Wyoming, Western Ranchers Form Wind Energy Associations

There's a growing movement out west as ranchers and property owners in high, steady wind areas of Wyoming and neighboring western states turn to wind energy associations as a means of better understanding and coming to terms with the growing number of wind energy project developers and agents interested in leasing rights to their land...

continue:

http://www.triplepundit.com/pages/wyoming-western-ranchers-form-wind-energ.php


Also NPR article:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=98741271

Japan's first solar cargo ship

THE world's first cargo ship partly propelled by solar power took to the seas on Friday in Japan, aiming to cut fuel costs and carbon emissions when automakers ship off their exports.

http://www.enn.com/top_stories/article/38904

Bringing Fair Trade Home: the Launching of the Domestic

"In an historic coming together farmers, farmworkers, traders, processors, marketers and food system advocates sat down as equals to bring fair trade home," reports the Organic Consumers Association. On December 7, "after three years of groundwork, the Domestic Fair Trade Association (DFTA) is ready to welcome new members." Dr. Chela Vazquez, representing PAN at the meeting held at the headquarters of Organic Valley Coop in LaFarge, Wisconsin, reports that "the participants agreed on a program to advance a vision of social and environmental justice in the food system by developing fair trade standards for North America." DFTA's primary goals are "to support family-scale farming, to reinforce farmer-led initiatives such as farmer co-operatives, to ensure just conditions for agricultural workers, to strengthen the organic farming movement, and bring these efforts together with mission-based traders, retailers and concerned consumers to contribute to the movement for a more equitable, diverse and sustainable agriculture in North America."

http://www.panna.org/files/domesticFairTrade20081217.pdf

Light REDD: The Looming Tragedy of Carbon Markets Paying to Destroy Ancient Forests

EARTH MEANDERS
By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
From Earth's Newsdesk
December 13, 2008

Using carbon funds, the world's governments are poised to subsidize ancient forest logging, claiming it benefits the Earth's climate. REDD's potential support of "low impact" logging of ancient forests, and conversion of natural forests to tree farms, fails the climate, biodiversity and biosphere.

Plans to pay for rainforest protection using funds from carbon markets progressed during this week's UN climate talks. I have long promoted the deceptively simple idea of paying to keep rainforests standing, yet am far from jubilant with the results. It appears first time, industrial logging of ancient forests -- through so-called low-impact and certified logging, and the conversion of these and other natural forests to plantations -- is falsely considered as having carbon benefits, and will be paid for with our tax dollars and carbon offsets.

The concept of paying for rainforest protection with carbon money has become known as avoided deforestation, or alternatively, as REDD for "Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation". Like many promising concepts before it (i.e. "sustainable development" and "certified forestry"), REDD is in danger of becoming empty jargon meant to legitimate continued environmentally destructive activities.

Worldwide, an area of forest greater than the size of Greece is deforested every year, and much larger areas are continually ecologically diminished, contributing about a fifth of the global greenhouse gas emissions causing abrupt and potentially run-away climate change. Given the biosphere, atmosphere and most species depend upon these forests; the basic idea of paying for protection of rainforests is a sound one. But like so many good eco-ideas before it, the devil is in the details.

Most generally, the concern is whether further commoditizing ecosystems does in fact lead to their protection. As capitalism verges upon collapse because of its dependence upon unsustainable growth as the measure of well-being, it is difficult to trust the world's ancient forest, global ecosystem engines, to yet another market. To date the carbon market has failed miserably to reduce emissions, and its primary impact has been to enrich the polluting elite. What will make avoided deforestation different?

There is much vagueness regarding what specific sorts of activities REDD will fund. Terms like preservation, protection, conservation, sustainability and low impact are used imprecisely and interchangeably when in fact they are quite different. Efforts to end old growth logging, aid in natural forest regeneration and improve their management, and promote socially acceptable plantations of mixed native species are certainly welcome.

Yet it is clear that REDD, as envisioned under United Nations' climate activities, will also subsidize first time industrial logging of primary and old growth forests, and why not? Virtually everyone else tasked with global environmental stewardship -- from stylish Greenpeace, to ultra-establishment World Bank, to second tier posers like Rainforest Action Network -- support the myth of certified ancient forest logging. They and others fail to see that maintaining and restoring large, relatively INTACT terrestrial ecosystems is key to solving both the climate and biodiversity crises, and is ultimately the only long-term foundation for global ecological sustainability.

REDD as it now stands further greenwashs the notion that logging the world’s last ancient forest ecosystems, and converting these and other natural forests to tree farms, benefits the climate. This is in direct contradiction to the best current science. We are learning primary forest ecosystems, including soils, continue removing carbon indefinitely. And their continued ability to both hold existing, and remove new, carbon is majorly and permanently reduced when "managed" for the first time.

The ecological rigorousness of the REDD concept is being negotiated away in order to get industry and government onboard. To appease those responsible for the very burning and cutting destroying ecosystems, while legitimizing their right to continue doing so in a slightly better fashion, REDD is at risk of becoming meaningless. The promise of logging their forests and having carbon payments too, largely motivates government and industry involvement with REDD.

REDD buys into the pernicious myth that low-impact, certified, sustainable, ecosystem based, socially responsible, pixie-magic-dust methods exist to acceptably log a sixty million year old sacred and ecologically precious ancient forest. The world's remaining primeval forests are ecologically and evolutionarily perfect, and there is no industrial management needed or possible that does not release huge amounts of carbon initially, while reducing long-term carbon storage potential. Nor can any sort of industrial scaled logging avert dramatic destruction forever of ancient forests' structure, composition and function.

Because plantations are widely mistaken as forests, REDD will lead to replacement of carbon rich forests by monoculture tree plantations. Much carbon is lost immediately, and future carbon storage potential is forever diminished. While planted trees remove carbon, the carbon stored is not going to persist for millennia like in ancient forest ecosystems. Fast growing monocultures to make paper may be rotting in a land fill within a year. Further, industrial tree plantations are notorious for their toxic waste, social disruption and soil depletion.

An ecologically sufficient gold standard for avoided deforestation looks like this. In regards to primary and old growth forests, a maximally effective program would fund only strict preservation in order to optimally protect carbon and biodiversity stores in the long-term; and only with local support, their continued traditional uses and possibly limited small-scale, community-based eco-forestry development. The best way to remove new carbon is to assist secondary forests to regenerate old-growth characteristics, while expanding and connecting fragmented primary forest landscapes through ecological restoration. There must be no incentives to promote, or tolerance of, replacing natural forests with monocultural tree farms. Demand for forest products can be met from rigorously ecologically certified native, non-toxic tree plantations and delicate management of maturing secondary forests.

There are many other important and troublesome issues regarding REDD that must be resolved for it to be a force for good. REDD allows the rich world to buy their way out of reducing their own carbon emissions reduction. The well-off must not be allowed to use REDD to avoid reducing their own fossil fuel emission reductions. REDD mainly benefits the countries and interests that have caused most of the world's deforestation, and it is imperative local forest dwellers yield most of the benefits. Further, REDD is likely to result in land grabs and other violations of indigenous rights. Strict prohibitions upon REDD financing industrial ancient forest logging and plantations upon recently deforested lands, coupled with getting payments to willing local participants, will alleviate most concerns.

If carbon markets expand to include forests and pay for anything less than full protection of ancient forests, carbon markets will be revealed as a fraudulent Ponzi scheme whose primary purpose is to enrich the elite, not to reduce emissions or ensure a habitable biosphere. Yes, I want carbon markets and REDD to work. But not at the expense of Earth's last intact ecosystem engines, not if carbon markets abet continued emission growth and forest loss, not if carbon accounting trickery pays for continued ecocide, not if land is stolen from local peoples, and not if it slows down sufficient, real progress to END the biodiversity and climate crises.

Carbon markets themselves are underperforming. There is no indication they will become global and result in absolute emission reductions in time to avert global ecosystem collapse. The primary beneficiary thus far has been polluting industries which have reaped windfall profits after being given carbon credits for free. Carbon markets will have completed their descent into irrelevancy and actual harm to the climate and biosphere if these funds pay to log ancient rainforests. If policy-makers get it wrong and grant carbon funding to anything less than full protection for ancient forests, carbon markets will have proven their failure.

It just seems a little much, indeed a blind leap of faith, to suggest that the present economic system, which has brought the Earth to the edge of ruin by liquidating the Earth's life-giving ecosystems over the last few hundred years, and is now collapsing, is capable of saving terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. If history teaches us anything, it is assigning an economic value to shared natural resources, in a world of exponential growth in population and consumption, assures their over-use. Unless these concerns with the functioning of carbon markets, and how they relate to primary and old-growth forests in particular are addressed, the REDD concept is unworthy of support.

http://www.climateark.org/blog/2008/12/light-redd-the-looming-tragedy.asp#more

November5.org Grassroots

Several of us from the Nader for President 2008 campaign had decided to channel our efforts toward one big goal, but we lacked a major focus. Recently, results of a survey done by the campaign came back. Top issue? Adopt single payer health care. It's not the only issue people care about, obviously. But, to turn this country around it's clear that we need to address our own pain now.

Our big goal for the next Congress will be to drive for national health insurance to cover privately-delivered healthcare for all Americans.

We're far from alone in this. The array and scope of the groups and their allies supporting national health insurance is impressive. But we are not reinventing the wheel, either. As long as you want to build a lasting organization that will get Congress to focus on people's needs -- not those of big business -- November5 can be the place to do it.

Here in the United States, we have excellent private health care. So why are nearly 100 million of our citizens uninsured or underinsured? You already know why: profit-driven private insurance companies. Taken together, they make the Pentagon look streamlined.

Not only that, but consider over 18,000 dead and hundreds of thousands getting sicker every year specifically because their health insurance is inadequate -- or non-existent.

The way to fix health care is to cut private insurance companies out of the basic health care picture, while keeping our system of private delivery. This is how Medicare came into being in the 1960s. It now covers all Americans over 65.

If we succeed in creating a system of "Medicare for All," we will help businesses and other organizations, independent contractors, veterans, people with pre-existing conditions, students -- all of us. If we get this done, it will revolutionize all of our lives for the better. We'll be able to focus on everything else that we want to accomplish for our communities, and our nation.

Passing national health insurance will be difficult, but it is achievable.

General Plan
Huge amounts of leg work have been done on this issue. H.R. 676, the legislation that supporters of national health insurance have introduced, had 93 original co-sponsors in the House. That number will probably increase as the new Congress comes into session. The first task now facing all supporters of the bill will be to make a new tally of co-sponsors and supporters in the next Congress.
We will be up against alternatives to "reform" health care, such as the plan promoted by Senator Max Baucus. They simply extend the status quo -- and the damage. They would expand the profits of the private insurance companies, and therefore cannot check the spiraling inflation generated by these companies, and the broken system they inhabit. So, right away, we have to draw a sharp line between what we want, and bad compromises.
Remember, to pass the House, we will need roughly another 120 votes. That means that we will have to go for a margin, to have around 140 votes in addition to the co-sponsors. Here is where our district-level organizations will have to go to work to pick up votes.
We will need sponsors of the legislation in the Senate. Those do not yet exist. This is a critical early step that we hope to help other groups active on H.R. 676 to take.
November5 is non-partisan. We cannot be bound by the notion that Republicans will not buy into national health insurance. It maintains private delivery of health care and will expand choice of doctor, creating conditions for greater innovation and competition -- not less.
We will need to build fast. This effort will work only if it moves deeply into communities, where members of Congress get their votes. We are currently designing a structure that will allow people to begin organizing independently, district by district, around our current goal -- without having to wait for plans from above.
Specific Steps
Inform yourself and others by reading:
H.R. 676
and these three articles:
Rose Ann DeMoro, Philadelphia Inquirer, December 8, 2008
Physicians for a National Health Program, Talking Points, December 10, 2008
Statement of Dr. Marcia Angell introducing the U.S. National Health Insurance Act
and by watching these excellent videos on H.R. 676. Pass them along in emails, on blogs, facebook and myspace pages. If you create videos on youtube, do one on national health care yourself:
HR 676 - The Single Payer Solution, Part 1 of 4
HR 676 - The Single Payer Solution, Part 2 of 4
HR 676 - The Single Payer Solution, Part 3 of 4
HR 676 - The Single Payer Solution, Part 4 of 4
Write a letter -- not an email -- in your own words to your member of Congress stating that you'd like their commitment to vote for H.R. 676. If your member of Congress is a co-sponsor of the bill, express your support for that stand. Email a copy to us, if you would, with the words "Letter to My Congressperson" in the subject line.
President-elect Obama has asked for volunteers around the country to host discussion groups on the health care issue during the last half of December. Attend a discussion in your area and make the argument for single payer. Click here for more information.
Soon, we'll be raising money online to build the November5 movement. November5.org will not be a passive website, it will be a place where each Congressional district will be represented by the people of that district. You'll be able to login and see the latest on your Congressional representative, plan with others events that make sense to you for promoting H.R. 676, and organize for meeting with your member of Congress.

If the model works, we'll be able to tackle other issues. For now, let's focus in, and get November5 built. The bell has rung -- and we are in a struggle that we can win, if we all dig deep.

The politicians who want to nibble around the edges of the rolling disaster that is our health care system may have industry on their side, but we have the best plan. Many highly-qualified doctors, economists, and legislators have put enormous work into it, we just have to stand up, be counted and gather others with us to do the same.

We look forward to the rewarding work ahead.

The November5 Team

Finance Giants Adopt 'Climate Principles'

...The code is intended as a guide to help financial and insurance institutions manage climate change across a broad section of services and products, unlike the Carbon Principles, a framework adopted earlier this year by several U.S. banks which focuses on project financing, such as coal-fired power plant projects, according to Climate Group Spokesman Neal McGrath.

"The Climate Principles are global, cover the entire spectrum of financial services and so are much broader in scope,"...

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2008/12/03/finance-giants-adopt-climate-principles

A New Corps for a Green New Deal

Seven MBA students helped big name companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Cisco identify energy efficiency opportunities in their operations that will save $35 million in net costs over five years.

They are part of the Climate Corps, an Environmental Defense Fund pilot program that pairs business students with corporations to explore strategies that save energy, greenhouse gas emissions and money.

The pilot was a success and now EDF wants to scale up with a partnership with Net Impact, the nonprofit focused on fostering tomorrow's socially responsible business leaders...

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2008/12/04/a-new-corps-green-new-deal

AT&T Offers to Help EPA Find Ways to Cut GHGs

...A range of business and public interests submitted comments to the EPA, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association. Fourteen attorneys general urged the agency on Monday to use its authority to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while the governor of Texas warned that greenhouse gas regulations would cause irreparable harm to his state's economy...

http://www.greenbiz.com/news/2008/12/02/att-offers-help-epa-find-ways-cut-ghgs

Brazil Announces Plan to Slow Amazon Deforestation by 70%

Just in terms of avoided deforestation in the Amazon, the plan foresees a reduction of 4.8bn tons of carbon dioxide that won't be emitted up to 2018 - which is more than the reduction efforts fixed by all the rich countries...

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/12/brazil-amazon-deforestation-reduction-plan.php

by Matthew McDermott, Brooklyn, NY on 12. 2.08

New LED Light Bulbs Can Replace 100W Incandescents

MetaEfficient.com

...LED bulbs have many advantages over incandescents and compact fluorescent: they use very little power, they last 10 years or more, and they contain no hazardous substances. They are also tough: they can be dropped and turned off and on repeated without damage, they can operate in very cold or warm temperatures.

LED bulbs can also save you money in the long term, because an incandescent bulb requires about $300 worth of electricity over ten years of use. The LED bulbs cost $50 (for the 100 watt equivalent Evolux) and $90 (for the 60 watt equivalent Zetalux), and their cost to run over ten years is about $38...

http://www.metaefficient.com/leds/led-light-bulbs.html