peter_vickery

0

What connects Holyoke, Massachusetts, with floods in Australia, and explosions in La Preciosa, Colombia? The answer is coal.

As the January flood waters subsided in Australia the governor of the state of Victoria, medical researcher Professor David de Kretser, pointed the finger directly at climate change. Referring to the spate of record-breaking climate events de Kretser commented “everyone says this week [is a] one in 100, one in 200 years [event] but they are happening pretty much more frequently now.”

Continue reading Colombia, Australia, and Massachusetts
Tags , ,

0

Most of the coal we burn in Massachusetts – including the coal burned at the Mount Tom power station in Holyoke – comes from Colombia. So we have a very real connection to the miners at La Preciosa coal mine in Sardinata, Colombia, where an explosion has claimed twenty-one lives.

I am trying to identify workers’ organizations that we in Massachusetts can work with to support the injured miners and bereaved families. So far I’ve contacted the United Mineworkers of America, Justice for Colombia, and the Colombian branch of the International Labor Organization. As soon as I have any news I’ll post it.

In the meantime, if you know of any other organizations likely to have on-the-ground links to the community near La Preciosa, please tell me (peter@petervickery.com) and I’ll help spread the word.

The struggle of the coal-miners of Colombia is intimately bound up with our campaign for climate justice. Let’s show some real solidarity.

Continue reading Colombian Coal Mine Explosion

3

The number of Britons who acknowledge the reality of climate change has fallen, according to a recent BBC poll.

I shall be offering no prizes (repeat, no prizes) for guessing the source of climate confusion in the land of my birth. But if you guessed “oil companies,” give yourself a pat on the back.

ExxonMobil is one of the fossil-fuel giants behind a network of right-wing think tanks successfully pushing climate-change-denialism into the popular media, says the UK’s Independent newspaper.

The bright side? It’s not only Americans who are falling prey to corporate-sponsored climate-change denialism. Apparently a British accent is no predictor of intellectual ability or an indication of inherent authority after all, although any of my students (or offspring) who happen to have stumbled across this blog should disregard that last comment. I really do know best.

In the face of the Right’s success in making climate-change denialism part of the debate among grown-ups who ought to know better, how should progressives respond? One option is to continue supporting Democratic office-holders who talk a good game about climate-change solutions but vote for decidedly dodgy cap-and-trade non-solutions like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). For a strong indictment of carbon-trading I recommend Mark Schapiro’s “Conning the Climate” in the current Harper’s Magazine.

Another option, popular among Democratic activists and voters alike during the senatorial special election, was to take what I think of as the Comfy Chair Option. My goal in this post is to urge readers to renounce that option and all its works. But I do understand its appeal.

After a decade of directionless Democratic supermajorities in Massachusetts and a year of Democratic under-achievement at the national level, many Bay State progressives are feeling disappointed, disaffected, and distraught. Yes, there is a welcoming home waiting for them in the GRP, but even I (a Green with the zeal of the convert) have to admit to a continuing dearth of legislative candidates and active local branches. And on the path from Democratic to Green is the comfy chair of alienation.

Some contributors to the blog just across the aisle (BlueMassGroup) are having a healthy and robust debate about the merits of fighting on within the party as opposed to supporting third-party candidates, among them my friend Leo Maley, who managed my successful 2004 campaign for Governor’s Council. One of Leo’s observations that jumps off the screen is that the 25 open seats in this year’s legislative elections present progressives with an opportunity to change the dynamic of the State House for the next decade.

Yes, 25 seats with no Democratic incumbent. As the manufacture and dissemination of news increasingly becomes the preserve of the major corporations, it becomes even more important to jump into the public arena, particularly the part of the arena dedicated to electoral politics. Whether progressives devote their resources to fighting on within the Democratic Party or to taking it outside by joining the Greens matters less than their decision to shun the comfy chair. I would like some of those 25 districts to end up in Green hands, but in the absence of Green candidates that hardly seems likely.

However, we can hope that Jill Stein’s candidacy will have a coat-tails effect and encourage Green activists not simply to support the gubernatorial campaign but to run for office themselves.

And this is definitely the year to run. Just as in Britain, here in Massachusetts the importance of the climate issue (an issue we should own lock, stock, and barrel) is starting to fade among the general public, giving climate-solution activists an even greater incentive to push it back where it belongs, i.e. front and center. If our voice is not in the electoral mix we leave the debate to ExxonMobil and their little denialist helpers in the Republican Party and to the the Wall Street dice-rollers and their Democratic allies.

So what’s my proposal for countering the fossil-fool propaganda and calling out the carbon-trader hucksters? Go to town or city hall, pull nomination papers for state rep, and run Green. Or persuade a friend to run.

Anything but the comfy chair.

Continue reading Not the comfy chair
Categories Tags ,

1

At best flawed, at worst chaotic.

That was the verdict of Gordon Brown, Britain’s Prime Minister, on the world leaders’ protracted photo-op in Copenhagen. “[A] worse-than-nothing deal slapped together in the last two hours,” is how Greenpeace blogger mikeg describes it.

By now it’s clear that the hard work of the NGOs and activists didn’t pay off the way many had hoped. Absent an international agreement, national and state-level responses are now essential, and here in Massachusetts we have the opportunity of the 2010 state elections to open up a policy space around real, Green climate-change solutions.

As we Greens gear up for the elections we need to assume the role of Official Opposition in Massachusetts (a role the Republicans abdicated long ago) and start subjecting the Democratic government’s policies to strict scrutiny.

Let’s start with the Democrats’ flagship climate-change measure, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI). This cap-and-trade scheme is what the Governor and the legislative leadership point to in answer to questions about their commitment to tackling climate change. But what do schemes like RGGI actually do, other than enrich carbon speculators?

I know one thing RGGI does: It provides a cloak for companies like GDF Suez to hide behind. GDF Suez is the energy giant that owns the coal-burning power station at Mount Tom in Western Massachusetts, a facility that emits more than one million tons of CO2 every year. At the beginning of December I wrote the company’s CEO, Gerard Mestrallet, asking him to switch from coal to renewables at Mount Tom. His answer, which arrived a couple of days ago, explained to me that GDF Suez participates in RGGI.

Well, that’s all right then.

Among the myriad problems that cap-and-trade schemes generate is the one Mr. Mestrallet’s letter represents; the problem of allowing major polluters to pose as public-spirited world citizens. It’s time to put RGGI under the microscope and hold the Democrats accountable.

Continue reading Chaos Theory
Tags