November 27, 2012

13-A November 27, 2012

CITY CLERK’S OFFICE - MEMORANDUM

To: City Council

From: Councilmember McKeown

Date: November 27, 2012

13-A: Request of Councilmember McKeown that the Council direct staff to evaluate how best to divest fossil fuel investments from the City's portfolios, and return with policy options as part of the February mid-year budget review.

13-A November 27, 2012 Climate Activists Hit Hard With 'Do the Math' National Tour | The Nation 11/18/12 12:30 PM

Walmart Strike Spreads to Texas; Organizers Promise Black Friday Protest Climate Activists Hit Hard With 'Do the Math' National Tour Tom Hayden November 13, 2012

LOS ANGELES —Less than a week after the presidential election, a fired-up crowd of climate activists cheered Bill McKibben and the “Do the Math” roadshow at their UCLA stop. “Do the Math” is on a three-week caravan traveling by biodiesel-powered bus, with a stop in Washington, DC, to challenge the president to take quick action on the environment.

The twenty-one-city tour promises to be a model for progressives committed to aggressively pushing Obama and Congress even About the Author before Obama’s second term formally begins in January.

Tom Hayden One hundred chanting, marching students attended the UCLA Senator Tom Hayden, the Nation Institute's event from the Claremont Colleges, fifty miles away, to announce Carey McWilliams Fellow, has played an active role in American politics and... their campaign to seek a campus divestment from the “rogue” fossil fuel industry. Already this week Seattle’s mayor instructed his Also by the Author finance team to investigate how to divest city funds, and Maine’s Unity College announced its plan to divest. Remember and Thank George McGovern (Lived History) 350.org, the sponsoring organization for “Do the Math,” is calling on The Democrats and historians threw George colleges, religious institutions and public pension funds to make no McGovern under the bus. Now it is time for his new investments in fossil fuels, “wind down” current investments in resurrection, in a search for history’s lessons. five years. Divestment would lead fossil fuel providers to begin to curtail lobbying activities in Washington, DC, and prepare to Tom Hayden transition to a future as “energy companies.” The strategy is partly Remembering Russell Means (Lived modeled on the global campaign of divestment from South Africa, History) although the analogy is incomplete. South Africans were carrying Russell was a reminder that the wars against out a liberation war that could not be defeated, with powerful indigenous people, and the conquest of their African-American and clergy constituencies in America. Legislators resources, are far from over, and that we like Maxine Waters and Willie Brown carried divestment bills for cannot be fully human until remorse with our seven years before being signed in California, tipping the balance eyes wide open allows the possibility of against apartheid. Despite its efforts, 350 is not inclusive of black or reconciliation. Latino constituencies although is message is one of environmental justice. The UCLA event was overwhelmingly white on a campus Tom Hayden where a majority of undergraduates are non-white.

How to explain 350’s scale? Just as a pointless war can spark a massive peace movement, the corporate- governmental attack on the sources of life itself causes an instinctive human response on behalf of the earth. The scale and energy of this movement goes far beyond the considerable organizational power of the well-funded and well-staffed national environmental groups. It rests on the collective legacy of many previous upsurges going back as far the millions who gathered at the first Earth Day, the vast anti-nuclear power movement and the Nuclear Freeze effort. It has something to do with the 51-year-old McKibben’s flexible, improvisational, gentle and grounded style of leadership. A longtime resident of Vermont, a graduate of Harvard and a lyrical nature writer, his personal authenticity contains echoes of Henry David Thoreau. He seems to know that he is a prophetic instrument of an emerging force much greater than himself.

The 350.org plan to attack the fossil fuel companies fully complements the peace movement’s demand to end the Long War on Terrorism, which is also an energy resource war. 350.org, however, is a single-issue movement lacking a platform on wars and military spending. Rapid progress towards renewables, however, will solidify public support for avoiding energy wars in the Persian Gulf.

The renewable resource that 350.org taps into is one of human protest energy rarely seen in recent years. In late 2010, for example, 350.org coordinated nearly 8,000 actions, most of them colorful and symbolic, across 188 countries.

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The 350.org approach borrows in part from the “anti-globalization” and rainforest action movements’ focus over two decades on attacking corporate power directly, although this time at its core power rather than the reputation of its brand. Naomi Klein is a key supporter, and is featured in one of several videos employed in the caravan’s multi-media presentation.

“If they are trying to take away our planet,” McKibben argues, “we simply have to try to take away their profits.” As he has in many writings, McKibben relies on environmental science to make an apocalyptic case. In order to keep rising climate heat below 2 degrees Celsius, he says, only 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions can be allowed;

but the fossil fuel industry already has 2,795 gigatons of CO2 in its reserves. Therefore, he concludes the very “business model” of giants like Chevron, Exxon Mobil and BP must be changed before they overheat the planet by implementing their conventional model.

If the “do the math” argument is too speculative for some, the 350 argument is bolstered powerfully by the rash of catastrophic weather events ranging from droughts to superstorms now slamming the continent with increasing force and regularity. Superstorm Sandy put Michael Bloomberg into Obama’s column, and New York governor Andrew Cuomo has vociferously attacked the climate-deniers. With California and New York becoming major supporters of energy efficiency and green infrastructure, any Obama energy or climate initiatives will begin with stronger support than four years ago. Even Obama’s former regulatory chief, Cass Sunstein, is writing about the economic benefits of environmental regulations compared to the status quo. Sunstein says the cost of the East Coast hurricane will be $50 billion and will reduce US economic growth by one-half percent.

On the XL Pipeline project, Obama soon may face another round of civil disobedience like that which caused him to delay the approvals process last year. Van Jones, formerly Obama’s “green jobs” representative, who now endorses 350, says the pipeline was a “done deal” until the protesters circled the White House. Obama now faces competing pressures from two core constituencies on the pipeline, from building trades and environmentalists. A likely rerouting of the pipeline around the Nebraska Sand Hills and most of the Ogallala Aquifer could mitigate objections from Nebraskans, but the dangers of disastrous spills, escalating costs and polluting emissions will remain. Attempts by Transcanada to open an alternative route through British Colombia face enormous First Nation and environmental opposition. Hanging over the controversy is the chilling judgment of NASA’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen, that it’s “game over” for the climate if the pipeline is completed.

Obama’s options seem to be: first, continuing to defer a final decision while monitoring the costs, risks and levels of opposition; second, meet with the 350.org protesters to hear their concerns directly; or make a dramatic counter-offer involving conservation, renewables and global leadership over the next four years, to be announced in his second Inaugural Address in January.

While the environmental caravan demanding renewable resources rolls towards Washington, Obama and top US officials are scheduled to visit Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar and Australia to shore up the American military presence in the navigation routes carrying oil and resources from Asia to the Persian Gulf. The so-called US geostrategic “pivot” towards Asia inevitably begins a new cold war with China over fossil fuels. Game over? Perhaps it’s sudden death overtime. As Al Gore described the terrible dilemma in Earth in The Balance (1992): “At this stage, the maximum that is politically feasible still falls short of the minimum that is truly effective.”

Now’s the time to read Naomi Klein on whether Superstorm Sandy will push us to realign our relationship with the natural world: Superstorm Sandy: A People’s Shock?

Tom Hayden November 13, 2012

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Oil-producing countries like Venezuela must change. (Chico Sanchez / EPA)

By Bill McKibben November 9, 2012

It's not just Sandy. Sandy was off-the-charts terrible, a storm that broke every record in the books: for storm surge, for Superstorm Sandy: How soon we forget barometric pressure, for sheer size. But it also blew in toward the end of what will be the warmest year in U.S. history. It was a year that already had seen a summer-in-March heat wave described by meteorologists as the most statistically freakish weather event in the continent's history, an epic http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mckibben-climate-change-20121109,0,7030709.story Page 1 of 5 It's time for fossil fuel companies to do the right thing - latimes.com 11/18/12 12:23 PM

drought that raised grain prices 40% around the world and a record-setting melt of Arctic ice. Cartoons »

It was a year in which scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who couldn't take the subway to their Manhattan offices in the days following Sandy, calculated On thin ice in the Arctic that the 1-degree rise in global temperature we've already seen has raised the chance of extreme heat events by an order of magnitude.

In other words, this year has been a wake-up call. There's no longer any room for doubt or for wishful thinking about the future. We know the damage that global warming has done so The pros and cons of trying to adjust far, and we can predict with ugly certainty what will happen if the global thermostat we don't change course. Photos: Flip through Ted Rall's editorial The world's governments — the Group of Eight, the Group of cartoons 20, Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, China, the U.S. — have all agreed to try to prevent the planet's temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees. That's too high a threshold — we've already seen that a 1-degree rise is melting the Arctic — but America's water mirage it's the red line the world has drawn, and it's better than Can you trust online hotel nothing. reviews?

The world's scientists have agreed, roughly, about how much more carbon we can emit and have a reasonable chance of staying below that 2-degree line: about 500 billion tons by 2050. At current rates of emissions, we'll blow past that mark Safety and sea life at Diablo Canyon in less than 15 years.

We'll have our work cut out for us to meet that target in the best of circumstances. But here's a really scary complication: Final 'Twilight' just shy of a number recently supplied by the Carbon Tracker Initiative franchise record in Britain. The world's fossil fuel companies, and the countries that operate like fossil fuel companies (think

Sandy and the winds of change Venezuela or Kuwait), already have about 2.8 billion tons of carbon in their reserves, five times more than the most LAPD officer used Taser See more stories » conservative governments on Earth think is safe to burn. on handcuffed woman That coal and oil and gas hasn't yet been taken from the ground, but the companies and governments that own it Ads by Google clearly plan to extract it. They've declared it to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, borrowed money E15 Puts Engines at Hollywood legacy is against it, sold shares based on it. And they are searching for auction house dream Risk more. Exxon alone already has in its reserves 6% of the Study Finds 5 Millions carbon necessary to take us past 2 degrees , and they boast of Vehicles Are Unfit for E15. Get spending $100 million a day looking for more. the Facts. This math has a clear pragmatic meaning: We have to figure SmarterFuelFuture.org out how to keep that coal and oil and gas in the ground so it Ads by Google never gets burned, and the only way to do that is by speeding up the transition to renewable energy. That will require spending on research, and it will require a stiff price on carbon to spur conservation. That will be hard, but it's not impossible. Germany is the one big country that's taken this crisis seriously, and there were days this summer when it generated more than half its power from solar panels within its borders. Germany's program isn't perfect, but then, Germany doesn't have Florida and Arizona and New Mexico and the California desert.

The math has a clear moral meaning too: Companies that are determined to continue searching for and encouraging the use of fossil fuel are, in the age of global warming, rogue forces. They could choose instead to be part of finding solutions by spending more of their massive research budgets on developing clean energy instead of finding and marketing more fossil fuels. Instead, they make massive political contributions to ensure their continued input on the laws that affect them. (Just weeks before Sandy, Chevron gave $2.5 million to a conservative "super PAC" with close ties to http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mckibben-climate-change-20121109,0,7030709.story Page 2 of 5 It's time for fossil fuel companies to do the right thing - latimes.com 11/18/12 12:23 PM

House Speaker John A. Boehner.) Most Viewed Latest News Reining in the fossil fuel purveyors will probably require revoking their social license, as we did in the past with tobacco companies and with firms that did business in apartheid South Africa. Until oil Feinstein has 'concern' about Rice's Benghazi companies decide to stop blocking change in Washington and other world capitals and start turning talking points 11/18/2012, 11:12 a.m. themselves from fossil fuel companies into energy companies, their favored status — with its tax Israeli airstrike hits Gaza family's home, killing 12 breaks and other perks — should be revoked. 11/18/2012, 11:02 a.m.

All of us, clearly, help fuel global warming. But we don't always have the choice not to because we live NFL Sunday night spotlight: Steelers vs. Ravens in a world with highways instead of trains and subsidized oil instead of subsidized solar power. We 11/18/2012, 10:02 a.m. can make changes in our personal lives, but until we can break the power of the fossil fuel industry, Obama lands in Thailand even as Gaza crisis it's useless to expect our leaders to act. The 20-year bipartisan resistance in Washington to making draws his attention 11/18/2012, 10:02 a.m. real progress on climate is the ultimate proof of the industry's power. Former Romney supporters leading immigration reform 'super PAC' 11/18/2012, 9:40 a.m. This year should have opened our eyes. And now that they're open, maybe we'll finally read the math that's written on the wall.

Bill McKibben is the founder of the global climate action campaign 350.org. The organization is currently visiting 21 American cities in 21 days with its "DoTheMath" roadshow, which comes to Los Angeles on Sunday.

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