Obama in Boston Fri - come protest cap and trade, false climate solutions, and US obstructionism at UN climate talks!

When: Friday, October 23, 2009, 11:00 am to 1:00 pm

Where: MIT, near Kresge Auditorium
48 Mass. Ave, Cambridge

PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY

President Obama will speak at MIT this Friday, October 23 about clean energy.

The Obama administration has been obstructing UN climate talks with bullying tactics, while he supports the proven ineffective scheme of cap and trade to reduce greenhouse emissions.  Cap and trade creates a mammoth carbon market, a rich new playing field for financial speculators, saves polluters money while allowing them to delay desperately needed emission reductions, and lets forest and agricultural emission reduction projects (real or fake) to be used as "offsets" to allow real and extra emisisons from smokestacks.  He supports the House and Senate climate bills (Waxman-Markey and Boxer-Kerry) that threatens to decimate our forests by incentivising biomass incineration and exempting all associated greenhouse gas emissions.  The bills also perpetuates coal, bringing online hundreds of dirty coal-fired power plants, while providing tens of billions of tax payer subsidies on the expensive, unproven Carbon Capture and Sequestration technology, which faces the inevitable leakage problem from underground storage sites, that Greenpeace pointed out as a serious environmental and human health hazard.  (More policy discussion below).

Come out and protest!

THIS FRIDAY, Oct 23rd, 11 am - 1 pm at MIT.

We demand a real climate solution, that actually looks at the science, and stop pretending that measures to protect polluters and special interests are somehow going to save the planet.  See below for directions to get there.

We will gather at 11:00 with signs and leaflets across from the main MIT building, 77  Mass. Ave. - in the grassy area near the street, before one reaches the Student Center.  President Obama's speech will be in Kresge Auditorium at noon.

We will be joined by peace activists: http://justicewithpeace/obama-mit-oct23
MIT's announcement of the event is at http://web.mit.edu/events/presidentialvisit/.

Bring as many friends as you can, and bring signs/banners (we'll have some extra ones if you need).  Some ideas of signs include:

CAP & TRADE = FALSE SOLUTION
NO FALSE CLIMATE BILL
NO OFFSETS
BIOMASS NOT CARBON NEUTRAL
<350 PPM, NOT WEAK TARGETS!
CLEAN COAL IS A LIE!
FUND CLIMATE, NOT WAR!
STOP US OBSTRUCTIONISM
DEEDS, NOT WORDS!
You can't negotiate climate change!
CLEAN ENERGY = CONSERVATION NOW
WAGE WAR ON WARMING
STOP the WAR/MING
STOP THE WARS, STOP THE WARMING
350 PPM = NO MORE OIL WARS
GET THE PROFITEERS OUT OF MY GOVERNMENT
DON'T TREAD ON 450
CLIMATE CHAOS IS NOT RATIONAL POLICY
The Whole World Is Watching, The Whole World Is Warming

Contact any media in your area and let them know what you are planning to do!

Hope to see you Friday!  If you plan to come, please let us know which (if any) signs you'll bring.

Thanks for all you do to preserve a livable planet!

Maggie, Emily, Eli, Jill, John, Maureen, Lorenzo and David - the Secure Green Future team
781-316-8283.  info@securegreenfuture.org

PS: Don't forget the important International Day of Climate Action this Saturday, October 24th, including some amazing events being planned in Boston, in Concord, and across Massachusetts. Visit 350.org for more information. You can find events here. And it's not too late to create an action. There are currently over 4300 events posted across the planet, so Saturday promises to be a breathtaking demonstration of an emerging global immune response beginning to resist climate change. [More on this later!]
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Directions to MIT Kresge Auditorium:

The Kresge Auditorium is located halfway between Central Sq and Kendall Sq, on Mass Ave.
Address: 48 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
Map:  http://whereis.mit.edu/?selection=W16&zoom=17
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More info:

Following the strategies outlined in a Sep. issue article in Foreign Affairs (which had to have been written already in early summer), the Obama administration is taking an obstructionist stance at UN climate talks, insisting that the odds of a comprehensive agreement in Copenhagen are 'vanishingly small' (guess who has the most control of the odds?), and therefore the world should abandon any binding emission reduction targets, and instead adopt a patchwork of country-specific policies determined by each country, and hope that we'll somehow avoid catastrophic climate change by doing so.  That report also focused on how US can avoid being blamed for Copenhagen's failure (it's the main worry of the US), by reframing Copenhagen as the first step in a very long-term process, analogous to nuclear nonpreliferation negotiations and global trade agreements.  This is exactly what the administration adopted.

As it turns out, climate talks is not even the first place where this administration has been obstructing international processes, and providing cover for other developed countries to roll back on their commitments and hide behind a "progressive" regime. See this excellent analysis by Naomi Klein in the Guardian.

Obama threw his full weight behind cap and trade, which, in the words of the nation's top climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, is the "Temple of Doom".  Cap and trade is extremely complex, non-transparent, fraud and influence prone, manupulable and gamable, sets up a vast carbon derivative market, creates perverse incentives, while ensures that the weak "cap" in reality is also the "floor", in that emissions will not be allowed to fall lower than the cap, while offsets and other "cost control" mechanisms ensure that emissions invariably will exceed the "cap".  Everytime cap and trade was tried, even in the best examples, it always proved itself less effecitve and more problematic than direct regulation and simple pollution taxes. More here.

We don't have the time for more trial and failure (and the next biggest market crash from carbon trading).  A recent UN Environment Program report tells us that, even if all climate legislations around the world (including the pathetic US House-passed climate bill Waxman-Markey) are carried out under the most optimistic assumptions, the world will still warm by 3.5 degrees C (6.3 degrees F) above pre-industrial by 2100.  Remember that 2 degrees C is the max of possibly managable warming, and 1 degree C is the most we could allow if the world wishes to preserve coral reefs and the entire ecosystems that depend on them.  Current US climate bill doesn't even aim for a 450 ppm greenhouse gas stabilization level, which, even if achieved, would only produce a 50/50 odds of staying below 2 degrees C warming.  More here.

Come join us Friday to tell President Obama we are not hoodwinked by false solutions.  We demand a real solution that involves direct regulations, a simple, revenue-neutral carbon tax coupled with equal dividends, and absolutely no offsets!  We demand a return to below 350 ppm within decades!