Vous êtes sur le site officiel des Travailleurs Industriels du Monde. Ici vous trouverez à peu près tout ce dont vous avez besoin pour rejoindre l'IWW et commencer à organiser vos lieux de travail et construire un grand syndicat au sein de votre communauté. La plupart des informations contenues ici traitent des Etats-unis et du Canada, mais nous avons aussi des liens vers d.autres sites IWW gérés ailleurs.

L'IWW est une organisation syndicale pour tous les travailleurs, un syndicat dédié à l'organisation des travailleurs sur leur lieu de travail, dans leurs industries et leurs communautés. Les membres des IWW organisent les travailleurs pour obtenir de meilleures conditions aujourd.hui et construisent pour demain un monde économique démocratique. Nous voulons que nos entreprises fonctionnent au profit des ouvriers et des communautés plutôt que pour une poignée de patrons et leur exécutif.

Nous sommes les Travailleurs Industriels du Monde parce que nous nous organisons industriellement. Ceci signifie que nous organisons tous les travailleurs produisant les mêmes biens ou fournissant les mêmes services dans un syndicat, plutôt que de les diviser par secteurs d.activité, ainsi nous pouvons mettre en commun notre force et faire triompher nos revendications ensemble. Depuis que l'IWW a été fondé en 1905, nous avons apporté des contributions significatives aux combats des travailleurs à travers le monde et nous sommes fiers de notre tradition visant à nous organiser indépendamment de critères sexuels, ethniques et raciaux bien avant que de telles méthodes soient courantes.

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By Kate Sheppard

The state government of Florida is set today to release its action plan on climate change, which includes significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and indicates that the state stands to reap $28 billion in net economic savings by 2025 if it moves forward with cutting carbon.

A draft summary [PDF] of the plan from the state's Action Team on Energy and Climate Change includes 50 policy recommendations, and notes that if all of these were acted upon, the state could reduce emissions 64 percent by 2025. That would mean a reduction of 33 percent below 1990 levels -- a much larger cut than Gov. Charlie Crist (R) called for last year when he created the "Action Team." The summary was posted on the state's Department of Environmental Protection website yesterday (as David Sassoon pointed out on SolveClimate), and a final version is due out shortly.

"Early action to address global climate change has significant energy security benefits for Floridians, while positioning the state to become a regional and hemispheric hub of green technology innovation and investment," the report concludes.

The measures proposed in the report would reduce the state's dependence on fossil fuels drastically, cutting petroleum use by 53.5 billion gallons, coal use by 200.2 million short tons, and natural gas use by 6.394 billion cubic feet over the period from 2009 to 2025.

"While it may be assumed by some readers that the current economic environment would hamper Florida's progress toward a low-carbon economy, the Action Team firmly believes that current economic conditions precisely sharpen the 'call to action' first issued by Governor Crist in 2007," says the report. "Now is the time for strategic investment in Florida's low-carbon energy infrastructure if we are to be successful in diversifying the state's economy, creating new job opportunities, and positioning Florida's 'green tech' sector as an economic engine for growth."

The Action Team, which Crist created by executive order last year, consists of 28 members, including environmentalists, business leaders, four members of the state legislature, and representatives from the utilities sector. It was headed up by the secretary of the Department of Environmental Protection, Michael W. Sole. The team approved each of the 50 proposed measures unanimously.

The plan also calls for the state to look at regional cap-and-trade programs like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the Western Climate Initiative, and evaluate whether to link up with those programs. But the report states that a cap-and-trade program will be only a portion of the plan: "The cap-and-trade program is intended to be implemented concurrently with other recommended policy actions, to guarantee that emissions targets are met within the covered sectors, and, potentially, to generate additional reductions and cost savings."

Meanwhile, progress on putting in place a renewable portfolio standard for the state seems to be lagging. Crist has said he wants the state to produce 20 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, but a proposal from the state's Public Service Commission wouldn't meet that goal until 2041. Though three of the PSC's five commissioners agree that the 2020 goal is possible, the recommendation that came from the commission's staff laid out significantly lower targets -- 5 percent renewables by 2017, 10 percent by 2025, and 15 percent by 2033.

A recommendation from the commission was expected yesterday, but instead regulators directed the staff to reevaluate their proposal. There will be another public hearing on the proposal on Dec. 3, and a vote is scheduled for January. The commission is supposed to have its proposal ready to send to the state legislature for approval by Feb. 1.

By Joseph Romm

Last week I critiqued EDF's pointless video/graphics competition (see here). The contest is pointless because a carbon cap can't cure our oil addiction. Indeed, under any plausible cap, U.S. oil consumption rises.

Gernot Wagner, an economist at Environmental Defense Fund, responded with a post here: "'Bizarre'? No. Tough? Yes: Joseph Romm's critique of EDF's contest is misguided." As I expected, EDF claimed that auctioning off the allowances would "generate large sums of money. Part of that could be used to jump-start our transition to a greener transportation sector that's less dependent on fossil fuels." That takes us to Fantasyland Shellenberger-Nordhaus-land, which we'll visit below.

But what I did not expect is that someone from EDF, particularly an economist, would actually argue the cap itself "goes a long way toward solving the problem. Let's look at the numbers":

MIT's analysis of the Climate Security Act [CSA] using their EPPA model says that net crude oil imports would be 22 percent lower by 2015 under CSA than without. These savings rise to 31 percent by 2020, 41 percent by 2025, and 66 percent by 2030. (Savings decrease in the next years due to some modeling assumptions around other countries taking on caps, but are up to 62 percent again by 2050.) Sure, that's technically not "solving the problem" entirely. However, solving two thirds of it isn't all that bad in my book.

I stand corrected -- not! Needless to say, I was quite shocked to see my old alma mater cited as the source of a claim that so blatantly flies in the face of both standard economics and practical logic.

After all, if you go to a standard economic analysis of CSA, say the one by the Energy Information Administration, Energy Market and Economic Impacts of S. 2191, the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2007 [PDF], you can see quite clearly in the Executive Summary's Table E32 that in every single case they analyze, U.S. energy consumption of liquid fuels in 2020 and 2030 is higher than it is in 2006. And that's true even though "all cases include the 35-mile-per-gallon corporate average fuel economy standard recently enacted." In the "Core" case, the allowance price is not cheap, $61 a ton of carbon dioxide in 2030 (adding about 56 cents to a gallon of gasoline), but U.S. liquid fuel consumption in 2030 is a mere 4.5 percent lower than it would have been without CSA, and still 5 percent higher than it is today. The oil consumption numbers are hardly any different in the case with a $91 a ton CO2 price in 2030.

So how did the Massachusetts Institute of Technology analysis get such a staggering reduction in oil consumption from the Climate Security Act using an economic model that yields only slightly higher CO2 prices than EIA? The answer -- sadly or laughably (either way, you end up with tears) -- is also magical thinking.

Journey with me now to a land far, far away from ours, where you can find the original MIT analysis, "Appendix D: Analysis of the Cap and Trade Features of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S. 2191)" [PDF] of their Assessment of U.S. Cap-and-trade Proposals. It turns out that virtually all of the amazing reduction in US oil consumption that MIT finds comes from "Net Bio Liquids Imports" -- see Table D6 on page D18. In 2020, MIT projects/assumes/prays the United States will be importing $39 billion worth of biofuels and in 2030 that we will be importing an astonishing $94 billion a year in biofuels!

How is this possible and what does it have to do with the cap? Magical thinking and nothing whatsoever. The cap is all but completely incidental here, since in 2020 it has added about $0.75 a gallon to the price of gasoline. If you think that would lead to $39 billion in biofuels imports in this country, then I have a video/graphics contest I'd love to sell you for $10,000.

Frankly, what MIT has done is so absurd that it isn't even terribly productive to waste a lot of time looking into their various assumptions. They simply wave a magic wand and grant superpowers to global biofuels. If you are a big fan of science fiction, you can read what MIT has done in their main report here [PDF]:

Biofuel liquids in the EPPA model are based on the assumption that cellulosic conversion processes are successfully commercialized and that the energy needed in the conversion/distillation process is also supplied by biomass so that there is no net CO2 release.

Why not just assume Santa Claus is going to hand out free carbon-eating toys to everyone on the planet? Oh, wait, that's what MIT did. In the real world, cellulosic biofuels have major challenges. The United States has been investing in biofuels R&D for three decades now and still we don't have a single commercial plant in the country. Obviously we should continue pursuing cellulosic technology aggressively, but it is criminal for an independent economic modeling analysis to simply assume we will get the breakthroughs needed to deploy the technology at massive scale by 2020.

As a side note, if I am reading the report right, then the amount of biofuels that MIT is assuming for the United States alone in 2030 would require the equivalent worldwide of roughly one-third of all U.S. cropland, grassland, and forest land dedicated to biofuels. You think it'll be a problem finding the necessary land and water in a world where most countries don't have the excess arable land that we do, in a 2030 world where we'll have another billion people to provide food and water for, in a world where global warming is already causing droughts, desertification, and water shortages, and our very, very limited use of crops and cropland for energy is already jacking up the price of food to record levels and promoting deforestation around the globe? Well, you've obviously never been to the joint MIT-EDF laboratory for "happy thoughts and fairy dust."

Back in the semi-real world, EDF's critique of my analysis then claims:

Depending on how many of the carbon allowances are auctioned (as opposed to given away for free), a cap will also generate large sums of money. Part of that could be used to jump-start our transition to a greener transportation sector that's less dependent on fossil fuels. It's tough to put a number on this. Yet it wouldn't be too surprising if a combination of these measures could take care of the remaining third of the problem.

How exactly would spending billions of dollars on technology take care of the remaining third of the problem? This time, however, I'm going to insist that EDF answer that question without using magic.

Advances in technology are great, and indeed I have spent much of my career working as hard as possible to achieve those advances. But the vast quantities of money that the federal government put into hybrid vehicle joint research with the big three automakers in the 1990s went nowhere because the big three abandoned the technology as soon as George W. Bush became president. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him commercialize the process.

Yes, incentives can jumpstart the transition to a greener transportation sector, but only with magical thinking can incentives get you the kind of mass-scale rapid deployment of alternative fuels and alternative fuel vehicles and alternative fuel infrastructure needed to replace one third of our oil consumption by 2030.

Note to EDF: Your contest is about how a carbon cap will "cure our oil addiction" not about how a carbon cap will eliminate oil imports. You know as well as anybody that the climate problem is not driven by our oil imports bought by our total oil consumption. And yes, people like Shellenberger and Nordhaus believe that throwing government money at the problem is the critical strategy needed to solve it (see here). But, unlike you, they don't believe in or even like government regulations.

I reassert for the umpteenth time that no country in the world has ever successfully introduced alternative fuels and alternative fuel vehicles into the consumer market on a large scale without mandates and regulations. Also I seriously doubt there will be much money from auctioning permits available "to jump-start our transition to a greener transportation sector" through at least the year 2020, but that will have to be the subject of another post.

EDF finishes its critique:

These arguments also show why the ad competition is a good idea. It's tough to translate economic modeling results into an accessible language without sounding overly wonkish, let alone describing the potentials for these additional measures.

So, any idea for a memorable image? It would indeed be neat to come up with something that mirrors the "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs" campaign.

Actually I can easily translate MIT's economic modeling results into a accessible language without sounding overly wonkish: "This is your energy system. This is your energy system on magic":

Where's my $10,000?

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

By Tom Philpott

Speaking of bottled water, get this, from Environmental Working Group: 

The bottled water industry promotes an image of purity, but comprehensive testing by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals a surprising array of chemical contaminants in every bottled water brand analyzed, including toxic byproducts of chlorination in Walmart's Sam's Choice and Giant Supermarket's Acadia brands, at levels no different than routinely found in tap water.

EWG is making an extremely important point here. Yes, our tap water is full of nasty substances, but the answer isn't to essentially privatize our drinking water by buying little plastic bottles of supposedly purified stuff. As EWG shows, bottled water is often no better than tap -- and (unlike municipalities) the bottled water industry has no obligation to publish results of contamination tests.

The real answer is to crack down on the sort of industrial and agricultural pollutants that routinely seep into our water supply and to reinvest in public water purification infrastructure.

In a startling recent article in The New York Review of Books on our nation's crumbling infrastructure, Everett Ehrlich and Felix G. Rohatyn reported:

Current funding for safe drinking water amounts to "less than 10 percent of the total national requirement," while "aging wastewater management systems discharge billions of gallons of untreated sewage into US surface waters each year."

Meanwhile, as Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania, reported in Grist last year, industrial-farming runoff creates all manner of drinking-water problems from the Midwest clear down to the Gulf of Mexico. Here's just one identified by Royte:

Applied to corn and soybean fields in the springtime, [atrazine] runs off into ditches that lead to streams that lead to drinking water uptakes. Atrazine doesn't break down over time and distance, and there's an increasing body of evidence that at levels far below 3 ppb (the level the U.S. EPA considers safe for humans), it's having some spooky effects on both wild and lab-raised frogs: it causes males to grow ovaries in their testes. In some Midwestern streams, scientists with the U.S. Geological Survey have found the herbicide at up to 224 ppb.

Bottled water doesn't address these problems; it represents a society-wide surrender to neglected infrastructure and limp oversight. And the cost, as Royte shows in her book, is an explosion of toxic plastic into the waste stream. And as  EWG shows, bottled water can't even promise to deliver clean water.

The real answer is to put that bottle down and start pressuring government to ensure every citizen's right to clean drinking water.

Thanks to friend of the blog, Jack Sargent, for pointing me to this fascinating dispute before the U.S Supreme Court now concerning the sealing of a record in an employment discrimination case. From the reporters committee for freedom of the...

By Kate Sheppard

Back in June, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was ready to vote on whether to hold U.S. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and Office of Management and Budget's Susan Dudley in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents related to the controversial decisions on smog and California's request for an emissions waiver. At the last minute, though, the White House blocked the committee's subpoenas for the documents, claiming executive privilege, and Oversight Chair Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) postponed the contempt vote so his committee could determine whether this claim of executive privilege is valid.

Yesterday, the committee released a draft report [PDF] of their finding, which, unsurprisingly, concludes that "the President's assertion of executive privilege is wrong and an abuse of the privilege." Here's more from the report, which Waxman is circulating:

Congress has a compelling legislative and oversight need for documents withheld from the Committee. The documents withheld pursuant to the President's assertion of executive privilege are critical to determining the role of the White House in Administrator Johnson's waiver and ozone decisions, whether White House actions with respect to these decisions were in compliance with Clean Air Act requirements, and whether any additional legislation is necessary to ensure the goals of the Act are effectuated properly in the future.

The President's assertion of executive privilege covers is expansive. It covers any communications that occurred within the White House, no matter how attenuated the connection between the staff authoring the communications and the presidential decision-making process. At the same time, the Administration has barred a key EPA official from responding to Committee questions about these communications and has refused to provide the Committee basic information about the authorship and distribution of the documents that would enable the Committee to assess the merits of the privilege claim and whether further accommodations could be achieved. The assertion of executive privilege under these circumstances has stymied the Committee's investigation of the waiver and ozone decisions.

The full report, and supporting documents, are available on the committee's website. The full committee will examine the reports next week.

One of the less followed stories during the economic collapse is its potential impact on the employee benefits of employees in the United States. Not only will workers lose a substantial part of their pensions because of the falling price...

Steve Greenhouse of the New York Times writes about the claimed increasing influence the Change to Win Coalition is having in this presidential election: Success has many parents, and with Senator Barack Obama gaining a lead in many polls, the...

...

By Ashley Braun

While sitting on a panel about bias in the media, Dan Rather called out the contrived format of the presidential debates, saying, "First of all, these aren't debates. They are a 'something,' but they aren't debates."

We feel ya, Dan. Which is why we sought out the meatiest environmental questions that talented Grist actors the average Joe Six-Pack is looking to the next president to answer. Check out our video series riffing on the environmental soundbites fed to us each debate: Debated Breath: In video series, Grist tries to stump the candidates with tough climate questions.

Your funny bone will find them delicious!

After you're done watching, vlog a response or question for the candidates on Grist's YouTube channel: YouTube.com/GristTV.

...

Part of the reason why I'm willing to consider and in some cases support the idea of secession (e.g. - here and here) is that I take a very...

By Kate Sheppard

With just 20 days to go before the election, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama will meet at Hofstra University for their third and final debate tonight at 9 p.m. EDT. Their ultimate encounter, moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS News, will focus on domestic and economic policy. Might we hear some questions (or, at least, a question) on climate change and energy policy?

At their first debate, the subjects were never brought up directly, but the candidates both noted the importance of the issues and sparred over the details achieving greater energy security.

In the second debate, the candidates mentioned energy concerns repeatedly -- though they didn't stray very far from their talking points. The highlight of that debate was, of course, Ingrid Jackson's pointed question about what they candidates would do about climate change in their first two years in office. And though the two candidates both acknowledged the importance of the concern, neither really addressed the urgency factor, and again, both stuck mostly to the spiel we've heard from them before. And thanks to the "townhall" format of last weeks debate, there was no time allotted for follow ups, leaving little room to explore the issue at any depth.

Thus, most of the questions enviros have for the candidates remain unanswered. Folks would still like to know how McCain's claim from the first debate that "no one from Arizona is against solar" fits with his own record of voting 23 times against measures to support renewable energy. They'd like to know what the candidates would do to curb automobile emissions, whether they plan to attend the world climate treaty talks in Poland this December, and how they'd address the pollution from coal-fired power plants (other than plugging as-yet-nonexistent "clean coal").

The candidates and the moderator will be seated together at one table tonight, a format that politicos are hoping will inspire more interaction between the candidates, and more pressing from the moderator. Previous moderators have been criticized for letting the candidates walk all over the rules, and for doing little to push them beyond their prepared sound bites. Might Schieffer finally be the one to finally get them talking?

For a sense of what Grist would like to hear about at tonight's debate, be sure to check out our climate questions series, episodes one, two, and three. And tune in for some post-debate coverage on Gristmill.

Back in April, we blogged the troubled status of workers comp in New Jersey, a patronage-ridden system that failed to provide timely benefits to many injured workers. The system suffered from a decades-long inertia: yes, there were problems for injured workers, but employers benefitted from relatively low rates. There was little groundswell for reform; the last effort to update the...

So says Peter Wallison in today's WSJ:...

Editor's note - this is perhaps the most serious, thought-provoking edition of HWR I've had the honor of hosting. There's a lot of meat here, so don't expect to multi-task your way through. These are momentous times. Not only will...

The candidates need to be pushed and prodded. Who can do it? How about Amy Goodman? Pat Buchanan? Or Ralph Nader?

Is it meddling? Or pursuit of national interests? We report, you decide.

The Canadian Green Party didn't win a single seat in yesterday's election, but Green Party leader Elizabeth May made a very interesting comment:...

By Maywa Montenegro

The relationship between our planet's vanishing species, languages, and cultures has long fascinated me, so I was thrilled to write a story on the subject for the current issue of Seed.

In the piece, my co-author Terry Glavin and I mention some important legislation being put forth at the annual meeting of the IUCN in Barcelona, Spain. Now that I look at my calendar, I realize the meeting's just now wrapping up ... and it looks like there is some amazing web coverage of the 10-day event.

I haven't yet figured out whether the resolution was adopted or not ... bonus to anyone who can beat me to the answer.