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THE WITNESS
From solar-powered emails to recycled cities, there are plenty of reasons to feel hopeful for our planet this Earth Day. Although protecting our forests, oceans and air is an endless job, we can also step back and appreciate all the really cool stuff going on all over the world thanks to people coming together and finding a better way. Big or small, these reasons all point to progress that is actually working. Continue reading
Today, Greenpeace proudly ads its voice to a growing coalition of groups to urge Tribune Company, publisher of the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune and several other major US newspapers, not to sell their print media to Koch Industries. SIGN OUR PETITION TO TRIBUNE COMPANY CEO PETER LIGUORI TO KEEP TRIBUNE’S NEWSPAPERS OUT OF KOCH’S HANDS.
Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who own Koch Industries, the second-largest private company in the US, oversee an estimated $115 billion in annual revenue. The Kochs are each worth $31 billion to $45 billion, and the brothers have a bad habit of funneling tens of millions of dollars to organizations that deny the reality or severity of global warming. They have a keen interest in influencing US politics and culture, hosting secretive gatherings of wealthy elites who collectively raise hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on state and national politics. This quiet circle of business leaders already has a concerning amount of influence in the US media and has prioritized increasing that influence.
Greenpeace’s opposition to the Koch bid for Tribune Co. newspapers is rooted in the billionaire Koch brothers’ proven track record of peddling misinformation on climate change science through media outlets they already have ties to, such as the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, the National Review and the Washington Examiner. And when the Kochs can’t get favorable reporting, they fund organizations to gin up their own media that promote Koch priorities–busting unions, beating back environmental protection laws, smothering public education, watering down healthcare reform, and a variety of other initiatives that only the 1% stand to gain from.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION. And stay tuned for more updates from Greenpeace on our work to keep the Kochs’ corrupting influence out of Tribune Company newspapers.
I’m wearing my new blue t-shirt from Bike to Work Day. It was a beautiful morning on the W.O. & D. trail. I hope you had a good ride yourself or at least wished you had when you saw bikes rolling by.
I was at a meet up stop In Vienna, Virginia, when a man rolled up and asked what was going on. When he heard that this was a distribution point for riders who had registered to get a free t-shirt, he asked “What do you get if you ride to work everyday?”
I didn’t hear a good answer to that from the group, although they offered him a t-shirt, but the obvious one is health, and the other is wealth. Compared to purchasing, insuring, maintaining and fueling a car, bicycling is a good deal with great side effects.
Forest Clearance in Kalimantan, Indonesia
Although it may not have made it to the front page of our newspapers here in the US, there was big news this week for our planet and for some of the last remaining tropical rainforests. The President of Indonesia has extended the forest moratorium, protecting roughly 20 million acres of forest from the threat of deforestation. This was great news, but it does not solve the entire problem because plenty of Indonesia’s forests were left unprotected and deforestation continues to wreak havoc there. Here is Yuyun Indradi, one of my Indonesian colleagues’ account of the news.
I have been fielding calls non-stop over the last couple of days, because as you may have noticed, there has been widespread coverage lately (see here, here and here) on the Indonesian government’s extension of its forest moratorium.
It’s good news.
And it’s encouraging that the President of Indonesia, known as SBY, is renewing his commitment to protect forests – and cut my country’s massive carbon emissions. If the powerful palm oil lobby here in Indonesia had got their way for instance, the forest moratorium would have been scrapped and there would be a free for all to clear land for pulp and paper, palm oil and mining concessions.
Thankfully that did not happen.
But sadly, the moratorium still doesn’t go far enough. As I’ve been telling journalists who have asked for our view on the moratorium extension, the President did not go far enough – he did not strengthen the moratorium to cover all forests and peatland. Like the previous moratorium, the extension only covers primary forests, and rather than ALL natural forest and peatland. This is what’s really needed if we want to save Indonesia’s remaining tigers and orangutans, which are under threat from relentless palm oil, and pulp and paper expansion.
Why is there a moratorium anyway?
A shocking 85% of Indonesia’s emissions are from deforestation and peatland clearance, making Indonesia one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, behind countries such as China and the United States. Norway is funding Indonesia’s forests and climate initiative to the tune of US$1 billion, with the aim to create an incentive to protect forests in Indonesia and cut greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a noble aim, and one we have been lobbying (both quietly and loudly) for years now.
So in May 2011, Indonesia introduced a two-year moratorium on permits for new concessions in primary forests and peatlands. While this moratorium was a welcome step in terms of the signals it sent, in practice most of the primary forests that it covers are already legally protected; the remainder are largely inaccessible and not under immediate threat of development. However, it leaves almost 50% of Indonesia’s primary forests and peatlands without any protection as they lie within already designated concessions and other significant areas of high carbon forest are not covered by the moratorium, as they are considered to be secondary forests.
The new two-year moratorium does nothing to fix that.
And furthermore, it does nothing about crucial issues of governance, which we feel goes to the heart of the matter. Without proper oversight and enforcement, the moratorium is a weak decree.
We have closely monitored the moratorium’s implementation, and for the two years during the last moratorium we still found cases of overlap with concessions and some deforestation (encroachment) in protected areas.
That’s not to mention that the Ministry of Forestry has changed forest functions (from protected forest to production forest) and forest status from forest area to non-forest area.
So what are we going to do?
A lot.
More work needs to be done to harmonize spatial planning, developing sectoral policies and maps, stronger law enforcement measures (including addressing corruption and money laundering in the forest sector) and mechanisms for social conflict resolution. We will be pushing (quietly and loudly) to get this done.
And we’ll continue investigating and publicizing cases of deforestation, the companies responsible and the laws that need strengthening.
We’ll remind the President that the path to zero deforestation means more than signing a decree.
The Mexican government is likely to authorize the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) corn in Mexico. And until now Mexican citizens, with the help of organisations like Greenpeace, have managed to prevent agribusiness giants like Monsanto, DuPont and Dow AgroSciences from gaining approval in Mexico for genetically engineered corn.
But this looks like it could change.
The agriculture ministry in Mexico may allow foreign companies to plant genetically engineered corn on 2.4 million hectares of land. Continue reading
A polar bear family in Svalbard.
One of the most rewarding things about my work is that I get to meet people almost everyday who are inspired by Greenpeace.
I met Pennsylvania fine artist Justin Ballew over twitter a couple of weeks ago. Inspired by our save the Arctic campaign, he tweeted us this illustrated poem. The poem is fun and simple, and I emailed him to ask him what inspired him to do this. Here’s what he said: Continue reading
President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder are at the center of the IRS controversy
Robust democracy is essential for ecological health; democracy is guaranteed by rights afforded to individuals and groups in civil society.
Greenpeace applauds President Obama for demanding accountability up the chain of command in the matter of political discrimination by the IRS.
We believe as firmly in the rights of all members of society as we do in our own as an organization. Stifling of political speech has no place in our society. We have not always been granted that respect. Greenpeace and allied organizations like the NAACP and Rainforest Action Network have been threatened – with the tax code as a weapon – by our ideological opponents and politicians allied with them. Continue reading
Here’s a cool new toy. A popular article on Forbes today details a new smart phone app called “Buycott,” which is catching the attention of shoppers who want to make sure their money spent on groceries and other basic products isn’t enriching corporations with bad records on social and environmental responsibility.
Take Koch Industries. Greenpeace has written extensively about the Koch brothers’ $67 million in support for groups that deny climate change science and promote industries that pollute our air and water, our politics, and our health. The millions of dollars going to groups like ALEC and the State Policy Network also serves to break unions, privatize education, and water down healthcare reform.
Those are good reasons not to give a dime to the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, who own the vast majority of Koch Industries’ private stock. Yet many consumers may not realize that buying products like Quilted Northern toilet paper or Brawny paper towels contributes to Koch profits through their giant pulp and paper subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific. Nor perhaps did the incoming Obama Administration realize that the 2009 inaugural carpet was made by a Koch subsidiary called INVISTA. What a crummy business deal–the President buys your carpet, then you coordinate hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaires determined to defeat his re-election bid…if only there had been an app!
“I have a question–who bought this Koch Industries carpet? Are you serious?!”
The President’s staff aren’t alone. You may well have Koch products in your house. Continue reading
Greenpeace International Executive Director Kumi Naidoo making opening remarks at the People’s Arctic Council
The Arctic Council meeting in Sweden just wrapped up, and while we were thrilled to deliver photos of 280 global “I Love the Arctic” photos to the delegates including US Secretary of State John Kerry, we were disappointed that the meeting ended with no action to protect the Arctic. Continue reading
Crossposted from PolluterWatch.
If you were the Koch brothers and you wanted to connect better with Latino and Hispanic voters, after you just dumped millions of your own cash into a presidential election that didn’t go in your favor, you’d probably be annoyed if one of your favorite front groups started undermining your voter outreach.
That’s exactly what’s happening with the Koch-funded Heritage Foundation. Heritage is having a public relations crisis after releasing a contentious report claiming that immigration reform would cost $6.3 trillion over the next 50 years, indebting taxpayers to support people who live in the U.S. illegally. The offensive kicker is that the Heritage report’s freshly-resigned co-author, Jason Richwine, previously published a dissertation claiming that Hispanic and Latino immigrants have lower IQs than White people.
Here’s a helpful meme for Mr. Richwine:
As Heritage Foundation is one of the billionaire Koch brothers’ favorite groups to implement their political agenda–receiving more than $2.7 million from Koch-controlled foundations since 2005–this is a poor start for the Kochs’ new interest in reaching Hispanic and Latino voters in the U.S.
Amid the fiasco, Heritage pulled out of Buzzfeed’s forum on immigration sponsored by the Charles Koch Institute. See infighting over Heritage’s assumptions about how so-called “illegals” contribute to the U.S. economy from the Koch-funded Reason Foundation, of which David Koch is a trustee. Continue reading
This post is written by Tina Nottaway, Spokesperson for the Traditional Algonquin Nation of the One Nation
“KWE,” I am an Anishinaabe woman who speaks the Algonquin language fluently. I live in the la Verendrye Wildlife Reserve in Quebec, which is located two and a half hours north of Ottawa. This is where my roots have been for generations. My way of life and identity depend deeply on the resourcesthat Mother Nature has provided for us here. Continue reading
