Friends of the Earth continued its tradition of hard-hitting, results-oriented advocacy in 2009. In Congress, in the courtroom, on the streets and through the media, our diverse and cutting-edge campaigns have produced key strides forward in the fight for a healthy and just world, empowering real solutions to global warming, putting our tax dollars to better work for people and the planet, and holding corporations accountable to the social and environmental impacts of their practices.
Friends of the Earth sounded the alarm about how the House climate and energy bill passed in June would fail to deliver effective solutions to global warming and would actually take us backwards by gutting the Clean Air Act. We exposed the truth about the bill’s massive loopholes and polluter giveaways – not to mention opportunities for Wall Street manipulation – through ad campaigns, testimony before Congress, our “Just the Energy Bill” animated video and activism tool, and media coverage in top national publications.
Because we need allies in the fight against polluting special interests, we collaborated with other groups to build a powerful, diverse coalition of more than 300 social justice, human rights, faith and progressive organizations who know we can – and urgently must – do better. Our push for a stronger Senate climate and energy bill resulted in a key victory: the bill that has advanced farthest to date in the Senate protects the Clean Air Act, the best existing tool we have to cut greenhouse gas pollution. We continue our fight to keep it that way.
We settled a key federal lawsuit in a way that forces the U.S. Export-Import Bank (Ex-Im) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) to address the global warming impacts of the projects they finance overseas and to invest more in renewable energy. Our pioneering lawsuit opened up the courthouse doors for the first time to people injured by climate change.
We successfully defeated congressional efforts to introduce and pass irresponsible appropriations amendments that would have tied the EPA’s hands from accurately assessing and regulating greenhouse gas emissions caused by biofuels production. In the process, we engaged 9,000 activists to write to their members of Congress in support of safeguards against deforestation and pollution caused by biofuels.
We stopped a Senate attempt to turn economic recovery legislation into a bailout for the nuclear power industry, helping to strip up to $50 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear power from the bill. Our ad campaign effectively pressured the proposal’s sponsor and other key senators to cut out the nuclear pork.
Our “New Roads = New Pollution” campaign successfully shifted transportation investments in economic recovery legislation away from new road projects and toward smart transportation infrastructure that can help reduce pollution and enable people to get around without cars, resulting in $17 billion for public transportation and $8 billion for high speed rail.
Our California-based Clean Cars Program helped pass the world’s first Low-Carbon Fuel Standard, which mandates a 10 percent reduction in the carbon intensity of all fuels sold in California and will prevent widespread use of the dirtiest fuels. Our team led the way in demanding that the alternative fuels used also meet critical sustainability standards.
We introduced national cruise ship legislation under the Clean Water Act to establish a ban on sewage, gray water, and oily bilge water discharges within 12 miles from U.S. shores and implement strong pollution limits for discharges further out. The bill’s introduction came on the heels of our release of the first-ever Cruise Ship Environmental Report Card, which gives environmental grades to 10 cruise lines and 105 cruise ships operating in the U.S. The report card ruffled cruise industry executives’ feathers and gives cruise-goers the power to choose the cleanest cruise available.
Nine years and two court battles after we first demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency improve air pollution limits for large ships, the agency finally proposed cleaner air pollution standards for ocean-going vessels in August. These rules would reduce harmful pollutants by 80 percent or more by 2030, preventing between 13,000 and 33,000 premature deaths.
We drew media and public attention to the threat nanomaterials pose to public health, publishing reports on the extreme germ-killer nano-silver and on nanomaterials in sunscreens. We also released a list of more than 100 food products and packaging that use nanoparticles. In response, our activists pushed the Food and Drug Administration to regulate nanomaterials in food, submitting more than 3,000 public comments.
We expanded the Compact for Safe Cosmetics to more than 1,000 companies that have agreed to remove carcinogens, reproductive toxins, and other chemicals of concern from their products, while adding nanomaterials to this list of unsafe ingredients.
We launched the “ShellGuilty” campaign with Friends of the Earth International, Oil Change, and Platform London to hold Shell accountablefor its human rights, climate, and gas flaring abuses in Nigeria, producing ads and releasing a report proving that Shell is the world’s most carbon-intensive oil company. After 13 years of legal battles and public pressure, Shell was forced to pay $15.5 million for its complicity in the 1995 murder of nine Nigerian activists who opposed its gas flaring and environmental devastation of their homeland.
We supported the Gabonese NGO Brainforest in rallying civil society opposition to the environmentally and socially risky Belinga mine project, an iron ore mine under development in one of the world’s largest pristine tropical forests. In response to our solidarity efforts, the project was put on hold pending verification of environmental impact assessments.
Bolstering civil society to put checks on Chinese investmentsOur China Sustainable Finance program continued to enhance the capacity of civil society activists to address the environmental and social impacts of investments by Chinese banks and oil companies in their countries. We developed financial advocacy training materials to help Chinese activists evaluate bank environmental policies, met with activists in Mongolia to report on the degradation caused by mining projects, and achieved the first meeting between a major Chinese corporation and civil society activists concerned about oil projects in Burma.
