How about a PLAUSIBLE PLAN with STRATEGIES & TACTICS whereby WE MIGHT NOT END UP DESTROYING HUMANITY?
What follows is a letter to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation asking them to organize our national foundations to do two things: First, asking our nation and its citizens to understand the genuine threat of Climate Destabilization. Second, funding a national teach-in on Climate Destabilization along with an education and advocacy campaign.
This is a plausible way in which humanity might be salvaged:
ABSTRACT: Improvements in Global Health and sustainable Global Development depend on climate stability. Otherwise, all the work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), from improving maternal and child health to alleviating poverty and hunger, would go up in smoke caused by the searing heat of climate chaos. Without dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use, close to zero emissions for the wealthy industrial nations by 2050, the effects of climate destabilization will be permanent—causing the end of civilization and the death of most of humanity.
Several broad measures must be enacted quickly, to prevent runaway climate destabilization. A carbon phase-out plan that limits warming to 2°C and is fair among nations is necessary. The industrialized world must assist the developing nations with clean energy alternatives, or they will follow a carbon-intensive path to relieve grinding poverty. An increasing price must be placed on carbon, with rebates to the public. This would both spur research and allow non-carbon energy to become competitive. This plan must start in the US, followed by worldwide enactment of similar policies. Coal must be phased out; most coal and uncon-ventional fuels, like tar sands, must remain in the ground. Importantly, current patterns of fossil fuel use are illegal under both domestic and international law.
In spite of the measures needed, political deadlock has immobilized action both globally and in the US. Only a coordinated partnership effort between the BMGF, other national foundations and the Association for the Tree of Life (ATL) can catalyze effective action. Through a compelling national grassroots campaign, the US public must be warned of the scope and scale of the threat, and the need for an immediate response. The ATL has the experience and human resources to mobilize the campaign—to leverage transformational change and to effect the required policy changes in the tight timeframe available.[1] The BMGF, with a consortium of national foundations, has the credibility and influence to call for and support the campaign.
Effective climate action is the most important imperative now facing humanity, overshadowing other national and global challenges. Vital global health and development initiatives will have no lasting value without halting the lethal warming of our earth. Therefore, a partnership between the BMGF and the ATL is necessary if we are to have a livable future for our children.
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion.
As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.”
Abraham Lincoln
INTRODUCTION
This letter of interest (LOI) from the Association for the Tree of Life seeks a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that would enable the BMGF work in the program areas of Global Health and Global Development to endure. The program explained in this letter is informed by and founded on the two closely related core missions of both the BMGF and the ATL.
The Gates Foundation begins with “all lives have equal value," while the ATL works to achieve "universal social and climate justice" (USCJ). The BMGF considers questions such as: “How do we invest our resources to affect the most people, serve neglected areas, and work in partnership with experts?” ATL asks “How can we assure the rights of all people to a dignified level of development, free of poverty's privations, while also reducing CO2 emissions to meet climate stabilization targets?”
This partnership is plausible because an adequate response to climate destabilization can start with Bill Gates, since he understands the urgency of looming climate chaos and its disproportionate effect on the world's poorest. A consortium of national foundations led by the BMGF needs to explain to the American people that climate convulsion is inevitable without all-encompassing reductions in our current fossil fuel use. A national grassroots campaign can then explain the details to the public and the effective responses required. So, the foundations sound the alarm and the ATL provides the national educational campaign and direct action advocacy.
THE CRITICAL ROLE OF UNIVERSAL SOCIAL AND CLIMATE JUSTICE
Climate stabilization, USCJ and poverty eradication are completely intertwined. The central conviction of this LOI is that poverty reduction, Global Health and sustainable Global Development depend on climate stability. Otherwise, climate issues will overwhelm the BMGF and its partner organizations’ progress in these program areas. It is already happening. The 2010 film "
Climate Refugees," explains that climate-related drought, floods and fires had already displaced some 25 million people. For example, all the BMGF's work in Bangladesh—to improve maternal and child health, dairy productivity and farmers, microfinance and the status of women—that progress will be washed away by the storm surges of climate destabilization. What BMGF program benefits will accrue if communities, lives and futures are ripped apart?
Additionally, the ethic of universal social and climate justice demands the elimination of poverty through low carbon means. The industrial world has filled the available air space with CO2, leaving little room for developing nations to grow along the same carbon-intensive track. The industrialized nations must drastically cut their emissions, while also helping the poorer nations with the technological, financial and human resources required for low-carbon development. Otherwise, they will take the traditional carbon path to raise themselves from destitution, thus catalyzing climate chaos. So, USCJ is not a charitable act, but necessary for the survival of us all.
We need an overall climate plan that allows for this transition from poverty, while also reducing carbon equitably among nations. The think tank EcoEquity's Greenhouse Development Rights framework[2] does this, and presents a fair, viable and straightforward structure for implementing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). ActionAid (a grant recipient of the Gates Foundation) has issued a similar report, "Rich countries' 'climate debt' and how they can repay it."
WHAT IS NECESSARY TO STABILIZE CLIMATE
Consider Bill Gates’ TED talk in February 2010, “Bill Gates on Energy: Innovating to Zero.” In it, he stated that industrialized nations need to get to zero emissions by 2050, and that innovation miracles are needed to meet this target and to keep energy affordable. He outlined several things necessary for this to happen:
• More basic research funding
• Market incentives to reduce CO2—price signals required
• Entrepreneurial opportunity
• Rational regulatory framework
• Get the message out—more rational dialogue
To Gates’ zero emissions outline, important pieces must be added, as explained by James Hansen, the world’s leading climate scientist, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has been demonstrably right about global warming for over 22 years, and explains that we must limit warming to 2°C—at most—in an emergency climate stabilization program.[3] Additionally the world’s climatologists, geophysicists and biochemists, along with their recognized scientific bodies—all argue for the absolute 2ºC limit. Emissions must peak in 2014 in developed nations, then decline 6% annually thereafter. No plausible scenario can achieve this reduction without placing a continually increasing price on carbon.
Hansen has proposed a detailed Carbon Fee and Dividend approach.[4] The plan attaches a continually increasing fee to CO2 emissions at the fuel source; all the fees are equally distributed to the public. An estimated 70% of households would receive as much or more from the dividend as they would pay for higher energy costs. Exporting nations must either adopt similar carbon pricing or pay a carbon fee adjustment at our border—essentially forcing all countries to place similar fees on carbon.
It meets the critical criteria of:
• Transparent, fair, and rational regulation that is quickly implementable
• Provides a stable, predictable carbon price signal
• Carbon is priced at the source—businesses don't directly absorb costs
• Addresses emissions in every sector
• Incentivizes CO2 reductions and efficiencies
• Stimulates innovation, research and development of low-carbon energy
• Widely opens entrepreneurial and job-creation opportunities
• Offsets citizens' higher energy costs with the only progressive carbon price
• Not exploitable by special interests
• Necessitates worldwide adoption
Further Fee and Dividend justification can be found at Citizens Climate Lobby website. Combined—Gates, Hansen, and EcoEquity's approaches provide the major pieces required to stabilize our world’s climate.
THE CURRENT SITUATION
Currently, climate stabilization efforts do not exist. The wealthy industrialized nations, the G8 nations, China and India, and the parties to the UNFCCC—almost all of the world’s nations—have more than once agreed to limit warming to 2ºC.[5] Yet the total emissions reductions of current agreements still allow temperatures to explode with a 4°C increase. This would reduce the planet's human carrying capacity to some 1 billion by 2100.[6] Allowing a 2ºC increase may even be ruinous, as massive human suffering and ecological destruction is predicted. An increase of 4ºC means the end of civilization, most of humanity and most of the rest of life on our planet. In that case, fatal tipping points and runaway warming would be expected.
It is essential that the US quickly enacts an increasing price on carbon and takes the lead in embracing the 2°C limit. Yet this Presidential Administration will not propose, nor will this Congress adopt, the necessary measures,[7] President Obama has been loath to use his "bully pulpit" to rouse public opinion. Fossil fuel interests disproportionally control Congress. Our media watchdogs have become obedient lapdogs. Very few US citizens understand the 2ºC limit and its tight time frame, and climate skeptics have neutralized many people. So, we do nothing “while Rome burns.” Even our environmental gadflies and clean energy advocates cannot envision an effective way to break the deadlock.
Leadership by the BMGF, gathering the Foundations, coupled with a national grassroots movement, is the only plausible plan to get to climate stabilization.
The ATL believes that the only possibility for a livable future lies in mobilizing a critical mass of our nation, in concert with the voice and support of our foundations, with effective carbon pricing policy as the centerpiece of the effort. The leadership of ATL has achieved national legislation and national policy change before, in a three-year timeframe.[8]
EDUCATING AND PERSUADING AMERICANS
Few people understand how dire the situation is related to the risk of climate destabil-ization. Most who do understand have just focused on changing personal habits such as replacing light bulbs, instead of working for large-scale structural shifts. Many feel over-whelmed and believe nothing can be done. Yet, people can face the threat when they understand that effective measures are available if enacted quickly. Greenhouse warming is simple science and can be readily grasped by most. Enough Americans must realize that their lives, their children and everything they hold dear hinges on decisive action.
The outline of the necessary national grassroots campaign includes:
• Simultaneous education and advocacy across the nation in at least a hundred locations. The relevant model is the national teach-in that accompanied the first Earth Day in 1970: Had we continued the environmental progress and momentum generated by the first Earth Day, we would not face complete catastrophe today.[9] The ATL is ready to execute this national teach-in immediately.
• The national grassroots campaign must convey specifics of what is needed, such as the necessity of a carbon price, its affordability, why the US must lead, along with the urgency of the threat and tight timeframe for effective action.
• Advocacy that cannot be ignored is required. This means simultaneous rallies that include direct action. ATL has dozens of groups that can be deployed as national partners, ready to go—putting thousands of people in the street, demanding a livable future.
• A driving principle of this education, advocacy and direct action is the illegality of our conventional pattern of energy use. Much of customary fossil fuel development and use is illegal under international and domestic law. The US and other industrial nations are scorning the laws they have constructed and confirmed—enforceable international agreements that are designed to keep us from cooking ourselves off the planet.[10]
GATES FOUNDATION ROLES
This leads to the roles needed of the Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation must clearly express to the American public that climate chaos is with near-certainty human-caused and immanent. The Gates Foundation should also form a Consortium of Foundations to echo the Gates declaration. Only the nation’s foundations have the influence, credibility and resources to be heard. And when they indicate that it is crucial for America to understand the scope, scale and urgency of the threat, they are the entities the US would be most willing to heed.
In addition, the Consortium must fund a national grassroots campaign that provides the education about impending climate chaos and advocates for an all-out effort at emergency climate mobilization. That leads to the role of the other partner in the collaboration, the Association for the Tree of Life.
ATL ROLES
The ATL is the organization to execute a national grassroots campaign leading to national legislation.[11] The ATL must educate and persuade the American public, which must be organized into a large enough and passionate enough movement that catalyzes effective policy response. The ATL has the team strategy and tactics ready to go right now. The ATL has over 1,000 social halls and auditoriums committed to hosting the grassroots education and advocacy part of the campaign. The decisive parts of a national organization and the concomitant components of its implementation are prepared and ready to be quickly deployed.
To add some proof to plausibility, principal actors within the ATL have produced national policy change through a national grassroots effort before. That movement started in church halls in the late 80's, designed to restore the ecologically devastated Mississippi River delta. Its national grassroots campaign produced transformational environmental and ecological change in the form of state and national legislation, a constitutional amendment, funding for action, and much more. The entire effort was started, and the transformational policy legislations enacted, in some three years.[12] Moreover, the tide of that effort has continued to grow since the beginning of the restoration. In many ways, the fight to preserve coastal wetlands was an opening skirmish, but a very instructive one, in the global climate campaign.
The missions of both the Gates Foundation and the ATL hinge on a successful initiative to move climate stabilization from polarizing paralysis to plausible tangibility.
CONCLUSION
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is significant in part because Bill Gates has already stated the zero emissions imperative clearly and publicly. It is the only credible entity that can be heeded, when it (along with other US foundations) tells the US public that the current trajectory of humanity will result in lethal climate destabilization. The Association for the Tree of Life is ready to galvanize the nation. But it cannot catalyze an effective national campaign without the support and cooperation of the foundation world. The survival of civilization hinges on this unique partnership. Since providing Universal Social and Climate Justice is necessary in order to effect climate stabilization, the core of both organizations' missions can be realized in no other way.
We ask the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, its Board and Staff to meet with the Association for the Tree of Life and discuss this essential partnership.
ADDENDUM 1
PROTECTING BOTH CLIMATE AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
Humanity may not survive unless we stabilize climate at no more than a 2ºC increase from pre-industrial times. The 2°C limit is endorsed by nearly all nations as the maximum that can be tolerated or managed. Yet these efforts would be heroic, requiring a sharp break from politics as usual. How to keep within a 2ºC Emergency Pathway will be considered following.
The South’s Dilemma, from “The Right to Development in a Carbon Constrained World: The Greenhouse Developments Rights Framework”
The 2ºC Emergency Pathway (the red line in the graph) defines the limit of allowable total gigatons (billion tons) of CO2 emissions. Basically, the Annex I Countries comprise most industrialized nations, and the Non-Annex I Countries comprise the developing nations.
Carbon emissions must decline sharply, even for the developing world. This includes rapidly industrializing nations like China and India (both categorized as Non-Annex). The 2ºC Emergency Pathway requires that global emissions peak by 2013 and decline to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. Complete cooperation is necessary from the more wealthy industrialized nations. They must reduce emissions to near zero by 2050, starting in about 2014 with an annual 6% reduction—more aggressive than anything yet proposed. But even if they achieve this, the CO2 budget remaining for the developing world is very constricted. Their emissions must peak a few years later, by 2020, then decline nearly 6% annually through 2050.
Until now, the developing world's only option for improvement has been the increased use of carbon energy. Inevitably, the wealthier nations must drastically reduce their emissions, while providing massive assistance, to lift the developing world from poverty with low-carbon development. Otherwise, the developing world's expansion of carbon fuel use will bring climate mayhem.
The situation invites political deadlock. We will only make progress with a climate regimen that provides an objective method that facilitates dramatic reduction of emissions, even while allowing the developing world to expand its energy use to relieve poverty. The think tank EcoEquity has a framework, the Greenhouse Development Rights (GDR) that accomplishes this.
The GDR defines a level of welfare below which people are not expected to share the costs of climate transition, as a "development threshold.” This is higher than the "global poverty line”—going beyond basic needs, but well short of affluence. People below this threshold can have development as their proper priority. As incomes rise, they assume more of the costs to curb their own emissions, as well as assisting those below the line with theirs.
Income that exceeds the development threshold is “capacity,” available to be “taxed” for investment in climate mitigation. Contribution to the climate problem is “responsibility”—cumulative emissions since 1990, above the development threshold. Capacity & responsibility are defined in individual terms to take account of the unequal distribution of income within nations. National per-capita averages fail to capture either the depths of a nation’s poverty or the extent of its wealth. This can hide a wealthy, higher emissions minority behind a poorer lower emissions majority. Capacity & responsibility can be combined into a single index of obligation: a “Responsibility Capacity Index” (RCI). The US would bear the largest share of global RCI (2010), at 33.1%.
The GDR provides an objective method to fairly differentiate national obligations, in bearing the burdens of climate protection (between wealthy and developing nations)—while ensuring a meaningful right of development. This is a real game changer. This would allow us to escape the Annex 1 / Non-Annex 1 divide, a significant obstacle to the progress of negotiations. It just simply assigns to each nation their obligation at an appropriate scale, according to their RCI. Additionally, the wealthy minority, in say India and China must pay their fair share.
How to operationalize this? The RCI could determine each nation’s contribution to a single global fund. The RCI serves as the basis of a progressive global climate tax—a responsibility and capacity tax—separate from a carbon tax. Alternatively, the GDR framework could be used to define national reduction obligations as shares of the global mitigation requirement, each in proportion to their RCI.
It is much easier to agree to principles than to implement them, especially in requiring powerful nations to accept large obligations and to commit to providing large international assistance over time. Yet without unprecedented global cooperation, the 2°C Emergency Pathway and climate stabilizationwould quickly become unattainable. Assuring universal social and climate justice is no longer a moral or noble thing to do, but instead a survival necessity for all of us.
ADDENDUM 2
PEOPLE’S CLIMATE STEWARDSHIP / CARBON FEE AND DIVIDEND ACT OF 2010
Collection of Carbon Fees/Carbon Fee Trust Fund: Beginning on July 1, 2011, a carbon fee of $15 per ton of CO2 equivalent emissions will be imposed on all fossil fuels at the point of first sale in the U.S. economy. CO2 equivalent fees shall also be imposed for other greenhouse gases including methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydro fluorocarbons (HFCs) emitted as byproducts, perfluorocarbons, and nitrogen trifluoride. All fees are to be returned to American households as outlined below.
Steady step-up of CO2 Fees, Ensuring Replacement of Fossil Fuels with Low-Carbon Energy: The yearly increase in carbon fees including other greenhouse gasses shall be at least $10 per ton of CO2 equivalent each year, to steadily reduce U.S. CO2-equivalent emissions by 2050 to 10% of the 1990 U.S. CO2-equivalent emissions. EPA and DOE shall annually review greenhouse gas emissions data and determine whether an increase larger than $10 per ton per year is needed to achieve emissions reductions commensurate with that reduction trajectory. If EPA and DOE find that U.S. emissions are not being reduced sufficiently, the CO2 fee shall increase by $15/T CO2 in the following year. [Modeled after Rep. Larson’s America’s Energy Security Trust Fund Act,” of the 111th Congress.]
Mechanisms for 100% Revenue Return: All revenue from CO2 and CO2 equivalent fees shall be returned to households. Mechanisms include: (1) Equal monthly per-person “dividend” payments made to all U.S. households (1/2 per child under 18 years old, with a limit of 2 children per family) each month beginning on August 28, 2011, (2) Use all carbon fee revenue to reduce payroll taxes for employers and employees. Unemployed persons and Social Security recipients shall receive equivalent distributions.
Border Adjustments: To ensure that U.S.-made goods remain competitive abroad and to provide an additional incentive for U.S. trading partners to adopt their own carbon fees, Carbon-Fee-Equivalent Tariffs shall be charged for goods entering the U.S. from countries without comparable Carbon Fees. Carbon-Fee-Equivalent rebates shall reduce the price of exports to such countries and ensure that U.S. goods remain competitive in those countries.
Phase Out of Fossil Fuel Subsidies: All existing subsidies of fossil fuels including tax credits, shall be phased out within 5 years.
Moratorium on New or Expanded Coal-Fired Power Plants without CCS: No new coal-fired power plants shall be permitted, constructed, or operated. No expansions in capacity of any existing coal power plants shall be permitted, constructed, or operated. [Exception: Permits may be issued for facilities that successfully demonstrate safe and effective long-term Carbon Capture and Sequestration of at least 90% of CO2 emissions.]
Seeking Treaties: The President shall seek treaties with other countries that encourage adoption of similar programs to reduce CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.
Created by the Citizens Climate Lobby and proposed by Dr. James Hansen on Earth Day, April 25, 2010
ADDENDUM 3
BINDING INTERNATIONAL CLIMATE LAW AND ITS IMPLICATIONS
This Addendum explains the obligations that the US is under, with respect to climate stabilization—agreements that we have made with the rest of the world. These questions will be considered: Is the US bound by International Law to follow ratified climate treaty provisions? If so, then what are the implications? Finally, can civil society galvanize a national movement whose outcome is climate stabilization?
Importantly, the US entered into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Treaty. The US Senate ratified the Treaty in the fall of 1992. Since many Senators, Congressmen and even Presidential Administrations have questioned US participation, many have stated that its provisions do not bind us. In April 2010, the Congressional Research Service was asked to consider whether this Treaty bound the US under international law. And not for the first time, Congress's attorneys found that indeed, the UNFCCC Treaty binds the US under International Law. Consider now two of the beginning Articles of the UNFCCC:
Article 2: OBJECTIVE
The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the Convention, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time-frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.
Article 3: PRINCIPLES
In their actions to achieve the objective of the Convention and to implement its provisions, the Parties shall be guided, INTER ALIA, by the following:
1. The Parties should protect the climate system for the benefit of present and future generations of humankind, on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. Accordingly, the developed country Parties should take the lead in combating climate change and the adverse effects thereof.
2. The specific needs and special circumstances of developing country Parties, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, and of those Parties, especially developing country Parties, that would have to bear a disproportionate or abnormal burden under the Convention, should be given full consideration.
3. The Parties should take precautionary measures to anticipate, prevent or minimize the causes of climate change and mitigate its adverse effects. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures, taking into account that policies and measures to deal with climate change should be cost-effective so as to ensure global benefits at the lowest possible cost. To achieve this, such policies and measures should take into account different socio-economic contexts, be comprehensive, cover all relevant sources, sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases and adaptation, and comprise all economic sectors. Efforts to address climate change may be carried out cooperatively by interested Parties.
Article 2 clearly states that the US must stabilize emissions at a level to prevent dangerous human-caused interference in the climate system. Following, Article 3 charges the US to implement the Treaty on “the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.” In addition we are required to respond to the threat: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing such measures.”
The two Articles of the UNFCCC discussed above have emphasized how we are legally bound by International Law to respond to the threat of climate destabilization in a manner that this LOI suggests. That is, we must act to stabilize climate within the 2ºC Emergency Pathway; we must help other nations because we have both the responsibility and the capability—economic resources, technological resources and human resources—and, we must act now.
So, this nation must respond immediately, yet the political system is paralyzed and cannot even consider effective policies. Much of the citizenry is unaware that the threat is real. Those groups who know the threat is genuine are not stating clearly enough why it is urgent nor specifying what must be done. And almost no one is aware that we are legally bound to respond by our own ratification of the UNFCCC!
If there is no ability of the political leadership to do what is needed and if the public does not know either what is needed nor that any important policy response is required, how can we sustain the necessary 2ºC warming limit upon which everything we hold dear depends? Fortunately or unfortunately, it is up to civil society, in the form of our national foundations to sound the alarm and support the education and advocacy effort that could stabilize climate. And civil society must provide the needed resources as soon as possible. Our national foundations must sound the Paul Revere alarm. Analogously, a national grassroots effort is the “Continental Army” answering the call to arms. The law is the moral justification, much like the Declaration of Independence was used to justify action against King George. This time, independence from our fossil fuel chains is the quintessence of this cause; humanity and the living world are at stake.
ADDENDUM 4
THE ASSOCIATION FOR THE TREE OF LIFE
The Association for the Tree of Life (ATL): Achieving national policy change in a tight timeframe. Who are we? What do we agree to? What are we? Why do we do what we do?
WHO ARE WE?
The ATL is climate scientists and religious leaders. Executives of ecological organizations, environmental organizations and young students—many from the youth climate movement wondering if it makes sense to complete their undergraduate degrees. The ATL is educators and platform presenters. Groups willing to take direct action and activists not willing to go that far. The ATL is more church communities than can be counted. Many former colleagues who helped build a successful national grassroots campaign for ecological restoration and are willing to re-up.
Individuals and groups in the ATL have helped thousands of the most poor, and leveraged billions (yes billions) of dollars for those in need. Hundreds of us each have done several years of social justice work, most also committed to clean air, clean water and a livable future for our children. We are thousands of people ready to fan out over the nation and execute a dramatic national teach-in combined with the fire of street action. The ATL is this and more; it is thousands of different people and perspectives united in wanting our next generations to have a habitable world.
Much of our optimism about the potential for changing the climate trajectory comes out of the experience of the ATL leadership in turning the tide on coastal wetlands loss. The result was national legislation and a constitutional amendment that assured funding for the massive restoration. More recently, following the hurricanes of 2005, an infusion of support from the Walton Family Fund through their “Ensuring Healthy and Resilient Freshwater Systems”initiativehas mobilized an intensive effort by national NGOs, including the National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund and National Wildlife Federation to enhance the efforts of the local grassroots organizations that initiated the restoration work, as well as those engaged in social justice work.
WHAT DO WE AGREE TO?
ATL members agree to a few fundamental principles:
• We agree on the need for universal social and climate justice—assuring the rights of all people to a dignified level of development, while also reducing CO2 emissions to achieve climate stabilization targets.
• We agree on emergency climate stabilization, limiting CO2 levels to keep within the 2º Emergency Pathway.
• We agree that it is essential to internalize CO2 costs by requiring an increasing carbon fee that is steep enough for alternative energy to become cost competitive and for carbon fuels to be phased out.
• We understand that we must stop coal and leave unconventional carbon fuels in the ground—such as tar sands and oil shale.
WHAT ARE WE?
ATL is Environews, a modern broadcasting network committed to being a conduit for news related to environment, energy and ATL.[13] ATL is Trunity, a fully hosted social publishing platform that gives both organizations and individuals the power to easily create world-class websites and build online communities across the US and across the world. Trunity can handle the entire nation convening simultaneously, working across a myriad of ideas and issues in real time.
Within its umbrella, ATL has over a thousand “communities of meaning” ready to consider social and environmental justice. We have over a thousand public spaces ready to host our message, our dialogue and our workshops. Most of these can host and handle hundreds of people. Examples would be church sanctuaries or social halls—places where communities convene to consider important questions of morality, social justice and our heritage. Nor are the communities unprepared. They are primed to welcome the message by their very principles, ready to help and ask others to help, ready to be prophets for a world that can endure. The ATL can hand-off the meaning and message of green justice—expecting to find many partners who will carry forth the green torch. The ATL has the curriculum and media, the proven organizing methods, the track record of transformation embodied in several key parts of its large tent of talent. Many of the individuals and groups in the ATL have brought about positive changes in principles and practices—some world class and some local.
WHY DO WE DO WHAT WE DO?
The ATL is designed to bring the message that we are utterly dependent on our biosphere and ecosystems, such as oceans, coastal estuaries, forests and grasslands. Only if the biosphere is stabilized and balanced can humans survive. It is ATL’s function to remove our blindness to that utter dependency. We believe that the message must be delivered with catalyzing drama, and motivating information, clearly asking our audiences and families to join us and help us build societies run on wind and sunshine while leaving fossil fuels buried. Constructing healthy societies will be based on peaceful cooperation, but direct action may be required to open our eyes and awaken our collective conscience.
[1] For more information, see ATL ROLES, pp. 5-6.
[2] Specifics about the plan are in Addendum 1. EcoEquity is a small, activist think tank with an outsized impact on the international climate justice debate. It has done this primarily by way of the Greenhouse Development Rights project. See the Executive Summary, “The right to development in a climate constrained world” They focus on the creation and promotion of new approaches that unite the politics of economic justice (global as well as domestic) with the politics of emergency climate mobilization. They believe that it is critical to stress the US’s role in the international deadlock, and its responsibility to help break it, for both realist and moral reasons.
[3] James Hansen makes a thorough case for the 2°C limit in “Storms of My Grandchildren, the Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to save Humanity” pp. 90-161.
[4] Explained in Addendum 2.
[5] See predicted 2° impacts on page 2 of the World Wildlife Fund report: “Climate Change: Why We Need to Take Action Now”
[6] This is a mid-point estimate and does not anticipate passing critical tipping points nor does it consider amplifying effects of several likely interacting factors like increased absorption of heat from lost ice. The best place to start verifying the probability of the complete catastrophe is the report from the Climate Action Centre, "4 degrees hotter"
[7] See Addendum 3.
[8] Detailed in Addendum 4.
[9] The first Earth day in significant part catalyzed the passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the creation of the EPA, among other things. For more details, see: http://www.saveourselvesnow.net/topics/view/69918/
[10] Fully discussed in Addendum 3.
[11] See Addendum 4.
[12] More information is in Addendum 4.
[13] See this segment: http://environews.tv/hb-477-pt-9-peaceful-uprising-2/
Contact Us
Send to a Friend
Comments
There are no comments.