HeadCount Blog

Last fall, we had a poll measuring how many of you had health insurance and where you got it. About 35% of you said you were without insurance, and it kicked off a great stream of comments posted online. We’re now going to start asking a new question every few weeks. We invite you to participate in the poll and, if so-inclined, expound a bit on why you answered the way you did.

This month’s community question deals with sustainability and climate change. Here goes:

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What was achieved, or not, in Copenhagen?

The Copenhagen Accord’s goal is laid out in Article 2:

2. We agree that deep cuts in global emissions are required according to science, and as documented by the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report with a view to reduce global emissions so as to hold the increase in global temperature below 2 degrees Celsius, and take action to meet this objective consistent with science and on the basis of equity. We should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible, recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries and bearing in mind that social and economic development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of developing countries and that a low-emission development strategy is indispensable to sustainable development.

Judging the accord almost solely on the basis of its domestic political implications, The New York Times declares a victory for Obama, who “may have improved his chances for passing global warming legislation in the Senate by forging an interim international agreement here that puts both rich and poor countries on a path to curtail greenhouse gas emissions.”

Details of the Accord remain to be worked out before it becomes binding. The target for the global temperature reduction mentioned in Article 2 will not have to be met until 2020 – several election cycles from now. The Senate climate legislation mentioned above is a long ways away from being passed. The United States still refuses to sign the 1997 United Nations-sanctioned Kyoto Protocol agreed to by 187 nations.

The Copenhagen Accord, on the other hand, works outside the United Nations. Obama cut a deal that would put the United States, India, China, Brazil, and South Africa at the center of climate control — leaving Europe out of the deal altogether. With no central authority, such as the UN, to monitor these countries’ promises, the whole accord resembles something of a big handshake deal among these countries.

What do the experts think? Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, takes an extremely negative view on the proceedings:

Two years of climate change negotiations have now ended in a farce in Copenhagen. Rather than grappling with complex issues, President Barack Obama decided instead to declare victory with a vague statement of principles agreed with four other countries. The remaining 187 were handed a fait accompli , which some accepted and others denounced. After the fact, the United Nations has argued that the document was generally accepted, though for most on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.
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Obama’s decision to declare a phony negotiating victory undermines the UN process by signaling that rich countries will do what they want and must no longer listen to the “pesky” concerns of many smaller and poorer countries. Some will view this as pragmatic, reflecting the difficulty of getting agreement with 192 UN member states. But it is worse than that. International law, as complicated as it is, has been replaced by the insincere, inconsistent, and unconvincing word of a few powers, notably the US. America has insisted that others sign on to its terms – leaving the UN process hanging by a thread – but it has never shown goodwill to the rest of the world on this issue, nor the ability or interest needed to take the lead on it.

From the standpoint of actual reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions, this agreement is unlikely to accomplish anything real. It is non-binding and will probably strengthen the forces of opposition to emissions reductions. Who will take seriously the extra costs of emissions reduction if they see how lax others’ promises are?

Ed Millbrand in the UK’s Guardian sees the glass half full, however. He blames China for not agreeing to 50% reductions in global emissions by 2050, or on 80% reductions by developed countries – although China could merely have been taking the fall for other developed nations. He sees hope in the international consensus acknowledging the science behind fears of climate change, and likes the idea that billions of dollars may soon trickle down from rich countries to poorer countries to ameliorate the effects of such change. In the end, he writes, that anything was done at all must be regarded as an accomplishment, particularly in the current economic climate.

The challenge for all of us is not to lose heart and momentum. The truth is that the global campaign, co-ordinated by green NGOs, backed by business and supported by a wider cross section of the public, has achieved a lot. We would never have had targets from so many countries, the engagement of leaders, and the agreement on finance without this sort of mobilisation.

We’re big fans of Radiohead’s Tom Yorke and his involvement in the climate-change movement.

If you receive the HeadCount Sustainability & Conservation e-newsletter, you already know that Yorke kicked off The Age of Stupid’s September 21 premiere with a New York City acoustic performance that was broadcast live to theaters screening the film. (Yorke performed “Reckoner,” as seen below). This drama-documentary-animation hybrid depicts an old man living in the devastated world of 2055, watching “archive” footage from 2008 and asking, “Why didn’t we stop climate change while we had the chance?”

At 2 p.m. EST today, Yorke will appear on “The Stupid Show,” airing live from the same building where the international climate change negotiations are taking place in Copenhagen. (President Obama will speak at the United Nations Climate Change Conference tomorrow.)

Presented by Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong and Mark Lynas, author of Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, “The Stupid Show” has been webcasting live every night of the conference, which concludes tomorrow. If you miss today’s live webcast, check “The Stupid Show” website for the show’s archives, including Yorke’s appearance.

(Nicole Parisi-Smith has been blogging about the Conference on Climate Change at Pop Culture Activist. Get the latest HeadCount Sustainability & Conservation e-newsletter here.)

The Age of Stupid: Trailers: Global Premiere from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

When I was a kid I was always a little confused by Fishstick Fridays. (And no, I really don’t like fishsticks, but thanks for asking.) Growing up in WASP-y Oregon, I didn’t make the Catholic connection until my teens. I eventually married a vegetarian of Irish-Catholic descent, and together we produced a couple of baby vegetarians, and so my meatless Fridays usually extend well into the following week. That is, unless I’m in a restaurant or dining with friends, in which case anything goes. So I guess that makes me a flexitarian or something.

But I am a guilty meat eater, just as I am a guilty driver, airplane passenger, and garbage generator. I know how those delicious sausages are made, but that knowledge does nothing to enhance my dinner. I believe that personable Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan is essentially wrong and that annoying Face on Your Plate author Jeffrey Masson is probably entirely correct when it comes down to the higher moral road on the issue. Information concerning the extent to which meat production is wreaking havoc on the environment – whether by clear-cutting rainforests to increase beef production or the creation of manure lagoons by factory farming – is widely available. And so are skeptics just as willing to argue that rice fields emit huge amounts of methane.

Fortunately, longtime vegetarian Paul McCartney has figured out a way to make the carnivore’s dilemma a little less painful. During the European Parliament’s “Less Meat = Less Heat” hearing on December 3, Sir Paul and climate-change expert Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri teamed up to endorse the Meatless Monday concept.

McCartney is pushing a ‘Meat-Free Mondays’ campaign, aimed at encouraging people to cut down on their consumption.

“Our campaign says ‘try one meat-free day in the week’,” he said.

“It’s very do-able. If you say to people, ‘go vegetarian,’ that’s very hard to do.

“But if you suggest to people ‘one day,’ I think most people will have a bit of a blow-out over the weekend and Monday they go to the gym.

“Once, for instance, we didn’t recycle – we weren’t interested, but now it’s an accepted part of our lifestyles.”

That’s what I’ve always liked about McCartney. He’s a radical who usually comes off as eminently reasonable, even a little old-fashioned. As demonstrated by his new corny-as-Kansas ode to Meat Free Monday:

Hundreds of books have been written about visualizing information, how we transform abstract data into images and concepts that actually mean something to us.

Seattle-based artist Chris Jordan takes photographs of common objects, even garbage, and digitally manipulates them into larger statements about mass consumption and waste. The work seen above, for example, is called “Plastic Bottles” (2007) and “depicts two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.”

Other works depict 166,000 packing peanuts representing the number of overnight packages shipped by air in the United States every hour, the 28,000 42-gallon barrels of oil consumed in the US every two minutes, and the 426,000 cell phones disposed of in the US every day. Looking at Jordan’s work helps adjust your sense of scale. We sure are a big country and we sure use a lot of stuff.

“Plastic Bottles” is part of Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait:

Running the Numbers looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 32,000 breast augmentation surgeries in the U.S. every month.

This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. Employing themes such as the near versus the far, and the one versus the many, I hope to raise some questions about the roles and responsibilities we each play as individuals in a collective that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.

“Chris Jordan: Running The Numbers – It Changes The Way You View The World” is on display in Seattle’s Art + Science at Pacific Science Center through January 3.

As Andy Bernstein pointed out in his report from the White House Clean Energy Economy Forum yesterday, the Obama administration appears willing to look at any and all options to create jobs, particularly in the green sector.

The question is, How fast can they do it? A simmering populist unease at the hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus funds that went to big banks rather than small businesses or entrepreneurs or infrastructure is likely to reach a boiling point by the next election year or two. For young voters the question seems to be: What will run out first, their patience or their credit?

Faced with massive postcollegiate debt and a still-shrinking jobs market (we only lost 100,000 last month, and that’s considered progress), one of the more promising solutions lies in the clean-energy field. The resulting energy independence would allow us to spend less money on defense. The $700 billion or so we spent last year, this year, and on into the foreseeable future on basic defense, not to mention the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would go a long way toward providing food, healthcare, and education to just about everyone who needed it.

Brad Johnson at The Wonk Room wrote a concise manifesto for a green economy that’s well worth reading.

The challenges facing President Obama and the U.S. Congress have not gone away. Paul Krugman worries that “unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more,” because “much of the political establishment now sees stimulus as having been discredited by events, so that it’s very hard to come back and scale the policy up to where it should have been in the first place.” But there remains a pathway out of Krugman’s dire vision of “a process of defining prosperity down” — if enough politicians embrace the alternative vision of a green economy, promoted by political leaders as far apart on the ideological spectrum as Van Jones and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The basic concept is simple, as the video from Repower America shows — heat up the economy by cooling down the planet.

The Recovery Act made a down payment for clean energy jobs, primarily through public spending. But the creation of a carbon market would drive private investment away from pollution and into clean energy. A Political Economy Research Institute clean energy economy report found that public-private investments of $150 billion a year could be sustained over ten years and create 1.7 million net jobs in the U.S. economy. Fossil-based energy production sends money overseas and sinks money into capital-intensive projects like mining and drilling, whereas clean energy and energy efficiency requires greater local and labor investment.

The stronger the carbon cap is in a carbon market, the greater the investment. A $150 billion carbon market would be about double the size of what is being considered by Congress. That investment would be sufficient to construct a nationwide smart grid, retrofit every building in America for energy efficiency, and produce 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources — all by 2020.

What do you get when you mix four White House cabinet members, a slew of campaign-workers-turned-staffers, and 120 or so young climate activists? Something to tell your grandkids about.

I had the privilege of attending the White House’s Clean Energy Economy Forum yesterday. The name doesn’t quite reveal the nature of the event. Most of the people in the invite-only audience were under 30 and a few hadn’t reached drinking age. It was a peace offering of sorts from President Obama’s top advisers to young leaders in the environmental movement, many of whom were rapidly turning on the administration for seemingly not making energy policy a priority.

More specifically, the meeting was spurred by a “demand” (I hate that word, but it seemed to work here) from the Energy Action Coalition, an amalgam of 50 youth-oriented environmental groups. The EAC launched It’s Game Time, Obama to insist that the President meet with young people to discuss climate change and attend the U.N. Climate Change Summit this month in Copenhagen. There has been little movement on climate change since the House passed a controversial energy bill in June, and Obama was fairly silent on the issue until the last two weeks. That also spurred EAC executive director Jessy Tolkan took to the Huffington Post to assail Obama the president and Obama the candidate for wearing two different faces on energy policy.

The White House was livid. So livid that they invited everyone over to talk it out.

Wait a second. Are we talking about government being responsive to the people? Could the administration care what critics have to say? Does it actually want to have an open dialogue with activist groups? Is this really happening?

I can tell you as an eye witness that it is, at least on the surface. And after spending three and a half hours at this potentially historic meeting, I’m fairly convinced it goes beyond rhetoric. The administration appears to be making an earnest attempt to reclaim young Americans – particularly socially and environmentally conscious young Americans – as a core base of support. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, while on the way to see Phish in Philadelphia, I got an unexpected email from…the White House.

We would like to invite you to join us for a Clean Energy Economy Forum to discuss the important role young leaders have in creating and sharing this opportunity. The event will bring together emerging leaders from non-profits, businesses, and community groups along with experts from federal agencies, members of the Cabinet, and White House officials to engage in a dialogue.

So, I guess some people at the White House heard that nearly 75% of the people we registered voted in the last election. They also probably realize that if they want to get popular support behind initiatives like climate change, the music community is a good place to start.

A few more emails started coming in. The next was from a key environmental group, the Energy Action Coalition, inviting me to a brainstorming and strategy session of youth-oriented leaders attending the White House meeting, which is Wednesday afternoon.

It’s no coincidence that this is all happening now. The U.N. Climate Change Summit is in Copenhagen next week and President Obama has vowed to go there and work toward an international agreement. If he succeeds, and Congress backs him up, we will take the most important steps in history toward averting a climate crises. If he fails, or can’t win popular support at home, many scientists say we’re about to reach the point of no return.

You may say, “HeadCount and climate change. Huh?” Well, actually we’ve been working behind the scenes with JamBase and artists like Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam to launch an initiative called “Music for Action” that will encourage fans to speak out on climate change. We also devote a page of our website to Sustainability and Climate Change – one of six issues we’ve tackled in 2009.

It’s exciting to know that people of influence recognize the impact HeadCount and the music community can have on the issues facing our country. We are still strictly nonpartisan and our message remains the same: “Make Your Voice Heard.” What’s changed is that our message is now pertinent 365 days a year, not just on Election Day.

We’re also fostering discussion about health care in the music community, through a poll and an upcoming series of articles on this blog.

We have big plans for the midterm elections next year, directly tying our Get Out the Vote effort to the key issues we’ve been working on.

I will report back from the White House meeting and let you know about our next key steps as an organization. Thank you for all your support, this year and in years past. If you have any thoughts or insights that might be helpful in preparing for the White House meeting, feel free to pass them along. I can be reached at andyb@headcount.org

The meeting will be webcast here at 4 p.m. EST on Wednesday, December 2, if you want to check it out.

After reading Debra’s great post on the federal investigation of Gibson Guitars’ Nashville factory for violating the Lacy Act, I remembered watching an episode of “Big Ideas for a Small Planet” on the Sundance Channel that focused on the art of sustainable guitar making. While guitars aren’t the biggest threat to our forests, without sustainable practices guitar companies may find themselves running out of wood. The special focused on Martin Guitars and interviewed the company’s CEO Chris Martin. I couldn’t find a clip from “Big Ideas” but did find a short clip from “Eco Biz” (above).

Martin Guitars, along with Taylor, Gibson, Yamaha, and Fender have all teamed up with Greenpeace to form the Music Wood Campaign.

The Greenpeace Music Wood Campaign is partnering with the music industry to protect threatened forest habitats and safeguard the future of the trees critical to making musical instruments. We are working together to increase the availability of traditional woods used by musical instrument manufacturers that can be certified to the exacting management standards of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and demonstrating, one species at a time, that there is a strong and growing market for well-managed, FSC certified wood.

Federal agents raided Gibson Guitars‘ Nashville factory yesterday, seizing wood, guitars, computers and files. Sources told the Nashville Post that Gibson is suspected of violating the Lacey Act by helping to illegally import Madagascar rosewood into the U.S. via Germany.

Clearcut logging has destroyed thousands of acres of lemur habitat unique to the island, threatening the animal with extinction. Scott Paul, director of Greenpeace’s forest campaign, defended the company’s record to The Tennessean, saying, “Historically, Gibson has shown an awful lot of leadership; they are one of the manufacturers far ahead of the field.” The raid, he says, “proves that even if you’re very serious about buying only certified, well-managed supplies, it’s still possible to get caught up….There are a lot of middle men between the guitar manufacturer and the company that is logging the ground [and] a lot of people who are not that honest in the timber business worldwide.”

Madagascar, an island off the east coast of Africa, is home to 47 types of rosewood and a uniquely diverse blend of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. This includes 88 species of lemur, an animal the Malagasy people have traditionally regarded as sacred. Rosewood sells for $5,000 per cubic meter. Despite strong opposition from environmental groups, the new president of the financially strapped nation, Andry Rajoelina, issued an executive order in September legalizing the export of rosewood and ebony. Read the rest of this entry »