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Palm oil touches our lives every time we take a trip to the supermarket. Palm oil and its derivatives are used in a ubiquitous array of packaged foods, including ice cream, cookies, crackers, chocolate products, cereals, breakfast bars, cake mixes, doughnuts, potato chips, instant noodles, frozen sweets and meals, baby formula, margarine, and dry and canned soups.

In the U.S. alone, palm oil imports by companies like Cargill and IOI have jumped 485% in the last decade. The dramatic and growing demand for this crop in recent decades has pushed sprawling palm oil plantations deep into some of the world’s most valuable rainforests. Palm oil production is now one of the leading causes of rainforest destruction around the globe.

Rainforest Destruction by Palm Oil

Nearly 90% percent of palm oil is grown in the tropical countries of Indonesia and Malaysia, where palm oil plantations under active cultivation cover 16 million acres, an area similar in size to West Virginia. The Indonesian government has announced plans to convert approximately 44 million more acres of rainforests, an area the size of Missouri, into palm oil plantations by 2020. The UN’s Environment Program says that “98% of Indonesia’s forest may be destroyed by 2022, the lowland forest much sooner.”

The worst part: This problem is not confined to Indonesia. Rainforest destruction for palm oil expansion is spreading quickly to other valuable rainforest regions, such as Central Africa. That’s one of many reasons why it’s so important that we tackle this problem now. Here are several others:

Download the Case Against Palm Oil factsheet

Endangered species and the loss of biodiversity

Indonesia’s rainforests are one of Earth’s most biologically and culturally rich landscapes. Incredibly, with just 1 percent of the Earth’s land area, Indonesia’s rainforests contain 10% of the world’s known plants, 12% of mammals and 17% of all known bird species. As recently as the 1960s, about 80% of Indonesia was forested. Sadly, Indonesia now has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, with just under half of the country’s original forest cover remaining. Conservative studies suggest more than 2.4 million acres of Indonesian rainforest is cleared and lost each year

The rainforests of Borneo and Sumatra are the last stand for one of humankind’s closest relatives, the orangutan. Orangutans face an extreme risk of extinction within our lifetime. Between 2004-08, the Sumatran orangutan population fell by 14% to 6,600, largely due to loss of habitat for palm oil expansion. The critically endangered Sumatran tiger and Sumatran rhinoceros, both of which have populations of only hundreds left in the wild, are also urgently threatened by palm oil expansion.

Forest communities and human rights

Corporate land grabbing of Indigenous and community forests for palm oil plantations is responsible for serious human rights abuses and persistent conflicts between companies and rural communities. In Indonesia there are over 500 different language groups and between 60 and 110 million Indigenous peoples, many of whom depend on standing natural forests for their livelihoods.

The Indonesian palm oil monitoring group Sawit Watch has identified 663 ongoing land disputes between palm oil companies and rural communities. In too many cases, private armies and paramilitaries have been deployed and people have been killed. Many industrial palm oil plantations also rely on the use of forced and child labor. In Malaysia and Indonesia, child labor has been documented and allegations of modern-day slavery on plantations across Malaysia are common.

Peatlands and climate change

Peatlands are carbon-rich wet ecosystems that have sequestered billions of tons of carbon through thousands of years of accumulating leaf litter and organic material. Indonesia has the world’s highest concentration of tropical peatlands, but the scale of their destruction is so large that it is having globally significant impacts on the climate, similar in scale to the world’s biggest coal and tar sands projects.

Indonesia is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after the U.S. and China, with 85% of its emissions coming from rainforest and peatland destruction. Deforestation in Indonesia is responsible for some 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is more than the combined emissions from all the millions of cars, trucks, trains, and buses in the U.S. each year combined.

The Solution: Responsible Palm Oil

Consumers are often misled by “RSPO-certified” or “Green Palm” labels. These labels from the Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) still allow “certified sustainable” palm oil producers to destroy rainforests and carbon-rich peatlands. Companies that produce, trade and use palm oil must go beyond these inadequate RSPO standards to be truly responsible.

Responsible palm oil is produced without contributing to rainforest or peatland destruction, species extinction, high greenhouse gas emissions or human rights violations. Snack food manufacturing companies need transparent and traceable supply chains from the plantation where the palm oil was sourced to the final product on your grocery store shelf.

What Can You Do? 

• Join the Palm Oil Action Team and organize events in your community to help spread the word and call out the companies using palm oil tied to rainforest destruction in their products.
• Share this blog or blog about the problems with palm oil.
• Become more aware of the snack foods that contain palm oil and reduce your consumption of those products.

How To Identify Palm Oil Products

Palm oil is found in roughly 50% of the products in grocery stores! Below is a list of some of the types of snack food products that contain palm oil to look out for when you’re shopping:

Many snack foods are made using an array of ingredients derived from the African oil palm. It won’t always be obvious when palm oil is lurking under the wrapper, so to take out the guess work, we’ve made a list of the most common palm oil ingredients used in snack foods:

FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT: THEPROBLEMWITHPALMOIL.ORG

However, what may initially appear as a political party tit for tat goes much deeper–in that the IRS has long been a vehicle of political retribution (with politics depending on what administration is currently seated in power)–and perhaps most disconcerting of all: tossing the constitutionally guaranteed equal protection clause right out the window.

The recurrent theme of governmental power targeting marginalized political communities has been a consistent, abysmal tradition dating back to the FDR administration. The administration admitted using inflated charges of tax evasion on political targets such as former Louisiana governor and senator Huey Long. And the tactic of wielding the IRS’ fiery wrath is an equal opportunity strategy for both sides of the aisle: under the Nixon administration, the IRS created the Special Services Staff (SSS) to look into thousands of perceived political enemies–including reporters who wrote critical stories of Nixon, such as Newsday’s Robert Greene, and civil rights organizations like the NAACP.

In fact, RAN has its own history with the IRS. In 2004, under the Bush administration, RAN was actually subpoenaed by the House Ways and Means Committee for all information relating to our demonstrations since 1993. Undoubtedly, this was part of a burgeoning effort by the Bush administration to stifle dissent and control free speech of activist groups. Six months before the subpoena, RAN had successfully won two major corporate campaigns: leading the first major logger, Boise Cascade, out of old-growth forests and transforming the lending practices of the world’s largest bank at the time, Citibank. Was it a coincidence that RAN was served a subpoena fresh off the heels of winning two of its biggest corporate victories?

So, the latest news of the IRS under the Obama Administration supposedly overreaching its tentacles into right-wing groups is certainly no foreign concept. In fact, what is happening currently with the Tea Party is probably one of the least egregious examples in this sordid, intertwined history. It’s also worth mentioning that these same right-wing groups were silent when RAN, Greenpeace and other allied organizations were subpoenaed under the Bush Administration. Still, this should be a wake-up call for those watching on the sidelines. This is symptomatic of our checks and balances system utterly failing.

The strategy of utilizing the IRS to do a political party’s bidding reveals something undeniably malignant: the government has a lot of leeway to unleash its fury on its desired targets. It is a wrath that is felt disproportionately according to what administration is in power and what interests are not currently serving the status quo. The truth is, this “scandal” should really be a full-fledged exposé on how the government may be inflicting both disparate intent and impact on people and groups that are not serving the current administration’s interests.

This is all indicative of a much larger problem we have in American government: the synergy and integration of government and corporate/special interests. If you’re sitting on the wrong side of the fence, the administration is essentially condoning the fact that it is okay to violate your equal protection rights. So, it is more than a political party spin job–it is about our government having unbridled power with launching intimidation tactics–that come at a heavy monetary and time cost. RAN and other organizations that have been subpoenaed have spent thousands in legal fees and have had operations stalled for months.

No presidential administration should be able to rattle this constitutionally protected dissent and free speech. As former Executive Director of RAN, Mike Brune, wrote in 2004 in response to Bill Thomas, former chairman on Ways and Means: “We firmly believe that citizen activism is a patriotic American tradition and a basis for a healthy democracy, and that it is not only a right, but also a responsibility.” And this all begs the question: what other entities does the US government have synergy with so it can continue inflicting additional oppression on marginalized political targets?

As I stood eye-to-eye with Bank of America (BofA) CEO, Brian Moynihan, a large stop-watch projected onto the wall of the conference room started to count down. I had two minutes before my microphone cut off and I needed to choose my words wisely.

Once a year BofA, like every publicly-held corporation, invites shareholders to meet with the CEO, along with the Board of Directors and the Senior Executive team. It’s our opportunity to raise questions about the bank’s performance and practice.

Rainforest Action Network, along with many of our friends and allies, has been calling on BofA to take some serious action on the climate. Together we’ve petitioned, written emails, placed phone calls, written letters, marched in the streets, visited bank branches and offices and used many creative strategies to get this message on the bank’s radar.

And now I had the ear of the top guy, for exactly 120 seconds.

At the beginning of the meeting, Brian made a speech listing off the bank’s proudest achievements. He included BofA’s environmental commitment. This is something we both like, I think it’s important for the bank to have a commitment to clean energy and energy efficiency and BofA has a good team working to meet their targets.

But here’s the problem, and this is what I told Brian: While BofA fanfares its commitment to leadership on climate change, at the same time it is the leading funder of the coal industry, the single largest source of U.S. climate emissions. This means that BofA is underwriting the very same climate pollution that it is trying to tackle.

The sad truth is that it is not possible for a bank to be both #1 in addressing climate change and #1 in financing the fossil fuel sector. These two goals are incompatible.

And so I asked:

“Which will you choose to prioritize? Will you choose to finance a transition to clean energy and a safe future for future generations, or will you choose the coal industry and a future of climate catastrophe?”

It looked as if Brian was listening, but I don’t think he really heard me, because he didn’t answer my question. Instead he replied by telling me some details about their environmental commitment and then asked Global technology and Operations Executive Cathy Bessant to explain the specifics of their clean energy financing.

If Brian didn’t really hear me, then perhaps he heard the words spoken by others in the room.

Person after person got up to the mic to speak about the many problems associated with the bank’s financing of the coal industry.

Ashish talked about Coal India and how their mines are destroying forests, critical tiger habitat and the health of Indian communities. Bonnie, Jim, Les, Eddie and Carly talked about Peabody and Arch Coals’ plans to transport 150 million tons of coal per year through their communities in Washington and Oregon for sale on the international export market. Lorelei, Kathy and Stephanie spoke about the daily horror experienced by Appalachians who live next to mountaintop removal coal mines. Sarah shared her experiences of living next to North Carolina’s Riverbend Coal plant, that has poisoned her community’s lake and inflicted serious illnesses on her family.

Barbara and June testified about the wide range of serious health impacts associated with coal and climate, delivering a petition to Brian from thousands of medical professionals and concerned citizens.

Faith leaders Reverend Nancy Allison and Rabbi Jonathan Frierich spoke to the moral imperative to take courageous action for the climate, as did Rabbi Margie Klein, who then sang an Appalachian spiritual to emphasize this point.

Was Brian listening now? I think he was; we dominated the meeting, causing him at one point to quip, “Is there anybody here who has a question that isn’t about climate change?”

Among the final speakers were students David, Meiron, Maria and Ali, who all asked Brian to consider the world he is leaving for future generations. “At the moment you are part of the problem”, said David, “Please can you be part of the solution?”

Todd Zimmer of RAN introduced the panel by noting that the audience included community members from Charlotte as well as student leaders of the campus fossil fuel divestment movement from Western Washington, Brown, Harvard, and Davidson. Todd remarked that although Bank of America has stated its intention to be a leader on climate and clean energy, its track record as the number one funder of the coal industry is in direct conflict with this ambition. The bank’s lending and financing decisions involving the coal industry that are made at the bank’s headquarters in Uptown Charlotte impose immense costs for communities in the U.S. and around the world.

The first guest speaker, Ashish Fernandes of Greenpeace spoke about the dangers of India’s coal industry to rural communities, the environment, and to investors exposed to risky energy infrastructure in the country. Contrary to the myth that a coal boom in India is inevitable due to the country’s energy needs, most new coal plants and mines face huge community opposition across India. In the last three years alone, courts have sent back at least four different power plants to drawing board. India produces 65 percent of its electricity from coal, and produces 90% of its coal from open pit mines, which endanger over a million hectares of forest, and threaten the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities in the country’s coal belt. Fortunately, wind is now cheaper than new coal plants in India and solar will reach grid parity with coal in under four years. However, the enduring influence of India’s coal lobby risks locking the country into coal dependence.

Next, Barbara Gottlieb, the director of health and advocacy for Physicians for Social Responsibility spoke to the global impacts of climate change on health. She began by highlighting that climate change is no longer a theoretical problem: It is happening now, and it is happening to us. Furthermore, she emphasized that climate change is not just an environmental issue. The British medical journal The Lancet called climate change “the health challenge of the 21^st Century.” Barbara noted that climate change is associated with more frequent and more intense storms, extreme heat waves, and drought, all of which pose acute risks to human health. She concluded by stressing that there is a way forward for Bank of America and the financial sector: Shifting their financing to clean, renewable energy.

Next, Bonnie McKinley from Portland, Oregon spoke to her experiences working with Power Past Coal and Rising Tide North America to fight plans to export coal from Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin through ports on the Pacific Northwest. Currently, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, Kinder Morgan, and other companies have introduced plans to build export infrastructure to ship Powder River Basin coal to be burned in India, China, and elsewhere in Asia. These proposed coal export terminals would bring up to 70 coal trains per day (each up to a mile-and-a-half long) through residential neighborhoods, leaving a trail of heavy metal-laden coal dust and putting communities at risk for derailments. Bonnie concluded on a hopeful note, remarking that a proposed railway for coal exports would never be built because, in the words of activist Vanessa Braided Hair, “Arch Coal understands money. What Arch Coal doesn’t understand is community. They don’t understand history. They don’t understand the Cheyenne people whose ancestors fought and died for the land that they are proposing to destroy. They don’t understand the fierceness with which the people, both Indian and non-Indian, in southeastern Montana love the land.” Bonnie also had a message for her baby boomer peers, urging them to take action to protect their communities and the climate: “Please get out and work for our special planet.”

Finally, Kathy Selvage from Wise County, West Virgina spoke about her decade-long experience fighting the impacts of mountaintop removal mining in her community and throughout Appalachia. She began by calling for the bank to “return to the integrity I knew decades ago” as an employee of a predecessor bank, Wise County National. Kathy spoke of her mother, who “would go outside and read the bible on front porch, then raise eyes to ponder what she had just read. When she raised her eyes, she saw a beautiful mountain across from her.” But after Glen Morgan Properties destroyed the mountain as part of one of their mountaintop removal mines, when her mother raised her eyes, “she saw the devastation of god’s creation.” The devastation wrought by the coal company that destroyed her community inspired Kathy to become active in the fight against mountaintop removal.

Kathy concluded by urging the audience to think about the interconnections between climate change, mountaintop removal, and other environmental issues. Faced with growing evidence of environmental threats hurting our communities and the environment, she reminded us that “we can no longer afford to stand still like we’re not a part of this planet.”

They are demanding an end to the havoc that Bank of America and the coal industry have wreaked on our lives. These brave people include Barbara Gottlieb from Physicians for Social Responsibility, who researches how coal causes respiratory diseases; Lorelei Scarbro, who comes from a family of coal miners and had mountains blown up in her West Virginian backyard for tiny seams of coal; and Ashish Fernandes from India—where coal was a false promise for a poor country to get rich but instead destroyed the health of thousands of innocent people.

Today, we need your help to deliver an additional blow to Bank of America: to call in and demand that it is time to stop funding King Coal. With hundreds—even thousands—of us calling in, this will disrupt operations on the day of the bank’s biggest public facing event all year.

** We’ve updated the phone number below, after Bank of America disconnected the first one.  Keep up the pressure! **

Will you help us prove to Bank of America that these people are not alone? Call the office of Bank of America CEO, Brian Moynihan. Here’s his number: (866) 826 – 8989

Leading up to today, shareholders and bank executives have felt the crescendo of our grassroots organizing in Charlotte. We have disseminated the message that Bank of America is the leading funder of coal and so clearly doesn’t care about its impact on climate change with several creative tactics. We’ve greeted bank shareholders the minute they landed at the Charlotte airport, plastered ads all over downtown Charlotte and the perimeter of the bank’s headquarters, flyered every hotel door where shareholders are staying; and, today—our activists are accompanied by a 20×12 ft mobile billboard parked outside of the shareholder meeting as they march in.

Bank of America knows we’re here. Let them know you’re here, as well.

Since today is such a ripe opportunity because of this public-facing moment, we need to pick up the phone and call. Please take a few minutes today to call Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan and let him know that Bank of America needs to stop funding coal. Here’s how:

1. Call (866) 826 – 8989

2. If someone answers the phone, ask to speak to Brian Moynihan (it’s highly unlikely they will put you through). Whether your call is answered by voicemail or a real person, be polite and respectful, but above all make sure you state how seriously you’re taking Bank of America’s decision to keep funding the declining industry of coal.

Here’s a sample call script:

Hello, my name is ____{name}____ and I’m calling today to tell Brian Moynihan that Bank of America cannot be #1 in addressing climate change when it is the #1 funder of coal.

I am deeply disturbed by how this decision is affecting the quality of our lives and future.

I demand that Bank of America stop pumping billions of dollars into the coal industry.

Thank you for your time.

3. After you call, click the button below to report how it went. It’s important we get an accurate count of how many folks made a call, and what Bank of America’s response is.

 

It’s time Bank of America is held accountable as the #1 funder of the U.S. coal industry—the bank is responsible for funding the decimation of purple mountains majesty via mountaintop coal mining (MTR); underwriting coal mines that have caused irreversible black lung to working class miners; and financially supporting contaminated, undrinkable water in once pristine streams. No financial institution should have this much power over our communities and our future.

Trust me, our mighty crew here in Charlotte will feel the amplified power of every phone call you make. Thank you in advance for standing up with us today. Together, we can be heard—because there are more of us than them.

For the past two years, RAN has been calling on the bank to get serious about addressing climate change.This is a bank that declares a “commitment to positive environmental change” proudly on its website and a bank that has fanfared multi-billion dollar climate initiatives. However, the bank is also the leading underwriter of the U.S. coal industry, the single largest source of U.S. climate emissions. This means that bank of America is actually underwriting the climate change that it claims to want to tackle.

The sad truth is that it is not possible for a bank to be both #1 in addressing climate change and #1 in financing the coal sector. These two goals are simply incompatible.

I’ve been terrified about what we’re doing to the climate for at least ten years, but the past 12 months of extreme weather event has underlined the reality of climate change and the urgent need for action. From Superstorm Sandy’s devastation on the eastern seaboard, to the droughts endured by the Midwest and Plains states, and the wildfires that raged across the Rocky Mountains last summer, the planet is sending us a loud and clear message that it’s in distress. These were major headline stories, but the impacts were truly felt everywhere: over the year, more than 69,000 local heat records were set. Even as I type these words, communities in North Charlotte are being evacuated due to flooding from weeks of heavy rain.

I’m joined here in Charlotte by more than 30 friends and allies, each with a personal reason for coming to talk to Bank of America (BofA) about climate change. This morning we held a press conference and I stood with Indian campaigner, Ashish Fernandes. Ashish spoke about the devastating impacts that BofA-funded coal mining companies have on his country’s biodiversity, water supplies and indigenous communities. We stood with Barbara Gottlieb of Physicians for Social Responsibility, who explained the serious health impacts of climate change and burning coal; these include strokes, asthma and malnutrition. We stood with Oregonian Jim Plunkett, who is fighting plans to build five new coal export terminals in the Pacific North West, and we stood with local Charlotte Pastor, Nancy Allison, who spoke to our moral imperative to protect the climate for future generations.

Tomorrow we’ll take our message directly to BofA’s CEO Brian Moynihan, to their Board of Directors and to the bank’s shareholders. We will ask the bank to stop hedging and make a firm choice:

Will the bank continue to fund climate chaos and community devastation, or will the bank fund a clean energy future?

The Church of Stop Shopping returns to New York now, after a week in the Bay Area.  A highlight:  we launched the “Extinction Resurrection” campaign at the front doors and inside the big banks that finance climate disruption. Then, each evening we went indoors to a concert stage–and direct activism spiced up the prayers, songs, and shouts of “Earthalujah!”

In “The Revolt of the Golden Toads” tour, we concentrated our crawling and hopping on JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America–which move billions into coal-fired power plants. We believe that the Golden Toad was forced into extinction 25 years ago by drought conditions in their cloud forest home–destruction that was funded by these banks.

Our impact this week in San Francisco? It is impossible to make Nielsen Ratings from activism. Clearly more and more people know they must now be Earth radicals. Put some URGENCY in the EMERGENCY. Our post-big-daddy-god church, with the wonderful music, tries to activate direct action. In nine Bay Area performance events we had something short of 2000 individuals in our audiences. Our media coverage was good and in our interviews we tried to be guided by the Extinction Resurrection theme, which is surreal and funny–but people get it.  It’s about survival.

We’re not celebrities. Celebrities don’t “Stop Shop.” So we have to land the message manually. During “Toads” we went at it non-stop for 6 days and 6 nights. The upside for the non-celebrity approach is this: it builds communities. (We call people who join our church–the citizens of “Earthalujahville.”  For instance, we were fed, transported, and offered beds by Earthalujahville citizens as we zig-zagged around the Bay.)

Everyone in the Stop Shopping Church experienced Hurricane Sandy–and the super storm created our new songs and put us into the masks of extinct beings. Last November we were left thinking that Earth is destroying consumerism on purpose. Earth is interrupting the sale. Why? Because consumerism keeps us a bunch of little apex predators and that adds up to a horrific Super Devil. Then again, anything that distracts us from this Eco-pocalypse is the Devil and must be cast out.

Extinction Resurrection. The Dark and the Light. Honest assessment of the current environmental movement leaves us feeling dark. But the ecstatic release of a good direct action raises us to the light. Darker and Brighter. Extinction and Resurrection. It’s the up and down and up of Evolution. We felt the darkness when we performed at Oakland City Hall and felt the memory of police violence there during Occupy. But moments later we unloaded some happy toad gospel at the Chase Bank across the street. They closed the bank and locked the doors after our first song. So they had to seal off the hushed high church of the bank. So we sang on the sidewalk and sent happy curses up into the surveillance system. Eventually we’ll be naked animals hopping on Jamie Dimon’s desk. Earthalujah!

We wish to thank RAN for posting these reports. Now the toad hops back to NYC, then over the Atlantic.

To be updated with Rev. Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping tour dates, click here for tour dates.

Photo Credit: Steve Rhodes

As our title indicates, coal has become an extreme investment. Long touted as a cheap and abundant fuel, coal’s environmental and public health costs are becoming increasingly acute: A 2011 Harvard School of Public Health study found that coal mining and combustion in the U.S. imposes between a third to over one half of a trillion dollars in externalized environmental and health costs each year.

Despite mounting evidence of the extreme impacts of the coal industry on the climate and human health, in 2012, US bank financing practices have failed to address the acute risks and impacts of the financing the “worst of the worst” companies in the coal industry. Even as U.S. coal consumption for power generation fell 11 percent in 2012, the top three U.S. financiers of the coal industry (Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase) collectively financed an estimated $9 billion for mountaintop removal mining companies and the most coal-intensive power utilities last year. The report card also finds that the broader banking sector remains deeply exposed to the coal industry, providing $20.8 billion in financing for these companies in 2012.

With few exceptions, bank lending and financing policies for the coal sector for this year’s report card received disappointingly low grades. Although Wells Fargo improved to a “C” for taking steps to improve its mountaintop removal mining lending practices and HSBC North America received a “C-“ for policies covering its lending to coal-fired power, grades for the rest of the U.S. banking sector showed almost no improvement from last year.

The long-term financial outlook for companies involved with coal mining, transportation, and combustion remains highly uncertain. As we note in one of our report’s case studies, Patriot Coal, a coal mining company with major MTR operations filed for bankruptcy last year and agreed to phase out its MTR operations. Of the 12 other MTR companies profiled in the report, only one had an S&P credit rating above ‘junk.’ Last month, investors scrapped a controversial plan to export coal through Coos Bay, Oregon. And on April 16^th, the Texas power company Energy Future Holdings (formerly TXU) announced plans to file for bankruptcy due in part to the deteriorating financial picture for the company’s fleet of coal-fired power plants.

Last year, even with the coal industry’s bankruptcies, risky proposals for coal plant upgrades, and coal export terminals, Wall Street doubled down on its exposure to the industry, despite its incredibly uncertain future. Unfortunately, they’re not just gambling with their own money. Bad investments can be written off, but coal’s impacts on human health and the environment are severe, permanent, and irreversible.

Today, Think Progress outed Mark Zuckerberg’s new political group as a shill for the fossil fuel industry. The Facebook mogul, along with the founders of Dropbox, LinkedIn and Microsoft (that would be Bill Gates) founded a new political group called FWD.US that has spent considerable resources on ads promoting the Keystone XL Pipeline and Arctic oil drilling. All in the name of “jobs,” of course.

While the world faces extreme weather events like super-hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and rising oceans from the burning of fossil fuels, FWD.US are advocating for increased oil infrastructure and drilling.Climate scientist James Hanson has called the Keystone Pipeline a “fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.”

This also indicates how flawed our political process has become as FWD.US is bankrolling two subsidiary groups with opposing political views. One led by GOP operatives, Americans For A Conservative Direction, and the other led by Democratic hacks, the Council for American Job Growth.

Check out this ad giving props to GOP Senator Lindsey Graham for supporting Keystone XL:

Check out the ANWR and Alaskan natural gas pipeline ad:

Both work to promote the interests of social media billionaires like Zuckerberg who essentially buy both parties to do their bidding and increase his bottom line.

Karen Hanson, communications director for FWD.US, has responded by saying: “FWD.us is committed to showing support for elected officials who promote the policy changes needed to build the knowledge economy. Maintaining two separate entities, Americans for a Conservative Direction & the Council for American Job Growth, to support elected officials across the political spectrum – separately – means that we can more effectively communicate with targeted audiences of their constituents.”

When did building the “knowledge economy” become about supporting anti-knowledge interests in the oil sector?

Maybe it’s time to “defriend?”

Rev. Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping are in the Bay Area this week! Click here for tour dates.

Mike Roselle’s smack-down of “Big Green” and Sandra Steingraber’s letter from jail–serving time for her fracking resistance in upstate New York–show us the sea-change that must take place in green activist culture.

I met Randy Hayes, RAN founder, in the late 80′s and came to know the Earth First and Redwood Summer activism while a Bay Area resident. Now these years later, we’ve worked with RAN campaigners Amanda Starbuck, Scott Parkin, and Annie Sartor in Mountaintop Removal activism.  During our partnership with RAN we began blasphemous performers in lobbies of big banks:  JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, PNC, UBS, Deutsche Bank and HSBC–are among the banks whose gods we have transgressed against–with BankTrack’s latest study as our Bible, supplied by RAN.

I moved from the Bay Area to New York in the early 90′s and gathered the singing activists after Reverend Billy’s sidewalk preaching began in front of the Disney Store in Times Square. Our activist group, legally constructed like a small theater company, was soon defending community gardens in the city. We took turns responding to hesitant overtures by such Big Green orgs as NRDC and Sierra Club, but we proved too wild and woolly. Meanwhile, since 2005′s Katrina and Rita storms–our “Devil” turned from big retail toward the CO2 emitting (think Dirty Coal) investments by big banks.

Most of our partners are local veterans of the MTR, fracking or pipeline wars. Time and time again, after a collaboration with a big green org, after a concert or a videotape or leading a parade before a rally–our relationship would end. A harsh example:  in 2007, when the Stop Shopping activists were hotly pursuing Starbucks for their suppression of licensing opportunities for the makers of Ethiopia’s Sidamo and Harrar coffees–we were told by Oxfam America that “We cannot state publically that we are working with you.” By that time we had gone to jail several times, and were involved in a YouTube duel with a Starbucks’ marketing VP.  Although the campaign was a success for Ethiopian coffee families, Oxfam didn’t want to be identified with activists who were sitting in the Tombs. They had that disease called “Fear of the what the imaginary middle class might think.”

Oxfam may have objected to our manipulation of fundamentalist religious memes, of the use of humor, dance and music in our activism, or just our lack of money. Who knows?  In 2013 –would Oxfam personnel feel differently about us, as eco-activism increasingly resembles the dramas (and arrests and police violence) of the Civil Rights Movement? We believe that the orgs of Big Green, and the foundations and donors that often side with them–are ready for a change. Everyone everywhere that loves Earth is becoming radicalized. There is more of a connection now with cultural change in American history, which has always involved bodily risk, music and general brazenness. Amen?

Rainforest Action Network staff–thank you for your hosting of our REVOLT OF THE GOLDEN TOAD Bay Area Tour. Our connection to your founders, and to your ambitious activism against the climate-change financing by big banks–feels like a natural home.

Earthalujah!

The Roundtable of Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) is a global certification scheme formed in 2004 to set the standard for ‘sustainable palm oil’. But the sad truth is, many of the companies that use these labels are in fact still causing rainforest destruction and the clearance and draining of carbon-rich peatlands that release massive amounts of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere.

Shockingly, Indonesia – the world’s largest palm oil producer – is also the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter after only China and the US. But unlike China and the US, 50% of Indonesia’s emissions are from cleared and drained peat lands, and 35% from clearing rainforests. Palm oil expansion is one of the top drivers of this destruction but under the RSPO these companies don’t need to publicly report the emissions they are responsible for. How are we going to fix this global problem if companies don’t fess up to their emissions?

Today in Kuala Lampur, the RSPO, which includes some 400 members who are palm growers, oil processors, traders, consumer goods manufacturers, retailers, investors and social and environmental NGOs, voted to adopt a new RSPO standard that still fails to address the climate impacts of palm oil productions. This vote by the RSPO members to support a new RSPO standard that certifies deforestation and excessive greenhouse gas emissions as ‘sustainable palm oil’ is a step in a wrong direction for the credibility of the RSPO.

The new RSPO standard is not a standard that can be trusted to produce Responsible Palm Oil. What’s needed now is for the companies that produce, trade and use palm oil in their products to go beyond the RSPO and commit to producing and sourcing palm oil that is truly RESPONSIBLE.

For this reason, RAN has just sent letters to 20 snack food companies—makers of some of the most popular brand name products in America—alerting them to the rainforest destruction in their supply chains. RAN has launched a campaign to convince America’s favorite snack food companies to go beyond the RSPO and to source RESPONSIBLE palm oil.

In order for us to succeed we need your help.

Stand with us by signing this petition and demand the snack food industry does what the RSPO has failed to do: remove rainforest and peatland destruction from its products.

Join us for a VIP reception at 6:30 with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, or come at 7:30 ready to party.

With all proceeds benefiting RAN, what better way to make a difference for the rainforests, for the climate, and for the planet?

You’ll be helping fuel RAN’s hard-hitting corporate campaigns to defend the world’s most important and endangered forests, promote human rights, and fight climate change.

Tickets are going fast, and we expect this event to sell out, so don’t delay – get your ticket now!

WHAT: The Terrapin Family Band featuring Phil Lesh, plus special guest Harper Simon

WHEN: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 | 6:30 VIP Reception | 7:30 Doors Open | 8:00 Show

WHERE: Terrapin Crossroads, 100 Yacht Club Dr, San Rafael, CA

TICKETS: $125 VIP | $75 General Admission | $85 at the Door

Big thanks to everyone who is helping make this event possible, especially Phil Lesh, Harper Simon, the Terrapin Family Band, Terrapin Crossroads, and the dedicated RAN supporters on our Host Committee…

Murat Armbruster / Allan Badiner / Mimi & Peter Buckley / André Carothers / Ginger Cassady / Chris Desser & Kirk Marckwald/ Dale Djerassi / Tom Van Dyck / Jodie Evans / Susan Fox / Bob Hamer & Jill Reber / Randy Hayes / Don Hazen / Jeri Howland & Jerry Edelbrock / Courtney Hull / Kristin Hull / Anne Irwin / Dasa & Bruce Katz / Frannie & Michael Kieschnick / Roxanne & Michael Klein / Anna Lappé / Leslie & Jaques Leslie / Sara Lovell / Anna & Rob McKay / Betsy McKinney / Liza & Drummond Pike / Bonnie Raitt / Nancy & Rich Robbins / Marsha Rosenbaum / Alice & Christopher Semler / Jessica Tully / Julia Violich & John Mecklenburg / Jackie Wallace & Jean Tripier / Nadine Weil / Patricia & Mel Ziegler

Every day this week in marking the third anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the art collective Liberate Tate is giving a performance dramatizing the trial of BP. It’s entitled ‘All Rise’ and is all taking place at the Tate Modern in London.

It’s not unusual for artists and cultural events to reference contemporary news or disasters. The difference here is that this is a guerrilla performance, completely unsanctioned by Tate or by one of its sponsors: BP.

Each day this week at 3pm UK time (GMT+1), performers using specially constructed cameras will film themselves wandering Tate Modern whilst whispering selected transcripts of the proceedings from the New Orleans courtroom.

The live-streams of the different performers are available to watch online from around the world on the dedicated website  (where an archive allows future viewing).

The BP trial, which started this February, accuses the massive corporation of gross negligence by plaintiffs who did not take part in a separate settlement made by the oil giant last year.

At the trial’s opening, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mike Underhill said: “Not only was it within BP’s power to prevent the tragedy, it was its responsibility.”

As Paul Brady, one of the performers on Monday April 22, underlined: “It’s not only BP that’s on trial for the devastation it has caused to Gulf Coast communities and ecosystems, it’s also Tate and other cultural institutions that provide BP with the social legitimacy to continue operating with such destructive consequences.”

‘All Rise’ is a performance that brings the BP trial into Tate Modern because BP’s arts sponsorship cannot be separated from the irrevocable damage it does to communities, the environment, and the climate.

For example, BP’s first advertising campaign after the Gulf of Mexico disaster was in the summer of 2011 and used the corporation’s sponsorship of art in a multi-million dollar attempt to rehabilitate its brand. This was very deliberate. The value to BP of the arts establishment that supports the oil company by accepting its sponsorship money is clear: BP uses its involvement in arts and culture to project a “feel good” image of the company.

In doing so, BP buys the leverage it needs to gain acceptance from elites and influential publics to carry on plundering the planet, to proliferate human rights abuses, and to interfere in what should be democratic political processes.

What is so invidious is that public cultural institutions also fall into what BP has captured.

This is why Liberate Tate has vowed, since its founding in January 2010, “to take creative disobedience against Tate until it drops its oil company funding.” And to inspire others to join in doing so as well.

‘All Rise’ follows a performance by Liberate Tate last July when over 100 members of the art collective installed ‘The Gift’ — a 16.5 metre wind turbine blade – in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern.

On the first anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2011, Liberate Tate poured oil over a naked man lying in the middle of Tate Britain in a work called ‘Human Cost’.

This week as we whisper extracts from the court transcripts — damning reports, objections, evidence, accountability, and risk throughout the BP sponsored Tate gallery spaces — we insistently ask: How much more environmental, societal, and climate damage does BP need to do for Tate to forego its sponsor? When will Tate put their sponsor on the stand?

The good news is that the public call for Tate to stop its relationship with BP is growing. Thousands of Tate members and visitors have voiced their objection that through its support of sponsor BP, Tate is forcing environmentally and climate-conscious gallery goers into an uncomfortable position of complicity with the oil company, one of the most environment-destroying corporations on the planet.

When our public cultural institutions have a formal relationship with corporations engaged in socially and ecologically destructive activities, exhibitions and galleries become part of the creation of climate chaos through the construction of a social licence to operate for oil companies.

Our practice involves illuminating this process at the culture wellhead through interventions and artworks created in Tate galleries.

We situate our interventions in the growing wave of desire for citizens to reclaim public space: a gallery should be a place to enjoy great art, not a site where an art museum associates visitors in the ecological destruction and criminal acts of its corporate partners.

About the Author

Glen Tarman is an artist, activist and advocacy director based in London. Glen is a founding member of the art collective Liberate Tate.  Liberate Tate explores the role of creative intervention in social change and aims to free art from the grips of the oil industry.

For more information on Liberate Tate, see http://liberatetate.wordpress.com/. Liberate Tate can also be found on Twitter: @liberatetate

An orangutan looks out from a cage in Aceh, Indonesia. The region’s Sumatran orangutans face extinction due to palm oil development. Photo: David Gilbert

I wish I didn’t have to write this blog post on Earth Day. The rainforest where I saw my first wild orangutan is under threat. I can’t believe it!

There are many reasons to protect the Leuser Protected Ecosystem, a forest area on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. Thousands of Indigenous people rely on the forest for their lives and livelihoods, and it is the last place on Earth where endangered species like the Sumatran orangutan and the Sumatran tiger coexist with elephants, rhinos, and Sunbears.

But the government of Aceh, the province in which the Leuser Protected Ecosystem lies, is considering a plan that would remove large regions of forest from the protected area, opening them up to palm oil and pulp plantations, logging, mining, and all of the roads and other infrastructure that come with them. The Indonesian government is now considering the plan, and has the power to reject it.

We need to be making sure that what’s left of the world’s rainforests are protected, not opening them to destructive industries seeking to profit from rainforest destruction. Send Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Secretary General of the Ministry of Forestry Hadi Daryanto an email now calling on them to reject this misguided plan and keep the Leuser Protected Ecosystem protected.

Of course, it’s not just local communities and wildlife that need to be protected from bulldozers and forest fires. Indonesia’s rainforests are a valuable carbon sink—destroying them would make our climate problem that much worse, imperiling the future of everyone on this planet just to enrich a few well-connected businessmen.

Urge the President of Indonesia and the Secretary General of the Ministry of Forestry to protect local communities, endangered species, and the climate now.

Uttuh’s treetop protest is just the latest appearance in a month long ‘invasion’ of forlorn orangutans in Cargill’s hometown outside Minneapolis. Multiple homeless orangutans have already been arrested protesting Cargill’s refusal to implement adequate environmental and social safeguards for the palm oil they trade across the globe.

To make matters worse for the Sumatran Orangutan, Cargill has also recently announced its plan to expand their Indonesian palm oil plantations — meaning that many more Critically Endangered forest species on some of Southeast Asia’s last natural rainforests will fall to Uttuh’s same fate. Target sites include Sulawesi, Central Kalimantan and South Sumatra, homes to thousands of unique species and Indigenous Peoples who rely on the lowland jungles of the rainforest for their survival.

While Cargill claims that it’s simply trying to feed the world and bring economic benefits to local communities in Southeast Asia, as the largest privately held multinational corporation in the US, it can’t hide from its most genuine motivation. Profit. Anthony Yeow, President Director of PT Hindoli, a Cargill oil palm plantation in South Sumatra is quoted as saying, “We are aggressively looking for new areas in Sulawesi, Central Kalimantan and South Sumatra that are environmentally safe to expand our oil-palm footprint.” Aggressively looking to expand our oil palm footprint? Environmentally-safe? Are these not oxymorons?

The truth of the matter is that the demand for palm oil is at an all time high. It’s found in over half the products sold in American grocery stores and has quickly emerged as ‘the’ cheap source of vegetable oil on the market. Its high profitability drives suppliers like Cargill to buy and sell more and more irresponsibly produced palm oil which is contributing to the unchecked expansion of palm oil production in Southeast Asia.

The facts are clear. Indonesia’s forests continue to be destroyed for new palm oil plantations. Endangered species like the Sumatran orangutan continue to be pushed closer to extinction. And, companies like Cargill continue to trade irresponsibly produced palm oil while unaccountable certification systems, including the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), attempt to legitimize the practices of the same companies who are continuing this deforestation!

Cargill needs to play its part in transforming the way palm oil is produced in Indonesia. They need to immediately establish environmental and social safeguards for their supply chain to ensure that the palm oil it produces and trades does not result in the destruction of rainforests, or lead to adversely impacts on Critically Endangered species, like Uttuh, and forest communities.

Let’s make Cargill accountable for their profit-driven assaults on Sumatran Orangutans, like Uttuh, by pushing them to change their palm oil safeguards right now. Sign up to be part of our National Palm Oil Action Team today!

Click here to stand with RAN in calling on the US snack food industry to cut rainforest destruction from its products.

In Cargill’s Hands from Rainforest Action Network on Vimeo

A stranded orangutan watches as her home is bulldozed.

This is the first blog post I’ve written for RAN. I’m the new senior agribusiness campaigner and I was hired because RAN believes that it is more urgent than ever that we take our palm oil work to the next level.

I’m writing this post to lay out the next phase of our campaign to stop the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests for palm oil. I want to bring each and every one of you reading this on board right from the beginning.

We have reached the last stand for Sumatran orangutans, but it’s not too late to save them. Many Americans are being made into unwitting accomplices in the destruction of Indonesia’s rainforests—which provide crucial habitat for a number of endangered species like the Sumatran orangutan—because palm oil is in half of all the products on their neighborhood grocery store’s shelves. In the months ahead, we’re going to tackle this problem at its source.

We’ve just sent letters to 20 snack food companies—makers of some of the most popular brand name products in America—alerting them to the rainforest destruction and orangutan extinction in their supply chains.

Stand with us: Sign our petition and demand the snack food industry remove rainforest destruction from its products.

We’re waiting for the companies’ responses to our letters, and we’re giving them this one chance to avoid being publicly named and shamed. Some of them might not even realize the impact of the palm oil they use in their products. In the meantime, we’re gearing up to launch a bold new campaign that will shift the companies who are the most unwilling to change.

But none of these companies will adopt new safeguards to keep rainforest destruction out of their supply chains if they think you aren’t paying attention. That’s why it’s so important that you sign the petition and stand with us.

We can’t thank you enough for all the work you’ve done to stand up to the corporations that are destroying Indonesia’s precious rainforests and putting orangutans out of a home for palm oil. Every change we’ve made in the world is thanks to you, your hard work and dedication. But our work is far from done.

Please sign our petition now, and then stay tuned. We’ll be in touch soon with more ways you can spread the word about the true price we pay for palm oil and take action on behalf of Indonesia’s rainforests and all of its inhabitants.

A Guest blog-post by Yann Louvel, BankTrack‘s Climate and Energy Campaign Coordinator

This week, Bloomberg published the results of its third annual ranking of the “world’s greenest banks”: Citi was ranked first, followed by Santander and JPMorgan. The study assesses banks based on their lending to clean-energy projects and reduction in their own power consumption and carbon footprints. However, banks’ support for dirty energy, such as fossil fuel and nuclear power, is notably absent from Bloomberg’s methodology. When the value of banks’ finance for fossil fuels so often dwarfs their investments in renewables, Bloomberg’s data does not even tell half of the story.

Measuring the Good, Ignoring the Bad

One question mark over Bloomberg’s ranking is its definition of “clean energy”, and in particular its inclusion of hydropower (including large environmentally and socially destructive dam projects) and biomass/biofuels in this definition.

But the fundamental problem with its approach lies in the complete omission of banks’ investments in fossil fuels and nuclear energy.  While banks’ growing investments in green energy are to be welcomed, it is even more crucial that investments in fossil fuels drop drastically in the coming years if we are to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic global warming. The ratio of green to “brown” investments would provide a meaningful study on the level of “greenness” of a bank, but looking at clean investments alone makes this little more than a PR exercise for the banking sector.

To give a concrete example of this problem, BankTrack, together with urgewald, Groundwork and Earthlife Africa, released the “Bankrolling Climate Change” report in Durban in 2011. The report is an investigation into the coal investments of the world’s leading banks. We looked at the funding of 93 international banks in 71 coal companies between 2005 and 2011 to identify the “top 20 climate killer banks” in the world. The results show a significant overlap between Bloomberg’s “world’s greenest banks” and the top 20 climate killer banks. In fact, seven of Bloomberg’s top ten appear in the “Climate Killer” list.

Citi, which tops Bloomberg’s list, was rated the number two climate killer bank, and JPMorgan, our number one climate killer bank, is Bloomberg’s number three. Citi’s investments in the coal industry grew by 40% between 2005 and 2010 as the bank poured more than €13 billion into the coal industry. Citi’s profile on the BankTrack website links the bank to the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, as well as mountaintop removal coal mining and the controversial Alpha Coal project in Australia, expected to directly and negatively impact the Great Barrier Reef. This makes the “Greenest Bank in the World” tag a little hard to swallow.

Environmental Direct-Impact, Back to Sustainability Pre-History

Another disturbing aspect of Bloomberg’s methodology is that “reductions in air emissions and water use and gains in energy efficiency” account for a full 30 percent of the score. These are banks’ “direct” impacts, e.g. their own use of energy for electricity and office heating. If this approach would have been understandable in the 1990s, it seems extremely dated in 2013, to say the least.

Numerous studies, particularly from NGOs including many from BankTrack members and partners in the past few years, have clearly demonstrated that banks’ primary environmental impacts are result from their core activities – their lending and investments – rather than through their “direct” impacts. While the sustainability debate in the banking sector started ten or twenty years ago with these direct impacts, the trend since then has been towards looking at the issues that matter: the impacts of banks’ finance. Methodologies for measuring these ‘financed emissions’ already exist, and BankTrack has long called on banks to report on these impacts systematically.

Management and reduction of direct impacts should be considered a ‘hygiene factor’ for banks, rather than a core issue. When Bloomberg reports that JPMorgan, which invested more than €16 billion in the coal industry between 2005 and 2011, “revamped its Park Avenue headquarters in New York, where energy-saving lights now dim automatically and a 54,000-gallon basement tank collects rain for flushing toilets and watering plants”, one has to wonder if it is looking down its telescope backwards.

Stop The Greenwashing

By avoiding mention of fossil fuels and nuclear energy, and by giving undue weight to banks’ direct impacts, Bloomberg’s “greenest banks” methodology is fundamentally, and it would seem deliberately, flawed. (BankTrack and partners Rainforest Action Network and urgewald already raised these concerns in a letter to Bloomberg last year).

The results of this study will now be used by the “world’s greenest banks” in their marketing and public relations material – a generous but undeserved gift to banks which are ploughing billions into environmentally destructive projects. This is a shame when there remain plenty of opportunities for Bloomberg, banks, analysts and other stakeholders to examine bank’s investments in fossil fuels, nuclear power, and their financed emissions. BankTrack will continue to denounce such greenwashing exercises in the coming months and years.

This apology consisting of less than 140 characters does not seem to cover the immeasurable scope of how the oil spill has impacted—and will continue to impact—this Arkansas community. Even Exxon’s own Cleanup Operations Progress page on their website has almost two dozen bullet points detailing the devastating range of this disaster.

And it appears Exxon is getting a little defensive. After other environmental organizations and activists jumped in to add their reaction to the mess, Exxon wrote a series of seemingly over-reactive tweets.

The real kicker? They all seem to center around this notion of “telling the truth”:

The list goes on and on. Check it out for yourself at Exxon’s Twitter account: @exxonmobil

We all know the real truth: our people and planet are the ones who are paying for these oil spills, and no amount of PR spin can change this gravely sad, undeniable fact.

Really, the Arkansas oil spill is an enormous wake-up call we cannot ignore—foreshadowing a huge battle in our midst. As pressure ramps up in the Keystone XL debate, we cannot stand silently on the sidelines. Whether it’s getting in on the social media conversation on Facebook or Twitter, educating your friends and family about what these pipelines really mean for America, and/or getting out there in the streets and resisting—we need you to be heard. The short and long-term future depend on it.

And that’s the honest truth. Without the spin machine.

Over the past few months, Bostonians have demonstrated their concern about the impacts coal has on our communities, health, and economy. BofA treats customers poorly, charges higher fees more often, and likes to foreclose on American families while it repeatedly gets bailed out. In turn, it helps big coal companies like Alpha Natural Resources bail out negligent corporations like Massey Energy, which faced bankruptcy in 2011 after the worst U.S. mining disaster since 1970.

BofA gives the coal industry as a whole several billion dollars in financing each year–while championing 10 billion dollars over a 20 year investment period in largely undisclosed “green initiatives.” It continues to fund the mountaintop removal coal mining that destroys communities and ecosystems, the coal-fired power plants making families sick, and the coal export terminal development that would condemn already overburdened communities to another century of dirty energy infrastructure. Nobody is surprised.

In January activists, organizers, researchers, students, and scholars gathered to discuss Banks, Climate Justice and the Green Economy and BofA’s leading role in the extraction, transport, and burning of coal. In February we came together again in greater numbers and featured local musicians, justice activists, financial advisors, and film makers to dig deeper into BofA’s dirty truth: disregard for our clean energy, green jobs, affordable housing, and quality of life needs. Then last Wednesday, a small but mighty delegation delivered a demand letter to the bank that has been circulating all the while.

In a clear show of respect for RAN and our allies, a notable representative of distinct influence in the bank received our delivery, listened to statements from the two asset managers, the rabbi and the philanthropist in our group, and promised to pass the letter on to its intended recipient, CEO Brian Moynihan. Fifty people from a wide range of distinguished backgrounds had signed on to the letter asking BofA to phase out its funding of coal energy and redirect financing into cleaner, greener energy infrastructure. The icing on the cake was walking out to a larger group of justice allies protesting outside, calling the bank out and putting Boston on the NoCoalBofA map with Charlotte and the Bay Area.

Some of the people who signed may be familiar to you already: Noam Chomsky, Sut Jhally, and Bill McKibben. But who knew that we would receive such support from investment firms, 19 in all? All those who backed this letter understand that the true cost of coal comes on the backs of people who live near the plants, near the mines, and near the railroads that deliver toxic dust clouds over school yards. When these industry leaders come together with community activists to urge the bank to shift its financing, we CAN cut the cash that fuels the industry killing communities and infuse the renewable energy market with increased cash flow.

RAN is part of a growing culture of fossil fuel resistance taking shape in Boston, one that complements and connects with existing resistance power bases here. From campus divestment and keystone pipeline action, to faith community summits and the working groups of 350 Massachusetts, people are rising up and teaming up. They’re linking the dominant energy infrastructure to the struggles of low-income communities and communities of color. Add to this the collaborative progress of the Coal Free Mass coalition in coal plant host communities, the creative persistence of national housing justice leaders at City Life/Vida Urbana and very much alive and networked Occupy affinity groups, and you get a sense of the concurrent activity on the ground to kick our dirty energy habit and manifest climate justice.

A friend recently noted we should thank BofA for being the bank everyone loves to hate, uniting too often divergent movements around a common target. It’s a testament to our movement that people apply their unique experience and knowledge to win these shared fights. This is the network that defines the heart—and muscle—of everything we do at RAN. Whether its people protesting on the street, taking an online action, supporting groups we believe in or signing onto a letter, we are ensuring that our chorus does more than preach—it sings.

The Reagan years represented a dangerous time in global history. Along with the nuclear arms race that eventually bankrupted the already faltering Soviet Union and took the world to the edge of nuclear war, the Reagan Administration provided aid and comfort to numerous brutal dictators and right-wing governments from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East to Central America. Ronald Reagan’s secret wars in places like Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador killed hundreds of thousands in a bloody campaign to end or contain communist influence.

Reagan’s legacy tells us that his political skills as the “great communicator” created a popular united front behind his conservative policies in the United States, but history reflects something very different. During the 1980s, a militant mass non-violent movement, known as the Central American Solidarity Movement, emerged to challenge Reagan’s covert wars in Central America. A critical strategy that the movement developed was the “Pledge of Resistance.” The Pledge of Resistance became an organizing tool that brought together a coalition of peace, religious, feminist and anti-nuclear activists and organizations to actively resist Reagan’s Central American policies.

As the Reagan Administration and its political allies began to escalate its not-so-secret wars in Central America, the Pledge of Resistance began escalations of their own. From 1984 into the early 1990s, the Central American Pledge of Resistance organized thousands into civil disobedience actions, both large and small, in protest of possible invasion of Nicaragua, the funding of the contras and support of death squad governments in El Salvador and other parts of Central America.

Now, we are faced with even more dangerous times.

During the 80’s, these madmen waged secret wars and funded death squads to eradicate other political ideologies, but today we are faced with an insane system based on fossil fuel exploitation shifting the composition of the planet itself for short term profit for a small elite minority. The results of oil, gas and coal extraction and combustion are heading the world further and further down the path of catastrophic climate change. Oil companies in Canada are extracting tar sands oil from an area the size of Florida. Coal companies use mountaintop removal coal mining to destroy over 500 Appalachian Mountains, bury thousands of miles of streams and rivers with mining debris and poison countless communities with air and water pollution.

The latest battle has been around the Keystone XL Pipeline which would run oil from the Alberta tar sands to the Gulf Coast. It would flow billions of gallons of oil in what climatologist James Hanson has called “the fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet.” Canadian oil giant, TransCanada has lobbied the U.S. government, spending millions on lobbyists and election year donations to grease palms for it’s dirty project. A few weeks ago, the State Department released a long awaited Environmental Impact Statement which said that the Keystone XL Pipeline would have little or no impact on the environment and climate. It turns out that the report was written by a TransCanada subcontractor.

For the past two years, environmental and climate activists have waged hard fought campaigns against the pipeline. In August, 2011 over 1200 were arrested sitting in at the White House demanding Obama reject it. Since July 2012, the Tar Sands Blockade has led actions against the southern leg of the pipeline (approved early last year by Obama) that runs from Cushing, OK to Houston, TX. The rebellious energy of the blockade has led to dozens of arrests, an 85 day tree-sit and a harsh backlash by TransCanada, Texas law enforcement and courts. Last month, tens of thousands marched in Washington D.C. in the largest climate rally in history.

Now a coalition of groups have called for another Pledge of Resistance, this time to the Keystone XL Pipeline. CREDO, Rainforest Action Network, 350.org, Hip Hop Caucus, Oil Change and others have put out the Pledge and have had over 50,000 sign up to resist the pipeline. Big plans and big movements are in the works.

When Reagan’s presidency ended in January 1989, he had failed to overthrow the Nicaraguan government either by U.S. invasion or through contra military action. The Pledge of Resistance held the line against Reagan’s interventions. While he attempted to bring to full bear the force of the U.S. government and military against the people of Central America (and many died as a result), the Pledge contributed to the thwarting of his ultimate goals. But now we’re faced with nothing less than melting permafrost, rising sea levels and extreme weather.

It’s now time to escalate outside the Beltway and even beyond the pipeline route.

Will you take the Pledge?