It’s Getting Hot In Here

(Or How Sierra Club Learned To Stop Worrying About The 99% And Love Wall Street)

crossposted from the Earth First! Newswire

By Red Emma

Greenwashing—[a compound word modeled on "whitewash"] a form of spin in which green PR or green marketing is deceptively used to promote the perception that a company’s policies or products are environmentally friendly.

John Muir must be rolling over in his grave.

The organization he founded in 1892, the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest environmental group, have been in cahoots with the worst of the worst corporations in recent years. They’ve been paid tens of millions of dollars by the fossil fuel industry, tyrannical billionaire mayors and Wall Street in exchange for cleaning (and greening) up their public images.  Not only have they acted as a green public relations firm for the bastions of wealth and power, but have also sold out frontline communities most impacted by extractive industry.

Corporations rule our world with an unyielding iron fist. They poison and literally explode local communities with fracking and mountaintop removal. They profit off of dirty extractive industry with multi-billion investments. They empower a police state to repress democratic people’s movements drawing a line in the sand against Corporate America.  But they also insidiously mitigate the power of grassroots resistance movements with a complicit non-profit industrial complex. Most environmental non-profits actively serve as a buffer zone between our people’s movements seeking real change and a corporate state hell bent on sucking every last bit out of the planet and its people before the impending ecological collapse.

In recent years, there has been an expanding critique of the big greens. Corporate executives and the super wealthy occupy the donor rolls and boards of many green non-profits. Organizations like Environmental Defense and Natural Resources Defense Council have actively partnered with the fossil fuel industry in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a front group that helped stop climate legislation in 2010. A 2010 expose in The Nation by Johann Hari revealed that Big Oil made large donations for decades to organizations like Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy to negate bad press over human rights and environmental abuses. Essentially, the big institutions of the environmental movement have been bought and sold.

Sadly, the Sierra Club which boasts a democratic governance system and a healthy grassroots base of local chapters have become part of the corporate world’s equation for control. They’ve partnered with, and been funded by, natural gas corporations to promote gas as a “bridge fuel.” They’ve taken large donations from New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg even as he’s attacked labor unions and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and released his racist police force to harass and demonize the Muslim community. They’ve even been business partners with the worst of the worst Wall Street banks, Bank of America, in greenwashing schemes to repair the bank’s damaged public image to the environmental community. Continue reading ‘Big Greenwashing 101′

UPDATE: the six activists have been arrested. Local news all over the place.

From the Greenpeace website:

“Breaking news: This morning, six North Carolinians built and ascended two 20-ft tall tripods in front of Duke Energy’s headquarters with a banner between them that read “Duke Energy: no dirty rate hikes” wearing t-shirts that said, “Be a good neighbor.”

The protest follows yesterday’s announcement from Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford that the organization has opened a campaign against Duke Energy, and a dramatic protest on top of the 400-foot stack of an Asheville coal plant earlier this week. Earlier this month, Greenpeace flew an airship over Cincinnati with the message “Dump Duke.” In Cincinnati, residents are deciding whether to keep buying energy from Duke, or explore cleaner alternatives.”

Images on Flickr

From one of the activists, Monica Embrey:

“…I have never lived in a community where so many people are suffering from the health impacts of coal. From children who have to miss recess because of the severity of their asthma to the parents who are battling cancer, the impact of the four dirty, coal fired power plants that surround Charlotte is unacceptable.

Continue reading ‘BREAKING: NC Activists Occupying Duke HQ in 20′ Tripods!’

UPDATE:  The 16 activists who pulled off 4 actions at the same plant have now left the site and been taken into custody. What an amazing job they did,  let’s all hope they are safe and well and get out of jail soon.

Early this morning Greenpeace activists entered the coal-burning Asheville Power Station owned by Progress Energy (soon to be owned by Duke Energy). Activists have locked down to the coal loader and have scaled the 400 foot tall smoke stack. Banners read: Duke and Progress Energy:  Stop Destroying Mountains.

Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/greenpeaceusa09/sets/72157629244871679/with/6869572913/

Follow the Action: http://quitcoal.org/

WATCH: SMOKESTACK BANNER:
http://vp.mgnetwork.net/viewer.swf?u=434e0a46a7ce102faba2001ec92a4a0d&z=SPA&embed_player=1
Continue reading ‘BREAKING: Activists Scale Coal Plant in Asheville, NC’

via RAMPS

Direct action is not as glamorous as many would have you believe. Days, weeks or year in jail or prison is not easy.  But fighting to save precious land and communities is damn motivating.

Yesterday, Coal River Mountain tree-sitter Catherine-Ann was sentenced to seven days in a West Virginia regional jail.

Her crime?

She stood up to King Coal to defend the mountain and stop mountaintop removal.

Last summer, she sat, along with Becks Collins, in the tree to stop the blasting for a month before coming down.  Their banners read “Stop Strip Mining” and “For Judy Bonds.” Judy Bonds was a West Virginia native and Goldman Prize winner who fought mountaintop removal until her death in Jan. 2011.

Alpha Natural Resources, who acquired the notorious Massey Energy in a takeover last year, found the pair of tree-sitters near the Bee Tree mine site on Coal River Mountain and tried to deal with the sitters more civilly than Massey had.  While Alpha didn’t use sound and light harassment techniques seen in previous years, they have filed civil suits against the sitters and the support team.

Month long tree sit. Jail time. Lawsuits. Quite the price in physical, emotional, mental and financial capital. So this begs the same question I’ve been asking for year’s now- “How far would you go to save a place you love?”

My friend Tim DeChristopher is spending two years in federal prison after successfully derailing a land auction attempting to sell off pristine Utah wilderness. A number of comrades in Appalachia have done long periods in West Virginia’s jails for fighting mountaintop removal.  I’ve been to jail numerous times (once was a five day stay in a Melbourne Australia jail) for various causes. Continue reading ‘Coal River Tree-sitter Sentenced To 7 Days In Jail’

Why Climate Change is really, really freaky

“If we accept this text, we are killing ourselves.” These were the words of an ambassador from a small island nation in the final hours of the longest UN climate negotiations in history. “We may be small, but we are not dead,” he continued. With these strong statements, the ambassador sought to rally other countries like his to push back against the weak agreement the conference had produced.

Continue reading more on the Fletcher Forum.

Never has there been a more dire time for defense of the planet. Increase your abilities to defend the Earth through learning the skills of climbing. We will offer a variety of trainings for forest defense and urban actions suitable for all skill levels from beginner to advanced.

Workshops include: Basic Climbing and Anchoring, Traverses, Tree to Tree Transfers, Basic Structure Rigging and Haul Systems, Tripods, Bipods, and Monopods, Advanced Structure Rigging, Large Scale Banner Hanging, and Basic Rescue and Training Set Ups.

To attend the camp contact:

efclimbers@gmail.com

www.efclimbers.net

About the climbers guild

The Earth First! Climbers Guild exists to enable direct action climbing and rigging trainers to communicate with each other to be able to set up training events and continue to produce guides on climbing and rigging as well as standardize the training process to create a safer and more effective environment in EF! direct action situations.

To become a Guild trainer you must be intimately familiar with all aspects of safety and rope work that are presented in the guild guides. Furthermore, to train others under the name of the Earth First! Climbers Guild, the steps as outlined in the guides must be followed. This is to insure a standardization of safe climbing practices.

The Guild will work to maintain a diverse membership and will implement codes of conduct at all events. Guild events will be geared toward the empowerment of all individuals who have a desire to learn.

Guild members will make a commitment to never be under the influence of any drug while training, teaching, or engaging in any climbing activities that are a part of an action or larger campaign. As trainers and skilled climbers, guild members have a responsibility to set the best possible example for those individuals learning from us. It is never acceptable to use any substance that could potentially impair judgment while climbing.

The reports of King Coal’s demise appear to be exaggerated. At least for now.

After a year of fighting for coal export terminals proposals in Washington, coal companies are moving south into Oregon.  Last week, it was announced that port officials at the Port of St. Helen’s, OR approved proposals to allow coal export terminals on the Oregon coast.

King Coal’s plan is take the coal being mined from leases in Wyoming and Montana, being opened up by the Obama’s Administration’s energy plan, transport it by rail to ports in the Pacific Northwest and ship it overseas to Asian markets for big profits. There are already active efforts in the Washington port towns of Longview and Bellingham.

The Port of St. Helen’s agreements with Houston-based port logistics company Kinder Morgan and Australia-based coal company Ambre Energy would ship up to 38 million tons a year and is the first proposal to be approved in Oregon.  It’s also reported that the ports in Coos Bay, OR are also in talks with unnamed coal companies about coal export terminal development.

Earlier in the year, Oregon’s Gov. John Kitzhaber had stated no coal would be exported through the state without a “open vigorous public debate.” It’s pretty clear that King Coal and the Oregon political establishment don’t want that at all. Continue reading ‘King Coal Ups The Ante In Oregon’

via movieposter.com

In the 1974 classic Roman Polanski neo-noir film Chinatown, private detective Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) discovers one of LA’s dirty secrets.

He finds that wealthy developers are legally stealing precious water from poor struggling farmers in California’s central valley to hydrate the wealthy homes of Beverly Hills and a rapidly growing Los Angeles.  It’s a sorted tale of corrupt local politics, exploited natural resources, an earlier version of the 1% vs. the 99% and seemingly the “future” of the city.

In a similar vein, despite growing green consciousness in southern California, the city of Los Angeles has another dirty secret and it is called coal. Furthermore, the electricity that the residents of L.A. are using everyday from coal is being burned at the expense of struggling Native communities in the American Southwest.

Despite a resolution passed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the L.A. City Council to get L.A. off of coal, the Los Angeles Water and Power Department (LAWPD) still purchases almost half of its power from coal plants in Arizona and Utah.  The resolution has led to two coal plants being shut down, but the LAPWD is still heavily invested in utility companies like Southern California Edison.

And while California itself has very few coal plants and no coal mines, it keeps its homes air conditioned and lights on through plants hundreds of miles away spewing pollution into the airways and waterways of the Southwest. This addiction has a particularly harsh impact on communities in the Four Corners area of New Mexico and Arizona as the Navajo Generating Station is located on Navajo land.  Furthermore, companies like St. Louis based Peabody continue to mine coal reserves on the same land. Continue reading ‘L.A.’s Dark Secret’