A total of 12 forged letters, sent to three House Democrats, have thus far been uncovered. As well, as Perriello, who voted for ACES, Kathy Dahlkemper and Chris Carney of Pennsylvania also received letters claiming authorship from community organizations. Dahlkemper and Carney voted against ACES.

The task now is unraveling the extent of the connection between the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the forged letters, and Bonner & Associates.

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Possible Coal Industry Link to Forged Letters

India’s environment minster has announced that his government plans to invest $200 million in the conservation of forests in the country. His ministry will also measure and report the amount of carbon the forests capture.

While announcing the scheme, the minister reiterated his government’s stance that conservation and protection of forests is one of the most important aspects in the global fight against climate change. In addition, stopping deforestation and reforestation are the simplest and one of the most cost efficient methods of offsetting carbon emissions.

The Indian government carefully timed the announcement of such plan given the increasing pressure from developed countries to commit of some kind of emission reduction goals. China is already in talks with the United States for a potential deal on reduction of sectoral carbon emissions and India, being the other major developing country, is feeling the mounting pressure.

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India Looking to Counter Emission Reduction Demands With Forest Conservation Plans?

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US Energy Consumption – What Does It All Mean?

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US Energy Consumption – What Does It All Mean?

This week’s environmental protests all have the same key feature – scrutiny. In each case, the protestors are asking for a very specific response from those involved: a closer look at what’s going on, and what can be done to make things better.

Florida Swamp Protest

In Florida, Stevie Lowe has been convicted of resisting a law enforcement officer without violence. She chained herself to a tree as part of an environmental protest against Florida Power & Light (FP&L), whose Indiantown power plant is the focus of dispute. Environmentalists say that FP&L are draining the nearby Barley Barber swamp to service their plant – a claim FP&L deny. Lowe, who will spend ninety days in Martin County jail, said her action was designed to ‘instigate more public scrutiny of the Barley Barber Swamp’.

Indian Tribe protests - in London

In London, activists mounted a highly publicised protest at the AGM of Vedanta, a British mining company. Their concern is that a planned bauxite mine in Orissa, India will destroy a mountain and damage the habitat of a local tribe as well as that of indigenous animals and plants. Bauxite is strip-mined, leading to surface denudation and requiring the removal of features like lakes and forests. Around 90% of global bauxite is converted to aluminium.

The Kondh tribe wishes to stop the development and has enlisted the support of ActionAid and Survival International as well as celebrities like Bianca Jagger. ActionAid purchased a single share in Vedanta to allow tribal activist Sitaram Kulisika to attend the meeting on behalf of the Kondh. Kulisika says that a year ago Vedanta said it would not mine the area without tribal consent and that he wished all shareholders to keep the directors of the company to their promise.  Those shareholders include the Church of England which has shares worth over $4 million in the company. Vedanta claims the project is both ethically and environmentally sound.

Chinese protestors win one battle, but face another

In Hunan Province, China, a series of protests have taken place. The first were demonstrating against pollution problems caused by a chemical plant that has already closed owing to health and environment problems. The second protests, in the streets of Zhentou township, followed the detention of protestors who’d taken part in the first protest. Local government buildings were targeted, as people demanded to be fairly treated following health problems by the Xianhe Chemical Plant. The plant opened in 2004 and had a poor track record from the beginning –poor environmental management and the stockpiling of solid waste. Local people claim the plant was harming the environment by keeping the waste which had high concentrations of toxic heavy metals such as cadmium and indium, which were leaching into local drinking water.

Their complaints appear to have had substance, as the plant was ordered to cease production in March 2009 – now the local people want free health checks and treatment for those found to have excessive heavy metal levels because they fear that now the plant has closed, their situation will be ignored by officials.

Florida Swamp courtesy of chaunceydavis at Flickr under a creative commons licence

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Environmental Protest Round Up 1 August 2009

“We are working tonight to asses the situation facing what is obviously an incredibly popular program,” the White House told the LA Times. “Auto dealers and consumers should have confidence that all valid CARS transactions that have taken place to date will be honored.”

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Cash for Clunkers Program Out of Money?

The decision to do so was made even harder after he received five letters from local constituency groups, including a Hispanic advocacy group and a local chapter of the NAACP, opposing the legislation. Or so he at first thought. According to an investigation by DailyProgress, it turns out those letters weren’t what they appeared to be and were in fact forged by Washington DC-area lobbyists.

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Lobbyists Forge Letters Urging Vote Against Waxman-Markey Climate Bill

I’m such a geek. This week, I’m headed to the legendary Red Rocks Park, in Morrison, Colorado, for four sold-out nights of music from the Vermont-based band, Phish, at what is arguably one of the greatest outdoor music venues in the United States, if not the world. And I will, at some point or another, be thinking about the New Deal.

That’s right, in the middle of some twenty-minute swirling, epic jam, my mind will undoubtedly stray a little and wonder about the millions of unemployed Americans that were employed during and after the Great Depression building thousands of roads, bridges, post offices, schools, dams and, well, amazing places like Red Rocks.

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Red Rocks, Rock n’ Roll, and FDR’s New Deal

Between 16 and 18 November 2009, a World Summit to consider issues of food security will take place at the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

The Summit has three interlinked aims:

• To reverse the downward trend of investments in agriculture by returning them to the  17% of Official Development Assistance (ODA) achieved in 1980
• To insure this investment works to remove hunger which is now considered to be a daily experience for more than one billion people
• To double food production for a world population set to reach nine billion in 2050.

Food in crisis, food as conflict

In addition to Summit meetings on these issues, there will be roundtables and break-out meetings on the relationship between financial and economic crises and food security (especially in light of the current global economic downturn), the governance of food security on an international and global scale (an increasingly troubling subject, especially for Africa where the relationship between richer and poorer nations can become strained at borders where ‘food migrants’ cross, particularly, at present, in the case of Zimbabwe) and establishing an early reaction fund for food security.

Invited guests will include Heads of State and Government as well as many FAO and UN dignitaries and representatives of advocacy and third sector groups, and the costs of the summit, which are estimated to be around $2.5 million, will be met by Saudi Arabia.  

FAO Director General, Jacque Diouf said, “I am very grateful to the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Abdullah, for his generous offer to fund this important meeting …There are more than a billion hungry people in the world today and Saudi Arabia continues to be at the forefront of the fight against hunger and poverty.”

African child with kwashiorkor, a hunger related condition, courtesy of venetia joubert at Flickr under a creative commons licence

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World Summit on Food Security