China’s green power plan

By Blake Deppe
People's World

June 30 2011

The energy's always greener on the other side...of the world, that is. Particularly, in China.

In fact, according to the Environmental Defense Fund's Tony Kreindler, China is "already beating the U.S. to clean energy jobs" and "is quickly becoming the global powerhouse in clean energy manufacturing and innovation, dwarfing the efforts of America."

China wants to employ a massive renewable energy development plan. Part of it calls for non-fossil fuel energy production to reach and remain above 11 percent of total energy production in the country by 2015. China also intends to put a million electric vehicles on the market by that same year.

People's Assembly Fair in Toronto

The People’s Assembly Fair on August 27th, 2011 at Dufferin Grove Park

By torontopeoplesassembly
June 30, 2011

Since the G20, the Toronto People’s Assembly has formed three times as a space where the climate and social justice community converges. In our first Assembly, we identified several key components of how climate and environmental justice related to our city. For the second Assembly, we created several People’s Councils to tackle the issue of how to build a stronger movement for climate justice in Toronto. Then, most recently, with our Third Assembly, we gathered to share stories about what inspires us as people involved in the movement for climate justice.

Now as we move into summer, the People’s Assembly will come together once again, but in a different form! Building on the proposal from the Action Discussion at the last Assembly, the General Council has been meeting and laying the groundwork for a People’s Assembly Fair.

The Fair will take place on Saturday August 27th from12-5pm atDufferinGrovePark, and is intended to be a fun and family-friendly event to revitalize ourselves as a community and engage the public with interactive and creative activities. By allowing a safe space to demonstrate alternative means for education, entertainment, and sustainability the aim of the Fair is to become its own image of a movement we would all like to see.

Unlike other summer attractions, The People’s Assembly Fair will be a participant driven event, meaning there are no mere “attendees,” but rather active participants in every sense of the word. You will create the Stalls, the interaction, the art, the performance and ultimately the “experience.”

Therefore, we are inviting community groups and individuals to come and set up a Stall. If you do not belong to a group, form an ad-hoc one with some friends! What you do is only limited by your imagination, but here are some ideas to get you started:

• Interactive or hands-on workshops
• Educational games or role plays
• Skill-shares
• Discussion-based seminars
• Art or banner making
• Skits or other performances.

As a General Organizing Council we will organize a central information tent, a stage with live music, and we have already confirmed that Food Not Bombs will serve a free meal for everyone. The rest is up to you!

Please RSVP to let us know what you would like to do for the Fair and we will reserve a space for your Stall!

Further action:

To join our organizing Google Group, please send an email to toronto-peoples-assembly+subscribe@googlegroups.com

To find out about meeting dates and times please email : peoplesassembly.toronto@gmail.com

Oil, water shortages, climate change could provoke wars: report

By Mike De Souza
Postmedia News
June 28, 2011

OTTAWA — Critical energy and water shortages combined with climate change could provoke wars within the next 15 years, warns a newly-released analysis by the Department of National Defence.

"Global reserves of crude oil could become problematic by 2025," wrote Maj. John Sheahan in a draft version of the report, Army 2040: First Look. "This implies that (barring the discovery of significant new reserves, and barring the adequate adoption of substitute fossil fuels or alternative fuel and energy sources) critical energy shortages will develop in the time frame of (and perhaps prior to) 2025."

The report noted that alternative fuels and energy may not be enough to respond to rising demand for energy that is forcing oil production to reach its capacity — a threat commonly referred to as "peak oil."

The deep green meaning of Fukushima

By Don Fitz
Links 
International Journal of Socialist Renewal
June 26, 2011

Humanity must decrease its use of energy. The decrease must be a lot (not a little bit) and it must happen soon. A failure to do so will lay the foundation for the destruction of human life by some combination of climate change and radiation.

How long will the disastrous consequences of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan continue? A good estimate is about 4.5 billion years — the half life of uranium-238. [1] The March 11, 2011, meltdowns sounded alarms that environmentalists have rung for over half a century. There is also a deeper green meaning: the limits of economic growth have long since passed and we need to design a world with considerably less stuff.

Ecosocialism and Spirituality

In Memoriam: They gave their lives for the Amazonian forest and the Peoples of the Forest: Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang.

By Frei Betto and Michael Löwy
Belem World Forum
2009

Chico Mendes with his children, 1988

We would like to start our conference here at the World Social Forum of Belem with a homage to two personalities of high human quality, which gave their lives for the defence of the Amazonian forest, and the Peoples of the Forest: Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang. They are the best known, the visible tip of the iceberg, of many other lives scarified in this unequal battle during the last decades.

Inspired, each in his own way, by their religious faith, they struggled, to the last consequences, for the cause of the oppressed and the exploited, which is, at the same time, inseparably, the cause of nature, of the forest, of life.

Read more HERE.

Japan Workers Bear Brunt of Nuke Clean-up

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
June 25, 2011

Older workers are volunteering to help clean up the nuclear site

HAVANA TIMES, June 25 (IPS) — Twenty-eight-year-old Yushi Sato washes cars for a living, but they are no ordinary cars. Every day, Sato hoses down vehicles contaminated with radiation from the Fukushima Nuclear Power plant that was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami that hit north-east Japan Mar 11.

Sato, who has worked at the Fukushima plant for the past five years, used to be a welder, but after the disaster struck he was assigned the job of washing the plant’s various vehicles. “We wash on average around 200 vehicles that show higher than normal radiation levels,” he told IPS.

The Rights of Nature - Purhase Now

The Case for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth

Now for Purchase HERE.

In April 2010, Bolivia hosted a gathering for civil society in the wake of the failed December 2009 United Nations Copenhagen climate summit (COP 15). It was clear to millions of climate activists, scientists and environmentalists around the world that the UN process had been sidelined by a deal, the Copenhagen Accord, which represented a major step backward in the search by the UN for a binding, comprehensive agreement that would protect humanity and the Earth from the ravages of climate chaos.

When more than 32,000 participants from around the world gathered for the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia, it was evident that a counter message had to be sent to the UN and the world that a far stronger commitment was needed if humanity is to successfully move to a safe and sustainable future.

Fossil fuel expansion as a crime against humanity

By Marc Lee 
Progressive Economics Forum
June 23rd, 2011

After at 2010 that was one of the warmest years on record, 2011 has shown us astonishing patterns of extreme weather worldwide. It would take a long time to make the full list, but you know what I mean: tornadoes, floods, drought, record cold in some parts, record heat in others, hailstorms (Al Gore does a pretty good summary of the state of things here).

A report for Al Jazeera tallied up the damages in the US alone at $27-28 billion, so far this year. They go on further to quote Swiss Re (global re-insurance company) that freak weather losses are about $130 billion per year now, compared to about $25 billion per year in the 1980s.

Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein, Wendell Berry Call for Civil Disobedience on Tar Sands

Peter Rothberg
The Nation
June 22, 2011

The Tar Sands, also known as the oil sands, are one of the largest remaining deposits of oil in the world, and efforts to extract the resource from a mix of clay and other materials underneath Canada’s Boreal forest have created the biggest, and by the accounts of numerous scientists and environmental groups,  the most environmentally devastating, energy project on earth.

TransCanada, one of the largest companies involved in tar sands exploration, has proposed a 1,661 mile, 36-inch extension of the newly built Keystone Pipeline from Alberta, Canada to oil refineries of the United States. This would expand the capacity for refining oil produced from Alberta tar sands by approximately one million barrels per day.

Time for the fight-back.

A group of leading environmental activists, many associated with the grassroots group 350.org, and many of them Nation writers, have issued a call and invitation for concerned citizens to take part in a campaign of non-violent direct action this summer in Washington, DC, in all likelihood, organizers say, during the last two weeks of August.

Why DC in the sweltering summer? That's when the State Department and the White House have to decide whether to grant a certificate of ‘national interest’ to some of the biggest fossil fuel players on earth, some of whom want to build the so-called ‘Keystone XL Pipeline’ from Canada’s tar sands to Texas's refineries.
The guidelines for participation are strict. Participants must pledge to:

1) Be utterly peaceful in all aspects of this action–physical and verbal.
2) Be dignified in dress and demeanor – these are serious issues, and we want to be taken seriously.
3) Attend an action training and briefing before I join the action. Knowingly and freely assume all risks, even if arising from the negligence of others, and assume full responsibility for my participation in this action.

Read the full letter below, signed by Maude Barlow, Wendell Berry, Tom Goldtooth, Danny Glover, James Hansen, Wes Jackson, Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, George Poitras, David Suzuki and Gus Speth. The missive clearly makes the case for the campaign and details the horrific consequences if TransCanada's plan proceeds.

Check out how to take part in the actions or otherwise support them and please post the letter to your social networks, forward it to your email list and talk about it with your friends and family.

Global support for nuclear plummets - lower than coal

Beyond Nuclear
June 22, 2011

In the wake of new nuclear power plant build rebukes in both Germany and Italy, a new poll conducted by international research company Ipsos for Reuters News finds that global support for nuclear energy has dropped quickly to 38% (down 16 points from 54%) to now become lower than support for coal (48%)—fuelled by a 26% jump in new opponents to nuclear power (above 50% in India, China, Japan and South Korea) who indicate that the recent crisis in Japan caused their decision.

Ipsos also released a detailed power point presentation of their findings. The survey of nearly 19,000 people in 24 countries also showed that nearly three-quarters of people think nuclear energy is only a limited and soon obsolete form of energy. Solar energy topped the charts with 97% of respondents strongly favoring it, closely followed by 93% for wind power.

Cuba Boosts Use of Renewable Sources of Energy

By Cuban News Agency
Tuesday 21 June 2011

HAVANA, Cuba, - The vice minister of the Basic Industry, Juan Manuel Presa, said on Monday that Cuba will continue to boost the use of renewable sources of energy, particularly eolic (wind) energy.

Speaking to ACN, Presa added that in Cuba there are currently 100 wind-meter stations to collect reliable wind data at a height of 50 meters in order to assess the existing potential in the country. In this regard, he noted that it is possible to immediately install equipment of up to 600 MW in the northern coast of the central and eastern regions of the island.

Today, there are four wind farms in Cuba with 20 wind turbines that contribute 11.7mw to the national system and, according to studies, several farms could be created with a potential of more than 2,000 MW.

Tania Carbonel, director of the Center for Studies on Renewable Energy Technologies, of Havana’s Jose Antonio Echeverria Polytechnical Higher Institute, said that wind energy has many advantages. “It is very cheap and clean because it produces no air or water pollution since no fuel is burned.”

Carbonel added that recent high fossil fuel prices and the problem of pollution, has accelerated the research in the direction of alternative energies.

Major users of eolic power are Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Ireland, India, China and the United States. In some of these countries it provides nearly 10% of total electricity production.

According to the World Wind Energy Association, it is difficult to assess the total number or capacity of small-scaled wind turbines, but in China alone, there are roughly 300,000 small-scale wind turbines generating electricity.

From Copenhagen and Cancun to Bonn and Durban, climate meetings are conferences of polluters

By Patrick Bond
Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal
June 21, 2011

Judging by what transpired at last week’s global climate negotiations in the former West German capital, Bonn, it appears certain that in just over five months’ time, the South African port city of Durban will host a conference of climate procrastinators, the COP 17 (Conference of Parties), dooming the Earth to the frying pan. Further inaction on climate change will leave our city’s name as infamous for elite incompetence and political betrayal as is Oslo’s in the Middle East.

It appears certain that Pretoria’s alliance with Washington, Beijing, New Delhi and Brasilia, witnessed in the shameful 2009 Copenhagen Accord, will be extended to other saboteurs of the Kyoto Protocol, especially from Ottawa, Tokyo and Moscow, along with Brussels and London carbon traders.