By Sarah K. Burkhalter

Big green groups were wholly delighted that voters elected Barack Obama as the next president of the United States on Nov. 4.

Frances Beinecke, President, Natural Resources Defense Council: “It sure feels good once again to be an environmentalist. Just the sight of people going to the polls was a welcome reminder that President Bush’s unrelenting assault on our natural heritage will soon come to an end. And if that weren’t uplifting enough, there is the stunning outcome of the voting itself. An advocate for the environment, Barack Obama, will be the next president of the United States. Talk about transformation! … Barack Obama’s election is a huge win for everyone exhausted from playing defense. Count us among them. It rekindles our hope that environmental protection may be restored to its rightful place as a treasured American value.”

Fred Krupp, President, Environmental Defense Fund: “Elections are about change and this election offers us the greatest opportunity we have ever had to change course on global warming.”

Cathy Duvall, Political Director, Sierra Club: “Yesterday ‘New Energy for America’ trumped ‘Drill Baby Drill.’ Barack Obama made this election about hope, change, and opportunity. … Obama spoke of using more clean energy to create jobs, secure energy independence, and fight global warming, and Americans clearly approved of that message.”

Sue Brown, Executive Director, National Wildlife Federation Action Fund: “These election results just confirm what our polls have shown — sportsmen are looking to hear about more than just gun rights. They want conservation candidates who’ll champion clean energy solutions. Now they’ll be looking to our new Congress and new president to deliver clear results on clean energy and climate.”

Larry Schweiger, President and CEO, National Wildlife Federation: “President-elect Obama and the incoming Congress offer new hope that Americans will come together to repower America with clean energy that revitalizes our economy and defends a planet in peril from the climate crisis. … The National Wildlife Federation looks forward to working with President-elect Obama and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to pass strong global warming legislation that invests boldly in clean energy, caps and cuts the pollution that causes global warming, and restores America’s natural resources. The action plan must be comprehensive and measure up to what scientists tell us is needed. After eight years of denial and delay, we can’t afford to wait any longer.”

Phil Angelides, Chair, Apollo Alliance: “It’s time for America to quit bailing and to start building. We look forward to working with President-elect Obama to forge a new path for our country, one in which a clean energy economy is a reality.”

Carter Roberts, CEO, World Wildlife Fund: “We look forward to working with the new president and his administration to implement the progressive environmental policies which he championed throughout his campaign — policies that will not only help us avoid catastrophic climate change, but will jumpstart the global economy and restore America’s reputation as a leader in solving the most serious problems confronting our world and future generations. … For too long, the world has looked to the U.S. for leadership on the climate crisis, only to be met with shallow excuses and indifference. With today’s historic election, we are optimistic that those days are behind us.”

Kevin Knobloch, President, Union of Concerned Scientists: “On so many levels, this is a historic moment. President-elect Barack Obama promises positive, productive leadership on many issues members of the Union of Concerned Scientists care deeply about — building a clean energy economy; reengaging in international negotiations on global warming and nuclear weapons; and restoring the integrity of science in federal policymaking.”

Steven Sanderson, President and CEO, Wildlife Conservation Society: “We congratulate President-Elect Barack Obama and Vice President-Elect Joe Biden for their historic election to lead our nation as we face tremendous challenges at home and abroad. Our nation is positioned to be a world leader in saving wildlife and wild places across the globe, including policies to address climate change. The WCS looks forward to working with the new administration and Congress on nonpartisan efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including reducing rates of deforestation which may account for 20 percent of all global carbon emissions. Efforts such as these are good for both wildlife and humanity, which share a common future as creatures inhabiting the same planet.”

John Passacantando, Executive Director, Greenpeace USA: “We congratulate Barack Obama on his historic election as President of the United States. He has demonstrated the once-in-a-generation ability to unite America behind a common vision. It is a vision that the United States urgently needs now to solve the triple challenge of the energy, economic and global warming crises. … Americans weren’t fooled by the millions of dollars the oil and coal companies spent during the election to derail a solution, or by last-minute scaremongering about the financial costs of cleaning up our economy. President-Elect Obama said that the change we need includes putting people back to work by solving global warming and investing in a clean energy future and Americans responded to that vision in historic numbers. For eight years, the international community tried to solve global warming while this country’s leadership sat on the sidelines. We look forward to showing a waiting world that America is back and ready to lead.”

Trip Van Noppen, President, Earthjustice: “We congratulate president-elect Obama and applaud the choice of the American people to move in a different direction on the environment than that of the last eight years. We may be eight years behind, but better late than never to address the pressing problems of global warming, reliance on fossil fuels, and threats to our air, water, natural places and native wildlife. We’re heartened that we now have a chance to see some real stewardship of America’s natural gifts once again from the highest office in the land.”

John Flicker, President and CEO, Audubon Society: “Voters in this historic election cast their ballots not only for change, but for a new era of hope for our environment, and the people, birds, and other wildlife that depend on it. Washington has been ignoring critical environmental issues for too long. President-elect Barack Obama and a more environmentally aware Congress offer the promise of leadership and fundamental change that could usher in new protections for America’s great natural heritage, and a new lease on life for species in decline.”

Rodger Schlickeisen, President, Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund: “For the first time in nearly a decade, we can look to the future with a sense of hope that the enormous environmental challenges we face will begin to be addressed and that our air, land, water, and wildlife — and the overall health of our planet — will not be sacrificed to appease polluting industries and campaign contributors. … Much damage has been done and there is much work to do, but we now have something that’s been absent for eight years: hope.”

Anna Aurilio, Washington, D.C., Office Director, Environment America: “This election pitted the energy policy of last 30 years against that of the next 30 years. From Sen. Obama on down the ballot, the candidates who won were talking about a clean energy future, and voters understood that this was the key to a stronger economy, a more secure world, and the solution to global warming.”

Brent Blackwelder, President, Friends of the Earth U.S.: “Today’s landslide election of Barack Obama and pro-environment candidates across the country signals a strong rejection of the failed energy policies of the last eight years and a historic mandate for large-scale, transformational change.”

Gene Karpinski, President, League of Conservation Voters: “America embraced change today, and the planet will be better for it.”

Continue reading " Enviro reax "

By Kate Sheppard

“Because of what we did on this day, at this defining moment, change is coming to America,” Barack Obama promised in his victory speech after a landslide victory in his quest for the presidency.

Obama made brief reference in his speech to the duel challenges of environmental crisis and energy crisis, promising that these will be among his priorities as president.

“Even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century,” said Obama.

“There is new energy to harness and new jobs to be created; new schools to build and threats to meet and alliances to repair,” he continued.

Enviros quickly chimed in with praise for the president-elect.

Friends of the Earth President Brent Blackwelder called the election a “historic mandate for clean energy.”

“Energy policy has never been more prominent in a national election, and rarely have the results been so clear,” said Blackwelder, whose group endorsed Obama. “Today’s landslide election of Barack Obama and pro-environment candidates across the country signals a strong rejection of the failed energy policies of the last eight years and a historic mandate for large-scale, transformational change.”

Gene Karpinski, president of the League of Conservation Voters, which also endorsed Obama, said, “America embraced change today, and the planet will be better for it.”

A number of enviro-backed candidates claimed House, Senate, and governor’s seats as well tonight — check in at Grist’s election central for coverage, and check back here in the morning for more green wrap-up on the 2008 elections.

Continue reading " Barack on! "

By Guest author

The following is a guest essay by author, advocate, and renewable energy industry analyst Paul Gipe. His latest book, Wind Energy Basics, will be published by Chelsea Green in early 2009.

—–

In a startling reversal, Britain’s Labour government has put on the table a feed-in tariff proposal for "microgeneration." The proposed feed-in tariffs will pay homeowners, farmers, and community groups for the electricity they generate with renewable energy.

The move represents an ideological breakthrough. Long an ardent supporter of Renewable Obligation Certificate trading systems and plain old-fashioned subsidies as the sole means of developing renewable energy, Britain’s Labour government has abruptly changed course.

Britain, along with its English-speaking allies in the United States, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, has been a staunch proponent of the "Washington Consensus" of neoliberal economic orthodoxy. In this world view, the only mechanisms that can be used to develop renewable energy and hew to ideological purity are quota systems coupled with Tradable Green Certificates. In Britain this policy is called the Renewable Obligation; in North America, it is known as Renewable Portfolio Standards.

However, outside the schools of economics aligned along the Chicago-London axis, others have argued that feed-in tariffs are a more effective and less costly market mechanism for rapidly developing renewable energy. These include prominent British economist Sir Nicholas Stern, as well as continental European economists who are less well-known in North America.

The specific proposal by the new Minister of Climate Change, Ed Miliband, is less significant than the fact the government felt compelled to act. Prime Minister Gordon Brown narrowly escaped a backbench revolt in the House of Commons earlier this year over exclusion of a feed-in tariff in Britain’s long-awaited energy bill. Meanwhile, in the House of Lords, debate on the inclusion of feed-in tariff provisions continued despite the government’s attempts to quash the subject.

Nevertheless, Miliband’s proposal is timid and vague.

For example, the proposal limits individual projects to no more than 3 MW. That’s enough for rooftop solar systems, but not big enough for most community wind projects. It’s clear that the government doesn’t want a program of feed-in tariffs to threaten its quota system, despite the fact that there’s widespread acknowledgement that Britain will miss its renewable energy targets and now pays more for renewables than its European neighbors that use feed-in tariffs.

The existing Renewable Obligation has mostly benefited commercial wind development in Britain’s highlands. What the British call microgeneration — rooftop solar, for example — has been dependent upon the waxing and waning of traditional up-front subsidies. As a consequence, Britain lags well behind Germany, Spain, Italy, and France — all countries using feed-in tariffs — in the development of rooftop solar photovoltaics.

Even in wind energy, Britain is falling increasingly behind continental nations. By the end of 2008, France, Britain’s long-time cross-channel rival, will operate nearly 1,000 MW more wind-generating capacity than Britain, despite being a relative newcomer to wind energy development. (See "French Wind Growth Continuing.") France uses an innovative feed-in tariff policy.

British renewable energy campaigners, notably Friends of the Earth, have called for more specifics in the proposal and for increasing the maximum project size to at least 10 MW — equivalent to about five modern wind turbines. Friends of the Earth is also calling for prices (the feed-in tariffs) to be differentiated by technology — solar is paid one price, wind another, and so on — a feature found in all countries successfully developing renewable energy.

Elsewhere, a number of Australian and American states, as well as Canadian provinces, are considering feed-in tariffs:

• The Guardian: People-power a step closer in energy bill
• Discussion Paper on Electricity Feed-in Tariffs in Tasmania Released (PDF)
• Renewable Energy Tariffs in Australia
• Gainesville Regional Utilities Proposes Solar Feed-in Tariff (Gainesville Sun)
• Feed-in Tariffs and Renewable Energy in the USA — a Policy Update (PDF) by Wilson Rickerson, Florian Bennhold, and James Bradbury (May 2008)

Continue reading " You put your feed-in there "

By Kate Sheppard

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to release new rules soon regarding the Renewable Fuel Standard established last year under the Energy Independence and Security Act. The legislation required the EPA take into account the life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions from the production of various biofuels, including indirect emissions from things like land use changes.

On Oct. 21, several academics and representatives from the biofuel industry sent a letter [PDF] to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson asking the agency to exclude accounting for these emissions from their rulemaking, calling the requirement “premature.”

“[T]here are no generally accepted methods for determining indirect land use change, or for that matter, any indirect (market-driven) change, and there is no way to apply even current methods in any meaningful way to the choices a farmer makes,” write the authors, which included experts from Michigan State University, Iowa State University, Auburn University, the BioEnergy Science Center, Mendel Biotechnology, and Ceres.

The authors said that it is “of particular concern” to them that “the EPA appears to be relying heavily” on the February 2008 report that found that both corn- and switch-grass ethanol actually have higher net greenhouse gas emissions that conventional fuel sources. “It would be very unfortunate if a rush to judgment by the EPA would cast unwarranted doubt on the value of these low-carbon, 2nd generation biofuels,” they wrote.

Several environmental groups also sent a letter [PDF] to Johnson urging him to uphold the requirements established by Congress. “[I]t would be both unlawful and irresponsible for EPA to delay evaluation of emissions from land use changes,” wrote representatives from the Clean Air Task Force, the Environmental Working Group, and Friends of the Earth.

“There is nothing ‘premature’ about Congress’s insistence that federally mandated, taxpayer-subsidized biofuels are environmentally beneficial,” they wrote. “The RFS has propped up the biofuel industry for three decades, on the untested assumption that biofuels are good for consumers and the environment. During that time, its proponents - including the authors of the October 21 letter - have failed to demonstrate that biofuels provide any such benefits. ”

“Judging from the October 21 letter and from supportive statements made in the press, biofuel developers continue to be less interested in examining the fuels’ net social and environmental impacts than they are in maintaining federal support in the form of mandates and tax breaks,” the letter concludes.

The EPA has yet to release the new rules, but they’re expected any day now.

Continue reading " Fuel me once, shame on you "

By Kate Sheppard

A group of 60 environmental and public health organizations sent a letter [PDF] to Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen Johnson expressing concern that the agency “is considering a series of actions aimed at dismantling and dramatically weakening decades of EPA policies for protection of the public from ionizing radiation” in the remaining weeks of the administration.

There has not yet been a formal proposal from the Bush administration EPA, but the groups are objecting to a possible proposal to weaken cleanup standards in the event of radioactive material releases on which the agency may move forward in the near future. An internal draft document [PDF] from August 2007 detailing proposed changes to the EPA’s Protective Action Guidance for Radiological Incidents (PAG) was recently leaked to the news site Inside EPA ($ub. req’d). The groups are concerned that some agency officials are trying to get the new guide pushed through before the end of the Bush administration.

The letter cites proposed revisions that the groups say would relax the rules to protect the public from radioactive releases like nuclear power plant accidents, fires at fuel manufacturing plants, and transportation accidents involving radioactive materials.

Most egregious, they say, is the proposed weakening of standards for drinking water. Previous PAGs included drinking water as a component of the food PAGs, which was included as part of the overall dose limit in the intermediate phase. The new rules create a separate water PAG, which would allow for levels of certain types of cesium, strontium, and nickel much higher than the EPA has historically allowed.

The groups signing onto the letter include Environment America, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Sierra Club, and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service.

“Much mischief is done in the last weeks of an outgoing Administration. We strongly urge you to decline to approve the issuance of the draft Protective Action Guidance for Radiological Incidents as long as it proposes to relax protections against radiation exposure,” they write. “The Environmental Protection Agency must protect, not radically endanger, public health and the environment.”

Continue reading " Water we waiting for "

By Grist

This Guardian story was written by reporter Haroon Siddique. Grist is a member of the Guardian’s Environment Network.

—

A unique proposal to protect one of the world’s most biodiverse places from oil drilling is facing a looming deadline without any funding in place.

The Ecuadorian government has said it is prepared to keep hundreds of millions of barrels of heavy crude oil in the ground, but in return it wants the international community to compensate it at the level of $350m (£202m) a year for a decade.

The deadline - already postponed twice - is in December. While there has been political support from Spain, Germany and Norway, as yet there has been little in the way of hard cash.

The Yasuni national park in Ecuador lies at the intersection of the Amazon, the Andes and the equator and spans almost a million hectares of primary rainforest. It is home to indigenous tribes, who wish to be left in isolation, and an extraordinary array of wildlife and plants, much of it endangered. Avoiding the oil extraction would also prevent the release of an estimated 100m tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Environmentalists believe the innovative proposal has the potential to be a model for how developing countries manage their environments and the global fight against climate change.

Nelson Torres, the Ecuadorian deputy ambassador to the UK, described it as a “third way of management of climate change” and said that it would “lay the groundwork for energy transformation globally”. Anita Rivas, the indigenous mayor of Orellana, where Yasuni is located said: “It’s a brave proposal, a unique proposal.”

The Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) field block lies in the south of Yasuni park, within an area officially designated in 1999 as an “untouchable zone” - a safe haven for those indigenous people who have chosen to live in isolation. The compensation package the Ecuadorian government is demanding is designed to deliver half the income that would accrue if the oil was extracted, over a period equating to the likely lifetime of the field.

The government has shown a greater will than previous administrations to protect indigenous people and the environment. Last week, the nation overwhelmingly passed a constitution that granted Ecuador’s tropical forests, islands, rivers and air similar legal rights to those normally granted to humans. But the president, Rafael Correa, is faced with the harsh economic reality that 70 percent of the country’s income comes from oil and 38 percent of people in the South American republic live below the poverty line.

In recent years, drilling has been allowed up to the boundaries of the “untouchable zone” but the region has seen little of the economic benefits, with a poverty rate in Orellana far higher than the national average.

A statement from Penti Baihua, a member of the Huaorani tribe, said oil companies had contaminated water, soil and air, scared away animals, and brought diseases that had made members of their families ill and even killed them.

“The oil must stay in the ground in the ITT and the [untouchable] zone because it is our home. If the oil companies destroy all of the Yasuni, where will we live?” he said.

There is widespread support for drilling to be blocked in the ITT but not everyone agrees with the government’s method. The meeting in London was organised by the Yasuni Green Gold campaign to launch its book of the same name which highlights the park’s vast array of plants and animals, believed to have resulted because the area did not freeze over during the last ice age.

The campaign director and joint author of the book, Ginés Haro Pastor, emphasised that while he supported financial help for Ecuador’s development he felt it should be separated from the issue of the Yasuni.

Yasuni Green Gold wants an unconditional commitment from the government not to drill oil in the untouchable zone regardless of financial pledges and wants it to scrap the idea of a deadline altogether.

Environmental campaigner Tony Juniper, formerly executive director of Friends of the Earth, is enthusiastic about the concept of developing countries being compensated for protecting the environment. He believes taxes, including a small duty on foreign currency trades, could raise the tens of billions of pounds needed to replicate the Ecuadorian scheme around the world.

But, he added, there were issues that needed to be ironed out, including whether countries should be able to seek compensation in respect of rainforest they had previously designated as protected, and whether wealthy nations such as Saudi Arabia and Russia should be able to claim cash for not extracting oil.

© Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

Continue reading " Pay or we drill! "