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A new path forward for climate change campaigners
((brightlines_include))
Our climate agenda is inadequate and may even be detrimental to the sort of effort U.S. environmentalists must now undertake. I'd like to offer for comment an alternative "bright lines" framework for climate action, and propose a shift in role and agenda for U.S. environmentalists that takes account of the circumstances in which we find ourselves and squarely faces the almost incomprehensible challenge before us.
Our goal, put starkly and simply, is to prevent the planned investment of $20 trillion over the next 25 years to increase fossil fuel supply, substituting in its place a crash global program -- capitalized at the same level -- to cut emissions, improve efficiencies, and develop renewables.
The choice should not be viewed, in the frequently invoked Robert Frost imagine, as " two roads diverged." The world is committed whole hog to fossil fuels, and there is no other road -- yet.
To create one will require restructuring the world's largest corporations, inventing appealing, low- or zero-carbon consumer products, and convincing the world's most powerful, nuclear-weapon-equipped nations to leave their reserves of oil, gas, and coal in the ground. We have less than a decade to do it.
Tectonic social change on such a scale is rapid, haphazard, and non-linear. It cannot be achieved in the time left to us by incremental, measured steps. The image of change we should carry in our minds is not Cape Wind or Toyota Prius, but the Berlin Wall crashing down.
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Global warming ads taking over the world
Avaaz.org, international sibling to Moveon.org, launched this global TV ad on climate change this week, urging viewers to take action and encourage their political leaders to follow suit. “Avaaz” means […]
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TV’s the 800-pound gorilla
Here’s a short but insightful clip on Variety.com wherein Al Gore discusses the utterly central role television plays in public opinion. I think some of us — I’m guilty as […]
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Cleaner by the Dozen
Green group produces list of top 12 eco-friendly vehicles American autos are drowning their sorrows in foreign oil after not making the 2007 Green Book list of the top 12 […]
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School of Rocky
An interview with Salt Lake City mayor and green innovator Rocky Anderson In a decidedly red state, Rocky Anderson is a decidedly green mayor — and a popular one at […]
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Former vice president. Newly minted rock star.
By now, everyone's heard the news. Al Gore isn't the guy he was in 2000. He's the New Gore -- relaxed, charming, self-effacing, funny. Really funny. Who'd have thunk it?
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Game over? Hardly.
With the new IPCC report finally out in the world, climate activists can again focus on action. What do we do now?
I say, first let's cut through the defeatism that's posing as realism, as in this article in yesterday's L.A. Times, "Game over on global warming?":
Everybody in the United States could switch from cars to bicycles.
The Chinese could close all their factories.
Europe could give up electricity and return to the age of the lantern.
But all those steps together would not come close to stopping global warming.Really? I ran the numbers and came up with a 17-18% reduction in global CO2 emissions (4.3% from zapping U.S. cars, 7.7% for closing Chinese factories, 5.6% for converting European electricity to wind).
Hasn't the Times heard of harm reduction? Every percentage drop in emissions will translate into some mitigation in sea level rises, violent storms, and other harms from global warming.
No less vexing, for this writer, was Robert Reich's blog reaction to the IPCC report. The former Clinton Secretary of Labor hadn't even finished his lead paragraph when he threw in the towel: "You can forget a carbon tax any time soon."
C'mon, Bob. Don't mourn, organize. Surrendering just when a political critical mass is assembling to attack carbon emissions is, well, un-American. A carbon tax is essential, and the work of coaxing the public and pressuring policymakers has to start now. There's just no alternative.
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Canada needs help saving it
I don’t usually pass these things along, but this email caught my eye: —– With last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluding that humans are significantly increasing global […]
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An Inconvenient Truth to show in U.K. schools
Despite getting a frosty reception in U.S. public schools, the (Oscar-nominated) film An Inconvenient Truth will be distributed to every secondary school in the U.K. Environment Secretary David Miliband and […]
