Well, it’s not the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, but it’s a start.

A coalition of U.S. environmental and social justice groups has asked President Obama to step up and attend the Earth Summit, a gathering of international bigwigs next month in Rio. It’ll be an important opportunity to meet influential people from other countries, attend critical meetings, and lead high-level negotiations. Oh, and figure out how to build a green economy, Van Jones-style, around the globe.

Twenty years ago, when George Bush Sr. was hedging about attending the first Rio Earth Summit, a pack of green groups tried to convince him with a spooky video featuring a horse charging through a burning wasteland and James Earl Jones warning ominously of the planet’s imminent demise. He did attend, and had some fascinating conversations, while Barbara enjoyed her stay as well.

This year, many of the major U.S. green groups were weirdly silent about the Earth Summit — until this week, when they sent Obama a letter:

We are writing on behalf of civil society organizations that represent more than 5 million Americans to urge you to commit as soon as possible to lead the United States delegation to the Rio+20 Earth Summit in Brazil in June.

Your presence at this Summit would signal its critical importance to all Americans, demonstrate our country’s deep concern over urgent global issues that will inevitably affect our security and well-being, and highlight our nation’s determination to be a contender in the race to a low-carbon green economy.

The letter [PDF] also asks Obama to roll out a list of commitments from the U.S. to promote the green economy here and abroad. The groups want Obama to push for elimination of fossil-fuel subsidies, sign onto the U.N.’s Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, which aims to bring clean power to developing countries, and crack down on ocean pollution and overfishing.

Twenty-two groups signed onto the letter, including four of the seven groups behind the Horsemen of the Apocalypse video in 1992 (the National Audubon Society, The Wilderness Society, and the Rainforest Action Network are still MIA), and some notable additions, among them the National Tribal Environmental Council, Physicians for Social Responsibility, and the Union of Concerned Scientists.

No word yet from the prez on whether he’s accepting the invitation. German Chancellor Angela Merkel is reportedly out. So is British Prime Minister David Cameron — never mind that Cameron once pledged to lead the “greenest government ever,” and the U.N. postponed the Earth Summit so it wouldn’t conflict with the other huge event of mind-blowing global importance next month: the British Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. (Seriously, Brits, why do you even still have a queen? You tell me that and I’ll try to explain why we have the Electoral College. Deal?) Also bailing are members of the European parliament, who say they can’t afford the hotels, which have jacked up their rates for the occasion.

The good news is that the presidents and prime ministers of more than 130 other nations have RSVPed for the event. And if Obama does decide to attend, I happen to know that there are still bunks available at one of the beachside hostels at Copacabana, cheap. I’m sure he’d find something worthwhile to do.

“They’re very disciplined, they’re very tightly organized, and they have a very emphatic policy of avoiding press coverage,” says Coll, a longtime editor at the Washington Post who is now a staff writer at the New Yorker and director of the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

It took three years to get into the heart of this beast, but Coll ultimately did it, even landing interviews with the company’s longtime CEO, Lee Raymond, a chemical engineer by training who famously denied that humans were causing climate change, and poured company money into climate denial organizations and campaigns.

The result of Coll’s labors is Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power, a book that takes us from the Exxon Valdez oil spill up to the present day, tracking the company’s evolution through an era when its stance on climate change became less and less tenable, both scientifically and legally. I caught up with him over coffee recently as he passed through Seattle.

Q. Tell me about the money ExxonMobil poured into campaigns to discredit climate science.

A. In 1997, when the Kyoto [climate] accords were brought into being, there were many constituents and politicians in the United States that opposed American ratification on fairness grounds, on equity grounds, on economic competitiveness grounds. But I think the record shows that ExxonMobil took a much more radical view of the challenge of Kyoto. More than virtually any other American-headquartered, shareholder-owned corporation, it funded communications groups and campaigning groups to challenge the science itself. I think of it as a pretty radical decision for a corporation of that size and scale in the American democracy to go after the science that way. I think it made a difference, and it still resonates in the American debate. In what other case would you see as wide a gap between what, say, 97 percent of the relevant scientists believe, and what the public believes?

Q. The company now acknowledges that climate change is a reality — and even supported a carbon tax in 2009. Why did it change its story?

A. The corporation had been in a kind of running battle with its opponents, who had gradually exposed these campaigns and [corporate] funding and really had gone after ExxonMobil’s reputation, comparing them to tobacco companies. By 2005, they’re really isolated because they’ve been exposed [as funders of climate denial] and because the science has moved [in support of climate change]. The board and elements of senior management believed they really needed to change their tone, but they didn’t want to restate their views in such a way as might create an opening for liability lawsuits. So essentially the message was, “We were never wrong. We were only misunderstood.”

Q. Could Big Oil someday be forced to pay for its cover-up of climate science, the same way tobacco companies had to pay?

A. Looking back on the tobacco industry, we know that they knew that the actual product they were manufacturing and marketing was dangerous to human health and they suppressed their scientific evidence. They buried that information and sold the cigarettes directly to you and the cigarettes were addictive.

Turn to ExxonMobil by comparison. The causation between selling gasoline and global warming is less direct. There’s another problem which is, who’s the victim, in a legal sense? In the tobacco cases you have deaths, you have people who are sick right now, whereas the victims of global warming probably will live in the future. There are some communities that have tried to sue on the basis of, “We know certainly enough that our community will be destroyed as the seas rise,” but those kinds of indirect claims so far haven’t gotten traction.

But the main difference so far is, we don’t know that [oil companies] were aware within their own scientific evaluation of global warming that the best evidence showed that the burning of fossil fuels was causing global warming and they suppressed it.

Q. But I thought your book showed pretty clearly that ExxonMobil scientists did know that climate change was legit — they were looking for ways that the company could profit from it, right?

A. Investigating how to profit from global warming if it occurs isn’t the same as knowing that it is underway — at least not in a courtroom. You’re right in a directional sense but the tobacco companies fell because decades of lawsuits unearthed voluminous records showing that the companies knew smoking was deadly to their customers but covered up the evidence. With the oil companies, we don’t yet have those kinds of internal documents. It’s possible those documents are there in their archives, but no whistle-blower has walked out to say, “We knew this all along.”

Q. Despite all of its efforts to armor itself from risk and liability, I get the sense from your book that ExxonMobil is vulnerable.

A. They’re a very conservative culture that after the Valdez [oil spill] has tried to wring out human fallibility from their daily activity to the greatest degree human engineering can do it. And yet their business model — what they actually have to do in order to find and pump out all this oil and gas every year — is moving them more and more into a risk environment.

Geopolitically, the only places they can own oil and gas anymore are often weak, unstable states, and that puts them in coup-making countries and guerrilla wars. And then environmentally, the big safe pools of oil are owned by governments in the Middle East and they don’t want oil corporations in there anymore. That means ExxonMobil has to drill in crazy, dangerous frontier environments. So they’re out in deep water, they’re moving into the Arctic.

So they try to give the impression that they have taken all the risk out of their operations and that they simply would not allow another Valdez or Deepwater Horizon to happen. But the fact of the matter is, stuff happens, every day, in their system. It’s like aviation in the ’30s: Before we figured out how to basically idiot-proof our planes, we crashed a lot of them. And that’s what they’re sort of in — that mode trying not to crash too many. Because if you do it in a completely disastrous way, then you bet the company on a single day.

Q. At what point does the risk associated with oil extraction become so great that renewables start to make sense for a company like ExxonMobil — or maybe for our culture as a whole?

A. Our culture as a whole, that’s the key there, because I don’t think ExxonMobil will lead us in that direction. But I thought about that a lot, because they’re so confident in their forecast, at least for 50 years, that the rising middle classes of China and India alone will keep them in the oil business. So I kept thinking, well, what would change that equation?

Suppose we got 10 or 15 years of extreme weather and warm weather, and public consciousness started to shift. Suppose this consciousness is rising and then you get a series of Deepwater Horizons, or something in the Arctic ice that isn’t containable — another one of these catastrophic accidents that demonstrates that the corporations’ claims that they are capable of containment are just not right, or not reliable. Then you could start to imagine politics that would price some of this risk-taking out of our system and incent a more rapid shift toward solar and wind.

Q. Ten or 15 years of extreme weather?

A. Europe has obviously been moving much more aggressively in that direction. They’ve already created a model for how you can do it without completely blowing up your economy. They have obviously certain advantages of size and cohesion and density of population, but it can be done in the United States as well.

Q. Are there any clean technologies that scare this company — something that could force the transition more quickly?

A. The one area where I found that they were the most nervous — they study all of these alternatives, just to see if some black swan is coming their way — and I think that  batteries would be the one thing that could very rapidly transform the transportation sector where oil is most relevant. So that’s it: a globally scalable breakthrough in battery storage capacity. Electric vehicles.

As it happens, we were in the same situation 20 years ago, as the 1992 Earth Summit approached and George Bush Sr. was giving it the old, “Well, maaaaaybe …”

Back then, a group of the major, mainstream environmental groups in the U.S. rallied for the cause. To convince Bush he should attend, they enlisted none other than Darth Vader. Well, his voice, at least — the actor James Earl Jones. They made the spooky film clip below, replete with — is that the Pony Express or the Horsemen of the Apocalypse? — and then ran it in movie theaters around the country. Jones did the voiceover. Need I even tell you that Bush Sr. decided to attend?

In my research into the 2012 Earth Summit, I’ve noticed very little action from the major U.S. greens. A handful of them, including EarthJustice, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Nature Conservancy, and the Pew Environment Group, have been involved, along with groups focused on clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and other issues, but where’s the old guard that sponsored the Darth Vader ad two decades ago? I decided to do a little poking around.

In the credits, the Darth Vader clip lists seven green groups: The National Audubon Society, Defenders of Wildlife, the Earth Day Network, the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club, the Rainforest Action Network, and NRDC. I spent some time poking around each group’s website, and reached out via email and phone to see what they’re doing for Earth Summit 2012. Here’s what I found:

Audubon Society: The website of this bird conservation stalwart featured stories about Burmese pythons in the Everglades and how to “celebrate Mother’s Day with puffins,” but I could find no mention of the Earth Summit. I sent an email to three staffers and received only this reply, from Taldi Walter, the group’s assistant director of government relations: “Nothing on my end.”

Defenders of Wildlife: This national nonprofit’s website included information about saving wolves and sea turtles, but nothing about the Earth Summit. In response to my query, Cindy Hoffman, vice president of communications, sent me links to several helpful sites, but said, simply, “Thanks for reaching out. No, we are not involved with the summit.”

Earth Day Network: Most of this group’s website is focused on, you guessed it, Earth Day, but some digging around unearthed this page with some useful background about the Earth Summit and mention of the group’s Women and the Green Economy campaign. The big “GET INVOLVED” button on the page just sends you to a general signup page, however, with no further information about the summit. A network spokesperson promised to set up an interview with the group’s president, Kathleen Rogers.

The Wilderness Society: The website for this most crunch-tastic of green groups headlined actress Wendie Malick and her fight to protect wild “pockets of wonder,” and the mama duck who is nesting in the planter outside the organization’s Washington, D.C., offices. There was nada about the Earth Summit on the site. I asked Senior Communications Director Kitty Thomas if the group was doing anything for the Earth Summit and she replied, “I checked and it looks like we aren’t.”

Sierra Club: This venerable green giant is doing more to engage with the Earth Summit than any other of the groups I talked to, save NRDC, but you’d never know it from looking at its website, which featured links to videos of celebrities talking about their “favorite piece of America” and Mother’s Day specials from the gift shop.

Justin Guay, with the club’s international program, told me the group is focusing its limited resources on promoting clean energy access for the world’s poor — a major priority for the U.N. The club has spearheaded two letters from business representatives and environmental groups asking the World Bank to commit to funding clean energy, and will hold a side event in Rio advocating for solar and other clean energy sources in the developing world.

I also spoke with Quentin James, national director for the Sierra Student Coalition, the club’s youth arm. James told me the coalition had just selected a group of delegates that will attend the summit, but could not offer a clear agenda beyond “trying to make sure that young people’s voices are heard on all the issues.” He also said they’d be pushing for action on climate change, but discussion of the climate is all but verboten at the official Rio talks — it has its own set of international summits, the most recent of which was held in Durban, South Africa, this past December.

Rainforest Action Network: This group’s website boasted of a stunt in which activists used a banner to “rebrand” the Bank of America football stadium in Charlotte, N.C., “Bank of COAL” (Buuuurn!) and a campaign to save the Sumatran orangutans. I could find no mention on the site of the Earth Summit, nor even the current shit storm brewing over Brazilian rainforest protection. A query for more information got no response.

NRDC: I happen to know that NRDC has been working fervently behind the scenes during the lead-up to the Earth Summit, but there was no mention of that on the group’s homepage, which featured a pop-up ad for “Green Gifts for moms and Mother Earth” with pictures of cute animal babies and their mammas. Nor could I find the Earth Summit on the “issues” page. There was no mention on the “policy” or “international policy” pages. Nada on the “act now” page. To find any mention of the Earth Summit, I had to dig into the staff’s numerous blogs. Sort by “issues” and you’ll find, in the long list, “Race to Rio.”

There you have it: For even the most active of these traditional American Big Green groups, the Earth Summit isn’t frontpage news. For most of the old school greens, it’s not news at all.

Jacob Scherr, NRDC’s director of global strategy and advocacy, who is heading his group’s Earth Summit work, assures me that even though the summit gets little love on the website, his efforts are receiving solid support from inside. He has a team of about 20 people working on the summit.

But what about the rest of the old guard? Several of them, including NRDC, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Sierra Club signed a letter in September 2009 urging President Obama to support holding the Earth Summit, and Scherr tells me he is optimistic that more U.S. green groups will get on board as the meeting approaches. But time is running short.

I can think of a couple of reasons that U.S. environmental groups aren’t rallying this year the way they did back in 1992. International climate talks have bogged down. In a world where massive corporations dwarf many nations, the U.N. doesn’t have the gravity it once did. And unlike in 1992, which spawned major agreements on climate, biodiversity, and other issues near and dear to greenies’ hearts, the focus in Rio will be on spreading the green economy and making good on past promises.

Nonetheless, their silence is notable. These are the groups that know how to call out the cavalry — or the Horsemen of the Fucking Apocalypse if necessary — when the need arises. So far, I’m not hearing any thundering hooves, and neither, I promise, is President Obama. When I last checked, this petition asking him to attend the Earth Summit had garnered a pathetic 321 signatures.

The Earth Summit, for all its flaws, is a huge opportunity for greens. With climate change pushed to the side, discussions will be focused on spreading renewable energy and creating sustainable cities and food systems — the issues that are energizing a new generation of activists. World leaders will be in attendance — presidents and prime ministers, plus mayors of major cities bigwigs from the business world. Young people will be there in force. One would think that the old guard of American Green might at least pretend to be interested.

Find more of Grist’s coverage of the Earth Summit here.

Photo by Richard Masoner/ Cyclelicious.

Today, America kicks off National Bike Month, our annual homage to two-wheeled travel. Here in Seattle, Grist’s hometown, every month can seem like bike month: Hearty souls ride in weather when full scuba gear is requisite. But today brought sunshine, and cyclists swarmed the streets, swerving through traffic, towing kiddie trailers through downtown rush hour, and generally acting like they owned the place.

It was great to see so many people out riding. I was also afraid I was going to see someone die. So for the sake of a safe and successful Bike Month, Grist is offering up a challenge to would-be bike commuters everywhere — and a few suggestions on how to get started.

Get your ass on that bike!

This is a call to all y’all who have threatened for years to pedal to work but just can’t get in the saddle. We know, we know — your bike tires are flat, the chain is rusty, you’re not sure your legs will get you up that last hill. Spare us the excuses: Follow the simple steps below and you’ll be blowing past standstill traffic in no time. If it seems like a lot to learn, don’t worry. Bike Month is in full swing, but official Bike to Work Week doesn’t start until May 14, so you’ve got time to prepare.

Post your stories and/or photos in the comments section below, and we’ll include our faves on the website later in the month. Points given for high fashion, unicycles, unicorns, and Iron-Man commutes that include swimming and/or running sections.

And lest you think we’re all bluster, we’re challenging the Grist staff to get off the bus and start riding as well. We’ll share a few of our most triumphant and harrowing tales in the weeks to come.

Three easy steps to getting your ass (and bike) in gear:

1. Get the thing tuned. Two things, actually — body and bike. Lurch out onto streets when your brakes, shifters, etc. aren’t working properly, and your inaugural commute could turn into a short trip to the curb and back.

Even if you know how to make all the adjustments yourself, consider having a professional bike mechanic do the work. They’re really good at what they do — and besides, it’s way more fun to ride when your bike is tuned to perfection. (Looking for a trusty mechanic? Just ask the hardcore, spandex-clad commuter in your office.)

Likewise, you won’t want to attempt a commute if it’s the first time you’ve been on a bike in three years. That old saying about “it’s just like riding a bike” is true, but again, consider the fun factor: A few spins around the block will prepare your legs and your lungs for the ride ahead, and just make the whole experience that much more enjoyable.

2. Make a plan. When it comes to bike commuting, your route makes all the difference. End up on the shoulder of some freeway, or riding down a narrow street between fast-moving traffic and a line of parked cars, and 50 years from now, you’ll be telling the grandkids about the one time you biked to work and nearly met your end. On the other hand, chart a route that takes you down bike paths and lanes and little-used back streets, and you’ll not only set yourself up for success, but also learn a few things about your hometown in the process. It’s true that you see more, hear more, smell more from the back of a bike than you do in a car.

Google Maps can help you find good bike routes, local cycling groups often produce good bikeway maps — and that mechanic you hire to pimp your ride ought to be a font of local biking beta.

Once you’ve established your route, or a couple of options, consider taking a test run on a weekend morning when traffic is light. It’ll give you a chance to check the route for potholes, blind corners, and other unpleasant surprises. You’ll also get a workout and a sense for how long it will take you to get to the office. Take a friend along who has done a lot of riding so you can pick up tips on gear, shortcuts, and scenic routes.

3. Be safe. One last thought before you roll onto the street: Don’t get yourself run over. That means following the traffic laws — yes, just like you’re driving a car — and not acting like the crazy people I saw this morning in Seattle.

Also, as some wise soul once told me, “Ride like you’re invisible.” It’s best to assume that every driver on the road is completely oblivious to your presence, even if you’re covered from head to toe in blinky lights. You’d be amazed at how often they really don’t see you. It’s not their fault. They’re daydreaming about getting a little exercise.

Want more tricks of the trade? The Grist archives are full of useful info about everything from bicycling fashion to dealing with irate drivers, and from biking with kids to what all those funny markings on the road mean. We encourage seasoned cyclists to add tips in the comments section at the bottom of this post, as the best advice comes from fellow travelers.

Our bet: Once you’ve tried it, you’ll be back for more.

Happy Bike Month everyone! We’ll see you one the roads.

Photo by Gandroid.

News flash: World leaders will gather in two short months at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to discuss the future of the planet. You may have caught the news stories last week about President Obama’s failure to RSVP. You’re forgiven if you missed them. You’re not the only one who just said, “Earth Summit, what?”

But this is for real. And there are a few things that you, good Jedi knights, ought to know about it.

1. It’s kind of a big deal.

The Earth Summit, which comes along once every decade or two, is a chance for world leaders to sit down and consider where Spaceship Earth is headed, and whether we might be wise to chart a different course.

The original Earth Summit, held 40 years ago in Stockholm, Sweden, marked the first global effort to address the mess we humans were making of the planet. The second Earth Summit was held in Rio 20 years ago (which is why this year’s summit has been given the idiotic nickname “Rio+20”). That conference resulted in a major commitment to protect biological diversity and the climate change framework that led to the Kyoto Protocol.

The third Earth Summit (aka “Rio+10”), held in 2002 in Johannesburg, South Africa, produced little action on the international level in part because George W. Bush boycotted the meeting. A delegation of U.S. members of Congress, mayors, and environmentalists helped spark change on the local and regional levels, however.

There have been a million forums and conferences and high-level meetings in between, but the Earth Summits are biggies — and this year’s has an especially worthy mission: to lay the groundwork for a green economy that both saves the planet and wipes out poverty. Winning!

2. There’s a reason you haven’t heard of it.

Unfortunately, the United Nations has a habit of making things inscrutable to anyone who doesn’t have a master’s degree in international policy. (Did I mention the stupid nickname? Marketing tip No. 1: Come up with a title that actually has some meaning outside of a small circle of graying tree-huggers and policy wonks.)

The U.S. government, which has provided almost zero opportunity for meaningful public input, hasn’t helped matters. The media hasn’t exactly been on top of the story, either (guilty as charged), and aside from a few well-hidden blogs, environmentalists have flubbed their efforts to get the word out.

Hell, if U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern hadn’t slipped up last week and told The Washington Post that Obama might be a no-show, the Earth Summit might have come and gone, with none of us any the wiser.

3. It’s going to bomb unless we get our asses in gear.

Listen, I get it. We’ve been burned too many times by these high-level gab fests. We watched U.S. leaders dodge the Kyoto treaty, and the 2009 climate talks in Copenhagen ended with a whimper. But to blow off the Earth Summit because it’s likely to produce nothing but hot air is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Left to their own devices, the delegates in Rio will likely produce an endless list of toothless proclamations and platitudes — particularly if the U.S. isn’t firmly on board. Need proof? Take a gander at the 200-plus-page rough draft of the summit agreement, and then consider that in Rio, the document will be team-edited, line-by-line, by delegates from more than 100 countries.

“You don’t get the most inspiring and innovative policy out of these negotiations,” understates Tara DePorte, executive director of the Brooklyn-based Human Impacts Institute, a small nonprofit that helped create coalition called MobilizeUS to get people involved.

4. It might not bomb if we actually do bust out the lightsabers.

“This meeting still has huge potential,” says Jacob Scherr with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a self-described “summitologist” who has been a fixture at international environmental negotiations for decades.

Sherr is among those who are pushing individual countries to bring their own lists of specific commitments to the summit. He points to several hundred “partnerships” that grew out of the 2002 Earth Summit as examples of how this type of regional or country-by-country progress can work. He also hopes that cities, large corporations, and foundations will join national governments in pledging to do good.

And the real party happens outside the conference room. The Earth Summit comes with a whole carnival of side-events — some of them U.N.-sanctioned, some not — including the Youth Blast, TEDxRio+20, and meetings on science, corporate responsibility, and sustainable cities. Groups that think the U.N. process doesn’t go nearly far enough have organized the People’s Summit, which will “occupy” Flamengo Park.

5. You can help.

Please, tell President Obama to show up. Saying so sends him a clear message that we give a shit about the future of our planet. And if Obama goes, that puts pressure on all other world leaders to attend. (Besides, this is his chance to come off as a total intergalactic hero.) To make things easy, NRDC has created a Facebook petition, and MobilizeUS has a petition on Change.org.

If you want more information, the U.N. has created “briefs” on the critical issues that will be addressed, including jobs, energy, cities, and food. Jacob Scherr’s blog is worth reading. MobilizeUS has a hundred suggestions for ways you can get involved. (Write your representatives! Make a video! Throw a house party [PDF]!) If you want to go all out and drink from the fire hose, check out the U.N.’s Rio+20 website and the Rio+20 Portal from the folks organizing the People’s Summit.

And of course, stay tuned to Grist in the coming months. We’ll bring you regular updates in the lead-up to the summit, as well as live reports from Rio in June. As Yoda once said, “In a dark place we find ourselves, and a little more knowledge lights our way.”

Correction: This story originally stated that George W. Bush refused to even send a delegation to the 2002 Earth Summit in Rio. Not so. The U.S. delegation was headed by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was heckled and booed when he defended Bush’s environmental efforts.

Photo by porchlife.

When the leaders of more than 100 countries meet this June to discuss the small matter of the Future of Life on Earth, President Obama might be there. Then again, maybe he’s got a golf match scheduled that day. He’s not saying.

Yes, it’s true, the guy who just picked up an early endorsement from Big Green groups like the Sierra Club and the League of Conservation Voters, the man who announced in his last State of the Union Address that “America remains the one indispensable nation in world affairs,” may be a no-show at the 2012 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

When asked about the president’s plans on Tuesday, U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern told The Washington Post, “I don’t have any understanding that the president has any intention of going.” A White House spokesperson was noncommittal: “I don’t have any scheduling announcements at this time.”

Ouch. What ever happened to “Love Your Mother”?

The Earth Summit, officially titled the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, is widely known as “Rio+20” because it marks the 20th anniversary of the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. You may recall that our fearless leader at that time, President George H.W. Bush, was in the same state of limbo at this time 20 years ago. He agreed to go only at the last minute, and didn’t bring much life to the party.

Despite the flaccid showing from the U.S., the first Rio summit produced several important policy landmarks, including a major commitment to protect biological diversity and a climate change framework that led to the Kyoto Protocol, a global climate treaty that Bush Jr. famously refused to sign.

Another product of the summit was Agenda 21, a non-binding document that is currently a favorite bogeyman for wing nuts and conspiracy theorists — including the Republican National Committee, which wants to include an anti-Agenda 21 statement in the GOP’s national party platform this fall.

This may explain why President Obama is wary of attending the Earth Summit. I mean, who would want to be associated with a document that promotes such nefarious goals as “fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems, and a safer, more prosperous future.”

And in an election year! It’s political suicide!

To be fair, it doesn’t look like the 2012 Earth Summit will produce anything as bold as the original summit did. Months of political jockeying have produced a proposal that has been dubbed, in wildly ironic U.N. speak, the “zero draft.” The Obama administration has called on the world community to boil this nebulous tome down to a five-page list of action-items, and wants delegates to bring a “cloud of commitments” that they are willing to undertake country-by-country.

Of course, it would help their cause if the president could commit, himself, to showing up. “If President Obama is not in Rio, it will be noticed,” says Jacob Scherr, who tracks international policy for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It will signal that the United States is relinquishing its leadership role in regard to the environment, and more generally.”

Several groups have started online petitions urging Obama to attend the Earth Summit, including this one on Change.org and this one on Facebook. Seeing as he’s planning to attend the G20 economic summit in Mexico a few days prior, maybe we should just send him a plane ticket from there to Rio.

Oh, right! The president has his own plane! Let’s just send him a map — or better yet, a globe. If he’s going to run his planet, Obama had better get serious about saving it.

Watch for more coverage of the 2012 Earth Summit in Grist in the coming weeks. We’ll also report live from Rio in June.

Photo by Greg Hanscom.

Denis Hayes is about the last person on the planet you’d expect to find walking around a construction site in a hardhat, chatting up engineers and contractors. Hayes is best known as the guy who coordinated the first Earth Day, back in 1970, when he was 25. Since that time, he has earned a reputation as a fierce defender of the environment, raking in every imaginable green accolade. Today, he is honorary chair of the Earth Day Network by night and by day,  president and CEO of the Bullitt Foundation, a major force in conservation in the Northwest.

But Hayes is full of surprises. He directed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory under the Carter administration and has taught engineering at Stanford. He can talk BTUs-per-square-foot-per-year with the best of them. Which is handy, because at the moment, Hayes is orchestrating the construction of a new, uber green headquarters building for Bullitt. The building sets out to meet the Living Building Challenge, which means, among other things, that it will generate all of its own water and electricity. The latter is no small feat, when you consider that the building is in infamously gray Seattle – not exactly a Mecca for solar power.

With Earth Day 2012 looming (it’s Sunday, people!), I caught up with Hayes to talk about the big day, green building, and his prognosis for the planet. Here are some snippets of what he told me:

On what he’s doing for Earth Day this year:

I’m going to Washington.

On where the real action will be:

There will be tens of thousands of smaller, grassroots events around the world. We [the Earth Day Network] have a gangbuster new organizer in India. We’ve got events planned in China, Ukrane, in Arab countries somewhat related to Arab Spring …

On the relevance of Earth Day:

Virtually every school in the country does an Earth Day activity or event. Earth Day is the gateway drug to environmentalism.

On the relevance of environmentalism:

We need a shot in the arm. We’ve been pretty disappointed with the environmental movement’s failure to capitalize on things that have gone wrong – the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. These things were all over the headlines, and yet what new policies have they led to?

On the Bullitt Foundation’s new emphasis on cities:

We were, for a long time, the only large environmental foundation in the Northwest. We were involved in the grand forest fights, the fight over the spotted owl, incineration of nerve gas at Hanford. Now there are several dozen environmental foundations in the Northwest, and most of them are focused on nature. There are very few that work on people.

On green building:

It’s irresponsible to build a building that’s not LEED platinum.

On the difference between LEED and the Living Building Challenge:

LEED is just more prescriptive standards. This is all performance-based. We won’t know if we’ve passed for at least a year.

On why Bullitt is framing its building with (green certified) timber:

We’re trying to create a new vernacular for regional architecture. Eighty years ago, if someone showed you a building in Santa Fe, Atlanta, and Anchorage, you would know instantly where those buildings were. Today, it’s all the same damn building.

On the building’s earthquake friendliness:

I don’t know that we can withstand a 10, but I think we can withstand a 9.

On solar power in Seattle:

The sun doesn’t shine here. People think it’s impossible to operate a house on solar energy in Seattle. We basically told the engineers, you’ve got an energy budget of 230,000 kilowatt-hours per year. Design a building that works within that.

On making the elevator as unattractive as possible to save energy:

It will be slow by design, but it will not, as I wished, play bagpipe music.

On using a composting toilet, six stories up:

Sheeeeeew, plunk.

On becoming a green developer:

I find that I quite enjoy it. Nothing would make me happier than to finish this building, spend one year in it, and then have someone buy it from us and start over again.

On why he’s so damned upbeat:

If you don’t have hope, you’re doomed.

Images by Phill.D and Walmart.

“California Declares War on Suburbia,” blared the headline from The Wall Street Journal this week. Quick, kids! To the bunker!

The bomb thrower of the hour was Wendell Cox, a vociferous libertarian opinionater who has made a career of defending America’s suburban status quo. His target: state legislation aimed at curbing greenhouse gases and stemming the tide of suburban sprawl.

“California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home,” he shrieked, “all in the name of saving the planet.”

Saving the planet? What. Ever. Gimme my McMansion in the ’burbs and a nice little doomsday condo. The rest of y’all can go to hell.

If Cox’s (and the Journal’s) aim was to give us all a little comic relief, they succeeded. Josh Stephens wrote a fantastic – and gut-bustingly funny – point-by-point rebuttal called, “Wendell Cox Launches Attack on Regional Planning, Common Sense.” But if the aim was to foster some intelligent dialogue about where we’re headed in California or the country, Cox gets a big fail.

Saying that California, or the entire nation, has declared war on the suburbs? That’s like a spoiled frat boy whining that his parents have declared war on his trust fund because they’ve cut him back to just a keg of beer and a pound of weed each week.

First off, Cox dramatically exaggerates what planners are actually trying to do. He claims that new master plans would force new “hyperdensity development” into narrow corridors along mass transit lines. Stephens bats down that distortion:

“Hyperdensity”? Hyperdensity is Hong Kong. It’s Mumbai. It’s a Hunger Games screening on opening night. The notion that Cox thinks anyplace in California could ever be hyperdense is enough to forever disregard him.

Cox’s biggest lie, though, is his suggestion that the suburbs are the last bastion of affordable living in the United States: “If the planners have their way,” he writes, “the state’s famously unaffordable housing could become even more unaffordable.”

To suggest that suburban existence is cheap is to ignore a host of other costs that come with living on the fringe. Factor in the costs of owning and operating a couple of cars, and even “low-income housing” in the ’burbs quickly soars out of reach for many families.

Even if suburban housing costs are relatively low, somebody has to pay to maintain all those bloody roads. Consider, too, the health costs that come from living in communities built for cars rather than human beings. And don’t even get me started on the bills that are coming due from all the greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere while we drive to the big box and to work.

Society as a whole has been shouldering the skyrocketing costs of suburban sprawl. All California wants to do is take a few of its generous underwriting dollars and put them toward something less expensive, and more sustainable in the long-term. Smart thinking in a time when the state budget is in the tank.

The same is true on the federal level, where the Obama administration has also been accused of waging a war on the ’burbs. Under President Obama, key federal agencies have begun to shift away from subsidizing sprawl and toward reviving cities and creating dense, walkable, transit-friendly communities. But to suggest that Obama and Co. are leading some covert campaign to destroy suburbia is to vastly overestimate the administration’s ability (or desire) to reengineer American government and society.

The roughly $200 million that the administration has doled out to smart growth initiatives over the past two years seems like a lot until you compare it, say, to the more than $40 billion that we spend annually on federal highways. (And where do you suppose those highways go?) Even that paltry sum was apparently too much for the Tea Party, which zeroed out the budget of the administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative this winter.

But the most irksome part of the “War on Suburbia” rhetoric is the notion that people cannot, or do not change. I give Cox and his co-conspirators this: Americans are a recalcitrant lot, rarely willing to give up their daily conveniences to serve a bigger cause. Still, a number of indicators suggests that there is a shift underway: The housing market in the exurban fringe has bitten the dust. Young people are spurning cars in favor of biking and walking and riding the bus. And surveys suggest that, if they had the chance, many Americans would give up the ranch house on the cul-de-sac for a more urban existence.

Will we Americans change our ways in time to avert climatalogical disaster? I’m not putting any money on it. But in the meantime, I’m all for putting a few more of our tax dollars toward more walking-friendly, city-style development, whether that’s in city centers or the suburbs.

That’s not waging war on suburbia. It’s just being a little smarter about where we put our money. Because frankly, we’ve got a lot bigger things to worry about than imaginary battles and black-helicopter conspiracy theories.

Nikki Henderson, executive director of People's Grocery, with the community solar project that is expected to save her organization more than $30,000 over the 20-year lease.

Here’s a not-terribly-novel idea: Get a bunch of people together, pool your money, and invest it in a project or a business that will make enough money to pay you back — hopefully with interest. Banks do it, right? And it seems like a decent way to fund promising green technology like solar power.

Or you’d think so, anyway.

Banks will fund huge commercial solar projects, but when it comes to community-level solar installation, they won’t touch it, says Billy Parish, president of Solar Mosaic, a Berkeley, Calif.-based company that seeds local solar projects. “When we were first getting started, we went looking for funding from banks,” he says. “Wells Fargo told us, ‘Come back to us when you have a book of $50 to $100 million worth of projects.’”

That just wasn’t gonna happen. And that’s why Solar Mosaic’s seemingly mundane business model is so interesting.

Here’s how it works: Solar Mosaic picks a worthy solar project. I’ll use its latest project as an example: the Society of St. Vincent de Paul of Alameda County, a nonprofit that provides free meals, job training, and other services to the needy in Oakland, Calif. To raise the $88,500 required to put solar panels on the organization’s roof, Solar Mosaic is collecting money — large sums and small — from investors who want to see the project succeed. Once the panels are up, St. Vincent de Paul will pay a monthly fee to lease the panels on its roof, providing Solar Mosaic with the cash to pay back its investors — and all the while saving money on its utility bill. At press time, the project was just $1,400 short of its goal.

Solar Mosaic started using this “crowdfunding” model in 2010, and to date, the company has raised roughly $320,000 to fund five solar installations, including an array atop People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in Oakland, as well as the home of artist Shonto Begay on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. It’s similar to the microfinance nonprofit Kiva, which raises money for small businesses around the world. And, like Kiva, its loans are paid back sans interest — you put $100 toward the solar panels for St. Vincent de Paul, and you’ll get $100 back.

But Parish says that’s about to change. Starting this summer, the company will offer investment products that it estimates will pay 5 to 10 percent returns. These products will allow everyday people to get in on a booming business, he says. Bloomberg recently reported that Warren Buffett and Google are pouring billions into solar energy development, lured by 15 percent returns.

“Why would I invest in Solar Mosaic instead of going out and buying a little stock,” you ask? Read this heartwarming letter from former Goldman Sachs Executive Director Greg Smith and then repeat after me: “I am not a muppet. I am not a muppet. I am not … ”

“A lot of people are afraid to put money into the stock market these days, and for good reason,” Parish says. “Young people especially are looking for ways for their money to earn a good rate of return and do something good in the world.”

It’s true that as with any investment, there’s a risk that you’ll lose your shirt. But at least you’ll have the satisfaction of having created clean energy and green jobs and supporting a project that’s easy to get your head around (derivatives, wha?). Besides, Parish points out, your investment is backed by the solar panels themselves, which continue to generate electricity — and revenue — even if the tenants change in the building below.

It’s solar power brought to you by the people, a rooftop revolution grown from the grassroots.

The front-runner in the race is Jill Stein, a Boston physician and veteran activist and candidate with the Massachusetts Green-Rainbow Party. (Note to the good people of the Bay State: We get that you’re trying to be inclusive, but a name like that is NO WAY to win respect in the world.) She is currently trouncing the second-place runner, former sitcom star Roseanne Barr. (Note to the good people of the Green Party: Oh, never mind …)

Lest you think this is all rainbows and ponies, however, Stein is not messing around. She says she became involved in politics after witnessing firsthand the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, learning disorders, autism — problems that she traces to toxic chemicals, an industrial food system, and a society built around the automobile.

Stein’s presidential platform includes universal health care, tuition-free higher education, and forgiveness of student debt. And at the center of it all is a Green New Deal that she says will put millions of people to work, tackle the climate crisis, and address our failing health as well.

The Green Party will choose its candidate for president at a national convention in Baltimore in July. If things continue as they have been, Stein will win the spot handily. (She has won 10 of 10 state primaries, plus the District of Columbia.) I talked with her earlier this week.

Q. Your website today says Mitt Romney has invited you to debate him. It’s an April Fools’ joke, right?

A. Well, that part of it is a joke. He did not invite us. But the rest of it is actually true. I have debated him [during the 2002 race for Massachusetts governor], and I was declared winner by more than one objective source.

Q. Did someone really say you were the only adult in the room?

A. Yes, that was an editorial in the Boston Globe, and if you watch the debate you’ll see why.

Q. Doesn’t a sense of humor automatically disqualify you from the presidency?

A. A sense of humor and lack of corporate funding are substantial obstacles. But I think that we’re part of a very large movement to change the way that politics works — so that the joke is no longer on us.

Q. Running for president under the Green Party banner, your motivations have to be something besides actually landing in the White House. I assume your campaign is largely an effort to change the system.

A. That’s right, and a journey begins with the first step. That said, no one in their right mind ever expected that young people in the streets were going to give the boot to an entrenched dictator, either in Egypt or in Tunisia. So remarkable things have been happening, likewise with the Occupy movement. There is enormous public will out there for substantive change.

The solutions that we are promoting — we don’t need to convince people that we need a climate we can live in, that we need health care as a human right, that we need to be creating jobs rather than just giving more tax breaks and giveaways to CEOs who just pocket the change — these are solutions that people already support. The question is whether we can actually harness our political system and move them forward.

Q. As disappointing as Obama has been, there’s a lot at stake in this election. Why should voters give you a vote when we could end up with a situation like we saw with Ralph Nader and Al Gore in 2000?

A. Progressives have been told we dare not vote for our values and our vision because dangerous things will happen — witness Ralph Nader. We have 10 years of experience with muzzling ourselves politically, and it’s very clear now that silence has not been an effective political strategy, and that the politics of fear in fact has delivered all those things that we were afraid of.

Obama has basically embraced most of Bush’s policies, including drill baby drill, pro-nuke, pro-coal, undermining the Durban [climate] accords. He’s celebrating the beginnings of the Keystone pipeline. We still have twice as many troops in Afghanistan as we had under George Bush. The only reason Obama withdrew from Iraq was because he was unable to negotiate immunity for the troops, so he wound up having to accept what was George Bush’s timeline for withdrawal.

So the point here is that by being quiet, we have essentially allowed corporations to run government whole hog. Obama has been very responsive to his corporate sponsors. So it’s really critical that we have an opposition voice.

Q. In how many states are you even on the ballot?

A. We’re currently on in 20 states. We expect to be on the ballot in 46, maybe 48 states. We do have some very difficult states — two that are impossible barring millions and millions of dollars.

Q. Is there any hope of getting you into a real debate?

A. Absolutely. The Commission on Presidential Debates has a standard, which is 15 percent [of the national electorate, as determined by public opinion polls]. If everybody who cared about the climate got on board and actually stood up and said that they’re supporting this campaign, that alone might be enough to get us into the debates. If all the students out there who are up to their eyeballs in debt stood up for this campaign, we would easily be at 15 percent.

If I can quote Alice Walker, “The biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it to start with.” And that’s true, for the environmental movement, the student movement, the antiwar movement, health-care-as-a-human-right movement — you put us all together, we have the potential for a Tahrir Square type event, and [to] turn the White House into a Green House in November.

Q. Is the Green Party itself something of a kiss of death in this country right now?

A. We ran a referendum here in Massachusetts — I’m talking about the Green Party along with some nonprofits. The referendum was non-binding. We basically proposed redefining economic development to be green, sustainable, re-localized, and healthy, and to create local small businesses and cooperatives in the green sectors of the economy, rather than just dishing out billions to multinational corporations that are part of the old fossil fuel economy.

We didn’t have money to spend on the referendum. We were hoping maybe we could get 10 or 15 percent [of the vote]. We actually got between 85 and 95 percent in every community — not just the treehuggers, but also the postindustrial, desperately poor urban communities as well. To me, it confirmed what I find in my everyday experience: People are into this. They get it.

Q. You’re using the same model for the Green New Deal you’re pushing on the national level. Tell us about that.

A. It’s an emergency solution that will put 25 million people back to work, end unemployment, jump-start the green economy for the 21st century, and substantively combat climate change. It would put communities in charge of defining what jobs they need. These jobs would be community-based, living-wage, full-time jobs, and would basically run the spectrum of jobs that make communities sustainable — clean manufacturing, local organic agriculture, public transportation, energy-efficient as well as active transportation, and of course clean renewable energy, conservation, weatherization, efficiency.

We would also include teachers, nurses, day care, violence prevention, drug rehabilitation, affordable housing construction, etc., so there would be a spectrum of jobs that make our communities environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable. The cost would be on the order of the first stimulus package, but it would create a whole lot more jobs, because the first stimulus package was largely tax breaks and subsidies for large corporations.

Q. I think a lot of working people feel burned by the green economy because we didn’t see the jobs that people like Van Jones were promising — certainly not right away.

A. It’s not only the green jobs that failed. Obama’s promotion of additional free trade agreements has been devastating to working people. He has not delivered on the Employee Free Choice Act. He has not stood up to the so-called “right to work” states, which actually undermine not only worker pay but also safety on the job.

Obama’s first appointments were Larry Summers, who laid the foundation for Wall Street’s waste, fraud, and abuse. He then went on to appoint Timothy Geithner to be head of the Treasury, who had headed the New York Fed while all that was going on. And then he brought in Jeff Immelt, the king of layoffs and factory closures. The head of GE was brought in to head Obama’s jobs council — the guy who had off-shored more jobs than any single person in America was brought in to head the Obama jobs program.

So it’s no wonder that working people are very skeptical of whatever Obama’s going to propose. And I think vote for him only out of fear. And that’s where Alice Walker comes in again, that the biggest way people give up power is by not knowing they have it.

Q. Last question: How do you travel on the campaign trail? Humvee? Private jet?

A. My dream is to get a veggie-oil bus. I take the train whenever I can. When there’s no choice, I fly, and when we drive, we drive in a Prius. So we don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk all the way.