Difference between revisions of "Draft GPUS Platform Amendment Climate Change"

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(Created page with '(Note from Marnie: The 2004 platform section is called Clean Air/Greenhouse Gases/Global Warming). We need to break this section in to two parts. This rough draft text was d…')
 
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(Note from Marnie: The 2004 platform section is called Clean Air/Greenhouse Gases/Global Warming).  We need to break this section in to two parts.  This rough draft text was drafted by John Atkeison, a climate change activist.  We are getting a more detailed draft with specific proposals from a Marin Green next week.)
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The need for drastic action to deal with the climate crisis is becoming increasingly obvious by the day.  Due to climate change, we live in a world of expanding deserts, vanishing polar ice, melting glaciers, increasingly severe weather, deepening droughts, and rising oceans.   
  
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Climate change caused by global warming threatens us all and demands immediate change to a happier, more sustainable way of life
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No one can escape the effects of climate change, which will become increasingly severe over time, but its impacts fall disproportionately upon poor people and people of color.  The responsibility for climate change, however, lies with the relatively rich.  The release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the source of human-caused climate change, is directly associated with wealth on both national and individual levels.  Climate change, in other words, is a result of over-consumption by those who can afford more than their fair share.
  
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Big changes already underway in Earth's climate systems make up the biggest challenge our species has ever faced and its consequences are upon us with a speed that is as unexpected as it is violent. There has been a strong scientific consensus for years that these climate changes are being caused by Global Warming caused, in turn, by greenhouse gas pollution and bad land use policy. The American Green response is comprehensive, from working vigorously for immediate cap-and-rebate legislation in Congress to advocating for a sustainable society for our near future. The same sets of solutions address multiple impending crises – in climate, the peaking of fossil fuel supplies, and the acidification of the world's oceans. We humans have less than a decade to begin big changes.
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Greenhouse gases heat the earth by trapping heat energy in the atmosphere.  Much of that heat energy is initially absorbed by the ocean, creating roughly a 30-year delay in the impact of that heat at the surface of the planet.  Practically speaking, that means that the melting glaciers and expanding deserts of 2009 were the result of greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere in the late 1970's, when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was below 350 parts per million (ppm). In order to return to a safe level of greenhouse gases in earth's atmosphere, we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases as quickly as possible to levels that existed before 1980, well below 350ppm carbon dioxide.
  
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Principles In Action
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A variety of suggestions have been offered about goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions:  45% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020 and 95% by 2050 are among the most aggressive mentioned.  However, when we compare those goals to the safe level of greenhouse gases discussed above, it is clear that the reductions offered have little to do with protecting life on earth and everything to do with protecting the political and economic status quo. 
  
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Our most basic principles demand that Greens address Global Warming directly and with solutions that reflect our values and that offer realistic hope for the future. There has not been a more profound challenge to our species in all our thousands of generations. There is only one solution- we must stop burning fossil fuels like oil and coal and change how we practice agriculture. The only path out of this crisis is a political one-- policies embedded in law and custom must rapidly reform how our species lives. Half measures won't do.
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We passed the safe level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before 1980 and emissions have risen dramatically since that time. The only rational action to take if we value a planet friendly to life as we know it is to expend maximum effort to not only curtail greenhouse gas emissions, but actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through reforestation and other climate-friendly strategies. Nothing offered by either Congress or the President has come remotely close to the level of ambition required.
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The most powerful elements of the social establishment oppose the needed changes. They have carried out a successful multi-billion dollar campaign of disinformation designed to confuse the public. At every opportunity they continue to deflect efforts at change and seek financial advantage.
 
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The inability of ruling elites to deal realistically with the climate crisis has left the question of survival in the hands of the world's common folk, who must be a vital part of solutions in any case. Greens should be able to best represent the future of our civilizations.
 
  
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• The Green principles of grassroots democracy and social and personal responsibility intersect to show the way to the future even while democracy itself is threatened. Attempts to solve the climate crisis at the expense of ordinary citizens of the United States and the world must be rejected. Polluters must pay and our society must be mobilized around the goal of sustainable survival.
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Here are some policies that can really solve the climate crisis:
  
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• Our principles of social justice and diversity demand that we shape our movements in a way that refuses the path of genocide by neglect and enlists the strengths of all peoples in creating our common future. The people most suffering the early effects of Global Warming tend to be those least responsible for its creation and much of the world's population knows this, even though many Americans do not.
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• Support an aggressive international climate treaty under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  We missed an opportunity to capitalize on worldwide momentum in support of climate action at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009.  We cannot let that type of potential go to waste again. The United States must do massively better than the 4% below 1990 greenhouse gas emission reduction it offered in Copenhagen.  Support for 45% reduction by 2020 and 95% reduction by 2050 is inadequate, but it is a good place to begin the discussion.
  
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• Never have the principles of ecological wisdom and future focus been more obviously and desperately needed. This is the core of sustainability.
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• Support a financial transactions tax to repay the United States climate debt.  We became wealthy burning massive quantities of fossil fuels and dumping the resulting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere shared by all life on the planet.  The United States and other wealthy nations must meet their obligations to repair the damage caused by paying the bill for adaptation to climate change in countries with less responsibility for climate change, and by providing a carbon neutral development path for those countries that can no longer be permitted to develop in the same way we did - by burning cheap fossil fuels.
  
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• Non-violence is the opposite of the world-torturing process of Global Warming, and is even more urgently required in a world of nations and classes constantly on the edge of conflict while holding weapons more deadly than ever before.
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• No "dirty clean energy".  Many of the "solutions" offered in climate legislation aren't real solutions.  Biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels will dump massive quantities of toxic pollutants into the air and water, and some of these energy sources produce more greenhouse gas emissions than coal.  Natural gas is primarily methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.  Consequently, when pipeline leakage is considered, the clean-burning characteristics of natural gas can be lost, resulting in a fuel with climate impacts as bad as coal.  Biomass and biofuels will also increase deforestation, contributing to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
  
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• These principles and others like decentralization, community-based economics,and feminism also address other severe social issues such as tightening supplies of resources such as oil and coal as well as other needs to re-shape our societies in a way that results in communities that are sustainable for ourselves and the planet.
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• No nuclear energy.  Nuclear energy is massively polluting, dangerous, expensive and slow to implement. Our money is better spent on wind, solar, geothermal and small-scale hydro.
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Greens are called to make these principles ever more relevant and part of the leading edge of political thinking and action. The need is urgent and time is short.
 
  
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The Crisis We Are In
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• We can do better than carbon pricing.  A variety of approaches to greenhouse gas reduction that try to shift demand away from fossil fuels by increasing the price of carbon have been suggested:  Cap and Trade, Cap and Dividend, Tax and Dividend.  All three share a common problem - perverse incentives (an unintended incentive to take action with negative consequences).  By putting an increased price on carbon, all energy sources that do not have the carbon price imposed look relatively more attractive:  nuclear power, biomass and biofuels are all in that category.  Carbon pricing could easily result in massive deforestation to produce additional biofuels that have suddenly become relatively cheap and economically attractive.  Instead of pricing carbon, we should simply mandate real clean solutions.
  
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The warping of our planet's climate systems by the trend we call Global Warming threatens the world's people today and the stability of our civilizations tomorrow. This problem has been caused by human action and must be reversed by human action. Scientific understanding is far more than good enough to know that we must act swiftly to have a chance of correcting the situation before it becomes impossible to stop. What is in our future, unless we change, is climate change that will re-make the planet into one that is very different than the one our civilizations developed on. One danger that is not well understood is the possibility that planetary climate systems may suddenly change without warning as they have in the distant past. Humanity is pushing climate systems faster than known at any time in the planet's history. Any uncertainty in our understanding of climate systems is a reason for caution and for fast action to reverse our reckless greenhouse pollution.
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• Adopt energy efficiency standards that reduce energy demand economy-wide by 50% over the next 20-30 years.  A variety of studies have suggested that we can make massive reductions in our energy use through a combination of conservation and efficiency measures. We don't actually need any additional power. We can and should instead reduce our consumption of power.
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Even in the near term, changing our societies and economic systems to more sustainable models will be much less costly and disruptive than waiting too long and paying the high price of delay in human lives, in wars, and social collapse.
 
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Humanity did not set out to change the world in this way, but we are changing Earth profoundly for all of the interdependent webs of systems upon which humanity depends for life itself. As yet another unintended consequence we threaten most of the species of life on our planet with extinction.
 
  
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Today's Price for Global Warming
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• Adopt a Clean Energy Portfolio Standard that rapidly replaces our combustion-based power sources with wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power.
  
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A process like Global Warming can only be seen clearly over a time span of at least decades, but we can no longer expect the effects to occur over centuries as was previously believed. In the most recent thirty years many events have made it apparent that climate changes caused by Global Warming are not only happening more quickly than anticipated, but these changes are accelerating and building on each other in feedback loops. For example, ice is melting from pole to pole, which means that instead of reflecting solar energy, more energy is absorbed, which in turn allows the release of more greenhouse gases on top of the gases humans release as pollution. For instance, the power of the Atlantic hurricane seasons have tripled and as a result Hurricane Katrina got the extra margin of power to break the New Orleans levees from the extra heat from Global Warming. In a very real sense, the catastrophic flooding of New Orleans was America's most obvious Global Warming wake-up call.
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• Build an efficient, free, public transportation system.  The best incentive we can provide to live closer to work and reduce the use of private vehicles is to make the alternative free and convenient to use.
  
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All over the world, patterns of heat and rainfall are changing and as a result climate-rooted wars such as the one in Darfur tear human communities apart. Avoidable deaths attributable to climate changes number in the hundreds of thousands already. As these effects of climate shifts become more pronounced, the destruction of people and their cultures accelerates. The peoples of the world have begun to organize to resist the business as usual approach that will doom many to extinction. Representatives of small island nations at the Copenhagen climate conference in December of 2009 said they they had no intention of presiding over the drowning of their homelands while the larger countries delayed. Americans need to make common cause with the islanders because we are all in the same boat – and there is no way only half the boat will sink.
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• Remove subsidies from fossil fuels, nuclear power, biomass and waste incineration, and biofuels. We must also acknowledge that the bulk of our military budget is, in fact, a disguised subsidy for oil and gas production. At least half, and probably more, of our military budget should be redirected to positive purposes like building a carbon neutral energy economy.
  
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Green Action for 2010
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• Adopt a national zero waste policy.  The less we consume and throw away, the less we will need to produce and replace.
  
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Our first legislative priority will be to replace the cap-and-trade approach with a simple cap-and-rebate design at the federal level. Grassroots pressure can rapidly change the assumptions on Capitol Hill and replace the complex bills designed to benefit big polluting corporations and Wall Street traders with legislation that simply and directly addresses the problem. For example, the CLEAR Act sponsored by Senators Cantwell and (D-WA) and Snowe (R-ME) charges for carbon use when it enters the economy, rebates 75% of the revenue to American citizens, and has specific ways to adjust its workings as the political situation permits.
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• Make the shift away from industrial style chemical-based agriculture to local, organic food production. Fertilizer and pesticides are produced using fossil fuels and our globalized food production system burns massive quantities of fossil fuels to transport our food.  Localized, organic food production eliminates most of that fossil fuel usage and also contributes to healthy, living soil that sequesters more carbon dioxide, further reducing the impact of agriculture on global warming.
  
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Our first organizing priority will be to educate and and activate at the grassroots to demand and achieve an effective and just solution to the climate crisis. The key factor that is missing in this political battle is the presence of a massive movement that demands action and gets it, either from existing elected officials or by electing new ones.
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• Use some of our savings from reduced consumption and military expenditures to create a retraining program to prepare workers for the new, clean energy economy. Prioritize the creation of green jobs in communities of color and poor communities.
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At every level of government an assessment of the “carbon footprint” should be made immediately and a plan made for replacing polluting activities with sustainable ones.
 
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At every level of civic engagement every effort should be made to shift to a sustainable way of life, with reduction of greenhouse pollution as a central goal.
 
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Every aspect of our lives and culture has been shaped or influenced by the rich energy of fossil fuels, and each of these will be affected as we move beyond them to a better, more sustainable, happier way of life.
 
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• Energy – radically reducing how much electricity we need is not only required but will have many positive effects on air quality and household budgets. The way we make electricity must change greatly as well. Decentralized or “distributed” generation is essential.
 
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• Where we live, where we work – “Energy Efficiency” through stronger building codes that are enforced can greatly reduce the need for both electricity and fuel for cooking and heating.
 
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• Transportation – Emphasizing free, constantly available public transportation over automobiles is a way to reduce greenhouse pollution and improve the quality of life for Americans.
 
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• Encourage Localization – Communities benefit from local agriculture, and it reduces greenhouse pollution as well. Goods and services provided locally encourage greater resiliency.
 

Revision as of 09:35, 29 March 2010

The need for drastic action to deal with the climate crisis is becoming increasingly obvious by the day. Due to climate change, we live in a world of expanding deserts, vanishing polar ice, melting glaciers, increasingly severe weather, deepening droughts, and rising oceans.

No one can escape the effects of climate change, which will become increasingly severe over time, but its impacts fall disproportionately upon poor people and people of color. The responsibility for climate change, however, lies with the relatively rich. The release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the source of human-caused climate change, is directly associated with wealth on both national and individual levels. Climate change, in other words, is a result of over-consumption by those who can afford more than their fair share.

Greenhouse gases heat the earth by trapping heat energy in the atmosphere. Much of that heat energy is initially absorbed by the ocean, creating roughly a 30-year delay in the impact of that heat at the surface of the planet. Practically speaking, that means that the melting glaciers and expanding deserts of 2009 were the result of greenhouse gases dumped into the atmosphere in the late 1970's, when the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was below 350 parts per million (ppm). In order to return to a safe level of greenhouse gases in earth's atmosphere, we must reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases as quickly as possible to levels that existed before 1980, well below 350ppm carbon dioxide.

A variety of suggestions have been offered about goals for greenhouse gas emission reductions: 45% reduction from 1990 levels by 2020 and 95% by 2050 are among the most aggressive mentioned. However, when we compare those goals to the safe level of greenhouse gases discussed above, it is clear that the reductions offered have little to do with protecting life on earth and everything to do with protecting the political and economic status quo.

We passed the safe level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere before 1980 and emissions have risen dramatically since that time. The only rational action to take if we value a planet friendly to life as we know it is to expend maximum effort to not only curtail greenhouse gas emissions, but actively remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through reforestation and other climate-friendly strategies. Nothing offered by either Congress or the President has come remotely close to the level of ambition required.

Here are some policies that can really solve the climate crisis:

• Support an aggressive international climate treaty under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. We missed an opportunity to capitalize on worldwide momentum in support of climate action at the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009. We cannot let that type of potential go to waste again. The United States must do massively better than the 4% below 1990 greenhouse gas emission reduction it offered in Copenhagen. Support for 45% reduction by 2020 and 95% reduction by 2050 is inadequate, but it is a good place to begin the discussion.

• Support a financial transactions tax to repay the United States climate debt. We became wealthy burning massive quantities of fossil fuels and dumping the resulting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere shared by all life on the planet. The United States and other wealthy nations must meet their obligations to repair the damage caused by paying the bill for adaptation to climate change in countries with less responsibility for climate change, and by providing a carbon neutral development path for those countries that can no longer be permitted to develop in the same way we did - by burning cheap fossil fuels.

• No "dirty clean energy". Many of the "solutions" offered in climate legislation aren't real solutions. Biomass incineration (trees, crops, construction debris and certain types of waste), landfill gas and many types of biofuels will dump massive quantities of toxic pollutants into the air and water, and some of these energy sources produce more greenhouse gas emissions than coal. Natural gas is primarily methane, which is 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. Consequently, when pipeline leakage is considered, the clean-burning characteristics of natural gas can be lost, resulting in a fuel with climate impacts as bad as coal. Biomass and biofuels will also increase deforestation, contributing to more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

• No nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is massively polluting, dangerous, expensive and slow to implement. Our money is better spent on wind, solar, geothermal and small-scale hydro.

• We can do better than carbon pricing. A variety of approaches to greenhouse gas reduction that try to shift demand away from fossil fuels by increasing the price of carbon have been suggested: Cap and Trade, Cap and Dividend, Tax and Dividend. All three share a common problem - perverse incentives (an unintended incentive to take action with negative consequences). By putting an increased price on carbon, all energy sources that do not have the carbon price imposed look relatively more attractive: nuclear power, biomass and biofuels are all in that category. Carbon pricing could easily result in massive deforestation to produce additional biofuels that have suddenly become relatively cheap and economically attractive. Instead of pricing carbon, we should simply mandate real clean solutions.

• Adopt energy efficiency standards that reduce energy demand economy-wide by 50% over the next 20-30 years. A variety of studies have suggested that we can make massive reductions in our energy use through a combination of conservation and efficiency measures. We don't actually need any additional power. We can and should instead reduce our consumption of power.

• Adopt a Clean Energy Portfolio Standard that rapidly replaces our combustion-based power sources with wind, solar, ocean, small-scale hydro, and geothermal power.

• Build an efficient, free, public transportation system. The best incentive we can provide to live closer to work and reduce the use of private vehicles is to make the alternative free and convenient to use.

• Remove subsidies from fossil fuels, nuclear power, biomass and waste incineration, and biofuels. We must also acknowledge that the bulk of our military budget is, in fact, a disguised subsidy for oil and gas production. At least half, and probably more, of our military budget should be redirected to positive purposes like building a carbon neutral energy economy.

• Adopt a national zero waste policy. The less we consume and throw away, the less we will need to produce and replace.

• Make the shift away from industrial style chemical-based agriculture to local, organic food production. Fertilizer and pesticides are produced using fossil fuels and our globalized food production system burns massive quantities of fossil fuels to transport our food. Localized, organic food production eliminates most of that fossil fuel usage and also contributes to healthy, living soil that sequesters more carbon dioxide, further reducing the impact of agriculture on global warming.

• Use some of our savings from reduced consumption and military expenditures to create a retraining program to prepare workers for the new, clean energy economy. Prioritize the creation of green jobs in communities of color and poor communities.

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