Earth Day: History, Strategies For Change

Earth Day Presentation
Professor Henry Schissler

THE FOUNDING OF EARTH DAY

Gaylord Nelson, who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, founded Earth Day to be celebrated on April 22 every year. The reason for choosing the April 22nd date remains unclear. Most people believe that it has to do with the annual Arbor Day celebration that takes place around the same time.

The first Earth Day event was a teach-in on April 22, 1970. It dealt with environmental issues as well as opposition to the Vietnam War.

Many laws were passed in the shadow of the first Earth Day, including the Clean Air Act, laws that protect the oceans, and clean drinking water, as well as the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).


KEY ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS IN AMERICA

The Sierra Club (1892)
The Sierra Club's members are more than 750,000 of your friends and neighbors. Inspired by nature, we work together to protect our communities and the planet. The Club is America's oldest, largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization." --- from the Sierra Club website

National Wildlife Federation
"National Wildlife Federation inspires Americans to protect wildlife for our children's future." four million members in 47 states, with conservation, education and public service programs to protect all forms of wildlife, from national parks and natural resources to all manner of animals, fish and bird.”

The Nature Conservancy
“The mission of The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and its 4 million members is to preserve the plants, animals and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by using science-based programs to protect the lands and waters they need to survive. TNC is a major organizer and sponsor of Earth Day.”

Some Key Environmental Causes
• Global Warming
• Clean Air (increasing asthma rates)
• Clean Water
• More Recycling Projects (including Water Bottles)
• Alternative Energy Sources
• Increased Funding for Public Transportation Systems
• Fuel Efficient Automobiles (but the Bush Administration Blocked California, Connecticut & Other States from Passing Laws Requiring Higher Miles Per Gallon Rates for Cars)
• No Return to Nuclear Power Plants or Coal (Both Supported by Bush)
• “Green” Buildings & Homes: Increased use of Solar Energy, Garden Composting; Decreased Use of Pesticides, Non-Organic Fertilizers, Etc.



SPECIFIC ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGIES FOR CHANGE

It is our responsibility to protect America's extraordinary natural resources. The health of our families and the strength of our economy depend on our stewardship of the environment. Farming, fishing, tourism, and other industries require a healthy environment.

• We must reject the assertion that we must choice between a healthy economy and a healthy environment. New technologies that protect the environment will create new high-paying jobs.

• A cleaner environment means a stronger economy. Far too many Americans live with unhealthy air or water quality. We must strengthen and enforce the laws that ensure we have clean air to breathe and clean water to drink
• We must commit to the next generation of affordable and renewable energy and to conservation measures that will immediately reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Energy independence aims to reduce U.S. reliance on foreign oil by developing alternative energy sources and technologies and encouraging energy efficiencies.
• We must eliminate billions in subsidies for oil and gas companies and use the savings to provide consumer relief from higher gas and fuel costs, which also drives up costs for food and other consumer products
• Energy independence puts America in the driver's seat to pursue affordable and efficient energy solutions that will benefit all Americans, improve America's security, reduce the burden on American families, and help clean our environment.

(1) Cut Oil Demand: 50% by 2020
That means reducing oil imports from around 65% to 10-15%. We can do this in part by getting the 100 mile per gallon (mpg) car into the marketplace. We must work to double the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE, to 50 mpg by 2020. And we will set a life-cycle low-carbon fuel standard that reduces the carbon impact of our liquid fuels by 30% by 2020.
(2) New Efficiencies, Energy Sources in Electrical Sector: 50% by 2040
We must call for a national renewable portfolio standard of 30% by 2020 that will rise to 50% by 2040. This is aggressive, but necessary as we start using more electricity for automobiles. We must push for an energy productivity law requiring a 20% improvement in energy productivity by 2020. We could save customers $21 billion a year by 2020.
(3) Dramatically Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions: 90% by 2050
20% by 2020, 80% by 2040 -- ten years faster than scientists say is necessary because we must lead the world, and we can't afford the possibility of backsliding and inaction. We will start with a market-based cap and trade system for greenhouse gas emissions to create incentives for the electric and industrial sectors to make significant reductions in their carbon emissions. Economists say the world can protect itself from drastic climate change at a cost of 1-3% of our economic activity. We can afford to protect the climate. Given the risks of catastrophic climate change, we can't afford not to do it.
(4) Lead By Example, Restore America as the World's Leader
We must return to the international negotiating table and support mandatory world-wide limits on global warming pollution. We will work closely with fast-growing nations, and cooperate with the European Union, the World Bank, and other allies to help finance the incremental cost of "doing it right." We must create a North American Energy Council with Mexico and Canada, which supply about 20% of our oil, and make sure our relations with these neighbors are firm and friendly. As we reduce our demand for foreign oil, we should work with the Persian Gulf nations and our partners at the UN, to create a multilateral system for protecting the Persian Gulf so that within ten years, the U.S. presence there could be sharply and safely reduced.
(5) Get It All Done Without Breaking the Bank
We will raise some revenue, from the sales of carbon permits, for example. Further, We must get out the "green scissors" to cut back on wrongly-placed tax subsidies. Over time, this program will yield huge productivity increases in our economy, as well as significant budget savings and revenues. We will create more than ten times as much value in the American economy by reducing our oil imports as we spend to make this program happen.
(6) Invite the Oil Companies to Become Energy Companies
People love to hate the oil companies. They have been raking in huge profits. But we must work with them and encourage them to become energy companies, and invest in our thriving new energy economy. They are invited to the table, but they aren't going to run the table any more.
(7) The Bottom Line...
Americans need energy to get to work; we need heat and electricity in our homes, schools and workplaces. We are hurt by unpredictable energy price cycles, and by our nation's energy policy failures. The way out of the cycle is to create competition, to support energy productivity, new technologies and alternative fuels. And everyone -- every American -- must make an effort to make us energy independent and combat global warming. Our national security and our planet depend on it. It's about creating a new energy economy here in the United States, and doing it quickly, with broad, bold strokes. It's the way to a bright, strong, prosperous future for the United States -- and for the world.
Specific Environmental Strategies Are Excerpted From New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson’s “Plan For An Energy Revolution”

Million Acres Of Rainforest To Be Saved

Published on Thursday, March 27, 2008 by The Independent/UK
Million Acres of Guyanese Rainforest To Be Saved In Groundbreaking Deal
by Daniel Howden

A deal has been agreed that will place a financial value on rainforests - paying, for the first time, for their upkeep as “utilities” that provide vital services such as rainfall generation, carbon storage and climate regulation.
The agreement, to be announced tomorrow in New York, will secure the future of one million acres of pristine rainforest in Guyana, the first move of its kind, and will open the way for financial markets to play a key role in safeguarding the fate of the world’s forests.

The initiative follows Guyana’s extraordinary offer, revealed in The Independent in November, to place its entire standing forest under the protection of a British-led international body in return for development aid.

Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of the London-based financiers Canopy Capital, who sealed the deal with the Iwokrama rainforest, said: “How can it be that Google’s services are worth billions but those from all the world’s rainforests amount to nothing?” The past year has been a pivotal one for the fast- disappearing tropical forests that form a cooling band around the equator because the world has recognised deforestation as the second leading cause of CO2 emissions. Leaders at the UN climate summit in Bali in December agreed to include efforts to halt the destruction of forests in a new global deal to save the world from runaway climate change.

“As atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise, emissions will carry an ever-mounting cost and conservation will acquire real value. The investment community is beginning to wake up to this,” Mr Murray-Philipson added.

Guyana, sandwiched between the Latin American giants Venezuela and Brazil, is home to fewer than amillion people but 80 per cent of its land is covered by an intact rainforest larger than England. The Guiana Shield is one of only four intact rainforests left on the planet and at its heart lies the Iwokrama reserve, gifted to the Commonwealth in 1989 as a laboratory for pioneering conservation projects.
Iwokrama, which means “place of refuge” in the Makushi language, is home to some of the world’s most endangered species including jaguar, giant river otter, anaconda and giant anteater.

Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo, a former economist, has appealed for state and private sector help for the country to avoid succumbing to the rampant deforestation currently blighting Brazil and Indonesia, in an effort to raise living standards in one of Latin America’s poorest countries.

“Forests do much more for us than just store carbon … This first significant step is in keeping with President Jagdeo’s visionary approach to safeguarding all the forests of Guyana,” said Iwokrama’s chairman, Edward Glover.
The deal, drawn up by the international firm Stephenson Harwood, is the first serious attempt to pay for the ecosystem services provided by rainforests.
“We should move beyond emissions-based trading to measure and place a value on all the services they provide,” said Mr Glover.

In addition to providing shelter to half the world’s terrestrial species and one billion of the earth’s poorest people, forests such as Iwokrama act as pumps, drawing water from the Atlantic Ocean inland to the Amazon and Guiana Shield where they help to seed clouds and deliver moisture over vast distances.

The Amazon generates the rain that falls on the vast soya estates of Sao Paulo, helping to make Brazil the second biggest agricultural exporter in the world.
Guyana’s attempt to secure its entire standing forest has received the backing of the British environment minister Phil Woolas and Downing Street has told The Independent that it is “considering the offer”. President Jagdeo met with Gordon Brown on the sidelines of a recent Commonwealth Summit in Uganda where they discussed the proposal. The UN road map to a deal to replace the Kyoto protocols foresees payments from wealthy climate-polluting nations to developing countries to compensate for potential income lost through avoiding deforestation. But there are fears that this formula may simply displace the demand for timber and cheap agricultural land.

Andrew Mitchell, head of the Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of rainforest scientists, said: “The decision on forests at December’s conference in Bali is a major step in tackling climate change but it fails to reward countries such as Guyana that aren’t cutting down their forests.”

© 2008 The Independent

Climate Change: The World's Biggest Security Threat

By Nicole Itano, Christian Science MonitorPosted on March 18, 2008, Printed on March 18, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/79882/

Rising sea levels are what some nations fear most about global warming. But in Europe, climate change is likely to mean a new flood of immigrants from Africa and other poorer countries, according to a new report.

That was one of the issues before the heads of state from the 27-member European Union as they gathered in Brussels Thursday and Friday to address climate change and, in particular, the security threats it raises.

Unchecked climate change could not only cause a flood of new environmental migrants to Europe, it could spark instability in energy-producing states and lead to the collapse of fragile states around the world, says the report by EU foreign-policy chief Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the European commissioner for external relations. Climate change, the report says, is a "threat multiplier" which "intensifies existing trends, tensions, and instability."
European leaders say they have an important role to play in leading the world towards an agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions -- and that's on this meeting's agenda, too. But increasingly, EU leaders are also seeing the need to prepare for the impacts of climate change at home. Meeting those challenges, analysts say, may require greater coordination of foreign policies.

"There's really a new approach and perspective developing," says Dirk Messner, director of the German Advisory Council on Global Change. "Climate change has been addressed until very recently as an environmental problem. ... But dangerous climate change, beyond 2 degrees or so, will result in a destabilization processes around the world."

In 2007, the Solana report notes, all but one of the emergencies for which the UN appealed for humanitarian aid had climate dimensions. And new trading routes are opening in the Arctic as the polar ice caps melt, shifting the balance of power in the region.

Little in the report is new. In fact, it echoes a widely cited 2007 study by 11 retired American admirals and generals issued by CNA Corporation, a Virginia think tank.

But the stark warning from such high-ranking EU officials is likely to invigorate the debate in Europe about the links between climate and security -- as well as highlight the urgency of coming to some sort of global agreement on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.

Europe, experts say, is not likely to experience climate-related instability within its own territory -- the brunt of the impact of global warming is likely to fall on the world's poor. But on the Continent's borders are regions, such as North Africa and the Middle East, that are both political fragile and acutely vulnerable to climate change.

"Migration is the real biggie," says Jeffrey Mazo, an expert on climate and security at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. "What's causing the migration is food insecurity and water insecurity and general insecurity in developing nations that don't have the infrastructure to cope with climate change impacts."

For countries like Greece and Spain, which lie on the edges of Europe and are already grappling with major illegal immigration crises, the threat of millions of environmental migrants is a worrying prospect. Already, the Greek government is planning to use development aid to address climate change-related problems in countries that are courses of illegal immigration, in hopes of pre-empting the problem.

Another effort that might help create jobs and stem migration is French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Mediterranean Union plan. On Thursday evening, he was scheduled to present the program intended to forge closer ties between Europe and North Africa and Middle Eastern countries. It includes the creation of a Euro-Mediterranean free trade area by 2010.

Critics of Mr. Sarkozy's efforts say that since 1995 the EU has given out $30 billion in grants and loans to 10 countries stretching from Morocco to Turkey, but with little result in terms of boosting democracy or ending poverty, reports the Associated Press.

Others argue that European officials are still uncertain of the scale of the potential problems caused by climate change. One often-cited estimate predicts that there will be 200 million climate migrants by 2050. But others put the figure nearer 20 million.

"It's taken people years to accept that climate change is actually true. Now it's a fact of life," says Jemini Pandya, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations organization. "Migration and climate change are two of the more pressing issues of the day. But until recently, there's been virtually no link between the two in terms of study and research."

Indeed, there's increasingly consensus that a crisis is looming, and experts say that a Europe-wide immigration policy -- taking into account the issue of environmental migration -- will have to be developed. The new EU foreign-policy representative, who will be appointed next year, will have to put climate issues at the top of the agenda.

"It's not just the European Union coming together," says Dr. Mazo. "Climate change is as much an opportunity as it is a threat on the security front, for strengthening all sorts of regional and global institutions."

Linking climate change to security is key to the issue being taken more seriously by Europe's political leaders. Dr. Messner says that until recently, climate change was the domain of environment ministers, who generally had relatively little power. Now, it's the realm of presidents and prime ministers.

"A wider community of the political class is seeing climate change as a serious issue," says Messner, who cites as an example the response of the German foreign minister to a recent report issued by his organization. "The political decisionmakers are now understanding what is going on."

Nicole Itano is an Italian correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor.
© 2008 Christian Science Monitor All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/79882/

Bush Intervened For Weaker Smog Rule

by H. Josef Hebert

WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency agreed to weaken an important part of its new smog requirements after being told at the last minute that President Bush preferred a less stringent approach, according to government documents.

They show tense exchanges between the EPA and the White House Office of Management and Budget in the days before the smog air quality standard was announced Wednesday.
Changes directed by the White House were made only hours before the agency issued the regulation. The late activity forced the EPA to delay the announcement for five hours.
The disagreement concerned the amount of protection from ozone, or smog, that should be afforded wildlife, farmlands, parks and open spaces.

This “public welfare” or “secondary” smog standard is separate from a decision to tighten the smog requirements for human health, which the EPA decided to do by reducing the allowable concentrations of ozone in the air from 80 parts per billion to 75 parts per billion.

The revised human health standard has gotten all the attention. But the most contentious fighting involved the public welfare standard, according to papers inserted in the EPA regulatory docket Thursday.

The memos and documents indicate that EPA officials had wanted to make the public welfare standard more stringent than the health standard, although still not as protective as some scientists had recommended.

But the White House insisted on making both standards identical, according to the documents. When EPA officials balked, the issue went to Bush, who sided with his budget office.
The White House defended Bush’s action.

“This is not a weakening of regs (regulations) or standards,” White House deputy press secretary Tony Fratto said Friday. “But it was an effort to make the standards consistent. There’s no question we have an interest in how federal regs impact communities.”

Fratto said the new standards are the “most stringent smog standards in history” and that communities will have a hard time meeting them. He described the area where Bush intervened as ‘a technical matter’ and said he acted on the advice of the Justice Department.
The White House’s involvement was first reported by The Washington Post.

Susan Dudley, head of OMB’s Information and Regulatory Affairs, alluded to Bush’s involvement in a last- minute memo to EPA chief Stephen Johnson.

“The president has concluded that consistent with administration policy, added protection should be afford to public welfare by strengthening the secondary ozone standard and setting it to be identical to the new primary standard,” she wrote. It should not be weaker or more stronger than the human health standard, the OMB insisted.

Although the memo was dated Thursday, it was faxed to the EPA on Wednesday, hours before the agency announced the rule. Parts of the memo were included in the rule’s preamble posted on the EPA Web site.

“Never before has a president personally intervened at the 11th hour, exercising political power at the expense of the law and science, to force EPA to accept weaker air quality standards than the agency chief’s expert scientific judgment had led him to adopt,” said John Walke, clean air director at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private advocacy group. “It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference.”

Dudley, in a March 6 memo, had questioned the EPA’s justification for have a stronger smog requirement for public welfare than for human health.

The “public welfare” - or secondary - standard is fashioned in a way to protect against long-term harm to the environment. The limits on ozone under this standard are likely to have more impact on rural areas than urban centers.

Environmentalists and ecologists have argued that the standard should be more stringent than the human health ozone standard.

Last year the EPA staff and a scientific advisory panel on clean air concluded that protection of forests, agricultural lands and the ecosystem requires a “substantially different” ozone standard from the one for protecting human health.

In recent weeks the Agriculture Department has weighed in against making the public welfare ozone standard tougher. The department expressed concerns about the impact additional pollution controls might have on agriculture and development of biofuels, especially ethanol.
The department made its concerns known to OMB. EPA officials said the need was clear for a different standard for public welfare and that drifting ozone pollution has been found to cause “adverse effects” on agricultural crops, forests and vegetation.

© 2008 Associated Press