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Mark Hertsgaard
Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), a fellow of New America Foundation, is The Nation’s environment correspondent. He…
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The Keystone Victory (Global Warming and Climate Change, Environmental Activism)
The moment couldn’t have been more ripe for a real advance in the fight against climate change.

Mark Hertsgaard
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A Great Green Wall for Africa? (Environmental Issues, Global Warming and Climate Change, World)
If a metaphorical wall of trees gets built as grassroots activists envision, it could help save the continent from hunger, poverty and climate change.

Mark Hertsgaard
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Copenhagen Disaster Durban Environmental Issue Jonathan Pershing Major South Africa Technology Todd Stern Xie Zhenhua
After all, men such as Todd Stern and Jonathan Pershing, the top two US negotiators in Durban, and Xie Zhenhua, who headed China’s delegation, understand the basics of climate science well enough. They know that burning fossil fuels, leveling forests and other types of human activity are dangerously overheating the planet. They know that far-reaching action must be taken if their countries and humanity as a whole are to escape encroaching disaster. They even know—for they explicitly endorsed it at the last round of major climate negotiations in Copenhagen two years ago—that 2 degrees Celsius is the absolute maximum temperature rise that can be allowed if there is to be any chance of avoiding catastrophic and potentially irreversible climate change.

Yet these negotiators just made a deal in Durban that has zero chance of meeting the 2C target. In fact, the Durban deal—if left unchanged—guarantees that we will fail to reach that goal. Given that scientists are warning that the planet is already committed to a “dangerous” amount of climate change, and that crossing the 2C target will bring “extremely dangerous” climate change, what else can the Durban agreement be called but a de facto denial of climate science?

Because the decisions these negotiators—and their bosses in Washington, Beijing and other world capitals—made in Durban carry such immense consequences, and because they reflect the will of the most powerful governments on earth, the negotiators have earned themselves the title Climate Deniers in Chief. Knowingly or not, they have handed down a death sentence, especially to the billions of young people around the world who were already fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with the hottest, most volatile climate our civilization has ever experienced.

For the sake of these young people, for the sake of humanity and the countless species with whom we share this planet, the Durban agreement cannot stand. It must be rejected by citizens and superseded by the actions of state and local governments and visionary entrepreneurs throughout the world, where encouraging progress is being made, usually outside mainstream media’s attention span. Beyond that, the Durban agreement must be radically strengthened through follow-up negotiations in the near future—meaning within months, not years.

Indeed, waiting years to require action is the fundamental failure of the Durban agreement: it delays obligatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions until 2020. Absurdly, it delays even signing an agreement about such cuts until 2015. It also says nothing about how large the cuts should be—no small omission, considering that global emissions increased by a record amount in 2010, putting the planet on a trajectory toward a hellish 6C temperature rise by 2100. Yet timing remains the key poison pill. Allowing business as usual until 2020 will make it economically prohibitive, if not physically impossible, to keep temperature rise to 2C, the International Energy Agency recently warned. Likewise, leading scientists have been saying since before Copenhagen that emissions must start declining no later than 2015 if there is to be much chance of hitting the 2C target. And yes, five years of delay makes a critical difference. The inertia of the climate system—including the fact that carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries—means that the earth is already locked in to 1.4 degrees of temperature rise. With temperatures rising by approximately 0.2C per decade, there is simply no room for delay if we wish to preserve a planet similar to the one in which our civilization has developed over the past 10,000 years.

While the deniers who crafted the Durban deal are a different breed from the conspiracy-mongers beloved by Fox News, they are by no means new. Ever since the first major global negotiations on climate change, held at the United Nations Earth Summit in 1992, politicians have repeatedly disregarded what science says in favor of what political reality supposedly allows, and many journalists and even some environmentalists have joined in the deception. Thus USA Today and NPR have hailed the Durban agreement as a “landmark” breakthrough, on the grounds that it commits, for the first time, both developed countries and emerging economies to reduce emissions. The Durban deal also extends the emission reductions pledges made by the European Union under the Kyoto Protocol. These two measures indeed required bruising, all-night negotiations, but they will deliver meaningful climate progress only if additional negotiations force the big polluters—particularly the two climate superpowers, the United States and China—to start cutting emissions posthaste. To applaud such an insufficient outcome is to confuse how politically difficult it is to reach a given agreement with how scientifically valid it is—the essence of the form of denial practiced by the Climate Deniers in Chief.

The disaster in Durban makes it clearer than ever that politicians will not save us from the fast-approaching train wreck of irreversible climate change. Salvation must come instead from the bottom up: from extending the victories citizen activism has already won, including the defeat of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline and the de facto moratorium on new coal-fired power plants in the United States. If people of good will want to halt this train before it’s too late, we can’t leave it to the engineers. More and more of us will have to invade the engineer’s compartment, take over the controls of the train ourselves and steer a path back to life.

When Washington pumped billions of dollars into the nation’s banks in 2008 and 2009, there was good reason to do so: It kept the US and arguably the global financial system from outright crashing, which would have brought even greater human and economic suffering than was experienced otherwise. But federal officials made an inexcusable error: they didn’t impose any conditions on the huge public subsidies that were provided to private banks.

Specifically, Washington could have made banks use the bailout money to modify the mortgages of people who were having trouble paying. This would have been fair–the banks had tricked many people into signing misleading mortgages in the first place–and it also would have been economically stimulative: it would have buoyed the housing market and boosted overall demand and therefore hiring.

President Obama has never publicly explained why he chose not to attach such conditions to the massive amounts of public money used to bail out the banks (but I’d bet that advice from Tim Geitner and Larry Summers played a big role). Now that Obama’s out running for re-election, he should be asked about this repeatedly on the campaign trail, by citizens as well as reporters, and urged to do better.

Because it’s not too late to do the right thing. As former New York governor and attorney general Elliot Spitzer explained recently in Slate, requiring banks to re-loan the billions in subsidy money they received to homeowners struggling with mortgage payments is a key step toward righting our economy and restoring justice for the 99 percent; http://www.alternet.org/story/153291/eliot_spitzer%3A_5_ways_to_make_banks_pay_for_their_secret_%247_trillion_free_ride?page=entire/.

Why not combine the Occupy movement’s feet-on-the-street activism with Spitzer’s policy advice? Strikes me as a recipe for real change.

And not a moment too soon. The International Energy Agency released its annual World Energy Outlook report yesterday, which warned that the world has five years to make fairly radical changes in its fossil-fuel dominated energy infrastructure if we are to avoid irreversible climate change. What exactly the IEA–which is a very establishment-friendly organization–means by radical and irreversible is something about which I’m seeking clarification from IEA officials; I’ll share my findings in a piece for The Nation next week. But certainly blocking a climate-killing tar sands pipeline like the Keystone XL would seem to qualify as an excellent step forward!

‘Occupy Wall Street’ and Obama

If ‘Occupy’ keeps up the pressure, Obama could be compelled to adopt more progressive policies.

By Mark Hertsgaard Last Modified: 10 Nov 2011 14:03

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – The bursting to life of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the most hopeful development in American politics since Barack Obama was elected president three years ago this month. Obama’s election has turned out to be largely a false hope. But that false hope might still be redeemed – and the president motivated to become the reformer he once pledged to be – if the Occupy movement grows into the kind of massive, broad-based, relentless movement no president can afford to ignore.

Already, the Occupy Wall Street website claims that the movement has spread to 100 cities in the United States and inspired sympathy actions in 1,500 cities around the world. Momentum appears to be building in other ways as well. Activists in other progressive movements – environment, labour, anti-poverty and housing – are beginning to collaborate with Occupy. TV commercials are airing on mainstream media outlets, even Fox News, spreading Occupy’s message that the US political and economic system is rigged in favour of the top one per cent. And opinion polls are indicating that a sizeable majority of Americans agree with this analysis, though there seems to be less support for the Occupy activists themselves.

The latest big protest targeted the White House itself, when an estimated 12,000 people physically surrounded the home of the US president last Sunday to urge rejection of a proposed climate-killing oil pipeline. Stretching 1,700 miles from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, the Keystone XL Pipeline would transport tar sands, an extremely dirty and carbon intensive form of oil, to refineries in Texas. Environmentalists have portrayed it as a make-or-break moment for President Obama to live up to his promise as a candidate in 2008 to fight climate change and kick the US addiction to oil. The crowd surrounding the White House on Sunday turned candidate Obama’s famous campaign slogan back on the president, chanting, “Stop the Pipeline, Yes We Can”. There were also expressions of solidarity with the Occupy movement, including a massive sign reading “OCCUPY EARTH”, and shouts of, “We are the 99 per cent”.

These activists have made the pipeline a defining issue for Obama’s presidency. They have also made it very difficult, though hardly impossible, for the president to approve it. In response to the mounting pressure, Obama publicly took ownership of the issue last week, telling a local TV interviewer that he himself would make the final decision (rather than passing the buck to the State Department) and adding that creating a few thousand jobs in the short-term might not be worth polluting the air, earth and water our kids need to grow up healthy. And the day after the White House protest came the news that the Inspector General (aka, the internal cop) of the State Department is going to investigate State’s ethically-challenged review of the pipeline application. This, my friends, is the sound of an administration backtracking. Mass protests can make that sort of thing happen.

Media coverage

The White House protest generated lots of media coverage, including in mainstream outlets. Surprising? Not really. Twelve thousand people is a lot of people, and physically surrounding the White House is a neat trick; no protest in recent memory has done that. What’s more, this protest came after weeks of media coverage of Occupy actions across the nation, so the media was primed. The media loves trends, and street protests against inequality, corporate skullduggery and its political enablers is beginning to be a trend in the US.

Other sparks of resistance: A consumer uprising organised through social media has led Bank of America to drop plans to charge customers a $5 monthly fee for using their debit cards. In addition, an estimated one million Americans have withdrawn their money from big banks and moved it to community banks or credit unions. And there is even talk of a “debtors’ strike”, in which homeowners and college graduates with onerous mortgage and student loan payments will collectively refuse to pay until big banks adjust the terms to affordable levels.

It’s entirely possible these actions are only the beginning, for opinion polls indicate that most Americans agree with the core message of Occupy. By a three-to-one margin, Americans tell pollsters they agree that, “Our economy works for Wall Street CEOs but not for the middle class”. They believe that the richest one per cent should be taxed more to pay for education, job creation and environmental protection. They reject official Washington’s obsession with deficit reduction and spending cuts, affirming that the government’s chief priority should be creating jobs. Americans are less enthusiastic about the Occupy protesters themselves, however. Only 30 per cent of the public say they have a “favourable” view of the Occupy movement, while 39 per cent are unfavourable and another 30 per cent say they don’t know enough about the movement to have an opinion.

Ripe conditions

In sum, conditions are ripe for the Occupy movement to grow and deepen into the kind of large, determined popular movement that strikes fear in the hearts of economic and political elites. If Occupy plays its cards right, it could bring about a profound, much-needed change in American society. And although Obama and his advisers might not realise it, the emergence of such a movement could also be the best thing that has happened to him as president.

Days after Obama was elected in November 2008, The Nation, the leading left-of-centre magazine in the US, published what has proven to be the single most prescient commentary about his presidency. Written by Frances Fox Piven, a professor at the City University of New York who has spent her career analysing social movements, the article explained “Why Obama Needs A Protest Movement”.

In depth coverage of the global movement
At a moment when many on the Left were rejoicing, Piven warned they were headed for “a terrible let-down” if they viewed Obama as “a visionary or a movement leader”. Rather, she argued, Obama had won because “he is a skillful politician. That means he will calculate whom he has to conciliate and whom he can ignore in realms dominated by big-money contributors…”

Instead of counting on Obama to implement their favourite policy proposals, Piven suggested, progressives should stay mobilised and seek to create the political conditions that would compel Obama to honour his promises. That, after all, was the secret behind the greatest wave of progressive reform in modern American history: the establishment of the New Deal by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930s. “FDR became a great president because the mass protests among the unemployed, the aged, farmers and workers forced him to make choices he would otherwise have avoided,” wrote Piven.

But Piven’s advice went unheeded, and absent grassroots pressure Obama has chosen these past three years to conciliate rather than confront the status quo. The result? A lacklustre record of domestic achievements, unemployment over nine per cent and poll numbers that call into question his re-election, despite a remarkably weak cast of Republican opponents. No US president in modern history has won re-election when the unemployment rate was over 7.5 per cent.

A long-lost voice

The Occupy movement, however, could transform this landscape by showing Obama and other elected officials that there is a political cost to favouring corporations and the super-rich over everyone else. With its brilliant slogan, “We are the 99 per cent”, the movement has at last given voice to the vast majority of citizens who have lost income, jobs, homes or pensions while the top one per cent have gotten even richer.

Already, the political conversation has changed in the US. Although much of the media coverage of the Occupy movement has been simple-minded or even hostile, there has been a great deal of it, and the effect has been to amplify the movement’s message and gain it followers. Now, budget cuts for workers and pensioners are no longer the sole focus of political debate; requiring corporations and the rich to pay their fair share of taxes is also on the agenda.

It’s too soon to say whether the Occupy movement will have staying power, much less play a role in the 2012 election. But clearly a decisive factor will be how the movement relates to Obama, and vice versa.

The Occupiers are adamant they will not be co-opted, by the president or anyone else. That is the right instinct. If this movement can remain an independent force, continue growing in numbers and diversity and keep the pressure on, it could cause both Republican and Democratic politicians to think twice about favouring the one per cent over the 99 per cent. And that could create the political space for Obama, like FDR before him, to champion policies that benefit the many over the few – which in turn might help save him from defeat in 2012.

Mark Hertsgaard (www.markhertsgaard.com) is a Fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC, and the environment correspondent for The Nation. He is the author of six books that have been translated into sixteen languages, including, most recently, HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.

An English language version of the article has been published by The Nation but for the moment is behind a pay wall. I’ll post an electronic version when it’s available, though of course you can always buy a hard copy on the newsstand or, better yet, subscribe!

This article will also be published soon by the two leading newspapers in The Netherlands and Italy, the NRC Handelsblad and La Repubblica, respectively.

Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2011:

Un enjeu de la lutte contre la famine

La « grande muraille verte » d’Afrique

Tandis qu’une famine ravage la Corne de l’Afrique, des scientifiques réfléchissent aux équilibres écologiques. Pour combattre la désertification, plusieurs pays ont lancé un projet de « grande muraille verte ». Encore faut-il que les populations soient mobilisées…

par Mark Hertsgaard

Elles n’étaient pas certaines de pouvoir le faire. Ni vraiment convaincues qu’elles le devaient. A vrai dire, beaucoup dans le village en doutaient : creuser des trous, planter des arbres, prendre des initiatives… N’était-ce pas le rôle des hommes ? « Tout le monde pensait que nous étions devenues folles », se souvient Mme Nakho Fall, une petite femme trapue et énergique, vêtue d’une robe aux motifs rouge et blanc. Avec une douzaine de ses voisines, elle profite de l’ombre d’un arbre. Nous sommes à Koutal, un village de l’ouest du Sénégal. Les chèvres et les poules vont et viennent entre les allées sableuses qui séparent les maisons. A onze heures du matin, la chaleur est déjà accablante. Pourtant, dans un mois à peine, les pluies et l’humidité de l’été feront regretter cette canicule.

Si les hommes de Koutal ne pouvaient se charger de planter des arbres, c’est qu’ils étaient déjà très occupés. Certains travaillaient dans la mine de sel voisine, où ils se rendaient grâce à des « cars rapides » qui ne les ramenaient pas avant la nuit. D’autres avaient migré vers Dakar, la capitale, à la recherche d’un emploi — n’importe lequel.

Pourtant, il fallait bien faire quelque chose : les arbres disparaissaient, emportant avec eux une partie de la vie du village. « On n’entendait même plus les oiseaux chanter », raconte Mme Fall.

Aucune des femmes qui l’entourent ne connaît l’expression « changement climatique » ; mais toutes se plaignent d’un climat moins clément et d’une sécheresse persistante, qui a durci la terre, la rendant plus difficile à cultiver. Sans compter que sa teneur en sel a augmenté.
Bien que l’océan Atlantique soit distant d’une soixantaine de kilomètres, deux bras de mer ont peu à peu trouvé le chemin du village. « Le gouvernement sénégalais n’est pas en mesure de dire dans quelle proportion le niveau de la mer s’est élevé, explique M. Adama Kone, ingénieur agricole, mais les tests effectués dans le sol montrent que l’eau salée s’est infiltrée en profondeur. » Une agricultrice presse un peu de terre….

Here in San Francisco, I watched the live feed of the event on the tarsandsaction.org website and interviewed some of the protestors in real time as they chanted, “Stop The Pipeline, Yes We Can.” Their spirit and creativity was a sight to behold. Most impressive was the mock pipeline, at least 100 feet long, that protestors hoisted above their heads and carried through the crowd, emblazoned with the slogan, “Stop the XL Pipeline.”

And guess what? The White House protests generated lots of media coverage, including in mainstream outlets. I suspect there are two reasons for this. First, twelve thousand people is a lot of people, and surrounding the White House is a pretty neat trick; I can’t think of any other protest that has done that. Second, and at least as important: the White House action came after weeks of media coverage of Occupy movement actions in cities across the nation and around the world, so the media was primed. The media loves trends, and massive street protests against corporate skullduggery and its political enablers is beginning to be a trend.

There was ample sympathy and solidarity with the Occupy movement in the crowd surrounding the White House, including a massive sign reading, OCCUPY EARTH, and chants proclaiming, “We Are The 99 Percent.” I was slightly surprised that no one made a sign or chanted, “Occupy the White House,” though….

I’ll be publishing a piece trying to make sense of all this in the coming days. Meanwhile, here’s the best piece of spot news reporting about the White House protest I’ve seen, written by the excellent Elizabeth McGowan of Inside Climate News: http://insideclimatenews.org/news/20111107/largest-keystone-xl-protest-white-house-encircle-president-obama-transcanada-permit-state-department/.

But today the Wall Street Journal revived the Romney-Perry story and even advanced it slightly: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204621904577014073955016092.html/. Kudos to the Journal! Their piece ain’t perfect; it downplays the fact that these guys BROKE THE LAW and, like so much campaign coverage, it focuses too much on personalities and tactical calculations. Still, it’s a valuable piece of journalism that increases the likelihood that Perry and especially Romney will face further questions about this scandal as the 2012 campaign continues.

Providing yet another reason for its 9 percent approval rating, Congress is attempting to write the nation’s next farm bill in secrecy—sneaking it into law as part of the deficit reduction package to be produced by the “supercommittee.”

This anti-democratic maneuvering could determine the shape of one of the most important—and controversial—pieces of legislation Congress considers, sometimes called the food bill because of its enormous influence over what Americans (especially children) eat, what food costs (here and overseas), whether our food is safe to eat and whether 45 million impoverished Americans (again, about half of them children) continue to receive food stamps. The bill also helps determine whether agriculture respects or pollutes our air, soil and water.

And the Farm Bill may not be the only law written behind closed doors and fast-tracked through the legisilative process, thanks to the supercommittee’s requirements. Ben Becker, a spokesman for the Senate Agriculture Committee, rejects accusations of undue secrecy in the new Farm Bill even as he emphasizes, “We didn’t choose this process. It was forced on all committees.”

Reauthorized every five years, the farm bill is due for reconsideration in 2012. Food movement activists had promised the strongest, most unified campaign yet to reform the legislation away from its emphasis on lavish subsidies for agribusiness and environmentally destructive practices and toward family farms and sustainable agriculture [see Dan Imhoff's “Farm Bill 101”].

Writing the bill in secret and sneaking it into law would not only pre-empt citizen involvement and violate democratic norms, observes In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan; it would also squelch the prospects for reform. “So now what happens to an important proposal like The Local Farms, Food, and Jobs Act, introduced by Representative Chellie Pingree and Senator Sherrod Brown?” Pollan asked in an e-mail interview with The Nation. “Does it even get a hearing? The writing of agricultural policy in America has never been a shining example of democracy at work; now, it threatens to devolve into a travesty.”

The proposed new version of the farm bill was at press time to be submitted the first week of November. It was devised solely by the “gang of four,” the two chairs and two ranking members of the House and Senate Agriculture committees and submitted to the supercommittee in hopes that it will be included in the deficit reduction plan, due by Thanksgiving. There were no new committee hearings on the new farm bill recommendations, no markups or votes. And if the supercommittee accepts the bill as written, there will be no possibility of amending it on the House or Senate floor or of voting on it separately.

Representative Collin Peterson, the Minnesota Democrat who helped draft the bill, defends the fast-tracking of the farm bill on the grounds that it will produce a stronger result than if the supercommittee were to act on its own. In addition, interest groups were allowed to submit proposals for the gang of four to consider in drafting their bill.

But that’s not democracy, protests Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, an NGO that has embarrassed corporate farmers by publicizing how much taxpayer money they receive in crop subsidies, sometimes for land that hasn’t been farmed in years. “Sure, people are submitting ideas, but the [four] members of Congress sitting around that table are mainly there to represent the interests of Big Ag,” Cook told The Nation. “They have made it very clear their main interest is in protecting a subsidy program for industrial agriculture…. Meanwhile, they reportedly want to cut roughly $4 billion from the food stamps program over the next ten years, at a time of economic distress, when we have 45 million people on food stamps in this country.

“If these are truly great ideas, let’s discuss them openly,” Cook argues, adding that his organization is mobilizing its 1.1 million followers and other parts of the food movement to say, in the words of a new TV ad, No Secret Farm Bill.

“Either the supercommittee would in essence write the Farm Bill, with no hearings or public input, or the Agriculture Committee and the communities we represent would recommend reforms,” counters Becker. “Even in the short time we were provided to offer recommendations to the super-committtee, we have actively sought input from farm, conservation, nutrition and other stakeholders and are including their recommendations as we seek to reform the nation’s agriculture policy.”

“I agree with Mr. Becker that the process was imposed on the agriculture committees, but this process did not impose a directive to write an entire farm bill with no hearings…and no opportunity to amend it,” responds Cook, who adds, “We’re hearing from a lot more [food movement] groups now, such as the Center for Rural Affairs, Bread for the World and Taxpayers for Common Sense, who are also starting to sound the alarm. So we feel we’ll be able to let Congress know that this is not OK—to use a draconian budget cutting exercise to avoid a democratic consideration of our next farm bill and lock up these issues for the next five years, especially when there is so much energy and interest out in the country in reforming our food and farm policies.”

This article appeared in the November 21, 2011 edition of The Nation.