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AEP settlement exempts company from enforcement for 10 years

Earlier this week brought news of a settlement agreement between utility giant American Electric Power and the U.S. EPA in which the company agreed to install some $4.6 billion in pollution controls at some of its power plants and pay over $70 million in penalties and cleanup costs. Today, The Washington Post reported that the […]

How should the environmental movement spend its money?

Tonight will witness the biggest social event of the D.C. environmental calendar: the Green Corps 15th anniversary bash. All the green glitterati will be there to honor Rep. Ed Markey and John Lewis with awards -- and more importantly, to raise money to support training organizers for the environmental movement.

I've been helping out with the event for the last few months and I'm excited about it. It's made me reflect on how much the environmental movement has changed since I graduated from the year-long Green Corps organizing fellowship in 2002 -- and think anew about the relative importance of organizing to other methods of achieving social change.

For those who don't know, Green Corps is the field school for environmental organizing. It generally takes 20-35 recent college graduates (out of more than 800 who apply!) and trains them in all the basic skills that go into running and winning an environmental (or really any social change or political) campaign. Then you get sent out somewhere in America to lead an environmental campaign yourself, working under the banner of a local, state, or national environmental group. My first campaign, for instance, was to work with Greenpeace to secure $5 billion in financing from the California government for clean energy financing. It's a lot more responsibility than most people think they'll have right out of college, and when you win, as you often do, it's hard not to embrace organizing for the long run, as most Green Corps organizers do. As a result, they've gone on to do amazing work with everyone from the Sierra Club to Move On and the Gulf Restoration Network.

During my Green Corps year from 2001 to 2002, though, organizing was almost all we had. It was difficult for national environmental groups to get big-time media coverage of any environmental issue, much less the climate crisis, which seemed to be going nowhere as long as President Bush was in office. Now, since An Inconvenient Truth hit movie screens, it seems like everything is media: whether you read Women's Wear Daily, watch NBC or Fox, or read your local paper, the planet is hot, hot, hot!

That change has had a huge impact, altering the spectrum of what's possible: we no longer have to beg for crumbs or think up cartoonish stunts to get attention (though no one should estimate the power of a cartoonish stunt to get attention). Suddenly, even Republican presidential candidates are forced to address the climate crisis and Democrats in Congress are actually considering fairly ambitious climate legislation. People across the country are making small changes to their own lives that might add up to something. More importantly, politicians at every level are more willing to give pro-environment legislation time on the agenda.

Here's why I keep coming back to organizing -- and think the environmental movement needs to continue to focus on building its long-term organizing capacity rather than becoming overly enthralled with a pure media approach:

Bookies make Al Gore the odds-on favorite to win the Nobel Peace Prize

The winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, and bookmakers are giving Al Gore the best odds of winning. Think he’ll actually bag the prize? Vote in our poll on the Grist homepage.

Images of a sustainable-food revolution

Imagine a place where residents pull together to create a thriving store and restaurant serving fresh, local food. Imagine a place where the money appears, the dreams become real, the produce and pastured meat taste like home. Imagine a place where officials support these dreams with policies that fund organic farmers and encourage the purchase […]

Find a ride to our reader party!

Heard the hype about Grist’s hometown throw-down and purchased your ticket, but haven’t quite figured out what to wear how you’re gettin’ there? You’re not alone. Grist reader Diana from Olympia, Wash., wrote to us asking if anyone else from her area might be carpooling, and we thought to ourselves: selves, might there be others […]

Notable quotable

"People use fossil fuels because the good Lord put them on earth for us to use." — Fred Palmer, senior VP of PR for coal giant Peabody Energy

Anti-bottled-water campaign kicks off in cities across U.S.

A Think Outside the Bottle campaign kicked off today, urging municipal governments to cut off bottled-water contracts and to press for greater disclosure of the source of bottled H2O. The campaign is spearheaded by Corporate Accountability International and joined by cities including Boston, Minneapolis, Sacramento, and Portland, Ore., many of which held taste tests today […]

In the farm belt, a look at the extremes of agricultural production

When I arrived in Iowa on a reporting trip this summer, I expected to experience it with city eyes: frankly, as a rural backwater. I’ve lived on a farm in the Appalachians of North Carolina since 2004, but the ten years before that, I lived in Mexico City and New York City. I don’t know […]

New developments in WTO fisheries subsidies negotiations

Some new ideas by Brazil and Argentina during the Doha round negotiations at the World Trade Organization have left me feeling rather optimistic about the ability of the WTO to actually help address one of the world's biggest environmental problems: global overfishing.

Their proposal is a real attempt by developing countries in the ongoing negotiations about fisheries subsidies to establish some rules to prevent countries from subsidizing their fishing sector without regard to the fish!

The proposal still needs work. But finally, leadership by the developing world to try a find a workable approach to ensure that development keeps the best interest of marine life and habitat in mind while also tending to the needs of people.

Evaluating U.S. and EU policies

The last couple of months I've been busy preparing two major reports on government support for biofuels, both for the Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI) of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD). These reports follow on from our October 2006 report on support for biofuels in the United States, which we commissioned from Doug Koplow of Earth Track, and which has been cited numerous times on these pages.

Last month, we issued what we call our "Synthesis Report," our overview of government support for biofuels in selected OECD countries. Coming out right on the heels of the so-called "OECD Paper" (actually, a discussion document for a meeting of the Round Table on Sustainable Development, to which I contributed), "Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel in Selected OECD Countries" hasn't yet attracted much attention in the press. It is rather dense in parts, I'll admit. But it contains some crunchy numbers.

For example, we estimate that total support to biofuels in OECD countries was at least $11 billion in 2006, with most of that provided by the U.S. and the EU. Expressed in terms of dollars per greenhouse-gas emissions avoided, the levels vary widely, but in almost all countries, whether for ethanol and biodiesel, they exceed $250 per tonne of CO2-equivalent. That is several multiples of the highest price of a CO2-equivalent offset yet achieved on the European Climate Exchange.

Then, last week, we released our long-awaited report on "Government Support for Ethanol and Biodiesel in the European Union" ...