Red, Green, and Blue

Environmental Protest or YouTube Stunt?

In New South Wales, Australia on 29th June, wood-chipping company, Eden says that an anti-logging protest was staged on its premises, for reasons that weren’t worthwhile.

Environmental protestors chained themselves to a conveyor belt, protesting that environmental legislation neglected the needs of local wildlife but a spokesman for the plant said ‘… It didn’t affect us in any way and we just left them there until they decided that they felt like going home and they did. These days it’s as much about the show as it is about the reasons, so I guess the show must go on and sometimes the reasons are worthwhile and sometimes they are not.’

If it was worth having, we wouldn’t be getting it, says Judge

In a mordant comment on where polluting substances end up, County Municipal Court Judge Julie Monnin expressed concerns about a plan to sequester carbon dioxide 3,000 feet under Greenville Ohio. She fears the likely decline in property values and pointed out that the plant could lead to people need, and failing to get, man-made earthquake insurance. In her own words, ‘Folks, if it were a good thing, Greenville wouldn’t be getting it.’

The carbon dioxide comes from a nearby ethanol plant and will be injected underground, but before this can happen, large trucks would need to travel local roads, creating seismic shockwaves to test the ground, but these tests have been postponed for fear they would damage local agricultural drainage systems.

Guilty of unlawful protest, campaigners believe they did nothing illegal

In the UK today, 22 environmental protestors have been found guilty of unlawful protest. In June 2008 they boarded a train carrying coal into Drax Coal-Fired Power Station in Yorkshire, after two of their number posed as railway staff to flag it down, allowing others to mount the train and prevent it moving for 16 hours.  During their protest they poured coal on the tracks to stop the train moving.  The campaigners claimed in court that they had not done anything illegal because they were trying to prevent climate change, but the judge—who has said they will not face a custodial sentence—decided that their actions, and the £30,000 clean up operation that followed the protest, were illegal.

Drax power station courtesy of leedsyorkshire at flickr under a creative commons licence

Last week’s confirmation of climate change by the White House has only further raised the stakes for the Arctic. As detailed in former posts, one of the significant effects of our changing climate is the thinning of the ice pack in the Arctic, and the subsequent opening of the Northwest Passage. As the Northwest Passage opens, so too will we see an upsurge in the demand for shipping and the rush to access oil, gas, and mineral resources. [More...]

Significantly for observers, commercial fleets are beginning to view the Northwest Passage as a viable option for getting from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

“The ice is more favourable than in past decades,” said Capt. Georges Tousignant of Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping, “It’s navigable, it’s not that high-risk.”

And it’s not just Nunavut Eastern Arctic Shipping that is interested in navigating the Northwest Passage, the Canadian Coast Guard has seen an increase in the number of ships that entered the Northwest Passage. The longer that good shipping conditions continue, the more companies that will view the Passage as a viable transit route.

Unfortunately for the polar bears and infrastructure built reliant on permanent ice in the north, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that ice melt rates have increased. In May of 2009, ice melted at a rate of about 54,000 square kilometers per day throughout the Arctic. Average May ice melt has traditionally been closer to 47,000 kilometers per day.

The implications of all this ice melt is that similar to the long-term melting of permafrost, there will be less of the dangerous multi-year ice that impedes shipping every year. And therefore every year there will be increased shipping, and increasing attention to the viability of the Northwest Passage.

With increasing attention being paid to the Northwest Passage, watch for its status under international law to become a point of contention along with other northern concerns such sovereignty and related territorial claims.

Image: ashatsea (Creative Commons)

While multinational corporations are not the first thing that pops into mind thinking about climate change, chances are that they’re going to be part of the solution. So, how do we work with these organizations?

If we’re working with multinational companies to help them reduce their impacts on the environment, we have to make them see what’s in it for them. At heart, two things - a risk of greater costs, and an opportunity to generate new revenue streams. With the proliferation of local, inter-regional programs as well as federal programs designed to combat climate change, the most immediate implication for the multinational industry will be the cost of doing business.

One can see how regional cap and trade programs on carbon emitters, as well as carbon taxes in certain jurisdictions are without a doubt going to have an impact on the bottom line. The key challenge (and, more importantly from a business perspective, opportunity) is for multinational firms to plan for these changes, therefore giving them the opportunity to turn climate change related challenges into long-term competitive advantages.

Why is this of interest to the environmental community? The quickest way to move a business organization is by helping them determine that the path you are suggesting is one that will provide them with a business advantage, greater profits, and increased shareholder value. By speaking their language, “opportunity, risk, and fiduciary duty” environmentalists will have a much easier time working with the business community, instead of against.

Image credit: iStockPhoto

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Mean Joe Green Cartoon Archive

American President Obama’s outreach to the Middle East and the Arab world at large could not have come at a better point. As tensions ratchet over Iran and its pursuit of nuclear weapons and the ever-simmering conflict between Israel and Hamas, the World Bank recently released a report criticizing the water-sharing regime between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. While the report’s release is not a bombshell, it does serve to highlight how conflicts and competition over natural resources will only contribute to regional tensions. Read the rest of this entry »

Salt Lake City, UT - There is nothing earth-shattering about what is going on at the Attorney General’s office in Salt Lake City, Utah. It’s quite the opposite. The Utah AG’s office is taking a small step in the right direction to save, not shatter, our planet.

The Utah Attorney General’s office in Salt Lake City has recently revamped its recycling program. Prior to April of this year, the AG’s office recycled through a private company, Columbus Secure Shredding (CSS), which also disposed of confidential documents. This allowed for the recycling of white paper, and number 1 and 2 plastics.

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Sometimes it’s impossible to extract the thread of environmental protest from the complex strands of civil disaffection, or to analyse the motives or protestors and give them a single label. The G20 protests in London were a case in point, combining liberals, anarchists, nationalists, environmentalists and many others in a seething blend of international concern.  Read the rest of this entry »

This month, two conferences have been held on an issue that largely divides Europe from America and the rest of the world. In much of Europe, Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are not used in food production and are not grown as crops. In pretty well the rest of the world, they are both widely grown and widely utilised. Why is there such a division?

Two conferences reveal the nature of the problem

Between 15—19 May, a Vatican organised ‘study week’ looked at ‘Transgenic Plants for Food Security in the Context of Development’ – a title that gives some idea of the expected outcome of a more pro-GMO stance, however there won’t be an official position statement on GMOs and both sides of the argument claim to have a degree of Papal support. In the no-to-GMO camp are quite a number of social justice activists who fear that native crops and native peoples could be dislodged by the cash-crop power of GMOs and they share an uneasy alliance with some bishops and theologians, whose view is that GMOs are both a threat to the environment and human health and a possible step on the path to usurping the role of God as Creator. On the opposite side are many agribusinesses, some other development campaigners and some other theologians, who see GMOs as the logical tool to destroy poverty, feed the hungry, and maintain stewardship of the environment.

Some watchers have said that several of the speakers at the conference have financial links to Monsanto, one of the world’s largest GMO producers. The counter-argument is that with GMOs being big agribusiness, it’s inevitable that most people working the field will have had funding or sponsorship from one of the very few companies at the top of the GMO tree.

Uganda seeks to change policy, and minds

And in Uganda, another conference is currently exploring  the production of GMO crops in Africa. The participants are looking at the gap between policy and research, and giving evidence on how investment in GM technology could benefit the continent. One claim being made at this event is that the widespread adoption of GMO agriculture could ‘significantly reduce’ the cost of food in developing countries by 2050. However, this could only be achieved if consumer preferences were changed, a transformation that has happened without protest in the USA and patchily and with massive protest, in much of Europe.

Vatican courtesy of David Paul Ohmer at Flickr under a creative commons licence

There are any number of reasons that we should worry about bees: not least that without them, some agronomists predict that the planet could only survive for four years, before the catastrophic failure of crop pollination led to a similarly catastrophic collapse of human civilisation. Forget tsunamis, changes in the Earth’s magnetic core, the arrival of aliens or the mutation of some native species to giant size—our biggest risk is that we lose those small, aerodynamically impossible, stripy creatures so famous for their eccentric flight, useful wax and delicious honey. It’s estimated that 35% of our crops, globally, require bees for pollination. Read the rest of this entry »

Urban Spaces – once concrete jungles of pollution – are starting to realize the potential for green living, and the race is on for which city can push that envelope the furthest.

That was the thesis put forward during today’s Marketplace of Ideas panel, which featured Chicago Mayor Richard Daley and was hosted by the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI).  Mayor Daley spoke about the realized benefits of green roofs, a design that Chicago has embraced with more than 600 roofs either in construction or completed, totaling more than 7 million square feet green of space.  These roofs cool the city, absorb rain water and air pollution, provide jobs for their installation and maintenance, and even provide folks with quality of life improvements. Read the rest of this entry »