Climate News Items

The Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission's (MTC) draft Public Participation Plan will set the framework for major decisions that it will make over the next three years in planning for over $200 billion in transportation investments.  MTC is required by SB 375 to implement a Sustainable Communities Strategy, or SCS, that will integrate transportation and land-use planning in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address climate change.

The Public Participation Plan will shape how well the SB 375 process will address the needs of the region's low-income communities and communities of color - communities at greatest risk from the impacts of climate change.  A just and equitable Public Participation Plan that actively empowers low-income communities of color in these important decisions would be an important step in moving the Bay Area toward greater inclusion.

“We aren’t demanding a loan or finance; we’re demanding a repayment of a debt, climate debt,” says Bolivian negotiator Navarro

In a central plaza of the Universidad del Valle in Cochabamba, Bolivia, a small group of men and women are presiding over a beauty competition, of sorts. They’re looking after a half a dozen llamas tethered to the base of a nearby stage, and flashing smiles as people come up to have their pictures taken with the tall, wooly animals. Over the sound system, somebody is describing with loving detail the various ecologically important functions that the llama plays in local agriculture, not to mention providing wool for winter clothing.

Nearby an impressive solar panel display has been set up by a local NGO called Energética, which supplies electricity to some of the nearby food stands and feeds into the university’s power grid. “Our goal is to bring clean energy to places in the country that have never before received electricity, rural places where they haven’t even ever had light after sundown,” staff engineer Mauricio Richter tells me, describing Energetica’s work, which is funded by both private grants and the Bolivian government. “We’re here to show that the technology is here, and it’s available.”

As of November 2009, at least 139 cities in the United States had climate action plans, including Portland and Chicago. Oakland doesn’t have one yet, but it does have a goal: by 2020, the city seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 36 percent of what they were in 2005. That goal is more aggressive than those of either San Francisco or Berkeley, which both have climate action plans.

By Juliet Eilperin

Van Jones, the environmental justice advocate who relinquished his post as a White House adviser five months ago after coming under fire from conservative activists, is reemerging on the public policy stage to push for green jobs.

By Gar Alperovitz, Ted Howard & Thad Williamson

Something important is happening in Cleveland: a new
model of large-scale worker- and community-benefiting
enterprises is beginning to build serious momentum in
one of the cities most dramatically impacted by the
nation's decaying economy. The Evergreen Cooperative
Laundry (ECL)--a worker-owned, industrial-size,
thoroughly "green" operation--opened its doors late
last fall in Glenville, a neighborhood with a median
income hovering around $18,000. It's the first of ten
major enterprises in the works in Cleveland, where the
poverty rate is more than 30 percent and the population
has declined from 900,000 to less than 450,000 since
1950.

Editor’s Note: This editorial was produced in association with New America Media (www.newamericamedia.org), a national association of ethnic media, and was published by ethnic media across the country to bring attention to the urgency of addressing climate change.

U.S. public concern about climate change has waned. The climate change summit in Copenhagen – largely viewed as a failure – did little to elevate the issue among the public. Climate change is foremost among the concerns of our communities. It is our responsibility, as the media that serve them, to call for action on this urgent matter. For many ethnic Americans whose family members are at the frontlines of global warming back in their home countries, climate change is a life-and-death issue.

If no action is taken, immigrants will continue to see their family members back in their home countries bear the brunt of rising sea levels and devastating cyclones.

By Suzanne Goldenberg & John Vidal

America sees a diminished role for the United Nations in trying to stop global warming after the "chaotic" Copenhagen climate change summit, an Obama administration official said today.

Jonathan Pershing, who helped lead talks at Copenhagen, instead sketched out a future path for negotiations dominated by the world's largest polluters such as China, the US, India, Brazil and South Africa, who signed up to a deal in the final hours of the summit. That would represent a realignment of the way the international community has dealt with climate change over the last two decades.