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Youths Sue U.S. Government Over Climate Inaction
Amel Ahmed, Al Jazeera
Young people across the country are suing several government agencies for failing to develop a climate change recovery plan, conduct that amounts to a violation of their constitutional rights, says their lawyer Julia Olson.
Their futures are at stake, say the young plaintiffs.
“Climate change is the biggest issue of our time,” said 13-year-old Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, a member of nonprofit Kids vs. Global Warming, a plaintiff in the suit.
“It’s not every day you see young people getting involved politically, but the climate crisis is changing all that. Every generation from here on out is going to be affected by climate change,” added Roske-Martinez, who founded environmental nonprofit Earth Matters and organized successful actions in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado.
The federal suit, which has made its way to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is part of a groundbreaking nationwide legal campaign spearheaded by youth and backed by some of the world’s leading climate scientists and legal scholars…
(4 May 2014)
Posing as U.S. Officials, Yes Men Announce Renewable Energy Revolution at Homeland Security Congress
Juan Gonzalez, Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
The culture jamming activist group The Yes Men have struck again. Earlier this week, members of the group spoke at the Homeland Security Congress posing as U.S. government officials. At the conference, they announced a fictitious new U.S. government plan called "American Renewable Clean-Energy Network" to convert the United States to 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. After the announcement, The Yes Men and indigenous activists led the audience in a large circle dance to celebrate the fictitious plan. We air excerpts from their action, including the speeches delivered by "Benedict Waterman," undersecretary of policy implementation at the U.S. Department of Energy, and "Bana Slowhorse," a Bureau of Indian Affairs official with the "Wannabe Tribe." The group joins us in studio to talk about their action. Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum are two members of The Yes Men, and Gitz Crazyboy is an activist fighting tar sands extraction in his Native lands…
View transcript and video
(2 May 2014)
FTSE joins Blackrock to help investors avoid fossil fuels
Pilita Clark, Financial Times
BlackRock, the world’s biggest fund manager, has teamed up with London’s FTSE Group to help investors avoid coal, oil and gas companies without putting their money at risk…
(28 April 2014)
What’s at Stake in Harvard’s Fossil-Fuel Divestment Debate
Todd Gitlin, The Atlantic
Climate change, as Harvard University President Drew Faust said last year, is “one of the world’s most consequential challenges.”
Divest Harvard, a student group supported by large campus majorities and with considerable alumni and faculty backing, agrees. Why, then, are the protesters at loggerheads with the president about whether the university should sell its holdings in fossil-fuel corporations?
What’s going on is more than a disagreement about tactics or style. It’s a collision over what they believe the university’s ethos ought to be, which amounts to, in turn, a dispute over how social change ought to take place. This dispute is fundamental and time-honored. It is playing out at universities all over the country, and it is not going away…
(30 April 2014)
Divest image via 350org/flickr. Creative Commons 2.0 license.
‘Divest It Like It’s Hot’
Jamie Henn, Huffington Post
In a video that features the Bernie Lean, ballet, and yes, lots of vests, the Santa Clara divestment crew breaks down the case for ditching fossil fuels:
Let me tell it to you straight
Our business model today just isn’t okay
We’re majorly stuck, you know that it’s cray,
In the shortsighted precedent of yesterday
We got C02 levels going out the wazoo
And a toxic addiction to fossil fuels
These corporations are destructive, arrogant and dumb
The way they’re burning carbon like it’s 451
Let’s keep them accountable, show ’em what the score is
Cause with massive subsidies they’re still making record profits
They break the bank while the water gets higher
And as the planet gets hotter
It’s coming down to the wire
How do we escape this system of destruction?
Let’s remove our stakes – it’s a matter of deduction
(30 April 2014)
