Feature story
- May 18, 2010
Today the biggest, most ambitious forest
conservation deal ever has been announced:
The Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement. After
more than seven years of hard-fought campaigning
to end the on-going destruction of Canada's
Boreal Forest, Greenpeace and eight other
non-governmental organisations have agreed
to a truce with the logging industry: we
will suspend the battle for the Boreal.
In return, 21 of the
biggest logging industry players from the
Forest Products Association of Canada (FPAC)
have agreed to an immediate moratorium on
logging in nearly 29 million hectares of
forest that covers virtually all the critical
habitat for the threatened woodland caribou.
The long-term agreement includes a commitment
from the parties to work over the next three
years to undertake conservation planning
for the entire area covered by the agreement.
This unusual alliance of logging companies
and environmental groups will work together
to ensure long-term protection within 72
million hectares of forest - an area twice
the size of Germany - that stretches right
across Canada.
This agreement is the
result of almost a decade of hard hard-fought
campaigning, intense market pressure and
peaceful direct action. It is the best chance
we have to permanently protect vast areas
of wilderness and biodiversity, protect
the threatened woodland caribou and secure
billions of tonnes of stored carbon which
would otherwise contribute to climate change
if the forest was logged.
This agreement would
not have happened without public support
and pressure. Last year, Greenpeace won
a key victory when Kimberly-Clark - maker
of Kleenex and the largest tissue manufacturer
in the world - agreed to a progressive forest
policy in response to our Kleercut campaign.
The role of consumer activism in transforming
Kimberly-Clark set a precedent for the rest
of the industry - it showed other companies
that involvement in forest destruction will
ultimately hurt their bottom line.
Today is just a start,
there is still more work to do to ensure
that the agreement leads to permanent protection
for large areas of intact wilderness in
Canada's Boreal Forest, one of the most
important forested areas in the world. Greenpeace,
together with the other groups and companies
involved, will continue to play a leading
role to make sure it is put into practice
in a way that really protects forests, biodiversity
and the global climate from the impacts
of destructive logging.
*Go to Boreal Resources for a complete set
of documents on the Canadian Boreal Forest
Agreement.
+ More
Mayapuri radioactive
hotspots update
Blogpost by jmckeati
- May 19, 2010 at 3:23 PM Add comment Remember
the dangerous radioactive hotspots Greenpeace
found at India’s Mayapuri scrapyard? This
morning we went back to see how the authorities
had got on with the decontamination of the
area. This is what our monitors found…
Greenpeace campaigners
distribute leaflets of information about
radiation, Cobalt 60 and its impact on workers
and traders health to the community at Mayapuri
scrap market. (© Maruti Modi / Greenpeace)
‘From our measurements,
we can conclude that the hot spots have
been removed,’ says Jan Vande Putte, one
of out radiation experts. There is some
remaining contamination that does not pose
an immediate risk to the workers but could
still be harmful if left for a longer period
of time. ‘The authorities now have the responsibility
to draft a comprehensive action plan to
further reduce radiation exposure of the
public to levels as low as achievable,’
says Jan.
So far authorities have
not followed international standards to
ensure the highest levels of safety. The
Atomic Energy Regulatory Board must publish
a comprehensive assessment of the situation
and its plan for further decontamination,
as is normal international practice. India
needs to put in place standards and processes
that would to ensure proper decontamination
of the area, to safeguard local people.
The Mayapuri incident
needs to be a wake-up call for all of us,
especially the India’s government. All of
the loopholes in the nuclear regulatory
system need to be identified and dealt with.
India is simply unprepared for the civilian
nuclear expansion the government is currently
proposing.
Greenpeace also distributed
information to the workers and local residents
around the impacted area in Mayapuri regarding
the possible health impacts of radiation
from Cobalt -60. ‘The manner in which the
authorities have dealt with this situation,
including a complete lack of transparency,
is shocking. Blood tests were conducted
around a month ago, and yet the results
have still not been provided to the people,’
says Karuna Raina, our nuclear campaigner
in India.
Earlier statements by
the DAE and AERB, issued on April 9th and
16th respectively, indicated that the decontamination
process had ensured that the area was ‘safe’.
Local people working in the vicinity of
the hotspots said that they had no knowledge
of any remaining radioactivity. An independent
regulatory body is supposed to be protecting
the health of people and environment not
the nuclear establishment. So why isn’t
it?
Deep Green: Cars, Corporations and Society
Blogpost by Laura K.
- May 20, 2010 at 3:02 PM 1 comment Deep
Green is Rex Wyler's monthly column, reflecting
on the roots of activism, environmentalism,
and Greenpeace's past, present, and future.
The opinions here are his own.
May 2010 - The Toyota
hybrid with a stuck accelerator and no brakes
is a sad icon of our age.
Our modern industrial
society remains stuck on growth and does
not know how to stop. Like the runaway Toyota,
we are headed for a crash. The car, however,
is more than a metaphor. The car is one
of the prime forces of destruction on our
planet, among the most harmful social design
decisions in historyAs a means of moving
people around, the car is inefficient, deadly
and toxic. Most North American cities offer
few transportation options, making citizens
dependent on automobiles. Today, certain
developing nations with traditionally sound
public transportation, are subsidising automobile
industries. Will these nations make the
same tragic mistakes that western nations
made?
In 1991, English poet
and playwright Heathcote Williams published
Autogeddon, a long invective poem about
the automobile’s trail of death and devastation,
which Williams called ‘a humdrum holocaust
... the third world war nobody bothered
to declare’. How did private, expensive,
dangerous, dirty automobiles come to dominate
North American transportation?
Killing the public option
In 1922, some 1,200 thriving urban railways
operated in North America, accounting for
90 percent of urban travel. No one complained
or demanded more cars and roads. However,
General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan
saw a ‘great opportunity’ to replace public
transportation with private cars. To achieve
this, he established a ‘task force’ to ‘motorise’
North America. Sloan coerced railroads to
abandon urban transport and used his influence
to discourage banks from making loans to
urban rail projects. Sloan’s secret cabal
used advertising and lobbying where it worked
and, where it didn’t, they used bribes and
intimidation. In Detroit and Minneapolis
GM’s ‘task force’ employed mobsters to intimidate
politicians. In Florida they gave away complimentary
Cadillacs to city councillors.
Then, in 1936, General
Motors, Firestone Tires and Standard Oil
(Exxon-Mobil), formed a holding company,
National City Lines, which bought urban
transport systems and systematically destroyed
them. It bought the Pacific Electric system
that carried 110 million passengers in 56
communities. It increased fares, cancelled
routes, reduced schedules, cut salaries,
allowed trains to decay, ripped up over
1800 kilometres of track and closed the
entire network. By 1956, over 100 rail systems
in 45 cities had been purchased and closed.
Meanwhile, GM ran ads claiming that electric
trains were ‘old fashioned’ and that private
cars represented ‘the wave of the future’.
In 1946, public railway
supporter Commander Edwin Quinby wrote a
report to city governments, describing a
‘deliberately planned campaign to swindle
you out of your electric railway system’.
GM used its media influence to accuse Quinby
and his supporters of being a ‘lunatic fringe
of radicals and crackpots’.
Quinby’s report caught
the attention of US federal prosecutors,
who indicted General Motors in Chicago for
‘criminal conspiracy to monopolise ground
transportation’ and destroy public transit.
They won their case, and the court convicted
GM of criminal conspiracy. GM paid a $5,000
US dollar fine. Otherwise, nothing changed.
Over the next 25 years, US prosecutors attempted
to limit GM's influence on public transportation,
but in the end GM had more money, lawyers
and influence. It succeeded in sabotaging
public transportation throughout North America.
Going global
We often hear globalisation promoters claim
that the ‘free market’ system allows ‘free
choice’. But the destruction of public transportation
in North America was not a public choice.
It was a corporate scheme for monopoly,
power and profit, preying on human ego and
gullibility.
In the 1980s, UK Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher joined the chorus
and proclaimed ‘nothing should be allowed
to stand in the way of the great car economy’.
Under Thatcher, British engineers built
the M25 motorway around London, designed
for 30 years of vehicle growth, but traffic
jams clogged London within six months.
Today, 17 companies
– including Toyota, GM, Honda, Volkswagen,
Chrysler, BMW and Mazda – produce about
60 million vehicles each year. Meanwhile,
some 50 emerging global automobile companies
– Harbin Hafei, Mahindra, Anhui Jianghuai,
Great Wall, China National, and others –
make about 10 million vehicles each year.
These emerging companies intend to grow
to rival the big automobile makers.
About 1 billion motor
vehicles now exist on Earth, a fleet growing
at about 3 percent every year. At this rate,
within 25 years, Earth will support 2 billion
vehicles and within 50 years - by 2060 -
4 billion vehicles.
Car destruction:
Over a million people die each year in traffic
accidents. Throughout history, over 50 million
people have died, comparable to the death
toll of World War II. Over 2 billion people
– drivers, passengers and bystanders – have
been injured in vehicle accidents. Most
of these deaths and injuries could have
been avoided with public transport. Accidents
happen with trains and buses, but at a fraction
of the automobile rate. Good public transportation
in place of automobiles would have saved
about 42 million of the 50 million traffic
deaths due to cars.
However, these unnecessary
deaths and injuries account for only a fraction
of the destruction caused by cars and trucks.
In an automobile culture, cars consume about
40 percent of the urban landscape for roads,
highways, parking lots, gas-stations, body
shops and so forth. This represents a massive
public asset – land - paved over to serve
an inefficient, dangerous transport system.
Worldwide, motor vehicles
emit about one billion metric tons of CO2
each year, 15 percent of global carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, modest ‘efficiency’ gains – hybrids
and mileage improvements – are swamped by
the shear growth of the car culture.
The social costs of
car culture include the destruction of neighbourhoods,
unsightly urban landscapes, fear, stress
and ‘road-rage’. One of the greatest social
costs is lost time and squandered human
productivity. Commuters on streetcars and
trains can be productive with work, reading,
relaxing, eating breakfast in the dining
car, or talking to colleagues and friends.
Hybrid fallacy
The ecological and social destruction caused
by cars goes far beyond carbon emissions
and ensnarled cities. The harvesting and
mining of resources – rubber, iron, rare-earth
metals for hybrid batteries, copper, plastics
and so forth – plus the energy-intensive
manufacturing process – comprise a massive
‘embodied’ energy and resource demand. Some
20 to 40 percent of the energy an automobile
uses in its lifetime is ‘embodied energy’,
consumed before it is purchased. None of
this is solved by building hybrid cars.
The car culture is a resource pig.
Currently less than
2 percent of new vehicles are hybrids. If
these few vehicles improved fuel efficiency
by 25 percent, that would translate into
one-half of 1 percent for the entire global
fleet of vehicles, which meanwhile is growing
six times faster, at 3 percent. Historically,
mechanical efficiencies do not translate
into less consumption, but more. Why? Because
when we gain efficiencies, consumer items
become cheaper, so people consume more.
Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak, for
example, owns four Priuses, perhaps thinking
that he’s solving global warming. New hybrid
owners will drive more and feel comfortable
living farther from their work. It is counter-intuitive,
but efficiencies increase consumption. In
economics, this is well known as the ‘rebound
effect’.
Car promoters love to
show oil consumption per capita declining
in certain regions. What they don’t tell
you is that per capita petroleum consumption
has been declining since 1979 as population
has outstripped oil production. Global oil
production has been flat since 2005, so
per capita consumption is now declining
everywhere, not because of hybrid cars but
because of oil field depletion.
A recent ad for the
Honda Insight hybrid proclaims, ‘Theoretically,
it seats 6.75 billion’, implying that Honda
could build a new hybrid car for every person
on the planet. This is a deceit: 6.75 billion
people, driving hybrids with 40 miles-per-gallon
efficiency, driving 10,000 miles a year,
would require 40 billion barrels of oil
annually, over 5 times the current demand
for automobile fuel, and the difference
is greater than the entire current world
oil production. There is not enough gasoline
– or other resources – to build and fuel
6.75 billion hybrids, or even half that
amount.
Buying a new hybrid
car will not reduce global petroleum consumption.
It will increase consumption by adding a
new vehicle to the road. The growing automobile
culture requires infrastructure, highways,
service and parking spaces, all costing
more space and more energy.
From the North American
experience with cars, we should have learned
that we cannot trust corporations to design
our cultures. Car companies may find it
profitable to repeat the crime of North
America, destroy public transportation,
deplete the planet of resources, mine every
last scrap of rare earth metals, burn the
declining oil and dam rivers for electricity
to grow and feed more cars. For the people
and the planet, this would be a disaster.
Nations who want to
achieve genuine sustainability should follow
the example of cities that have designed
and built excellent public transportation,
cities such as Stockholm, Oslo, Moscow,
Helsinki, Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, Seoul,
and Sao Paulo.
The motor vehicle, including
the Toyota hybrid with its stuck accelerator
and faulty brakes, should fade away into
the dustbin history’s bad ideas.
- RexWeyler
You can respond to "Deep
Green" columns at my Ecolog, where
I post portions of this column and dialogue
with readers.
Leaderboard Launch Shows
IT Companies Need to Get Political!
Blogpost by EoinD - May 17, 2010 at 1:49
PM Add comment (Ed: This entry was first
posted April 29 on our old Making Waves
blog.)
The Cool IT campaign has just unveiled Version
3 of the Leaderboard, our third assessment
of Information Technology (IT) companies’
efforts to fight climate change. If the
world is going to end its reliance on dirty
energy, sweepingly incorporate renewable
energy into our electricity grid, and boost
energy efficiency, IT companies represent
a key link in the chain to get us there.
At today's Green:Net
conference in San Francisco, where we launched
Version 3 Leaderboard scores to an audience
of tech companies and reporters, everyone
is talking about innovative technological
solutions that could get us economy-wide
gains in efficiency and reduce global warming
pollution.
And indeed, the clean
energy revolution will require that IT delivers
these tools. If we’re going to plug in our
cars, we will need a way to monitor our
electricity usage and juice them with renewables.
Well, IT is building the smart grid and
smart electricity metering to allow us to
do just that.
And if you were constantly
reminded how much energy you’re using when
you turn on your lights or run your blow
dryer, you would probably cut back your
usage a bit, right? IT can help us make
our buildings more efficient, so we use
less energy to light and heat our homes,
but it can also help us measure our individual
impacts so that we make better choices about
our energy consumption. But IT companies
need to demonstrate the real-world contributions
of their products and services in order
to get credit on the Leaderboard.
In this evaluation,
a handful of IT companies have provided
examples of the solutions that they will
offer to help solve the climate crisis.
And to be sure that they are putting these
products and services to good use, we have
rated them on their ability to demonstrate
metrics by which they plan to measure the
positive climate and energy impacts of their
solutions.
Cisco really shines
in this area, scoring highest overall, largely
for its specific cases studies of solutions
and the associated means for measuring their
contributions. Similarly, Ericsson, which
is new to the Leaderboard, starts off well
in second place for its climate solutions.
Most IT companies have
also set greenhouse gas reduction targets
for their own operations, which is ever
more important as cloud computing becomes
a primary way of communicating, sharing
documents, posting photos, watching videos,
and organizing our lives (i.e. the Google
suite of web tools).
Our recent report, Make
IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution
to Climate Change, details this growing
problem. Companies that build data centers
to run their cloud platforms will have a
choice to make: either increase the demand
for dirty energy by building data centers
near cheap coal-fired power, or throw some
weight behind the deployment of renewables
and commit to using clean energy to fuel
the cloud.
We know what the real
leaders should do.
Real leaders will work
hard to influence local, national, and international
decision-makers on climate policies that
slash emissions and enable widespread deployment
of renewable energy and carbon-cutting technologies.
While this sounds like a no brainer - given
that advocating for favorable policies and
incentives boosts both the climate and IT’s
business model - companies are not displaying
the degree of political activity we’d hope
to see. And they better get going if they
hope to beat the fossil fuel industry, which
continues to throw its lobbying dollars
behind maintaining the status quo.
Google scores top marks
for advocacy, and a number of the IT companies
turned out in Copenhagen, but we still need
to hear some specific policy goals articulated
by these corporations and witness proactive,
vocal advocacy for climate and energy policies.
This will be an important
year for the climate. In the U.S., debate
will soon begin on an energy and climate
bill that is expected to put a price on
carbon pollution. And the year will end
with international climate talks in Cancun,
Mexico, where world leaders will once again
attempt to negotiate a fair and binding
deal to stop climate change.
We hope to see Leaderboard
companies improve their scores in 2010 by
actively participating in political advocacy
and showing us what real climate advocacy
leadership looks like.
