Webinar: NY Renews Community - Looking for Ways to Make a Difference?

NY Renews Community,
  
Looking for ways to make a difference?  

NY Renews is looking for you!

A year after our launch, NY Renews is building rapid momentum toward timely, just, and equitable action on climate change in New York State. Our coalition has grown to unite more than 100 environmental, social, labor and economic justice organizations with a mission to move the state’s economy off of fossil fuels and foster a just transition to renewable energy, create well-paying, safe jobs and revitalize impacted communities.

Facing a President-Elect who has stacked his cabinet with climate deniers and Big Oil, our best chance for progress is at the state and local level, and New York can show the way.

In recent weeks, hundreds of New Yorkers have turned out to town halls and press conferences, asking the Governor to stand up to Donald Trump by passing the nation's most ambitious climate policy. We need as many New Yorkers as possible to play an active part in pushing Governor Cuomo to be a real climate leader.

Ready to get involved? 

Join us for a Webinar on Monday, January 9th, 

from 7 to 8 pm

Find out how you can take action with NY Renews 

at this critical moment

*RSVP for the Webinar Here

[Click image to enlarge]

Spread the word widely on Facebook

In the meantime, please keep up the pressure by calling the Governor's office nonstop. Click here to go to our call-in tool (or here for Spanish). Urge him - soon and often - to stand up to Trump and make the Climate and Community Protection Act part of the 2017 NY State budget.

We look forward to your joining us on Monday, January 9th to discuss next steps.

Onwards, in solidarity,
Marc Weiss
for NY Renews Organizing Committee

Fossil Fuel Industry Misinformation Delayed Action on Climate Change For Decades

America has been duped on climate change

By Robert Brulle | January 6, 2016 | The Washington Post

Robert Brulle is a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is co-editor of "Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives."

Future generations will look back on our tepid response to global climate disruption and wonder why we did not act sooner and more aggressively. Climate change will adversely impact present and future generations, as well as all species on Earth. Our moral obligation to protect life requires us to act.

Yet even after the recently completed United Nations climate conference, we are still on track for dangerous levels of climate change. Why haven’t we acted sooner or more aggressively? One answer can be found in the split over the veracity of climate science.

Recent scholarship documents the coordinated efforts of conservative foundations and fossil fuel corporations to promote this uncertainty. Amplified by conservative media, this campaign of disinformation and omission has significantly altered the nature of the public debate and led to political polarization around the issue, making meaningful legislative action nearly impossible.

These findings are supported by recent investigative news reports, which show that since the 1970s, top executives and scientists in the fossil fuel industry have been well aware of the evidence that their products amplified climate-warming emissions. They conducted their own extensive research on the topic and participated in ongoing scientific discussions. The American Petroleum Institute, an industry trade group, even circulated the results to its members. By 1978, a senior executive at ExxonMobil proposed creating a worldwide “CO2 in the Atmosphere” research and development program to determine an appropriate response.

Unfortunately, that path wasn’t taken. Instead, in 1989, a group of fossil fuel corporations, utilities and automobile manufacturers banded together to form the Global Climate Coalition. This group worked to ensure that the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions, was not adopted by the United States. In public statements, the Global Climate Coalition continued to deny that global warming was occurring and emphasized the uncertainty of climate science.

The spreading of misinformation continued. In 1998, API, Exxon, Chevron, Southern Co. and various conservative think tanks initiated a public relations campaign, the goal of which was to ensure that the “recognition of uncertainties (of climate science) becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom.'”

While that coalition disbanded in 2001, ExxonMobil reportedly continued to quietly funnel climate misinformation through “skeptic” think tanks, such as the Heartland Institute, until 2006, when its funding was exposed. The company — the nation’s largest and wealthiest — continues to work with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a so-called public-private partnership of corporations and conservative legislators, to block climate change policies.

For years, ExxonMobil had been a participant in public efforts to sow doubt about climate change. Yet at at the same time, the corporation was at the leading edge of climate science and its executives were well informed regarding the scientific consensus on climate change. This allegedly deceitful conduct has generated public outrage and recently led New York’s attorney general to initiate an investigation into whether ExxonMobil has misled the public and investors about the risks of climate change.

While important, these legal proceedings cannot fully address the larger moral issues of corporate social and political responsibility. Just as Congress investigated the efforts of the tobacco industry to dupe the public into believing its products were harmless, we need a full and open inquiry into the conduct of ExxonMobil and the other institutions whose misinformation campaigns about science have delayed our efforts to address climate change.

The central concern here is the moral integrity of the public sphere. The Declaration of Independence says the legitimacy of government is based on the consent of the governed. But when vested interests with outsize economic and cultural power distort the public debate by introducing falsehoods, the integrity of our deliberations is compromised.

Such seems the case today when we consider the fossil fuel industry’s role in distorting discourse on the urgent topic of climate change. If vested economic interests and public relations firms can systematically alter the national debate in favor of their own interests and against those of society as a whole, then the notion of democracy and civic morality is undermined. Congress can and should act to investigate this issue fully. Only then can we restore trust and legitimacy to American governance and fulfill our moral duty to aggressively address climate change.

Film: 'MERCHANTS of DOUBT' - Free Screening in Williamsville, October 25th

How a handful of so-called 'experts' obscured the truth on vital issues from 

tobacco smoke to global warming ...

MERCHANTS of DOUBT

A 'Must See' Documentary Film

 Free and Open to the Public

WHEN: Sunday, October 25 at 3:00pm

WHERE: North Presbyterian Church, 300 N. Forest, Williamsville [Map]

View the Film Trailer:

CLIMATE ACTION: A 'Hail Mary Pass' to Protect People and the Planet

'Rise Up for Climate Justice' Rally in Niagara Square
Rally will follow the Pope’s speech to Congress Thursday, September 24 on the road to the United Nations Climate Change Conference, Paris, December 2015

by Larry Beahan

A hundred and fifty nations are meeting at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December 2015. Let us pray that they will come to a workable and binding agreement that will put us on a path to zero greenhouse gasses before New York and New Orleans are totally inundated and California is scorched beyond habitability.

Agreed, church and state should be well insulated from one another, usually.  But with our planet on a deadly track for carbon-fueled climate disaster and with our politicians fumbling the ball, a prayer or two, maybe even a Hail Mary Pass is in order.

On TV the other night eleven presidential candidates vied for that quarterback-slot.  These eleven apostles of doom, one after another, washed their hands of the climate warming crisis. Meanwhile the religious leaders of the world have all dropped their prayer books and demanded that we quit strangling this God-given planet with fossil fuel fumes.

In August, Muslim leaders from twenty countries called on the 1.6 billion Muslims to phase out greenhouse gas by midcentury.

But Florida Senator Marco Rubio says, “I do not believe that human activity is causing these dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.” His teammate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, said “We shouldn’t be destroying our economy in order to chase some wild, left-wing idea that somehow, us, by ourselves, are going to fix the climate.”

Yet the leaders of the Anglican and Eastern Orthodox churches urge in a letter to the NY Times, that the nations of the world craft a clear and convincing course of decarbonization at the Paris Conference.

President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency issued its CO2-reducing Clean Power Plan that delivers the death blow to coal as a source of electric power, yet the President has authorized drilling for oil near the dwindling Arctic ice cap.

In May, three hundred and forty Jewish rabbis released a Rabbinic letter on Climate Crisis calling for, “spiritual leadership of the Jewish people in this deep crisis in the history of the human species.”

And Donald Trump says, “I consider climate change to be not one of our big problems. I consider it to be not a big problem at all. I think it’s weather.”
The Dalai Lama disagrees. He calls on governments around the world to stop deforestation and stop burning fossil fuels. He says, “It is not sufficient to just express views, we must set a timetable for change in the next two to four years.”

Jeb Bush brushes off climate change, “I don’t think it’s the highest priority. I don’t think we should ignore it, either.

Good Pope Francis is coming to the US on September 24^th to deliver what is expected to be a “Dutch Uncle” lecture to the US Congress. He will likely remind us that the United States has pumped carbon into the skies for generations, to profit this country but at great cost to poorer nations.  He needs to say that if climate change is to be curbed the United States will have to lead with a war-time, Manhattan Project-style total mobilization away from coal and gas and on to solar, wind and geothermal energy.

So here goes a Hail Mary that Pope Francis will succeed in persuading our politicians to go to the Paris UN Climate Change Conference in December and come away with binding agreements to cut greenhouse gasses by at least 40% in 2025 and 85% in 2050.

The environmental, social justice and religious communities of Western NY are united in the “Rise up for Climate Justice” campaign.  Join them at 5pm in Niagara Square on September 24 to demonstrate Buffalo’s support of Pope Francis on his Hail Mary mission to Washington.

This article was originally published in The Public. 

For more information on the Rise Up for Climate Justice Rally, click here.

Pope’s Adviser has Strong Words for Climate Change Deniers

                                                           Tom Toles | The Washington Post

Pope’s top adviser blasts US climate skeptics

By Timothy Cama - 05/12/15  |  The Hill

 

Pope Francis’ closest adviser castigated conservative climate change skeptics in the United States Tuesday, blaming capitalism for their views.

Speaking with journalists, Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga criticized certain “movements” in the United States that have preemptively come out in opposition to Francis’s planned encyclical on climate change.

“The ideology surrounding environmental issues is too tied to a capitalism that doesn’t want to stop ruining the environment because they don’t want to give up their profits,” Rodríguez said, according to the Boston Globe's Crux blog.

Rodríguez’s comments came at the beginning of the annual meeting of Caritas Internationalis, an association of Catholic charitable groups.

He said many individuals both inside and outside the Catholic Church are awaiting Francis’s encyclical “with hope,” and especially watching how it might impact the United Nations’s December meeting that seeks to  reach an agreement on an international climate change pact.

That is Francis’s top stated goal for the encyclical, to encourage Catholics to fight climate change and influence the U.N.’s process.

But Rodríguez singled out the United States as the source of premature criticism, the Globe reported.

“I have already heard criticism over the encyclical,” Rodríguez said of the United States, adding that it is “absurd” to be so negative about an encyclical that no one in the public has seen.

The Heartland Institute, funded in part by the billionaire conservative brothers Charles and David Koch, has taken the lead on countering Francis’s encyclical.

The right wing group sent climate change deniers to the Vatican last month to try to convince top Catholic officials that human activity is not harming the planet, and there is no need for Francis’s action.

~   ~   ~   ~

Pope Francis: Environmental Sinners Will Face God’s Judgment 

“We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat,” Francis said. “But we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment one day, and it will be seen if they truly tried to provide food for him in every person, and if they worked so that the environment would not be destroyed, but could produce this food.”
 -- Pope Francis, May 12, 2015 
 

Get Climate Science Deniers Out of Science Museums

Sign the petition telling science museums to kick Koch off the board!

The world’s top scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, just released an unprecedented letter calling on science and natural history museums to cut all ties to the fossil fuel industry. They wrote:

When some of the biggest contributors to climate change and funders of misinformation on climate science sponsor exhibitions in museums of science and natural history, they undermine public confidence in the validity of the institutions responsible for transmitting scientific knowledge. 

The letter comes on the heels of recent news that Smithsonian-affiliated scientist Willie Soon took $1.25 million from the Koch brothers, Exxon Mobil, American Petroleum Institute and other covert funders to publish junk science denying man-made climate change, and failed to disclose any funding-related conflicts of interest.

In particular, the letter points a finger at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (D.C.) and the American Museum of Natural History (NY), where David Koch is a member of the board, a major donor and exhibit sponsor.

Oil mogul David Koch sits on the board of our nation’s largest and most respected natural history museums, while he bankrolls groups that deny climate science.

Click here to sign this petition to the Smithsonian and the American Museum of Natural History: It’s time to get science deniers out of science museums. Kick Koch off the board!

Still undecided about signing the petition? Read on. The most embarrassing and scientifically misleading display that the Smithsonian designed, according to physicist and climatologist Joe Romm, directly suggests that humans can simply evolve to deal with global warming. Romm wrote at Climate Progress:

Smithsonian visitors are asked to “imagine” a time that is “far into the future” when “Earth’s temperature has risen and it’s really hot.” Unbelievably, you are then asked “How do you think your body will evolve?” Your choice is “Will you have a tall, narrow body like a giraffe? Or more sweat glands?” 

Click here to sign the petition.

The petition message and the list of signatures will be delivered to the American Museum of Natural History before their annual board meeting the first week of April, and to the Smithsonian before their board meeting in June.

~  ~  ~

The scientist letter was initiated by The Natural History Museum, a new museum that is free from ties to the fossil fuel industry, calls out climate science deniers and culprits obstructing action on climate change, and actively champions the just transition to a sustainable and equitable future.

SPONSORS: The Natural History Museum, Forecast The Facts, Daily Kos, Environmental Action, Rainforest Action Network, Bridge Project, Oil Change International, Other 98%, Courage Campaign, CREDO, Friends of the Earth

Senators Pull All-Nighter to Wake Up Congress on Climate Change

Is the Senate's climate change all-nighter more than a one-night stand? 

The effort by 28 Democratic senators [Monday night] was launched in part by Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse, who credits warming oceans for the state's disappearing idyllic and populated coastline.

Whitehouse has spoken about the issue every week the Senate has been in session for the past two years, culminating in 60 speeches that have gone largely unnoticed by the public.

He and fellow Democratic members of the climate change caucus hope their all-night session propels the issue back into the spotlight since it has been on the back burner for several years.

When Democrats tried to pass legislation that would have capped carbon emissions, skepticism around climate change reached an all-time high. Opponents, led by organizations and businesses involved in the fossil fuel industry, successfully turned public opinion and stopped any efforts in its tracks.

"It is unfortunate," Whitehouse said. "History will look back at the propaganda effort of the carbon polluters as one of the most sophisticated and complex propaganda efforts that human kind had to withstand."

The Koch Brothers, billionaire businessmen who made their fortune in the oil and gas industry, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to defeat Democrats. Cap and trade would have cut into Koch industries' revenue, which is estimated to hover around $100 billion per year.

Tim Phillips, the President of Americans for Prosperity, the political organization backed by the Kochs, said that killing climate change legislation in a Democratic-controlled Washington was his organization's major accomplishment.

Wealthy former hedge fund manager Tom Steyer is willing to spend Koch-like money to push the issue of climate change and defeat skeptics in the 2014 midterms.

Whitehouse, who has known Steyer since college, said if he can make good on his pledge to infuse the effort with $100 million, he would "help to neutralize an incredibly one-sided spending."

The above contains excerpts. The full report is at CNN.com

Notes from the Editor: To see Senator Whitehouse's evidence-based approach to understanding climate change in his 50th speech, click here. His 48th speech was on the anniversary of superstorm Sandy, and he was joined by New York Senator Schumer.

Senator Schatz Urges Bipartisanship on Climate Change

U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-Hawai'i) led 30 Senators in taking over the floor to call for action on climate change from 6:30 p.m. on Monday, March 11, 2014 till 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, March 12, 2014. In addition to the 30 senators, more than 100,000 people participated in the #up4climate all night event by signing petitions calling on Congress to act. Watch the video:

Name Extreme Storms after Climate Deniers

CLIMATE NAME CHANGE: A satirical proposal to name extreme storms after politicians who deny human-caused global warming and obstruct climate policy.

This video, published by ClimateNameChange.org on Aug 26, 2013, has gone Viral. It has received over 2 Million hits!

Since 1954, the World Meteorological Organization has been naming extreme storms after people. But ClimateNameChange.org thinks it's time for a new naming system. If you agree with their proposal, endorse this CLIMATE NAME CHANGE plan by clicking here.

On Wednesday, there was a hearing of a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee about the impact of President Obama’s Climate Action Plan. Republicans argued against doing anything about carbon pollution. To see their five craziest arguments, and the rebuttals of those arguments, click here.

Debate on Oil Prices Overlooks the Elephant in the Room

By Joel A. Huberman

I was inspired to write this essay when I read the Viewpoints section in the Sunday edition of The Buffalo News on February 12, 2012. The News had recruited two “experts” to answer the question, “Should [the] U.S. remove restrictions on oil drilling?” One expert, Andrew P. Morriss, replied “Yes”, while the other expert, Michael E. Kraft, responded “No”. Although both men discussed important concerns (the factors affecting oil prices, the need for conservation, the importance of producing energy locally rather than in politically and militarily unstable foreign regions, etc.), both of them completely missed what seems to me to be the major issue—the elephant in the room.

            That elephant is the carbon dioxide (CO2) that we release when we burn fossil fuels (oil, gas, and coal) and the global warming, ocean acidification, and other disastrous consequences of that CO2.

            I think most readers of this essay are already familiar with many of the predicted effects of continued fossil fuel burning. I’ll mention just a few—melting of glaciers, melting of polar ice caps, frequent heat waves and frequent and prolonged droughts, frequent storms and floods, submersion of coastal cities and farms as sea levels rise, and combined warming and acidification of our lakes and oceans.

            All readers of this essay living in the eastern two-thirds of the United States are currently experiencing or have recently experienced abnormally high temperatures. I’m writing this essay on March 21, 2012, in the middle of a period of unusually high temperatures (70s to low 80s, in mid-March, in Buffalo, NY), which has been going on for nearly two weeks straight. This has never happened before in my lifetime, and I’m 71 years old. According to Jeff Masters, the founder of Weather Underground, in his blog for March 17, 2012, Minneapolis, MN, was 39°F above its average, and Bismarck, ND was 41° above its average for the preceding day, March 16. What will happen if summer temperatures in the American midwest approach 40°F above average? Answer: many Americans will die.

            Speaking of the American midwest, if global warming continues at its present pace, our midwest and most of our west are likely to become deserts within the next 50 years. According to a recent study by Aiguo Dai of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (available here), the map below shows the measured pattern of dryness and wetness across the USA in the decade 2000-2009 (which does not include last year’s severe Texas drought). To interpret this map, one needs the color scale below it and the corresponding quantitative indicators of drought potential (“Palmer Drought Severity Index” measurements). Values less than -4 are considered indicators of severe drought potential.

Thus, even in the first decade of the 21st century (2000-2009), the American midwest and west were rather dry. But what might the future bring if we keep burning fossil fuels and warming the planet?