Environmentalists Join The 'Occupy Wall Street' Fray

by Russell McLendon, Forbes, October 7, 2011

Mother Nature Network, Contributor

A supporter cheers from the pedstrian overpass as police arrest demonstrators affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement on October 1, 2011. (Image by Getty Images via @daylife)

Occupy Wall Street may be “leaderless,” but it’s far from directionless.

Less than three weeks after the protest movement began on Sept. 17, its “We Are the 99 Percent” message has exploded into a national rallying cry, inspiring not only a bustling mini-city in New York’s financial district, but also an overnight network of sympathizers from Seattle to Miami. According to the unofficial umbrella group Occupy Together, some 500 cities worldwide will see “Occupy” events this week.

And while the nebulous campaign is focused mainly on economic issues, it has also strived for inclusiveness, winning the support of diverse groups ranging from teachers and college students to nurses, bus drivers and construction workers. When its momentum coalesced Wednesday into theOccupy Wall Street March, it included some 5,000 people, many of them from organized labor

But Wednesday’s march was also buoyed by another group of rabble-rousing upstarts: environmentalists. Fresh off their own nonviolent stand outside the White House — where they spent two weeks protesting the proposedKeystone XL oil pipeline — the re-energized U.S. environmental movement has now found an even bigger, broader stage. And like most factions of Occupy Wall Street, it seems perfectly happy to share that stage with other interests.

“For too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures,” wrote Bill McKibben, co-founder of350.org, in an email to supporters before the march. “They’ve been a constant presence, rewarded not with pepper spray in the face but with yet more loopholes and tax breaks and subsidies and contracts. You could even say Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempt to do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet. So it’s a damned good thing the tables have turned.”

“A few hundred” climate activists joined Wednesday’s march, according to 350.org communications coordinator Molly Haigh, who says the Keystone XL protests have revived a latent zeal in the U.S. environmental community that’s now dovetailing with Occupy Wall Street. “I think it’s been really huge, in terms of generating a feeling of affinity,” Haigh tells MNN. “Obviously, 1,200 people were arrested as part of the Keystone XL protests, so for a lot of those people it’s amazing to see this sort of awakening happening so soon afterward. And some of the same folks who were at those protests are coming back out, so it’s really exciting.”

One of those folks is Justin Haaheim, a lead organizer for 350.org in Connecticut who was arrested Aug. 31 during the Keystone XL protests and also attended the Wall Street march Wednesday. “It was one of the most inspiring things I’ve seen in a long time in terms of the environmental movement,” Haaheim says of the march. “I was surprised by how much there was a really common message among all the protestors. It would be really easy for something like that to have a million different messages, but it was encouraging to see that the environmental message was very widespread and very meshed in with the broader Occupy Wall Street movement.”

McKibben and 350.org now hope to conjure some of that mojo in Washington (which also held its own “Occupy D.C.” march Thursday) for “ Occupy State Department,” a protest to stop lobbyists from dominating Friday’s final public hearing on Keystone XL. The State Department will rule on the proposed pipeline by year’s end, and critics have accused it of “bias and complicity” in favor of the project. On top of that, Haigh says, many hearings so far have suspiciously become pro-pipeline pep rallies. “ At previous hearings, corporations have hired people to stand in line and save space for lobbyists, and the effect was that a lot of landowners and people who would be affected by the pipeline got blocked out from speaking,” Haigh says. McKibben aims to make sure that doesn’t happen at Friday’s hearing, which Haigh says will be “pretty extreme.”

Afterward, she adds, McKibben will head to New York and pay a visit to Zuccotti Park, home base for Occupy Wall Street. In addition to lending his star power to those protests, he’ll likely also be drumming up support for a major Keystone XL protest planned for the White House on Nov. 6 — one year before Election Day 2012, a date meant to remind President Obama of hiswavering support from environmentalists.

While Occupy Wall Street and the Keystone XL protests seem to now be merging, Haaheim says there has always been “a lot of solidarity between the two campaigns, and a lot of overlap.” In fact, Occupy Wall Street’s first “official” statement lists an array of grievances with corporate America, many of which are at least indirectly related to environmental and public health. Referring to corporations in the third person, some of its most clearly environmental grouses include:

• “They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.”
• “They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless nonhuman animals, and actively hide these practices.”
• “They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.”
• “They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.”
• “They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.”

Of course, in the mashed-up spirit of Occupy Wall Street, these grievances aren’t really meant to be split into separate issues. The five listed above are clearly born from frustration at environmental problems, but they’re part of what many protestors see as one big, holistic problem. Whether it’s the Wall Street bailouts or the BP oil spill, high unemployment or high CO2 emissions, Occupy Wall Street aims to defend what it considers a mistreated majority from a privileged minority.

“For me, there’s a lot of continuity in all of it,” Haaheim explains. “One of the central issues is that people need to be engaged, stand up and make their voices heard.”

Russell McLendon blogs for the Mother Nature Network.

More from the Mother Nature Network:

• To occupy Wall Street, occupy the Internet
• Occupy Wall Street protest grows as unions swell ranks

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2011/10/07/environmentalists-join-the-occupy-wall-street-fray/

Top lawyers put fossil fuel bosses on trial in the UK's supreme court in a mock case to explore if ecocide - environmental destruction - could join genocide as a global crime

Test trial convicts fossil fuel bosses of 'ecocide'

Top lawyers put fossil fuel bosses on trial in the UK's supreme court in a mock case to explore if ecocide - environmental destruction - could join genocide as a global crime

from Damian Carrington's Environment Blog, The Guardian, October 5, 2011


Update: Two verdicts of guilty, one not guilty: that was the conclusion of the mock ecocide trial (details below) held at the UK's supreme court on 30 September 2011. Real lawyers, judges and a public jury found the CEOs of fictional fossil fuel companies guilty of "extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) to such an extent that the peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory, and of other territories, has been severely diminished", as a result of their company's extraction of oil from tar sands in Canada. The jury found one of the CEOs not guilt on the count of damage caused by an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Polly Higgins, the driving force behind the trial and who is working to have ecocide join genocide and three other crimes against peace in the UN, said: "For me the trial was a moment of truth. No longer is it acceptable to pursue profit without consequence. Corporate Ecocide is a global crime that is far greater and far more prevalent that most people realise. Those few people who dare to speak up about Corporate Ecocide in Wall Street have been arrested for speaking out about a greater crime, a far greater breach of the peace than their own shouting and campaigning. Surely it is now the time to prosecute the true destroyers of our world."

She added: "I'm not keen to see lots of [people] in the dock. What I want to see is people making responsible decisions. For example, a crime of ecocide could force governments to change the incentive structures for businesses by redirecting subsidises for fossil fuels towards clean energy sources. In this way the dirty energy companies that are wrecking the environment today could be transformed into the clean energy companies of tomorrow."

Original story (29/09/11): It's a grim list: genocide, crimes against humanity, crimes of aggression (such as unprovoked invasions) and war crimes. All are recognised by the UN as crimes against peace and prosecuted through the international criminal court.

But should the bosses of polluting companies and the leaders of environmentally-unfriendly states join those responsible for mass murder in the dock. They could if a fifth crime against peace - ecocide - joined that list of human evils? The United Nations is now considering the proposal and the first test of how a prosecution for ecocide would work takes place on Friday, with fossil fuel bosses in the dock at the UK supreme court in London. It is a mock trial of course, but with real top-flight lawyers and judges and a jury made up of members of the public. The corporate CEOs will be played by actors briefed by their legal teams.

The crime of ecocide is the brainchild of British lawyer Polly Higgins, who in her UN submission defined it as:

Ecocide: The extensive damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.

Crimes being considered for prosecution in Friday's trial include the extraction of oil from Canada's tar sands, a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, fracking for shale gas in Nigeria and bauxite mining of Niyamgiri mountain, India. The real world parallels are not accidental, I'm sure.

An international law against ecocide, enforceable in the UK, will be assumed for the purposes of the mock trial. But there is no script and the jury's verdict is theirs alone to decide. "It is nerve-racking, it is not a done deal," says Higgins.

She argues the link between ecocide and genocide is that damage and destruction to the environment depletes the Earth's resources, whichleads to conflict. Only by making ecocide a crime for which individuals can be jailed, will we change the norm which allows profit to be put before the planet, she told me.

Higgins says a key inspiration is William Wilberforce, whose campaigning led to the abolition of slavery in the UK. He changed to norm of how black people were treated, she says, and ecocide law would change the way the planet is treated. "We have go to the point when the ethical imperative trumps the economic imperative," she says. At the moment in many countries, she points out, the first responsibility of CEOs is a financial one to their shareholders. If environmental destruction is not illegal but can boost profit, it will happen, she says.

But she is not anti-corporate or anti-profit, she says: "I started as a corporate lawyer. Now I want to make the problem part of the solution." She says companies should be making profits from solving the problems of global warming, habitat destruction and the extinctions of animals and plants. The companies that traded in slaves did not go out of business after slavery was abolished, she claims.

I asked her about the problem of proving causation between the acts of companies and environmental damage, which has doomed previous attempted prosecutions in the US.

"Genocide is a crime of intent, but ecocide is not," she says. An ecocide law would create a pre-emptive responsibility to prevent ecological damage, she explains, in the same way that "superior responsibility" or "strict liablility" enables people to be prosecuted whether or not they intended to cause damage. "I am really not wanting to see lots of CEOs locked up," she says, but wants them deterred from ecocide in the first place.

I also asked her about the phrase in her ecocide definition that says "whether by human agency or by other causes". If there is a natural disaster, who can be prosecuted? The "other causes" term is there, she says, to place an obligation on governments to intervene in disasters to minimise damage.

If this all seems utter fantasy to you, it is worth noting that Bolivia has already passed laws granting all nature equal rights to humans. Furthermore, ecocide could become an international crime by amendment of the ICC's Statute of Rome, which would need 86 nations to back it. Are there 86 states backing the ICC who feel climate change, the crisis in the oceans and other environmental problems are trashing their "peaceful enjoyment" of the Earth's bounty? I wouldn't be surprised if there were.

Update (11:22 Friday): The two crimes chosen for the ecocide mock trial are the extraction of oil from Canada's tar sands, a major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. I'll update the post again when the verdict comes.

Note: The trial, organised by the Hamilton Group, begins at 0900 BST on Friday 30 September and will be broadcast live by Sky News's Supreme Court web channel. Members of the public can attend. I'll post updates on this page. Michael Mansfield QC leads the prosecution against Nigel Lickley QC for the defence. Michael Norman will sit as the judge and the jury are members of the public recruited through Facebook and other social media and vetted for conflicts of interest.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/damian-carrington-blog/2011/sep/29/ecocide-oil-criminal-court

Video proves the NYPD led the marchers onto the Brooklyn Bridge for entrapment

Link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fockzr7rXys

Shell Oil seems to be losing its own unscientific push-poll on Scientific American

The world's demand for energy continues to grow due to population growth and improving standards of living. At the same time, the days of "easy oil and gas" are over. Until now, the focus has been to discover new resources from increasingly challenging reservoirs and locations. Yet existing reservoirs typically yield only 30-35% of their potential.

What do you see as the main benefit of using enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques?

Post a Comment | Read Comments (60)

Thanks for voting!

Please share your thoughts in the comment section below.

Click on a region to discover what other people around the world are thinking.

Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/sponsored/energyforthefuture/index.cfm?id=poll-4&WT.mc_id=SA_shell_p4_300x100ros_n

NASA Leads Study of Unprecedented Arctic Ozone Loss

Left: Ozone in Earth's stratosphere at an altitude of approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) in mid-March 2011, near the peak of the 2011 Arctic ozone loss. Red colors represent high levels of ozone, while purple and grey colors (over the north polar region) represent very small ozone amounts. Right: chlorine monoxide – the primary agent of chemical ozone destruction in the cold polar lower stratosphere – for the same day and altitude. Light blue and green colors represent small amounts of chlorine monoxide, while dark blue and black colors represent very large chlorine monoxide amounts. The white line marks the area within which the chemical ozone destruction took place. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
› Full image and caption

October 2, 2011

PASADENA, Calif. - A NASA-led study has documented an unprecedented depletion of Earth's protective ozone layer above the Arctic last winter and spring caused by an unusually prolonged period of extremely low temperatures in the stratosphere.

Video

Play video

Unprecedented Arctic Ozone Loss in 2011. 

The study, published online Sunday, Oct. 2, in the journal Nature, finds the amount of ozone destroyed in the Arctic in 2011 was comparable to that seen in some years in the Antarctic, where an ozone "hole" has formed each spring since the mid-1980s. The stratospheric ozone layer, extending from about 10 to 20 miles (15 to 35 kilometers) above the surface, protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.


The Antarctic ozone hole forms when extremely cold conditions, common in the winter Antarctic stratosphere, trigger reactions that convert atmospheric chlorine from human-produced chemicals into forms that destroy ozone. The same ozone-loss processes occur each winter in the Arctic. However, the generally warmer stratospheric conditions there limit the area affected and the time frame during which the chemical reactions occur, resulting in far less ozone loss in most years in the Arctic than in the Antarctic.


To investigate the 2011 Arctic ozone loss, scientists from 19 institutions in nine countries (United States, Germany, The Netherlands, Canada, Russia, Finland, Denmark, Japan and Spain) analyzed a comprehensive set of measurements. These included daily global observations of trace gases and clouds from NASA's Aura and CALIPSO spacecraft; ozone measured by instrumented balloons; meteorological data and atmospheric models. The scientists found that at some altitudes, the cold period in the Arctic lasted more than 30 days longer in 2011 than in any previously studied Arctic winter, leading to the unprecedented ozone loss. Further studies are needed to determine what factors caused the cold period to last so long.


"Day-to-day temperatures in the 2010-2011 Arctic winter did not reach lower values than in previous cold Arctic winters," said lead author Gloria Manney of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro. "The difference from previous winters is that temperatures were low enough to produce ozone-destroying forms of chlorine for a much longer time. This implies that if winter Arctic stratospheric temperatures drop just slightly in the future, for example as a result of climate change, then severe Arctic ozone loss may occur more frequently."


The 2011 Arctic ozone loss occurred over an area considerably smaller than that of the Antarctic ozone holes. This is because the Arctic polar vortex, a persistent large-scale cyclone within which the ozone loss takes place, was about 40 percent smaller than a typical Antarctic vortex. While smaller and shorter-lived than its Antarctic counterpart, the Arctic polar vortex is more mobile, often moving over densely populated northern regions. Decreases in overhead ozone lead to increases in surface ultraviolet radiation, which are known to have adverse effects on humans and other life forms.


Although the total amount of Arctic ozone measured was much more than twice that typically seen in an Antarctic spring, the amount destroyed was comparable to that in some previous Antarctic ozone holes. This is because ozone levels at the beginning of Arctic winter are typically much greater than those at the beginning of Antarctic winter.


Manney said that without the 1989 Montreal Protocol, an international treaty limiting production of ozone-depleting substances, chlorine levels already would be so high that an Arctic ozone hole would form every spring. The long atmospheric lifetimes of ozone-depleting chemicals already in the atmosphere mean that Antarctic ozone holes, and the possibility of future severe Arctic ozone loss, will continue for decades.


"Our ability to quantify polar ozone loss and associated processes will be reduced in the future when NASA's Aura and CALIPSO spacecraft, whose trace gas and cloud measurements were central to this study, reach the end of their operational lifetimes," Manney said. "It is imperative that this capability be maintained if we are to reliably predict future ozone loss in a changing climate." 

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2011-308&cid=release_2011-308

Union Says NYPD Police Can’t Use Bus Drivers at Occupy Wall St. Protests

Union Says Police Can’t Use Bus Drivers at Wall St. Protests

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-03/union-says-police-can-t-use-bus-drivers-at-wall-st-protests.html

October 3, 2011, 8:14 PM EDT

•  

By Patricia Hurtado and Chris Dolmetsch

(Updates with hearing schedule in third paragraph.)

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- A New York transit workers’ union asked a federal judge in Manhattan to bar police from forcing its members to abandon their routes and transport anti-Wall Street demonstrators arrested for disorderly conduct.

The Transport Workers Union Local 100 sought preliminary and permanent injunctions today in federal court in Manhattan. The union, which said last week that it’s supporting the protests, asked U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer to prohibit the New York City Police Department and the New York City Transit Authority from requiring drivers to transport such protesters.

A court hearing is set for tomorrow on the request, said Jim Gannon, a spokesman for the union, which represents 38,000 members, including about 9,000 city bus drivers. Drivers were ordered on Oct. 1 to convey some of the 700 demonstrators arrested over the weekend during anti-Wall Street protests in lower Manhattan.

“The actions of the NYPD on Oct. 1, 2011, amounted to a seizure of the bus drivers,” Arthur Schwartz, a lawyer for the union, said in court papers. The police department “deprived the drivers of their liberty without due process of law,” he said.

More Arrests

Five protesters were arrested today, accused of wearing masks near Liberty Plaza in violation of a city law, said Paul Browne, an NYPD spokesman. Some protesters have gathered at the park, located a few blocks from the Federal Reserve and Wall Street.

Police commandeered about five buses after the Oct. 1 demonstration on the Brooklyn Bridge and ordered the drivers to transport protesters who were arrested, including one bus whose passengers were told to leave, Local 100 President John Samuelsen said.

The drivers -- some of whom were ordered by their supervisors to comply with the police -- didn’t resist, Samuelsen said.

“There’s NYPD brass with guns on buses saying ‘Move the bus, this bus is now under the control of the NYPD,’” he said. “What room to protest is there? It’s not a transit supervisor you’re dealing with.”

The anti-Wall Street protests were thrust into the national spotlight this weekend when police arrested more than 700 people for disorderly conduct on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Demonstrators, originally walking on the span’s pedestrian footpath, converged on the roadway and were arrested on Oct. 1.

NYPD Cooperation

Only nine of those arrested by the NYPD weren’t released from holding facilities in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the union said in its lawsuit. Most of those arrested were given summonses and released.

“We have no intention of changing our longstanding policy of cooperating with the NYPD,” Jeremy Soffin, a spokesman for the state Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s buses and subways, said in an e-mail.

The union said today in its lawsuit that more demonstrations are planned and transit workers and their buses will again be used improperly by authorities.

“The Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are continuing,” the union said in its lawsuit. “There is a great likelihood that on Oct. 5, or at future marches, the NYPD will engage in additional mass arrests, and that they will act as they did on Oct. 1, 2011, and commandeer buses and bus drivers.”

Union members who went to court this afternoon with their lawyer said they were told he was meeting with Engelmayer.

Elizabeth Thomas, a spokeswoman for the New York City Law Department, said in an e-mail that the city will respond to the union’s request for a temporary restraining order. “We believe that the NYPD’s actions were proper,” she said.

‘No Imminent Danger’

Schwartz, the plaintiff’s lawyer, didn’t immediately return a voicemail message to his mobile phone or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment or update on the matter.

Samuelsen said authorities can only force people to assist police when there is “imminent danger.” Local 100 members participate in “legitimate” police and fire department emergencies as needed, he said.

“There was no imminent danger here,” Samuelsen said. “The protesters this weekend appeared to be marching peacefully, as is their right.”

SAVE THE DELAWARE RIVER FROM 20,000 FRACKING WELLS

SAVE THE DELAWARE from JFOX on Vimeo.
please go to delawareriverkeeper.org or savethedelawareriver.com for more details

October 21, 2011 is Don’t Drill the Delaware Day!

The fight has come to the final front.  The lines are drawn.

Protect the Delaware River Watershed from pollution from toxic gas drilling. The Delaware River Basin, an intergovernmental body, is about to move forward with regulations to permit fracking.  This is a public health hazard and we cannot let this occur!

Two actions:

1) Call the Governors and President Obama TODAY and tell them Don’t Drill the Delaware, and Don’t approve ANY regulations to permit fracking!

1. Governor Christie’s office  - 609-292-6000
2. Governor Cuomo’s office - 518-474-8390
3. Gov Corbett’s office – 717-787-2500
4. Gov Markell’s Wilmington Office - 302-577-3210
5. And the white house comment line is 202-456-1111

2) Come to the DRBC meeting!

When: October 21, 8 am

Where: Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, 1 Memorial Drive Trenton, N.J.

Links to buses will be posted here.  Sign up by email @ savethedelaware@gmail.comand/or continue to check back.

The members of the DRBC – the Governors of New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware and the Army Corps of Engineers as the federal representative – will decide the future of this Watershed, the Wild and Scenic Delaware River, and the water supply for over 15 million people with their action on October 21. How can they allow drilling and fracking to start with weak regulations that don’t protect our drinking water and our watersheds? We need to tell them “Don’t Drill the Delaware!”

Keep checking back for updates and go to:

www.delawareriverkeeper.org

Participating organizations include:

www.democracyforamerica.com

www.350.org

www.unitedforaction.org

www.protectingourwaters.org

www.nyh2o.org

www.foodandwaterwatch.org

www.catskillmountainkeeper.org

www.catskillcitizens.org