Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Thousands Storm Capitol Hill in Largest Protest Against Global Warming

Live from DC: Thousands Converge for Capitol Climate Action Against Dirty Coal [Updated]

 

By Jeff Biggers, AlterNet

 

Alternet.org -- Posted on March 2, 2009

 

http://www.alternet.org/environment/129630/

 

Editor's Note: This page will be updated throughout the day with the latest news and photos from the Capitol Climate Action in Washington, DC. For more about the action, you can visit Capitol Climate Action: http://capitolclimateaction.org/.

 

UPDATE 5:15 EST by Jeff Biggers and Stephanie Pistello

 

The Capitol Power Plant's days of coal are over.

 

It's been the waiting game here: Since 2 pm, over 2,000 activists have blockaded the five main gates to the Capitol Power Plant. The rather larger police turnout is impressive; clad in their best stocking caps, they dot the chain fence like lamp-posts, taking in the gregarious march with a bit of interest and fascination. No attempt at any arrests have been made.

The crowd is controlled and peaceful; there is a festive atmosphere, young and old, all bundled up and dancing to keep warm on this crystal clear but chilly afternoon.

 

The only clouds now, in this blue sky, are the coal- fired ones billowing from the Capitol plant. At 5 pm, the Capitol Climate Action hailed the historic action and dispersed.

 

It has been a fascinating and powerful day. Communities from across the country have come together in an amazing arm-to-arm support on the picket line. On stage in front of the main gate, tribal members from Michigan, New Mexico and Arizona have testified to the disastrous impact of coal mining in their communities, and coal-fired waste and mercury emissions in their water.

 

Robert Kennedy, Jr., with his son and daughter at his side, made an impassioned case against the criminal elements of mountaintop removal policies and poorly enforced environmental abuse by willing coal companies.

Kennedy recalled his own father's campaign to help end strip mining in the 1960s, citing the ultimate effect of mining on destroying local economies and the union movement.

 

Kennedy called on Capitol Hill to recognize the "true costs of coal."

 

Kennedy was hopeful, though, saying a "sea-change" had occurred with the new Obama administration.

 

Kennedy, like all protesters, readied themselves for arrest.

 

The End of Nature author Bill McKibben declared he had been waiting 20 years for this moment, dating back to his groundbreaking book on climate change.

 

A series of chants of 350 -- the silver bullet number of parts per million of CO2 -- erupted.

 

Kathy Mattea, the Grammy-award singer, beautiful weaved an old Jean Ritchie song, "Blackwater," with other Appalachian ballads on coal.

 

Judy Bonds, whose Coal River Mountain in West Virginia is literally being detonated daily by explosives, told the crowd: "I don't mind being poor, I don't mind being made fun of, but I do mind being blasted and poisoned."

 

Dr. James Hansen called on the Obama administration and the nation's legislators to look at the root cause of climate destabilization, and reminded the crowd of the urgency of the moment. Hansen sounded the alarm on CO2 emissions over 25 years ago.

 

Only steps away from actress Daryl Hannah, the legendary Larry Gibson, who has spent 25 years on a journey to stop mountaintop removal along his home of Kayford Mountain in West Virginia, has been standing on the line of arrest for hours. Like McKibben, this historic moment has been long in waiting. When Gibson began his crusade to end mountaintop removal two decades ago, he recalled barely being able to draw a crowd of two.

 

While the coal industry may have invested over $40 million dollars in fictitious "clean coal" ads, the stunning array of banners and placards -- Clean Coal is Like Dry Water, Coal is the Mother's Liver, Topless Mountains Are Obscene, Coal is Dirty, Power Past Coal

-- drove home the dirty reality of coal and coal-fired plants today.

 

Dirty coal has indeed left the Capitol Power Plant.

 

See you at Cliffside in Charlotte, North Carolina on April 20th for the next coal-fired plant to retire.

 

UPDATE 12:55 pm EST

 

Spirit of Justice Park

 

Contingents of marchers are gathering in the park just to the south of the Capitol, a few blocks from the Capitol Power Plant. A long line of hundreds of younger marchers have just entered from the Powershift rally at the Capitol building. Dividing into four banner areas, Red (Power), Blue (Change), Green (Justice), and Yellow, the activists are chanting "Clean Coal is a Dirty Lie," among other chants. It's an energetic crowd, on a very windy and cold day, though the sun keeps attempt to break through the clouds.

 

Ahjani Yepa-Sprague, from the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, in Michigan, is handing out a statement that declares: "Mercury from coal-fired power plants, like this one, are of special concern to children and women of childbearing age like myself...Tribal lifeways have had to be altered because of the existing mercury in lakes and streams in Michigan....Tribal communities in Michigan and around the world are threatened by the pollution and harms caused by coal plants."

 

Cassie Robinson, a young activist from eastern Kentucky with Mountain Justice, told me she has traveled to Washington to draw attention to climate change, the destruction of her communities from mountaintop removal, and an increasing concern about the problems of natural gas development in Appalachia, an issue often overlooked.

 

Carl "Pete" Ramey, a great-grandfather from Wise County, Virginia, and VFW chaplain, who spent 37 years laboring in an underground mine, as just read an opening prayer: "Is faith asleep? Let it wake. Today is ours. Let's take it." Addressing the largely young crowd, Ramey recalled his increasing activism with the environmental movement after witnessing the impact of mountaintop removal in his region. "I'm inspired by these children."

 

Author Bill McKibben held down the corner of the park with plenty of media cameras. He declared simply: "Coal is killing the planet. Green energy is going to drive us out of this recession."

 

Kentucky farmer-poet Wendell Berry has arrived, stocking cap affixed, bracing in the cold wind as a crowd of young admirers swelled around him.

 

The Capitol Power Plant action is set to begin in the next 30 minutes or so.

 

***

 

UPDATE 11am EST

 

The great snow storm has passed. The clouds are parting. The sun is breaking through. Those tiny ripples of hope, that Robert Kennedy once invoked, are beginning to gather near Capitol Hill.

 

The Capitol Power Plant: It was built at the same time the first Ford Model T cars rolled onto the streets. A century later, the Capitol plant will finally end its use of coal in the age of the iPhone and Blackberry.

 

There's a new era in Washington, DC--a clean energy era. And with an Obama administration that wants to double our renewable energy production in three years, and has called for cap 'n trade legislation to limit carbon emissions, thousands of clean energy and coalfield activists are converging on the snow-swept streets of Washington, DC today to remind Capitol Hill that a growing and incredibly organized movement is ready to make this new clean energy era a reality.

 

The Capitol Climate Action today is more than a historic protest against coal, coal-fired plants and their role in climate change. It's a celebration of a road map to end our dependence on our nation's dirtiest fossil fuel.

 

The denials of coal's dirty past are over: Thousands of citizens are prepared to engage in civil disobedience at the Capitol Power Plant today to make clear the sense of urgency in dealing with climate change legislation and policy in an effective and timely manner.

 

In anticipation of this first mass act of civil disobedience in our nation's history around climate change, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have asked the Acting Architect of the Capitol to end the use of coal at the Capitol plant as "an important demonstration of Congress' willingness to deal with the enormous challenges of global warming, energy independence and our inefficient use of finite fossil fuels."

 

That's one small step for Congress; one giant leap for the nation, if we continue to retire the oldest and dirtiest coal-fired plants at a similar pace.

 

In the meantime, at the other 635 coal-fired plants, over 40 percent of our nation's carbon dioxide emissions continue to erupt from electricity plant silos like as silent volcanoes of death.

 

The urgency of this movement rings with a new message:

We all live in the coalfields now.

 

At the historic Powershift09 conference this weekend in Washington, DC, where over 12,000 students and clean energy activists gathered for a whirlwind of panels, workshops and speeches, scores of experts and community organizers in coal mining and coal-fired plant areas provided some dramatic backstory to the growing movement against climate destabilization.

 

Elisa Young, a farm resident from Meigs County, spoke about the spike in cancer and asthma in an area beset with five coal-fired plants in southern Ohio. According to one recent study, men in Meigs County have the lowest life expectancy rate in the state.

 

Judy Bonds, from the Coal River Mountain Watch in West Virginia, showed how near 500 mountains in central Appalachia have been toppled into the valleys, as part of mountaintop removal mining, wiping out 1,200 miles of streams, depopulating and ruining historic mountain hamlets and economies, and contaminating watersheds.

 

The human costs of mountaintop removal have emerged as the most egregious violation of human rights in the region in our lifetimes.

 

Chris Martin, a student from Tennessee, reminded the audience that the TVA coal ash leakages in his area last December brought out the fact that more than half of our nation's population and their water sources rest within a half hour drive of an unregulated coal ash pond and potential catastrophe.

 

According to the American Lung Association, 24,000 Americans die prematurely from coal-fired plant pollution each year. Another 550,000 asthma attacks, 38,000 heart attacks and 12,000 hospital admissions are also attributed to coal-fired plants.

 

In 1895, newspapers ran ads for smoke-free "clean coal"

in Chicago, as the boom in coal-fired plant electricity was about to launch a new era.

 

Over a century later, those same "clean coal" ads are still running, and the dirty coal denials are taking place.

 

The convergence on the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, DC, marks a new era in confronting these denials.

 

While applauding President Barack Obama's commitment renewable energy, coalfield activists and clean energy advocates are directly addressing a president still beholden to the chimera of "clean coal," its devastating extraction counterparts and dirty coal's underlining role in the silent tsunami of climate destabilization.

 

For those suffering the consequence of dirty coal's legacy, the time has arrived to put an end to the "clean coal" scams of the coal lobby, which not only jeopardize any efforts to pass effective climate legislation before the world climate change conference in Copenhagen in December, but continue the devastation of coal mining in Appalachia, the Midwest and the West.

 

"What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future," Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the UN's International Panel on Climate Change, has declared.

 

It's time for dirty coal to leave the building.

 

[Jeff Biggers is the author of The United States of Appalachia, and the forthcoming book, Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland (The Nation/Basic Books).]

 

c 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/129630/

 

Thousands Storm Capitol Hill in Largest Protest Against

Global Warming

 

By Jason Mark, AlterNet

 

Alternet.org - Posted on March 3, 2009

 

http://www.alternet.org/environment/129728/

 

Blaine O'Neil believes he and his friends are on to

something big -- namely, saving the world.

 

"Climate change is more than a life-or-death issue --

it's a life-or-death issue for the next infinite

generations," says the 19-year-old, a biology major at

Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. "We need to show

Congress that we need climate legislation now and that

green jobs are the way to go. We can't keep living off

of this short-term fossil-fuel energy. We need

immediate and aggressive change; it's simply the only

choice we have left."

 

O'Neil, along with 30 others from Swarthmore, was among

an estimated 12,000 people -- mostly college students

-- who descended on Washington over the weekend to

demand sharp cuts in the country's greenhouse gas

emissions. For environmentalists, the three-day-long

mobilization was a convergence of superlatives.

 

Organizers called a grassroots lobbying drive on Monday

"the biggest lobbying day on climate and energy" in the

country's history as they enlisted some 4,000 students

to visit nearly every congressional office. And later

that day, in what activists dubbed "the largest mass

civil disobedience on climate" in the U.S., some 2,500

people blockaded the gates of the Capitol Power Plant,

which burns coal to provide heat to the senators' and

representatives' offices, a symbol of the nation's

reliance on fossil fuels.

 

The grassroots energy displayed in the Capitol appears

to mark an important turning point for the

environmental movement. Climate change -- for many

years the concern of a narrow circle of scientists and

inside-the-Beltway policy wonks -- seems to have

finally birthed a broad-based citizens movement. The

numbers prove the point: Powershift, the 12,000-person

conference that organized the lobbying day, attracted

5,000 students at its 2007 gathering 14 months ago; the

first such meeting of campus climate activists, in

2005, had fewer than 200 attendees.

 

For author-activist Bill McKibben -- whose seminal book

about global warming, The End of Nature, was published

before many of the Powershift participants were born --

the emergence of a muscular social movement demanding

carbon-dioxide reductions is long overdue.

 

"I've been waiting 20 years to see what the climate

change movement would look like, and it looks great,"

McKibben, one of the initiators of the power plant

action, told AlterNet. "We've got a lot to do. And the

reason we're doing this protest is to give [President

Obama] the political space he needs to maneuver, to

show him that people care. Because the fossil-fuel

industry doesn't want to give him any space."

 

The popular pressure is coming just in time. In

December, leaders from around the world will gather in

Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate an international

treaty to replace the Kyoto Accords. With greenhouse

gases continuing to accumulate in the atmosphere, and

ecosystems already showing stress from rising

temperatures, environmentalists warn that the

Copenhagen negotiations will be a do-or-die.

 

And there is unlikely to be any meaningful progress at

the talks unless the U.S. plays a leadership role.

Green groups, therefore, believe it's essential for

Congress to pass some kind of ambitious climate

legislation before the world's leaders arrive in

Copenhagen.

 

Gus Speth, a former environmental advisor to Presidents

Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and now dean of the Yale

School of Forestry, says that 2009 will be a "hinge of

history."

 

"Far too many members on the Hill don't feel sufficient

political pressure," he told AlterNet. Speth was among

the prominent environmentalists -- along with farmer-

writer Wendell Berry and climatologist James Hansen --

who risked arrest at the power plant protest. "They

[Members of Congress] get the science, that's not

difficult. I think what we've been missing is a protest

movement in this country, a powerful welling of

grassroots support. Real citizen power: That has been

the missing ingredient."

 

The recent actions in Washington, then, are a crucial

test of eco-muscle. Will green groups succeed in

persuading politicians to put strict limits on

greenhouse gases? Or will entrenched fossil-fuel

industries be able to successfully defend their

longtime privileges?

 

The student swarming the congressional offices, and the

protestors surrounding the Capitol Power Plant on

Monday, seemed determined to prove that they are ready

to make the sacrifices demanded for success. The night

before, the sky had dumped three inches of snow, and

temperatures throughout the day were frigid, punctuated

by occasional flurries. But the climate activists were

undeterred by the storm.

 

Despite the icy weather, the people surrounding the

power plant were jubilant, dancing and bouncing to keep

themselves warm and chanting slogans, such as: "Climate

change / What's the solution? / A green jobs

revolution" and the elegantly simple, "Coal stinks."

 

Many of those at the protest seemed heated by a feeling

that the political dynamics are turning in their favor.

Last year, for example, environmentalists scored a

major victory when Democratic lawmakers removed

longtime auto industry ally Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.,

from his chairmanship of the powerful House Energy and

Commerce Committee.

 

The December coal slurry spill at a Tennessee Valley

Authority power plant has put the coal industry under

heightened scrutiny and is raising new questions about

coal's dangers from extraction to ignition to disposal.

And President Barack Obama has signaled that his

administration will play a leading role in crafting any

agreement that comes out of Copenhagen.

 

In yet another sign that lawmakers are feeling they

have to respond to environmentalists' demands, four

days prior to the Capitol Power Plant protest, House

Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate

Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called for the

plant to stop burning coal within a year. Even coal

country's Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.V., a longtime defender

of the plant, said he would agree to a coal phase-out.

Before a single banner had been unfurled or a placard

raised, environmentalists had scored a win.

 

Although emboldened by the victory, the newly

invigorated climate movement recognizes that it isn't

going to stop global warming by protesting one coal

plant at a time -- mostly because there simply isn't

enough time. The very urgency of the issue means that,

unlike social campaigns of the past -- which perhaps

could tolerate incremental change -- climate justice

groups are desperate for immediate action. As McKibben

points out, "we're running out of years."

 

At the same time, the fossil-fuel industry is preparing

for a major political fight. An alliance of utilities,

coal and mining companies has pledged $40 million to

influence any climate-change legislation. And some 770

companies have hired more than 2,300 lobbyists to work

on climate issues, which means that there are four

climate lobbyists for every member of Congress,

according to the Center for Public Integrity.

 

"Yes, it's an uphill climb, but we believe the tide has

turned," says Jessy Tolkan, executive director of the

Energy Action Coalition, the main force behind the

Powershift convergence. "We know the polluting

industries will always have more money to put lies on

television and to stuff money into politicians'

pockets. But we have something more powerful -- we have

numbers."

 

Tolkan notes that 23 million members of the millennial

generation voted in the last election and were a key

force in bringing Obama and a fortified Democratic

Congress into power. Of those, 340,000 people signed

the "Power Vote" pledge setting climate change and

green jobs as their top political priority.

 

During the Monday lobbying day, students used those

statistics to warn legislators that they if they ignore

climate change, they could lose their jobs.

 

"We are flexing our political muscle, and we are

telling them how many young people voted in their

district," Tolkan says. "We have a chance right now to

make it clear that we have the ability to vote these

people in and out of power."

 

Tolkan's optimism will be tried later this year when

Congress and the president turn their attention to

climate policy. The economic crisis appears to have

moved climate lower down on the agenda (a recent Pew

poll showed it dead last among the public's

priorities), which could siphon off support.

 

Even more challenging, climate politics threatens to

fracture the Democratic caucus. Otherwise-progressive

legislators who come from coal-producing states will

likely oppose legislation that goes too hard against

coal -- the single largest source of the U.S.'

greenhouse gas emissions. They will probably demand

government support for (so far unproven) "clean coal"

technologies, such as carbon sequestration.

 

Yet for many of the organizations behind the power

plant rally -- national groups such as Greenpeace and

Rainforest Action Network and local ones like the Black

Water Mesa Coalition and the Chesapeake Climate Action

Network -- the very idea of "clean coal" is anathema.

One of the most popular signs on Monday was "Clean Coal

is a Dirty Lie."

 

"When I hear about 'clean coal' it just breaks my

heart," says Enei Begaye, a Navajo and Tohono O'Odham

woman, who has fought coal mining on her reservation in

northeastern Arizona and who was at the power plant

protest. "There's no way we can support [climate

legislation that includes coal]. Because coal is

tearing our communities apart and is the root of our

suffering."

 

These kinds of disputes over tactics and strategies

will only become more acute as environmentalists get

closer to federal climate legislation. But the hundreds

of skills-sharing sessions, trainings and workshops

that occurred over the weekend show that organizers are

ready for the long struggle that is coming. Without

exception, environmentalists said they were excited to

return to their communities and put pressure on their

legislators, on their home turf, for climate action.

 

"Climate change and its unpredictable effects on our

planet scares me so much," said Emily Pappo, 18, as she

blockaded the south gate of the Capitol Power Plant.

The protest was the first for Pappo, a New York

University student majoring in environmental studies.

"I think that it's beautiful, the fact that so many

people are here for one important cause. I'm so happy I

could be a part of it. Each of us learned so much. We

have to take the skills we learned here and take them

back to our communities and our campuses."

 

[Jason Mark is the co-author of Building the Green

Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots. He edits

the magazine Earth Island Journal, published by Earth

Island Institute, the fiscal sponsor of the Energy

Action Coalition.]

 

c 2009 Independent Media Institute. All rights

reserved.

 

View this story online at http://www.alternet.org/story/129728/

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