by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 26, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By Agence France Presse
China currently supplies about 95 percent of world demand for rare earths, which are used in high-tech equipment from iPods to missiles and have seen prices soar in recent years.
Lynas hopes to begin operations within months, producing an initial 11,000 tonnes of rare earths a year and effectively breaking the Chinese stranglehold on the materials.
But more than 5,000 people, many wearing green and holding banners reading “Stop pollution, stop corruption, stop Lynas”, gathered in Kuantan to call for the plant to shut down, chanting: “We want Lynas to close down”.
Lee Tan, an activist who helped organise the rally, said: “The plant is dangerous because it produces huge amounts of waste that is radioactive”, adding residents were worried the waste could leak into the ground and water.
Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim also attended the protest and his colleague Fuziah Salleh said the plant should be relocated “in the middle of the desert”.
“The green rally is in support of sustainable development and Lynas is definitely not a sustainable development,” she told AFP.
Read more from The Australian
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 26, 2012 | Protests & Symbolic Acts, Repression at Home
By Will Potter / Green is the New Red
More than 70 cities will be protesting corporations that are part of a secretive lobby group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, that helps corporate interests literally write our laws.
Occupy Portland has called for a national day of protest on February 29. The protests will focus on corporations that pay tens of thousands of dollars to be part of ALEC, in exchange for the power to draft model legislation which is then introduced in state legislatures across the country — all the while, most state lawmakers have no idea the bills were actually written by corporations.
Corporations have used ALEC to draft model “eco-terrorism” legislation that classifies civil disobedience as terrorism. Other bills drafted by corporations attack union rights, environmental protections, and any attempt to restrict corporate profits. Here is a closer look at how ALEC stealthily drafts legislation.
In other words: ALEC is a trojan horse used by corporations to sneak legislation into statehouses across the country.
As organizers explain in their collective statement:
There has been a theft of our democratic ability to shape and form the society in which we live. The corporations, which run our government, place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and domination over equality. This situation stems from our society’s obsession with profit, consumption and greed, which corporations only take to its logical and frightening conclusion. In this obsessive pursuit of profit above all else, our voices have been drowned out…
I think this is a sentiment shared by countless Americans, whether they identify as part of any movement or not. It’s quite common even in apolitical crowds to hear people talk about the power that corporations have over the political process. However, the omnipresence of this corporate influence in our culture can make it difficult to identify the specific mechanisms that allow it to exist.
That’s what is so inspiring to me to see the Occupy Movement focus on ALEC. It demonstrates an increasingly sophisticated movement willing to engage complicated political processes, and merge widely-held public sentiments with concrete strategies that aim for the wheels of the trojan horse.
From Green is the New Red: http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/occupy-protests-alec-f29/5781/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 25, 2012 | Education, Movement Building & Support
By Dave Cooper / Huffington Post
While combating dirty fossil-fuel energy sources like coal and shale gas, activists can sometimes find themselves so intensely focused on one issue that they lose track of important developments in other related fossil fuel campaigns.
Mountain Justice Spring Break (MJSB), March 21-28 in northern West Virginia, seeks to build bridges between the long-established anti-mountaintop removal (MTR) campaign in Appalachia and the fast-growing anti-fracking campaign.
College students and young people on their spring breaks from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Virginia, New York and other states will attend MJSB for a week of trainings, skill-sharings, workshops, documentary films, speakers from the mountains and the hollows — learning about Appalachian music and culture through bluegrass, folk and old-time music in the evenings. A special emphasis at MJSB is connecting activists in the anti-MTR campaign with the “Fracktivists” in the anti-fracking campaign.
Mountain Justice Spring Break will offer site tours to see mountaintop removal and fracking sites in Wetzel County, West Virginia, plus tours of a coal slurry impoundment and a strip mine near Morgantown, West Virginia.
MJSB participants will also hear from citizens who live close to coal-burning power plants with air pollution and ground water contamination from multiple large power plants and large coal ash impoundments.
Other MJSB workshops will focus on anti-oppression, community grassroots and campus organizing, listening projects, coal slurry impoundments, non-violent direct action, tree-sits, media skills, fundraising, citizen air monitoring, and coal ash.
The MJSB camp location in northern West Virginia is surrounded by drilling sites for oil and natural gas, and large fracking equipment and tanker trucks constantly thunder up and down the main highway.
The dual focus of MJSB 2012 is significant, because while natural gas drilling is booming in places like northern West Virginia, coal continues to decline as a source for America’s electricity: According to the US government’s Energy Information Authority (EIA), from 2007 to 2011 coal declined from 49% to 43% as a share of the nation’s electricity supply. The EIA projects that coal will continue to decline over the next 25 years to 39%.
Yet the Sierra Club’s Bruce Nilles, Senior Director of the club’s Beyond Coal campaign, calls these numbers conservative and predicts that the percentage of electricity supplied by coal will fall even farther. “For many years the EIA has exaggerated coal’s prospects for the future, and every year has had to downgrade its projections,” said Nilles. “We know coal’s future is even darker than EIA is predicting.” For example, in 2010 the EIA predicted it would take 25 years for coal to drop to 44% of the electricity supply — it actually took only two years.
The EIA attributes this decline in coal to “slow growth in electricity demand, continued competition from natural gas and renewable plants, and the need to comply with new environmental regulations.”
While the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign has been very successful in opposing new coal plants and helping shut down dirty, older power plants, the club formerly referred to natural gas as a “bridge fuel” — a transitional source of energy until more renewable sources of energy come on line.
A Feb. 2 story in Time magazine’s Eccocentric blog points out that the club had in the past accepted donations from the natural gas industry and notes that “mainstream environmental groups have struggled to find the right line on shale natural gas and the hydraulic fracturing or fracking process.” Since 2010, the Sierra Club has refused any further donations from the natural gas industry, even turning down a promised $30 million donation, but the issue has caused concern among club members in states where fracking is underway. The Sierra Club no longer uses the term “bridge fuel,” and in 2010 launched a Natural Gas Reform priority campaign.
Environmental groups combating fossil fuels are facing titanic energy industries and a congress that is deeply indebted to them for big campaign contributions. There are many difficult choices and difficult decisions. No one has all the answers, but building stronger bridges between the campaigns against coal and fracking — as Mountain Justice Spring Break seeks to do — seems like a good start.
From Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dave-cooper/mountaintop-removal-and-f_b_1299580.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 23, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Mining & Drilling
By ICTMN Staff
The Alaska Native group REDOIL has joined with eight environmental groups in an effort to stop a drilling ship from drilling in Arctic waters, the Associated Press reports.
The drilling ship Noble Discoverer, operating for Shell Oil, was granted an air quality permit by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to drill three exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s northwest coast this summer.
REDOIL (Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands) has joined Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Northern Alaska Environmental Center, Oceana, Pacific Environment, Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society in suing the 9th Circuit Court.
According to AP, Colin O’Brien, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental law firm representing the groups, said “We think EPA took shortcuts. … We believe the permit failed to ensure that all air pollution controls are in place and that all standards are met for this major new source of pollution in the Arctic.”
A Shell spokeswoman said that the company’s vessels met EPA standards, but O’Brien disputes this. Shell hopes to send a second drill ship, the Kulluk, to the area, and the Discoverer would be accompanied by more than a dozen support ships. O’Brien says that EPA “only required [the] new [emissions] technology on the Discoverer drill ship and failed to hold Shell’s other vessels to the same standards.”
From Indian Country Today:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 17, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Lobbying
By Mongabay
Federal public prosecutors in Brazil have challenged a plan to strip protected status from 86,288 hectares of land to make way for five new dams, reports International Rivers. The challenge is set to be heard by Brazil’s Supreme Court, according to the group, which is campaigning against new hydroelectric projects in environmentally-sensitive areas.
The prosecutors, known as the Ministério Publico Federal (MPF), filed a complaint against Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff on the grounds that eliminating the protected areas violates Brazil’s Constitution and its environmental legislation. The lead prosecutor, Roberto Monteiro Gurgel Santos, said that the hydroelectric projects lack requisite environmental impact studies.
São Luiz do Tapajós and Jatobá, a pair of dams on the Tapajós river, would affect 75,000 hectares alone, including 17,800 hectares in the Amazonia National Park, 36,158 ha in the Itaituba 1 and Itaituba 2 National Forests, 856 ha in Crepori National Forest, and 19,916 hectares ha in the Tapajos Environmental Protection Area. Meanwhile 8,470 hectares would be excluded from the Mapinguari National Park for the Jirau and Santo Antônio dams on the Madeira River, and 2,188 acres would be excised from the Campos Amazônicos National Park for the Tabajara dam on the Machado River.
The order to reduce the extent of the protected areas is in question. The Rousseff Administration says the move was proposed by ICMBio, the federal environmental agency, but International Rivers says internal memos from the local staff of ICMBio “expressed direct opposition to the proposal”.
“According to them, the reduction of protected areas, in the absence of socio-economic and environmental assessments of impacts and risks, is likely to cause tremendous damage to the region’s biodiversity, including endemic and endangered species, and to the livelihoods of local populations,” said International Rivers in a statement.
Brazil is in the midst of a dam-building spree in the Amazon — some 60 hydroelectric projects are planned for the region, including the massive Belo Monte dam on the Xingu river. Brazilian construction firms are also actively pursuing projects on Amazon tributaries in neighboring countries, including Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador.
Brazil says the dams represent a source of clean, renewable energy, but critics maintain the dams displace local people, disrupt fisheries, and flood large tracts of forest, contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 14, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Protests & Symbolic Acts
By iLoveMountains.org
More than 1,200 people are gathering in Frankfort, Ky. on Feb. 14 to celebrate I Love Mountains Day and call for an end to mountaintop removal coal mining—a destructive practice that has shortened lifespans and caused illnesses in Central Appalachia for decades.
The iLoveMountains.org team has just launched an innovative new web tool to illustrate the overwhelming amount of data that shows the high human cost of coal mining, and we invite you to check it out. See it live now by clicking here.
The Human Cost of Coal page maps national data including poverty rates from the 2010 U.S. Census, birth defect rates from the Center for Disease Control, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, and life expectancy and population numbers from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The site also includes summaries for twenty-one peer-reviewed studies that show human health problems such as heart, respiratory and kidney diseases, cancer, low birth weight and serious birth defects are significantly higher in communities near mountaintop removal mine sites.
Ada Smith, a resident of Letcher County Kentucky explains the significance of The Human Cost of Coal:
“Though many of the (health) studies state the obvious for those of us living in these communities, the scientific facts give us much-needed evidence to make sure our laws are truly enforced for the health of our land and people. If we choose to not pay attention to these recent studies we are deciding to make Appalachia a sacrifice zone. What we do to the land, we do to the people.”
From EcoWatch
