The Sunday morning news talk show hosts chatted about a lot of things in 2007, but global warming and climate change were hardly mentioned. Make them start talking about it in 2008. And make the presidential candidates on the various shows demonstrate they actually know something beyond feel good cliches.
Go to Top Reporters and sign the petition. Don't leave it up to American television news to take the initiative.
Scientific American published an article a week or so ago entitled "10 Solutions for Climate Change." It's food for thought, not because the ideas are new or different, but because it does give us, collectively and individually, ways to make some difference regarding climate mitigation and adaptation.
These 10 "solutions" are also focal points in terms of what we ultimately decide to do and where we decide to put our resources, both human and financial.
They are in no particular order: (1) Forgo fossil fuels, (2) Infrastucture upgrade, (3) Move closer to work, (4) Be efficient, (5) Consume less, (6) Eat smart, go vegetarian, (7) Stop cutting down trees, (8) Unplug, (9) One child, (10) Future fuels.
A really interesting site showing country by country CO2 emissions and birth and death rates in real time is Breathing Earth
Now them coal boys know how to pull strings in the state capital. Governor Sebelius (Kansas) is, well, she's still a loose cannon; but that young fella Blunt (Missouri) is gonna play ball. He's on the "A" team. We'll just keep reminding the legislators who they work for. As far as the good citizens are concerned, they know who's passing out the jobs. Coal now and coal forever. It's the American way.
As reported by the Associated Press last week, The Carbon Monitoring for Action database, compiled by the Center for Global Development, is now available on-line at CARMA.
Bob Dylan once sang, "The times they are a-changin'." We don't know yet to what extent they are changing, but a breeze is stirring. Kansas City's Climate Protection Planning Process has now embarked on its second phrase.
It all started in 2005 when the U.S. Conference of Mayors passed a Climate Protection Agreement. It was a recognition that climate change and global warming were real. In 2007 more than 540 cities from all 50 states, encompassing more than 60 million people, have signed on to the Climate Protection Planning Process.
On November 2nd at Rockhurst University a number of mayors from cities in the region will meet to sign on to the Climate Protection Agreement. This means the idea begins to grow larger as more cities and towns recognize that climate change is quite real. Now imagine that we had a national government with a vision....
To most people it probably seemed like an innocuous news story in the Kansas City Star this past Friday: Al Gore shared the Nobel Prize for Peace with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One could agree or disagree with the Nobel committee's choice. Readers were invited to comment. I lost track after some 14 pages of comments.
More than half the comments seemed almost like a metaphor for the dark cultural paranoia spreading across America. The remarks of many of the writers expressed a visceral, irrational rage toward Al Gore, as though the former Vice-President had harmed them personally in some way.
The climate-neutral city is an idea whose time has come for many reasons. It's quite likely, for example, that such things as closed-loop product systems, smart grids, and sharing goods will be tried out and modified first in urban areas.
Some thirty plus years ago the late Jane Jacobs, one of the most perceptive urban theorists around, pointed out--contrary to the established urban planning mantra--that the most prosperous and healthy parts of cities like Boston and New York had the highest population density, while many of the poorest areas had the lowest population density. (Jacobs' classic book The Life and Death of Great American Cities is still worth reading today for its insight and vision.)
Would they actually buy and sell it if it were on the market? How would you react if you were told that global warming would cause the death of untold numbers of people, but there was a way to utilize all the corpses by making a new Exxon oil product? What better idea than transforming dead people into oil and calling the new product Vinoleum. Is this not another brilliant example of the market economy at its best?
Two individuals posing as representatives of Exxon-Mobil and the National Petroleum Council were the keynote speakers at a conference of 300 oil representatives in Calgary, Alberta, where they introduced their “new” product. The attendees listened politely until the two imposters passed out “commemorative candles” to the audience. The candles were supposedly made from the flesh of an Exxon janitor, who had died as a result of cleaning up a toxic spill.
