FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SEPTEMBER 4, 2001
3:28 PM
 CONTACT:  Redefining Progress
Ansje Miller of Redefining Progress, 011-27-72-11-20-326 (in Durban); Email:
miller@rprogress.org
Craig Cheslog of Redefining Progress, 510-444-3041, ext. 305 (in the U.S.);
Email: cheslog@rprogress.org
Beverly Wright, 011-27-82-85-80-333 (in Durban) Email: dscej@aol.com
Tom Goldtooth, 011-27-82-85-80-856 (in Durban) Email: ien@igc.org
 
 
 
Diverse Groups Release a Consensus Statement Exposing Climate Injustice and
Environmental Racism 
  
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA - September 4 - U.S. delegates to the World Conference
Against Racism connect and condemn the United States administration's walk
out of both the Kyoto Protocol and the WCAR as similar acts of environmental
racism and climate injustice, said representatives from a diverse group of
U.S. organizations attending the WCAR.
People of color, Indigenous peoples and workers bear a disproportionate
health, social, and economic burden of a society addicted to a fossil fuel
economy. As such, they are the first victims of government inaction,
corporate abuse, and negligent public policy. "Foot dragging and inaction is
not only immoral, but is sending a death warrant in people of color
communities, which is tantamount to environmental racism," said Dr. Robert
Bullard, National Black Environmental Justice Network and Professor of
Sociology at Clark Atlanta University.

In April 2001, 25 civil rights, academic, religious, grassroots, and policy
organizations gathered to share testimonies of struggle, and strategies for
reducing the human impact on climate change and for achieving environmental
and economic justice. Today at the WCAR, these diverse groups unveiled a
statement of solidarity about the problem of global climate change. This
statement recognizes the disproportionate impacts on low-income, people of
color, and Indigenous peoples, and workers. In a call to action, the group
demands that governments and corporations include the concerns of these
affected communities and enact strong and fair policies to address climate
change.

(The full text of the statement is available at
www.rprogress.org/media/durban/)

Among the inequities of climate change:

-- Climate change-related insect and rodent-borne diseases, respiratory
problems related to air pollution, and deaths and illness related to thermal
extremes, will disproportionately impact the poor and communities of color
because of the distribution of impacts and access to healthcare. -- People of
color are concentrated on the coastlines, vulnerable to erosion and flooding
due to sea level rise. -- While wealthy homeowners have the means to move,
low-income households often do not and, usually renters, lack insurance to
replace possessions lost in storms and floods. -- Indigenous peoples are
already losing traditional medicinal plants to a warming climate, and
subsistence households are suffering from the loss of species unable to adapt
climate change.

"If the U.S. Administration truly represented Americans most affected by
climate change, they would not have walked away from the Kyoto Protocol and
the WCAR," said Jenice View, Executive Director of the Just Transition
Alliance.

Although President Bush cites concern that curbing carbon dioxide emissions
would "harm our economy and hurt our American workers," over 2,500
economists, including eight Nobel Laureates-declared that policies to slow
climate change can be enacted without harming either the United States
economy or living standards
(www.rprogress.org/publications/econstatement.html).

"Fair and low-cost approaches to climate change can and must be implemented.
Given the evidence, the Bush Administration appears to be selling out the
U.S.'s people of color, low-income, and Indigenous communities to the fossil
fuel industry that supported his election," said Tom Goldtooth, Executive
Director, Indigenous Environmental Network.

Signatories present at the World Conference Against Racism included:

-- Dr. Robert Bullard, National Black Environmental Justice Network
(www.ejrc.cau.edu)
-- Pamela Chiang, Asian Pacific Environmental Network (www.apen.org)
-- Felilcia Davis, Ben E. Mays Center National Education Resource Center
(www.dogonvillage.com)
-- Tom Goldtooth, Indigenous Environmental Network (www.ienearth.org)
-- Ansje Miller, Redefining Progress (www.rprogresss.org)
-- Dr. Yvonne Scruggs-Leftwich, Black Leadership Forum
(www.blackleadershipforum.org)
-- Ruben Solis, Southwest Workers Union (www.swunion.org)
-- Amit Srivastava, Corpwatch (www.corpwatch.org)
-- Jenice View, Just Transition Alliance (www.justtransition.org)
-- Dr. Beverly Wright, Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, Xavier
University (www.xula.edu/dscej/)

###
 
Published on Tuesday, September 4, 2001 in the Boston Globe
An Ecological Betrayal
by Theodore Roosevelt IV
 
''THERE'S BEEN an oil spill in Alaska; it looks like a big one.'' That was
John Sununu, the White House chief of staff during the adminstration of
George Bush Sr., speaking to the EPA administrator, Bill Reilly, after the
spill of the Exxon Valdez. Twelve years later, more than half the affected
species have not recovered.

The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is the biological heart of one of the
last great wilderness areas in North America, considered by many the American
Serengeti.

Despite the stalwart opposition of most Democrats and moderate Republicans,
despite the overwhelming objections of the American people, the House of
Representatives recently passed an energy bill that would open these
ecologically valuable and sensitive lands to oil drilling. The bill goes to
the Senate this fall.

Yet again, on an environmental issue of grave concern to the American people,
the more conservative elements in the Republican Party, my party, choose to
turn from its own proud conservation heritage and from its own rank and file.
Instead, it bows to myopic partisan pressures.

The American people rightfully expect protecting our environment to be a
bipartisan undertaking. Unfortunately, they no longer even associate the
Republican Party with conservation. They have forgotten, just as our party's
leadership has forgotten, that it was President Eisenhower who gave us the
Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge; President Nixon who gave us the Clean Air
Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Environmental Protection Agency; and
Teddy Roosevelt who gave us the first national wildlife refuges, national
monuments, and millions of acres of public land.

Today, another Republican, John Sununu, the New Hampshire congressman, has
given us a disingenuous amendment to the House energy bill. The amendment is
an attempt to disguise as conservative a willful and aggressive intrusion on
the pristine wilderness of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. It claims to
limit the drilling to 2,000 acres, but this includes only the land where
drilling pads and supports actually touch the ground. This is like measuring
the New Jersey Turnpike by the acreage occupied by its tollbooths, in which
case the turnpike would be situated on 2.77 square miles.

We are facing a potential energy crisis, but it has nothing to do with lack
of supply. There is no shortage of fossil fuels in the world pantry. The
problem is that America contains only 4 percent of the world's oil reserves.
The administration claims that draining our small oil stocks will feed
America's undisciplined appetite for energy and give us greater independence
from foreign powers. Only Christ could perform the miracle of the loaves and
the fishes.

Earlier this year I gave a speech to Asian business leaders on globalization
and the financial markets. To the surprise of some of my colleagues, I
included a section on the global environment. To their amazement, all the
follow-up questions were on the environment. Those Asian business leaders are
strategizing for the future, and they get the big picture.

While the economic forces unleashed by globalization are responsible for
breaching the Berlin Wall, while those forces break through trade barriers
and challenge national and ideological borders, the one wall with which we
are heading for a collision is the carrying capacity of the global
environment and the world's depleted stock of renewable resources.

Efficiency and technological innovation will continue to fuel the global
economy, but those values must be tempered by decency. Restraint and
discipline are no longer optional.

The American people also get the picture. When the administration talks about
''balancing'' environmental and energy needs, the American people recognize
the problem: Those needs are not currently in balance. Our environmental
accounts are in the red; we are running on credit, and we are running out of
it.

As James Gustave Speth of Yale University's School of Forestry states, ''We
are entering the endgame in our relationship with the natural world. Whatever
slack nature previously cut us is gone.''

We Americans are heading into a carbon-constrained, ecologically fragile
future for which we are ill prepared. Under the present leadership we are
dragging our feet, willing to sacrifice vital natural resources instead of
making real investments in current efficiency and future energy technologies.
This is hardly a conservative agenda.

Moderate Republicans, and I am one, are distressed that an administration
that strenuously claims to be conservative is instead intent on maintaining
undisciplined and wasteful consumption. This is unsustainable public policy,
and I doubt that it will go far in achieving victory in the midterm
elections. Bad public policy and bad politics are a lethal combination.

Our country is about more than the success of our economic enterprise, and it
is that more that keeps us strong: our moral vigor, determination, and grit,
our openness and generosity. The vastness of these lands has harbored the
vastness of the American spirit, and our people will not part with either
easily. And they shouldn't.

The Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is this nation's Rubicon; it is the place
where we will learn if we possess the restraint, reason, and decency to
respect the values preserved there. It is the place where we will learn
whether our nation will rise honorably to the challenges of this new century
or capitulate to them.

Theodore Roosevelt IV is a member of Republicans for Environmental Protection
and the great-grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt.

 
Holes Seen in Job Estimates for Alaska Drilling
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
 
 
nvironmental groups released a study today that says the jobs gained from oil
drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would be far fewer than the
750,000 that many unions have said the drilling would create.

The League of Conservation Voters and other environmental groups that oppose
the Alaska drilling say the study should go far to offset the main argument —
new jobs — that the Teamsters and other unions used to persuade 36 House
Democrats to vote a month ago for the drilling, a hotly contested issue in
Congress.

The study, by an economist with long ties to unions, is the environmental
movement's latest weapon in its biggest feud with labor in years.

Many environmentalists are angry at the Teamsters and several building trade
unions for playing a pivotal role in lining up enough support among House
Democrats to secure approval of the drilling, a major victory for the Bush
administration.

The administration will try to persuade the Senate to approve the drilling
this fall, but environmental leaders say they hope the new study will help
ensure that it does not.

"Some labor unions outmaneuvered us in the House," said Deb Callahan,
president of the League of Conservation Voters. "But we still think we can
win this thing in the Senate."

The study, done by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center of Economic and
Policy Research, faulted the 1990 study that the Teamsters and the oil
industry repeatedly cited to argue that the Alaska drilling would create
750,000 jobs.

Mr. Baker's study estimated that the Arctic drilling would create just 46,300
jobs. He concluded that the earlier study, commissioned by the American
Petroleum Institute, was far off in estimating that the oil from the refuge
would represent 3.5 percent of world oil production. Relying on more recent
estimates, his study found that the refuge would account for 1.15 percent of
world production.

As a result, he said, the Arctic drilling would push down world oil prices
far less than forecast by the 1990 study, which was conducted by the WEFA
Group, based in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. The 1990 study said the low prices would
give the American economy a shot in the arm, creating hundreds of thousands
of jobs.

The 1990 study predicted that other oil-producing nations would do little to
reduce output to push prices up once the Alaska drilling helped pull them
down. Relying on estimates that the WEFA Group used in more recent studies,
Mr. Baker concluded that other nations, including those of the Organization
of Petroleum Exporting Countries, would cut production far more than the 1990
study estimated to offset output from the refuge. That, he said, would
nullify much or all of the lower prices generated by the Arctic drilling.

Citing his prediction of 46,300 new jobs, Mr. Baker wrote, "Economic impacts
of this magnitude are almost too small to be noticed, given the size of the
U.S. economy."

Jerry Hood, a Teamsters official based in Alaska who is a special assistant
to the union's president, James P. Hoffa, on energy policy, defended the 1990
study. "We are comfortable with the jobs number developed in that study," Mr.
Hood said.

Some environmental leaders said the feud over Arctic drilling could
jeopardize efforts by labor and environmentalists to work together on many
issues, notably fast-track trade legislation.

"There's clearly been a rupture between the Teamsters and the environmental
movement," said Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club. "The Teamsters got
away with casting the impression that all of labor favored the drilling,
which it wasn't. It's going to be extremely important to the future of the
blue-green alliance how the rest of labor helps set the record straight."

In recent days, the Service Employees International Union and the United Auto
Workers have spoken out against the drilling.

Mr. Pope said he was surprised that the Teamsters would work so closely with
the Bush administration on energy policy after President Bush took several
anti-labor actions early in his administration.

"I don't understand how Hoffa says he's bitterly fighting the Bush
administration on Mexican trucking, which he says is his top priority, and
then he takes Arctic drilling, which should be a much smaller issue for the
Teamsters, and he uses it to legitimize Bush by giving him a major
legislative victory," Mr. Pope said.

Mr. Hoffa said supporting Arctic drilling made sense. "It provides jobs for
Teamsters," he said. "It's a sound answer to the need for additional oil for
the country."
 

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