this letter is going to be a little longer than usual. (If you want to cut to the chase, though, the list of actions can be found here.)
We’re calling this next phase of the fight “Summer Heat.” Over the course of the final weeks of July, from the Pacific Northwest to the coast of Maine, from the Keystone pipeline route to the White House where the administration has broken its promise to put solar on the roof, to the Utah desert where they’re getting ready for the first tar sands mine in the US, we’re going to try and get across the essential message: it’s time to stand up – peacefully but firmly — to the industry that is wrecking our future. Click here to make your stand: joinsummerheat.org/map
We believe that mass action can breathe life into even the most hardened political fights, and so these actions will all aim to bring together thousands of people to stand together -- perhaps sometimes on the wrong side of the law.
A major milestone.
For the first time, NOAA's Mauna Loa observatory recorded an average daily CO2 concentration above 400 parts per million. Globally, we're not yet at annual averages above 400, but this is indeed an important milestone. We've created 400.350.org to reflect on what this means, and talk about what we're doing to cool the planet.
Please take a moment to read and share.
Take the Transition Challenge!
This guest post was written by Marissa Mommaerts. Marissa is the Communications Manager at Transition US, the national hub of an international network of communities transitioning away from fossil fuels toward sustainable, local economies.
Sitka, Alaska moves community members to create a resilient energy future
This guest post was written by Ray Friedlander at the Sitka Conservation Society.
#FossilFreedom Day of Action Kicks off Across the Country
Over 50 events are planned on college campuses across the country today to highlight the growing fossil fuel divestment movement that has spread to more than 300 colleges and universities over the last semester.
One of the day's largest events will take place at San Francisco City Hall, where students from across the city will rally with 350.org founder Bill McKibben and city supervisors who recently voted unanimously to push the city’s pension fund to divest $583 million from the fossil fuel industry. San Francisco was inspired to work towards divestment because of the student movement -- now, they're helping students push their universities to divest!
Other events include students at Colorado College camping out on campus to call for divestment, students at Northern Arizona University dropping a big banner over a campus building, students at Cornell University hosting a die-in to symbolize the human cost of climate change, and students at Wellesley College meeting with their boards of trustees to push for divestment.
Based on the anti-apartheid divestment campaigns of the 1980s, the current fossil fuel divestment effort has spread to over 300 colleges and universities in the last six months. Four colleges, Sterling, Unity, Hampshire, and College of the Atlantic have committed to divest their endowments. Students have met with their boards of trustees to push for divestment on over 50 campuses and passed student body resolutions supporting the move on more than 30 campuses. More board meetings are scheduled for the coming weeks.
The action on campus has sparked some incredible progress off-campus, as well. Last week, 9 mayors across the country joined San Francisco and Seattle to announce that they would be pursuing fossil fuel divestment. The cities include: Eugene, OR, Berkeley, CA, Richmond, CA, Boulder, CO, Santa Fe, NM, Bayfield, WI, Madison, WI, Ithaca, NY, and State College, PA. There is still much more work to do: each of these cities will need to follow through with their commitment to keep their city funds out of fossil fuels and push their state pension funds to fully divest, but these Mayoral commitments are a great start, it shows that the divestment campaign is beginning to gain the political support we need to make a real impact.
We'll be sharing photos and updates from the #FossilFreedom Day of Action throughout the day today. Make sure to follow the hashtag on Twitter for breaking news from around the country.
The “Big 4” Australian Banks are Financing the Destruction of the Great Barrier Reef
A new report released today by Market Forces and 350.org Australia shows how Australia’s ‘big four’ banks, supported by international investors, are literally Financing Reef Destruction.
The report makes it clear that the ‘big four’ Australian banks – ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac – play a critical role in enabling major fossil fuel projects. Combined, these banks lent $3.8 billion to coal ports and LNG terminals in the Great Barrier Reef Word Heritage Area since January 2008.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef literally sits in the way of the fossil fuel industry and its massive expansion plans. Of the many new coal terminals planned just one port, Abbot Point, near Mackay, could increase almost nine-fold in capacity to become by far the biggest coal export port ever in the world.
350.org Australia and Market Forces are calling on customers of those banks to tell them to stop financing reef destruction or they will pull out their funds and go elsewhere.
Bill McKibben, coming to Australia in June for a “Global Warming: Do the Maths” tour, said “When you do the maths on avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, there simply isn’t enough room in the carbon budget for new fossil fuel projects.
“We’ve got to wind down the fossil fuel era with great haste if we’re going to keep the planet from overheating,” McKibben said. “This report provides Australians with the information they need to make hard decisions about where their money is invested and if it’s helping or destroying the planet.”
How Divestment Happens: The Inside Story from the Uniting Church of NSW & ACT
Just over a week ago here in Australia, the Uniting Church of New South Wales and ACT made the bold pledge to divest it's investment funds from the fossil fuel industry, directing them into renewable energy instead. It made headlines, and is the start of a coming wave of divestment campaigning in Australia. Justin Whelan, Mission Development Manager at Paddington Uniting Church explains how they got the Church Synod to make the decision - and one that was made by consensus!
There is an etiquette in the church that we don't clap resolutions when they pass, but this time excitement got the better of too many people. A wave of applause broke out. Was it only in this moment that people realised the significance of what we had done? Or was this the bursting dam, a community waiting a long time for a little nudge to help them be the radical, prophetic people they want to be?
For those of us who brought the divestment proposal to the 400-member council meeting (known as a 'Synod meeting') of the Uniting Church in New South Wales and the ACT, there was relief to go with the excitement. We had been negotiating with key leaders over the first three days of the meeting, soothing concerns and making small amendments as needed. The ethical investment managers had legitimate operational concerns, and by working with them they were addressed.
Another key leader, whom we had pegged as an ally, told us he would oppose it in the strongest terms. A long conversation ensued about theories of social change and comparisons with other campaigns he is passionate about. At the time we thought we hadn't convinced him but when the public debate came, he too supported the resolution with a minor change: he wanted to add to the decision!
So now we have committed to investing in renewable energy instead of fossil fuels, and a communications strategy will be devised by 'head office' staff to encourage and support individual members taking their own action, such as moving their superannuation (pension) funds to ethical investors.
All this by consensus. Our church’s decision making process was a potential problem but in the end we need not have feared. This proposal followed a string of resolutions about the environment and climate change over the last two decades. The church has been an outspoken advocate for climate action for at least ten years. At the same meeting we heard from farming communities being ‘fractured’ by the coal seam gas industry, and passed a resolution calling for the protection of valuable land and water resources. The divestment proposal was both an effective way to dramatically ramp up that advocacy, as well as putting our money where our mouth is. In this context, “we refuse to profit from destroying the earth” was a pretty easy message to sell.
If anyone was in doubt about the significance of the Synod's decision, the media interest will have set them right pretty quickly. With nothing more than a media release, our resolution achieved national print and radio news coverage, a string of interviews and a social media storm (thanks 350.org for helping with that!). One journalist asked me whether I really thought this would have any impact - whether anyone would care what the church does with its money. I felt like saying "well, you called me, didn't you?"
There are still questions of implementation for the investment managers to consider, and we are starting to get some backlash from coal mining companies that give grants to church-run community services. In Australia, the resource sector is so significant to the economy that it was inevitable that even churches find themselves enmeshed in it. These are challenges we all face as communities living in the world as it is now. These are challenges we must all face head-on if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.
The Uniting Church in NSW-ACT has had an ethical investment policy for about 30 years, making it something of a world leader in that regard. We already refuse to invest in the tobacco, armaments, uranium mining and gambling industries, as well as companies with poor records on human rights, working conditions, and so on.
Now fossil fuel companies have been added to that list. For some this link to other toxic industries was a cognitive breakthrough: we weren't saying they were 'bad' companies, we were saying their once vital business has become a threat to human and ecological life.
As Bill McKibben says, and we emphasised, "there is no flaw in their business plan. The flaw is their business plan."
Justin Whelan, from the Uniting Earthweb Group
You can read more about the church’s divestment decision here.
Get Ready for the Australian Coal Show-Down
While the momentum of the Fossil Fuel Resistance Movement has grown from strength to strength across the United States, it's worth noting that a similar sort of momentum is now brewing across Australia.
Just four months into the year and we’ve already seen many climate wins here.
In Newcastle activists successfully stopped the expansion of the world’s largest coal port, in WA plans to build a gas hub on James Price Point were withdrawn and companies have been pulling out of coal seam gas operations across New South Wales.
There’s been even more this month. Just last week the Uniting Church of New South Wales and ACT announced it was divesting from the fossil fuel industry and in the middle of the month the small town of Bulga in the Hunter Valley won its court appeal to block a new coal mine. On Wednesday six Greenpeace activists climbed aboard a coal ship on the way to South Korea to demand a stop to our coal exports.
There's a fantastic groundswell building, and now through Bill McKibben’s Do the Maths Australia tour in June, we’ll be launching a new wave of campaigning to divest Australia from the coal industry, and to do our part to bring on the global age of renewable energy. Naturally, this has started to get the coal industry worried.
On Wednesday the Australian Coal Association, writing in The Australian, took aim at 350.org and Bill McKibben, saying “Foreigners coming to Australia to campaign against our national economy can do a lot of damage if their claims go unchallenged.”
They also said a lot of other self-inflating and misleading things in that article. One thing's for sure: in the coming months they will be working their spin doctors hard. We’ve got a fight on our hands, and we need to be one step ahead.
350.org Australia is throwing everything we’ve got into this fight, and so we're reaching out for help now. Can you help us ensure Bill McKibben's Do the Maths tour helps wake Australia up to the battle we are facing -- taking on the fossil fuel industry to ensure we all have a safe climate future?
Chip in now to our Start Some Good campaign here, which will enable us to rise to the challenge.
Let's get ready.