[env-trinity] Article submission: Jerry Brown gushes about "fighting climate change" at Vatican as he fracks California

[Dan Bacher]

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/21/1404267/-Jerry-Brown-s-Real-Environmental-Record-Exposed

Jerry Brown gushes about "fighting climate change" at Vatican as he  
fracks California

by Dan Bacher

In yet another carefully choreographed photo opportunity to tout his  
"green" image, Governor Jerry Brown today urged the world's mayors to  
"light a fire" and "join California in the fight against climate  
change."

Brown was speaking on the first day of the Vatican's symposium on  
climate change and modern slavery hosted by the Pontifical Academies  
of Sciences and Social Sciences.

"We have fierce opposition and blind inertia," Brown claimed. "And  
that opposition is well-financed, hundreds of millions of dollars  
going into propaganda, into falsifying the scientific record,  
bamboozling people of every country. We have to fight that propaganda  
and overcome the inertia and the tremendous opposition."

"Mayors, you are at the bottom of this power chain and you have got to  
light a fire. We have to join together. We have to make a change. It's  
up to us to make it happen," Brown said.

The Vatican's symposium aims to drive awareness, dialogue and action  
at the local level on climate change and modern slavery – two  
interconnected issues highlighted in the pope's recent encyclical,  
according to an announcement from the Governor's Office.

Pope Francis will address the symposium later today and Governor Brown  
will address the symposium again during tomorrow's program.

You can expect the mainstream media and some corporate "environmental"  
groups to gush over Brown's grandstanding at the Vatican without  
little critical analysis of the Governor's actual environmental  
record, a toxic legacy that I have documented in article after article.

Fortunately, faith leaders from Brown’s home state and environmental  
experts introduced a critical note to the narrative about Brown's  
visit to the Vatican when they commended the Pope for his leadership  
and urged him to take this opportunity to call on Brown and other  
leaders to ban fracking and take every possible measure to protect our  
climate.

“We in the faith community applaud Pope Francis for highlighting the  
moral imperative of addressing climate change and protecting creation,  
and appreciate that he is bringing leaders like Jerry Brown to the  
Vatican to highlight the issue,” said Rev. Ambrose Carroll, a senior  
pastor at the Church by the Side of Road in Oakland, Calif., and a  
member of Faith Against Fracking. “We hope he will be able to get  
Governor Brown to see the indisputable incompatibility of his attempts  
to fight climate change while enabling the worst climate polluters to  
continue fracking.”

“As Pope Francis meets with leaders from around the world on climate  
change, we applaud his efforts to make environmental stewardship a  
priority of the Catholic community and commend his willingness to  
speak up about our moral imperative to protect the planet,” said  
Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch and Food &  
Water Europe.

“Among the Pope's guests this week is California Gov. Jerry Brown, an  
American politician who, despite having done much to further the  
global conversation on climate change, continues to put his own  
state's environmental and public health at risk by supporting the  
expansion of fracking and other extreme oil drilling. We urge Pope  
Francis to send a clear message to Brown and other elected officials  
that fracking—in California, in Europe, or elsewhere—has no place in  
his vision for a greener planet," emphasized Hauter.

Latino communities in California, who disproportionately live near  
fracking and other extreme oil drilling sites in the state, in a  
classic case of environmental injustice, on Monday sent a letter to  
Pope Francis asking him to intercede on their behalf and protect  
residents from fracking, according to Californians Against Fracking. (http://californiansagainstfracking.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Pope-Francis-Latino-Letter.pdf 
)

"As the defender of all that is moral and good, we ask that you  
intercede on our behalf due to the suffering we are facing as a result  
of Governor Brown’s support of these practices," the letter stated.  
"In our communities, the oil and gas industry is using dangerous  
extraction methods like fracking next to our schools and in our  
backyards, and it is contaminating our air and our water, and making  
us sick. Because of fracking, our communities are suffering."

The group said more than 60,000 children in California attend school  
within one mile of a stimulated oil well – of which 60 percent are  
Latino. Statewide, Latino students are nearly 19 percent more likely  
than non-Latino students to attend a school within a mile and a half  
of a stimulated well. Last week, a Kern County family sued Governor  
Brown claiming that the new fracking regulations do not protect the  
health of Latino public school children. (http://www.crpe-ej.org/crpe/index.php/component/content/article/360-romo-v-brown 
)

In his recent encyclical on climate change Pope Francis said, “Many of  
those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem  
mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their  
symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts  
of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such  
effects will continue to worsen if we continue with the current models  
of production and consumption…We know that technology based on the use  
of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil, and  
to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without  
delay.” )http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html)

More than a dozen countries in Europe, including Italy, Germany and  
France. have banned or placed a moratorium on fracking. In the United  
States, a number of states including New York and Maryland have moved  
to halt the practice - but not Jerry Brown's California, supposedly a  
"green" state.

Earlier this month, an independent study by the California Council on  
Science and Technology confirmed that fracking and other methods of  
oil development in the state are harmful to human health, air quality  
and the state’s vulnerable water supply.

There is little doubt why Governor Brown is such a fervent backer of  
extreme oil extraction in California; the oil industry is one of the  
biggest and most faithful contributors to his campaigns.

On September 20, 2013, Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 4, an  
odious piece of legislation that creates the infrastructure for the  
expansion of fracking in California.'' Before Brown signed the bill,  
he had received millions in donations from Big Oil, according to  
Robert Gammon's East Bay Express article published on October 2, 2013.  
(http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/fracking-jerry-brown/Content?oid=3726533 
)

"Before Jerry Brown signed legislation last month that promises to  
greatly expand fracking in California, the governor accepted at least  
$2.49 million in financial donations over the past several years from  
oil and natural gas interests, according to public records on file  
with the Secretary of State's Office and the California Fair Political  
Practices Commission. Of the total, $770,000 went to Brown's two  
Oakland charter schools — the Oakland School for the Arts and the  
Oakland Military Institute. The other $1.72 million went to his  
statewide political campaigns for attorney general and governor, along  
with his Proposition 30 ballot-measure campaign last year," said Gammon.

Jerry Brown's support of fracking is just one of the multitude of  
terrible environmental policies that he has embraced. Since I am the  
only reporter, that I am aware of, who has investigated the  
environmental record of Jerry Brown as a whole, I encourage other  
journalists also to investigate his real environmental record.

His environmentally destructive policies include promoting carbon  
trading greenwashing; rushing the Bay Delta Conservation Plan to build  
the Delta tunnels; driving Delta smelt and salmon to the edge of  
extinction; campaigning for the Prop. 1 water grab; and forging ahead  
with the oil industry lobbyist-overseen Marine Life Protection Act  
(MLPA) Initiative to create deeply-flawed "marine protected areas."

For more information about Governor's real environmental record, go  
to: http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/30452-the-extinction-governor-rips-the-green-mask-off-his-tunnels-plan

Governor Brown's Remarks

The full text of the Governor's remarks is below:

Thank you. I think I’ll take as my text – if I may – some words of  
Saint Paul to the Galatians, “God is not mocked for whatsoever a man  
soweth that shall he also reap.” And what Saint Paul said in reference  
to God we can also say about God’s creation. We have heard what we’re  
doing to that creation, what a trillion tons of CO2 and other  
greenhouse gases will do. And that text that God is not mocked is not  
susceptible to compromise, to regrets. It’s inexorable, it’s  
absolutes. We have to respond and if we don’t, the world will suffer.  
We will all suffer. In fact, many people – millions are suffering  
already.

Now, to change the world from a fossil fuel based culture is not easy,  
but there are plenty of examples where it’s happening. So, I can bring  
you the example of California, which for many years has been taking on  
serious environmental challenges. California is now deriving 25  
percent of its electricity from renewable sources and in that source  
we don’t count nuclear or hydro. Secondly, we have the most efficient  
buildings, because of our building regulations, in the entire country.  
As a result, California citizens have saved tens of billions of  
dollars in energy bills. The same is true for our appliance standards,  
the most efficient in the country. As far as automobile pollution, we  
have very strict tailpipe emissions standards. And as a result and  
because of some changes in Washington, those standards are now adopted  
as the national standard of America. And that source of pollution is  
going down, not fast enough but steadily. We also have 40 percent of  
the electric cars in the United States.

But we’re not stopping there. We also have a commitment. And my  
commitment is to increase the renewable portfolio to 50 percent of the  
electricity consumed, 50 percent. And, at the same time, reduce  
petroleum in cars and trucks by 50 percent in the next 15 years.  
That’s quite a challenge, but it can be done. The California economy  
has steadily reduced its greenhouse gas emissions, particularly on a  
per capita basis, but its economy is growing over the last decade  
faster than the economy of the United States as a whole. So, there are  
ways that we can not mock creation or the laws of nature, but live  
within them. We have to get on the side of nature and not abuse it or  
go against it.

Pope Francis spoke about the abuse of goods. And what our modern world  
has seen and has enjoyed is the good of petroleum. We are a petroleum  
culture. We got here by means of petroleum, on airplanes and cars. Our  
clothes, the food deliveries, it’s all based on petroleum. So, it’s  
not a bad, it’s a good. But it becomes a bad when used at the point  
that seven billion people now have over a billion cars with the coal  
plants, the oil and the gas. So, we have to make a transition because  
goods become bads when they are abused and go beyond a certain  
threshold.

We know the problem. Yes, there are uncertainties, but we don’t even  
know how far we’ve gone or if we’ve gone over the edge. There are  
tipping points, feedback loops. This is not some linear set of  
problems that we can predict. It requires that we imagine down the  
road in the future and then react.

But right in the middle of this problem we have fierce opposition and  
blind inertia. And that opposition is well-financed, hundreds of  
millions of dollars going into propaganda, into falsifying the  
scientific record, bamboozling people of every country. Television  
stations, political parties, think tanks, PhDs, university personnel,  
they form a group of people that is attempting to put a cloud of doubt  
and uncertainty over the clear science that you heard earlier this  
morning. So, we have to fight that propaganda and overcome the inertia  
and the tremendous opposition.

Now, how are we going to do that? First of all, we are going to have  
to set a clear goal. And that goal is almost unimaginable. One-third  
of the oil that we know exists as reserves can never be taken out of  
the ground. Fifty percent of the gas can never be used and over 90  
percent of the coal. Now, that is a revolution. That is going to take  
a call to arms.

And if you look at our national leaders, we’re not going to get there.  
Mayors, you are at the bottom of this power chain and you’ve got to  
light a fire if I may use that metaphor – in terms of climate change,  
it’s probably the wrong one. But we have to join together. It’s not  
going to happen. We’re not on the road to avoiding the catastrophes  
that climate change entails, so we have to make a change. This is a  
real conversion. Using the word transformation – that’s a big word, I  
don’t like to use it. It’s very hard to transform. I once entered the  
Jesuit seminary and our goal was to become perfect, a life of  
perfection. I can tell you, it’s very hard. You don’t get perfect and  
at the end of the day you don’t feel very transformed. But in this  
case, we may not transform our being, but we are going to have to  
transform our use of the goods in the world, namely petroleum. And we  
can do it.

I ask you to join with California and 19 other states and provinces to  
make a commitment to live within the no more than two degrees, to get  
us down to two tons per person. We can do that. By the way, the United  
States is over 20 tons per person. California, we’re at 12, so we’re a  
little better. But that’s because we have a lot of sun and we have a  
very benign climate. But we are suffering in the Southwest from  
drought and the ravages of climate change already. But keeping it  
under two is the goal. In Vietnam they only use one and a half tons  
per person. India is maybe two. So the developed world has put in most  
of the carbon and we’re going to have to take most of it out. It’s a  
big challenge. It’s not politics as usual. It’s not going to happen  
unless major changes happen.

And for the Holy Father to issue that encyclical that’s a change. The  
role of nature, the interconnectedness of all beings, these are ideas  
that while implicit, have never been so clear as they have been made  
in this encyclical. So, let’s take some inspiration from the Holy  
Father. Let’s take inspiration from ourselves, but don’t be in any way  
confident or complacent. We have a big mountain to climb. We have very  
powerful opposition that, in at least my country, spends billions on  
trying to keep from office people such as yourselves and elect  
troglodytes and other deniers of the obvious science.

So, that’s all I have to say. When I look at it – I could quote an  
Italian, by the way, who said – I shouldn’t quote him because he’s the  
founder of the Italian communist party. But he said, “Pessimism of the  
intellect, optimism of the will.” And if we really sense our  
collective power we can exercise the political will to reverse the  
trends we’re on and to turn a new chapter in human history and live in  
compatible ways with other beings, with ourselves, and protect the  
most vulnerable. And do the right thing.

By the way, the church is not trying to become scientists. The pope  
isn’t a scientist, but he’s got scientists. And the Pontifical  
Academies have laid it out pretty clear, so it’s up to us to make it  
happen, the mayors and the governors. But I’m not counting on the  
presidents and I’m not counting on any Republican Congress in  
Washington. So, it’s up to you guys and you ladies. Thank you very  
much. 
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