US- China Carbon Plan, Environmental Decline, Net Neutrality

New U.S. -China Carbon Targets Fall Short of Reductions Needed to Avert Climate Change Disaster

Interview with Karen Orenstein, senior international policy analyst with the environmental group Friends of the Earth, conducted by Scott Harris

Just one week after the Democratic Party suffered a string of mid-term election defeats including losing control of the U.S. Senate, President Obama made a joint announcement with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing outlining a plan to reduce the carbon emissions of both nations with the goal of boosting the chances for a successful international climate agreement in Paris in December 2015.

The non-binding agreement, as described by Obama, would aim to cut U.S. carbon emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2025. Xi pledged that China would reach peak carbon emissions by 2030 and would build a new generation of green power sources to supply 20 percent of the nation’s energy needs by the year 2030. Just a few days later, while at the G-20 summit meeting in Brisbane, Australia, the president announced that the U.S. would contribute up to $3 billion to the Green Climate Fund to assist developing nations adapt to climate change.

Not surprisingly, Republican leaders criticized the U.S.-China agreement, despite the fact that many in the party had long based their opposition to regulating carbon emissions at home as long as major polluters like China and India refused to make similar commitments. Many environmental groups were also critical of the agreement, but for a very different set of reasons. They point out that the carbon reductions outlined are not legally binding and are nowhere near the cuts needed if the world is serious about preventing runaway climate change. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Karen Orenstein, senior international policy analyst with the environmental group Friends of the Earth. Here, she assesses the recently announced U.S.-China carbon reduction agreement and the challenges ahead for the climate movement.

For more information on Friends of the Earth, visit foe.org.

Related Links:

• Interview with Karen Orenstein, conducted by Scott Harris, Counterpoint, Nov. 17, 2014 (22:27)
• “U.S. pledge to Green Climate Fund welcome first step, but much more is needed,” Friends of the Earth, Nov. 14, 2014
• “One day after U.S.-China climate commitments, green groups urge Obama to protect extant international climate policies,” Friends of the Earth, Nov. 13, 2014
• “U.S.-China agreement will not fix the climate,” Friends of the Earth, Nov. 12, 2014
• “BREAKING: The US and China Just Announced a Huge Deal on Climate—and It’s a Game Changer,” Mother Jones, Nov. 11, 2014
• “The Angry GOP Backlash to Obama’s Historic Climate Accord,” The Atlantic, Nov. 12, 2014
• “Awkward: Watch a Supercut of Republicans Using China As an Excuse to Do Nothing About Climate Change,” Mother Jones, Nov. 12 2014
• “Obama’s $3bn for climate fund could kickstart action on global warming,” The Guardian, Nov. 14, 2014
• “U.S./China Emission Targets Should ‘Be Floor, Not Ceiling’ of Climate Action,” Common Dreams, Nov. 12, 2014
  

  Failed Politics, Runaway Consumerism is Root Cause of Environmental Decline

  Interview with James Gustave “Gus” Speth, environmental movement activist, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

  James Gustave “Gus” Speth has been called the ultimate environmental insider for his founding roles in the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, his chairing of the Council on Environmental Quality under President Jimmy Carter, and his leadership of the United Nations Development Program. He then served as dean of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies for ten years. Speth currently teaches at the Vermont Law School.

  In recent years, Speth has been a critic of the large, national environmental groups of which he was such an intrinsic part. Now 74 years old, Speth just published a memoir titled, “Angels By the River,” in which he recalls his many years of activism as well as his childhood in pre-civil rights era South Carolina. He considers his 2011 arrest in front of the White House for protesting the Keystone XL pipeline as one of his proudest accomplishments.

  Speth was in New Haven, Connecticut on Nov. 8 to accept the Thomas Berry Award, given jointly by Yale’s School of Forestry and Divinity School. There, Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with him about his view of what many environmental activists maintain is the incompatibility of laissez-faire capitalism and implementing corporate regulations necessary to protect our ecosystem and ensure the survival of life on planet earth.

  GUS SPETH: I think we need to ask ourselves now again, afresh, what is an environmental issue? The answer normally is it’s air pollution, climate change, biodiversity. But what if the answer to an environmental issue is really any issue that affects environmental outcomes, any issue that affects whether we succeed. And if you answer it that way then you have to dig deeper and look at the root causes, and certainly our failing politics is a tremendous cause of environmental decline, a perpetual cause of environmental decline. There’s great social inequality, insecurity in the country. Our runaway consumerism, our affluenza, our failure to really change our lifestyles, our very materialistic values and anthropocentric values, and values that focus on now and not tomorrow. These set of values that dominate in our culture, we ought to be challenging them, and there’s a whole list of things. We ought to building new corporate types, new structures for business: public/private hybrids; for profit-not for profit hybrids; all kinds of co-ops; local banking; state banks; and new types of finance that have a lot more democratic governance of the way our investments are going in the country. There’s just a whole host of big deep changes we need to make.

  So what some of us are doing is trying to create new institutions and change old institutions so we are actually promoting deeper systemic change in the country that can lead basically to a new economy, an economy that really does give true and honest priority to people, place and planet. We’re determined to keep building the strength of these institutions and these ideas till the point that we begin to get enough momentum to change the system, to move to a next system. And we don’t have to know everything about it, but we need to know the general directions of change and I think we’re getting a lot of good information and ideas on that.

  BETWEEN THE LINES: So, throughout the book I was reading – and other people talk about this too – you talked about the need for a “transformative change in existing capitalism,” that the capitalism we have now is completely out of control; it’s heading for wealth for fewer and fewer people and poverty for so many more. Can we transform capitalism enough that it would still be capitalism and we could have a sustainable world, or do we need to move to a different system? You quoted Barry Commoner at one point in the book and he was pretty much saying capitalism isn’t the system…I mean, if you change it enough to make it sustainable, it really wouldn’t even be capitalism anymore. Do we even need to go down that road? Does it even matter what we call it? Do you think that capitalism can be reformed enough to get us through this?

  GUS SPETH: Well, it depends on what you mean by capitalism. I think what we need to think about is moving dramatically beyond the rapacious capitalism we have today, this consumerist capitalism that we have. And one of the ways to do that is to really have much more democratic control over where capital is spent. There may still be investors in this world of the future, but the public would be the major part of the steering about where money is spent and where money is invested. We have a system now where the banks make all the decisions with a little bit of influence from government on infrastructure and things, whenever that happens, but by and large, the decisions about making investment decisions are based on high financial returns by banks and the people who are seeking to make investments through the banks. And we need a system where we recognize the tremendously high social and environmental returns that we could get from other investments. So we need a heavy democratic guidance for investment decisions, and that implies that we have to have effective government. We have to have a government that works, that’s deeply democratic.

  Sometimes when I think about these issues, I say we need to save our failing democracy first, because people are not going to trust government to make these decisions if it’s the government we have now. So we need government … and we’re beginning to see a lot of hybrid arrangements of community investment corporations around the country, community development corporations which are public institutions that are steering the development of their cities. So I think in the future, there should be a role for the market. I think we need to take back as citizens a lot of the things that have been commodified and taken away from us as commoners, but I can see a role for the market to do certain things, but it ought to be a heavily regulated market, one that’s really regulated to act in the public interest. Right now, just on environmental issues, the uncompensated damages of corporate actions – this is on a global basis – are estimated to be over a third of corporate profits. So if they really paid for the damages they were causing, it would consume more than a third of corporate profits. So this is not a market that is now managed for current and future generations.

  James Gustave “Gus” Speth, a leading environmentalist and both an architect and critic of the U.S. environmental movement. His memoir, “Angels By the River,” was recently published by Chelsea Green. Read Speth’s views of the urgent need to develop a new, sustainable economy at the New Economy Coalition.

  Related Links:

  • “Angels by the River: A Memoir,” Chelsea Green, publisher
  • Articles by James Gustave Speth at Environment 360
  • “James Gustave Speth: Survival Depends on Transition to a New, Sustainable Economy,” Between The Lines, June 12, 2013
  • Vermont Law School at vermontlaw.edu
  • “Gus Speth: ‘Ultimate insider’ goes radical,” Grist, Sept. 27, 2012
  • “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I,” Orion, April 2012
  • “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part II,” Orion, June 2012
    

    Six Years After 2008 Campaign Pledge, President Obama Pushes for Net Neutrality

    Interview with Craig Aaron, president/CEO of the media reform group Free Press, conducted by Scott Harris

    In an unexpected announcement from the White House, President Obama issued a statement on Nov. 10 declaring his public support for net neutrality, a principle that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally, where individuals and small start-up companies will have their content delivered to the public at the same speed as powerful, wealthy corporations. In a videotaped statement the president said, “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.” The president now advocates placing regulation of the Internet under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, the same set of rules governing telecommunication utilities like landline telephones.

    Although Obama had pledged his support for net neutrality when while campaigning for the White House in 2007 and 2008, his actions in appointing two Federal Communications Commission Chairpersons Julius Genachowski and Tom Wheeler, who both refused to back the policy called into question his commitment on the issue.

    The White House position changed after a federal court overturned FCC rules regulating the Internet in January and almost 4 million people sent public comments to the FCC objecting to Chairman Wheeler’s proposal to establish a tiered Internet system, where a fee-based system would determine the speed at which content would be delivered. Now, with President Obama’s public support for net neutrality, the coming fight will be between pro-net neutrality activists and content providers on one side and telecom giants like Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other broadband providers on the other. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Craig Aaron, president and CEO of the media reform group Free Press, who examines President Obama’s recent public advocacy for net neutrality and the role public activism can play in deciding the final outcome of this policy debate.

    For information on the media reform group Free Press. For more information on net neutrality and media democracy campaigns visit Freepress.net and Savetheinternet.com

    Related Links:

    • Interview with Craig Aaron, conducted by Scott Harris, Counterpoint, Nov. 17, 2014 (24:39)
    • “The President Might Have Just Saved the Internet,” Free Press, Nov. 10, 2014
    • “Most Conservative Voters Heart Net Neutrality,” Free Press, Nov. 12, 2014
    • “Pick Up the Phone and Talk Some Sense into Tom Wheeler,” Free Press, Nov. 13, 2014
    • “Obama backs equal access to Internet,” Boston Globe, Nov. 10, 2014
    • “Net Neutrality Shows People Power Can Make the Politically Impossible, the Politically Inevitable,” Truthout, Nov. 18, 2014
    • “President Obama Urges FCC to Implement Stronger Net Neutrality Rules,” The White House blog, Nov. 10, 2014
    • “Net Neutrality: President Obama’s Plan for a Free and Open Internet,” The White House, Nov. 10, 2014
      

      This week’s summary of under-reported news

       MP3

      Compiled by Bob Nixon

      • As the United States escalates its offensive against ISIS militants, the United Nations reports nearly 14 million people have fled the conflicts in both Syria and Iraq. At the same time, refugees have fewer places to seek safe haven as neighboring countries Turkey and Jordan are closing their borders. (“UN says 13.6 million displaced by wars in Iraq and Syria,” Reuters, Nov. 11, 2014; “Countries bordering Syria closing borders to refugees, aid group says,” Toronto Star, Nov. 13, 14; “For women fleeing war, grim choices,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 3, 2014 )
      • The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is changing its rules affecting future covert operations in response to fierce criticism of the development agency’s secret program in Cuba to establish a Twitter-like service with the goal of undermining the island’s Communist government. (“Aid agency rules would ban risky undercover work,” Associated Press, Nov. 10, 2014; “Alan Gross still in Cuban prison despite senators tries to win his freedom,,”CNN, Nov. 12, 2014)
      • California’s Central Valley is home to a boom is almond cultivation. Driven by a growing appetite for the healthy nuts, almond production has doubled since 2005. Yet, almond trees consume large amounts of water, even as California officials

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