This is one of those articles that makes me really appreciate when some of these consultants grow consciences and tell the rest of the world that everything you’ve been afraid of that these companies do is everyday business for them. Usually the company interests and lobbying groups try to write it off as a disgruntled employee or someone on the periphery of how a company worked, but in reality these people usually wind up being the folks in the trenches with insight into how the company really worked underneath the glossy and friendly images their marketing departments make sure are on the evening news and the commercials during prime time.

In this case, Jeremy Leggett not only grew a conscience, he was so revolted by what he had been doing he decided to take his fight back against the people who used to sign his checks by pioneering solar energy and working as a consultant for Greenpeace. And he has a few choice words about the industry that used to be his employer.

First, about Jeremy, so you understand exactly how much weight his word carries:

Jeremy Leggett has undergone quite a few large career changes, from oil industry consultant to Greenpeace scientist to solar power entrepreneur. A geologist by training, he worked with the oil industry until his studies brought him face-to-face with the growing evidence of climate change. In an industry refusing to change, Leggett went to work for Greenpeace and was part of the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks up to the non-binding, international climate change treaty, the Kyoto Protocol. Seeing the strong resistance to renewable energy, Leggett decided to move in that direction himself, setting up SolarCentury, the UK’s largest solar energy company, which helps support the sustainable development organization, SolarAid.

Now, some highlights from the interview I thought were very interesting:

Christine Shearer: You began your career as an oil industry consultant and professor at the Royal School of Mines, helping train petroleum engineers and geologists. Could you say a bit what that was like and why you left?

Jeremy Leggett: Well, it was a lot of fun. I was really into it. I loved geology, I loved the process of studying history, I loved the research part. I researched the history of the oceans, so I came at the climate system through the research on oceans, the bottom up, as it were. My consulting, a lot of it was with the oil industry; I worked with the oil industry in Japan, in Pakistan, in other places, with BP and Shell, so I was very much, y’know, a part of the machinery and if anyone had ever said to me I’d be doing what I’m doing today I would really have doubted that. And the reason I ultimately grew disenchanted was the emergence of the worrying climate science in the mid-1980′s coming from the atmospheric guys studying the climate from the top down. When I put those two things together, what they were saying about the heat-trapping ability of the atmosphere with what I knew about the behavior of the oceans, that’s when I got really worried about global warming and of course still am.

Shearer: As you became alarmed about global warming, did you talk to your colleagues in the petroleum industry about it and, if so, how did they react?

Leggett: Sure. All of the time. And in the mid-1980′s there was growing concern. I thought it would all switch sooner than it did. As you probably know, it took BP and Shell until 1997 to actually admit there was a problem as organizations and then of course they started doing good stuff. But that’s ten lost years in which they were battling very hard to hold everything back. Even though there were very senior people in those companies saying to me, “This doesn’t look good, does it, we should be doing something about it.”

Shearer: But as a corporation they just couldn’t?

Leggett: Well, of course, Exxon is beyond the pale, still is beyond the pale as an organization with a terrible culture and a terrible attitude to the future and the mortgaging of the future.

Well, we didn’t really need more proof about Exxon, but at least now we have the statement of someone on the inside corroborating what we know about the oil giant – they may know how to make truckloads of money, but they have no qualms about being unethical and likely immoral in the process.

At the same time, it’s clear there is at least some debate going on within these companies about how badly they need to change their ways and how they’re literally leveraging the futures of generations yet unborn to fill their coffers now. The phrase “you can’t take it with you,” comes to mind.

But what can we do about it?

Shearer: What do you think could really help the use of renewables grow?

Leggett: I think it would help a lot if the vested interests and the cultures that have been created started listening to rational argument and didn’t go into default mode of defending their environmentally ruinous status quo. That’s a constant theme. In all the years I’ve been at this business, what’s struck me is we create cultures that are really resistant to change and whether they’re just naked defense of vested interest or lack of imagination or a combination of the two, to believe or see that things can be done differently, they’re cultural problems more than technology problems.

Shearer: Yes, what do you say to people who say renewables are great but not technologically or economically feasible?

Leggett: I say talk to the people in Silicon Valley. See where they’re going with their feet and their wallets. This is what excites them. Young professionals are moving out of the digital revolution into the solar and clean technology revolution generally for their vocation. So what do they know that officials in the White House or here in England or the old fogies in the oil industry don’t know? They have a different view of the world, the Silicon Valley folks, and they have the right one and the dinosaurs have got the wrong one.

I like his ideas – and I like his optimism that if we could create an entire culture of people willing to and actively doing the right thing, we may be able to change the course of our planet for the better.

[ Confessions of a Former Oil Industry Consultant ]
Source: TruthOut

At the risk of making a political point amidst the tragic death of 29 miners in West Virginia, it’s very much worth noting that while everyone is praising the CEO of Massey Energy as a self-made man (hardly) and a shining example of American rags-to-riches capitalism, that Don Blankenship, a man who’s made headlines for a number of things, including whining about paying for benefits for his employees, whining about global warming, and whining about the same regulations that he and his company broke that were designed to keep his employees safe (not to mention give them the right to unionize so they have a voice in their safety and don’t just have to trust him), is actually a teabagger – one of these far-right political thugs willing to follow the Church of Beck right off the lemming cliff they’re all headed to.

The worst thing about all of this is that under the face of his “shining example of American capitalism” is the ugly truth of the matter -that every “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” person who’s managed to make themselves so successful like Blankenship has only done so on the heels, backs, and necks of the people he’s exploited, endangered, and employed over the years. Don’t get me wrong, most coal miners are paid very well for their time and risk, but you can’t take money with you when you’ve got problems like misdirected airflow in your mine away from escape routes.

I’m sure he sleeps well at night, but it’s a real shame that he does – especially after having the audacity to release a statement on the same day as the funerals for the fallen miners in his mine that essentially said the company wasn’t going to have a big problem making up the money lost by the explosion. After all, they’ll just increase production at their other mines.

But back to point – Blankenship is a teabagger, very happy and willing to make sure others don’t have the same opportunities to become self-made the same way he did. After all, he has to protect his position at the top. From Crooks and Liars:

Meet Don Blankenship, CEO of Massey Energy Company. Blankenship is also on the Board of Directors of the US Chamber of Commerce. In this speech above, he denies climate change, derisively refers to Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid, and others as “greeniacs”, and calls them all crazy. Watch the speech, you’ll see. In his mind, “the greeniacs are taking over the world.”

Massey Energy Company, Blankenship’s highly successful strip-mining and mountaintop removal operation is the parent company of Performance Coal Co, where a tragic explosion occurred on April 5th. As of this writing, 25 miners have died and 4 more are still missing. Twenty-five families are without a loved one. Four more may discover they have lost someone they love too. 29 families in all, forever changed by one single, violent event in a coal mine. One single violent event in a coal mine run by a company so obsessed with profit it runs roughshod over employees’ and neighbors’ health and safety.

Here’s something else about Don Blankenship and Massey Energy Company: Blankenship spent over $1 million dollars along with other US Chamber buddies like Verizon to sponsor last year’s Labor Day Tea Party, also known as the “Friends of America Rally.”

The full story, complete with embedded videos, is over at AlterNet:

[ CEO of Mine Where 25 Workers Were Killed Is a Teabagger ]
Source: AlterNet

How sad is this? Exxon Mobil, one of the largest companies in the world, raking in billions of dollars in profits off of the backs of the people who work for them and the very planet we live on (while simultaneously providing thousands of jobs and the fuel that fills our vehicles – let’s be fair) paid absolutely no income taxes in the United States in 2009.

Now you might think that they get off this way through deductions, community service, and other socially-beneficial efforts that would offset their corporate tax burden, but you’d be wrong:

Last week, Forbes magazine published what the top U.S. corporations paid in taxes last year. “Most egregious,” Forbes notes, is General Electric, which “generated $10.3 billion in pretax income, but ended up owing nothing to Uncle Sam. In fact, it recorded a tax benefit of $1.1 billion.” Big Oil giant Exxon Mobil, which last year reported a record $45.2 billion profit, paid the most taxes of any corporation, but none of it went to the IRS:

Exxon tries to limit the tax pain with the help of 20 wholly owned subsidiaries domiciled in the Bahamas, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands that (legally) shelter the cash flow from operations in the likes of Angola, Azerbaijan and Abu Dhabi. No wonder that of $15 billion in income taxes last year, Exxon paid none of it to Uncle Sam, and has tens of billions in earnings permanently reinvested overseas.

Yup – offshore tax havens. If you have the money to set them up, you can save way more money – especially over years – by shuffling that money around outside of the US borders so the IRS can’t keep track of it.

What makes the situation really despicable is that Exxon actually complains about high taxes in the United States even though they don’t pay any of them:

Mother Jones’ Adam Weinstein notes that, despite benefiting from corporate welfare in the U.S., Exxon complains about paying high taxes, claiming that it threatens energy innovation research. Pat Garofalo at the Wonk Room notes that big corporations’ tax shelter practices similar to Exxon’s shift a $100 billion annual tax burden onto U.S. taxpayers. In fact, in 2008, the Government Accountability Office found that “two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005.”

That’s the kind of thing that makes me sick.

[ Outrageous: Exxon Mobil Paid No Income Tax in 2009 ]
Source: AlterNet

An open letter from Frances Beinecke, of StopGlobalWarming.org, calls out the people who are out rallying against clean and sustainable energy because they somehow think that clean air and water is somehow a political debate and not a scientific one (or really, a matter of basic human rights). Quite honestly, the fact of the matter is that the mountain of evidence for climate change – and the fact that the so-called “climategate” scientists have all been absolved of their so-called doubt (proving the controversy was more political than scientific anyway) – has been largely ignored by the people who would rather stick their heads in the sand and ignore the real changes in the world around us is getting to the point where their ignorance is starting to threaten all of us.

Even otherwise progressive groups like minority groups in Washington are taking aim at clean energy and climate legislation because they fear for the economic impact on their communities. To aside to this for a moment, I completely understand and empathize with the black community and the latino community; anything that will put a strain on the economy will hit minorities disproportionally, but this kind of short-sightedness is what’s caused progressive movements for racial equality and opportunity to stall in the past. Unfortunately it’s the old guard of civil rights leaders who are more interested in their personal position than the best interests of the community that resist these kinds of efforts and then whip up their followers into a frenzy with fears of massive job losses and economic tragedy – rather than embrace the promise of the future, educate our children in new technologies and industries, send them off to be engineers and scientists instead of businessmen and women, in order to be ready for a changing world – we’re stuck clinging to the past, and to old ideas.

What was true in the black community then is true in the latino community now – as much as our respective minority communities rail against progress in America, we thus seal the coffins of our own social placement. When the rest of the world leaves us behind and the privileged minority in America is the only group with the wealth to keep up with it, we’ll still be left behind because we insisted on not adapting as opposed to staying ahead of the curve, where we really ought to aim.

And to people who seem to think this is a political debate, where opinion can be flung about as fact? Beinecke has a message for them:

Saying the Earth is flat doesn’t make it so. Nor does ignoring climate change make it go away. Still, we haven’t heard the last of the deniers. Now that clean energy and climate legislation is moving through the Senate and has the backing of the White House, we will likely hear more talk of “hoaxes” and “cons.” The fossil fuel industry, which has the most to gain by delaying climate action, is eager to amplify these false claims.

But next time you hear them, email, call, or write to the journalist or politician and demand to know where they get their facts from. If their standards are higher than the IPCC’s then they should be happy to share their evidence.

And when you want to get the truth behind the counterfeit theories, visit this great Union of Concerned Scientists’ Fact Checker site, where real climate scientists assess questions through the lens of science not politics.

But back to point; energy and climate are scientific realities that we need to acknowledge. Instead of clinging to an antiquated way of life, we need to collectively acknowledge that our current fuel sources and energy sources are unsustainable and work to forge new industrial paths that will help us live in tune with the world around us instead of in contrast with it. I, like a number of people who are both minorities and scientists as well as pundits, believe this is not only possible, but necessary for our collective survival.

[ Climate Change Is a Scientific Reality, Not a Political Debate ]
Source: StopGlobalWarming.org

Writing for the Buffalo Beast, Michael Roddy and Ian Murphy have an excellent rundown on some of the planet’s worst enemies right now – people who would make excellent villains in an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers – and while I’m being a little sarcastic, these are folks who not only put their own heads in the sand to the damage they, their businesses, and their interests do to the environment and the health of the planet, they also spend tons of money to make sure that you put your head in the sand and keep it there.

What makes the story even better is that The Beast comes up with some scenarios that would be poetic justice for these folks as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

George Will, Columnist

Misdeeds: The errors Will has committed to print over the years are both more numerous and irresponsible than his bow tie collection, for which he also feels no remorse. He claimed in a February 2009 Washington Post column that “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” The Center responded: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information… global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.”

Corporate teats: The Republican Party, a catchall for corporate polluters, his wife, rapacious swine in general, and anyone who cites Ronald Reagan to justify his massive carbon footprint.

Most egregious lie: “So the column accurately reported what the Center had reported.” Incredibly, the Post backed him up.

Comeuppance: Locked in a large freezer, strapped to a chair directly under a ten-foot icicle and made to write a column. The room’s climate is controlled by a computer program, which checks his column for scientific veracity. The temperature goes down when Will’s right and up when he’s wrong. He either freezes to death or the icicle falls and splits his head open. It’s up to him.

…

James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma

Misdeeds: Inhofe thinks that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind,” yet somehow served as the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from ‘03 to ‘07. Once called Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to testify as a key witness. Believes that “scientific consensus” on climate change is a conspiracy perpetrated by greedy scientists to score grant money. Went to Copenhagen as the leader of the Climate Truth Squad, earning big laughs from overseas reporters. Lifetime recipient of Twelve Dumbest Members of Congress award.

Corporate teats: Seven figures from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and anyone willing to pay for his “campaign expenses.”

Most egregious lie: “You know, God’s still up there. We’re now going through a cooling spell.”

Comeuppance: Locked in an outhouse and set on fire.

…

Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Misdeeds: For the last 60 years, Singer’s pimped his PhD credentials to any and every industry in need of phony science. He’s slithered seamlessly from denying that smoking causes cancer to saying that DDT is harmless to “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” of climate change. Glacier data he later attributed to his wife was denounced as “complete bullshit” by the Glacier Monitoring Service.

Corporate teats: Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sun Oil, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Most egregious lie: “55% of glaciers have gained mass in the last 30 years.”

Comeuppance: While addressing yet another denier conference in 2012, the pressure created by an undetected tumor in Singer’s brain triggers an anomalous episode of schizophasia, causing his entire speech to spew forth as an incoherent word salad. Instead of the audience stopping Singer and urging him to seek the immediate medical attention he so obviously needs, they offer him a thunderous standing ovation and an invitation to speak again next year.

There’s so much more hilarity where that came from, too.

[ THE BEAST 15 Most Heinous Climate Villains ]
Source: The Buffalo Beast

Oh, I have to let this article speak for itself. The title is strong on its own, but it’s true – it is ideology that’s holding back a green revolution in this country – there are more technologies and cottage industries and new products and businesses to count, but something is holding them back – something is keeping this entire market from breaking the surface. Let’s take a look at what it is:

American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our “free market” and anti-government attitudes. One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this outdated ideology. Result: other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don’t. So we lose.

Remember how “chips” was a major driver of the economy in the 80s and 90s? Then the Internet drove the economy late 90′s and early 2000s? The world understands that “green energy” is the next big industry that will drive the world economy. Actually, the rest of the world has understood this for some time and has been investing and inventing and innovating and building. Meanwhile over here America’s big oil and coal companies bought themselves a Presidency and an anti-government ideology and a climate-change-denial industry that has cost us 8 years and counting.

Now we’re playing catch-up, and the rest of the world is determined to keep us from taking the lead.

It’s true. I heard the CEO of a coal company in West Virginia in an interview with NPR say, when asked if climate change was real, outright say it’s fake – claiming that it, just like other so-called “scares” in the past, passed over and nothing was made of them (of course, the ones he chose are actually real – like the hole in the ozone layer, which is very much real even today, but the multinational push to stop using CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals managed to keep it from spreading to the point where it’s a serious problem – but even so, remember that your grandparents could go out without sunscreen in the summer. We can’t.) and that if government did manage to pass climate regulations, that we all may as well “teach our children to speak Chinese.”

That’s infuriating, especially since it’s the actions of people like him that may force us to do that anyway, if you think that’s such a horrible thing (personally I think American children could do with a little multi-lingual teaching, but that’s just me – only Americans are truly monolingual.) – the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other industrialized nation in the world is making a push towards clean energy and green technologies, and while they’re in no horrific hurry to turn off their carbon producing industries (although some of them are farther on the forefront than we are) they’re still developing and rolling out technologies and large-scale tests while we at home are still debating the evidence in front of us as if adding up all of the coins in the piggy bank a different way will lead to a different result.

Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, specifically points at the great lengths that the Chinese are going to in order to power and employ their massive lower and burgeoning middle classes with renewable energy, and while it’s not slowing their emissions rate, it could very easily begin to do so quickly, or wind up powering more people at an America-style rate while using a fraction of the fossil fuels we do.

If the United States doesn’t take its rightful place back at the front of the pack in science and technology, especially in the area of energy, we’ll wind up behind the curve, and in another position where we’ll have to buy tech or energy from someone who knows how to do it better than we do, and I don’t think anyone really wants that, from a security or a self-determination perspective. Instead of writing massive checks to OPEC nations, we’ll wind up writing them to the Chinese and the Germans to buy their expertise and their energy technologies.

[ Green Revolution - Ideology Holding America Back ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

Let’s be clear from the outset: I believe the answer to that question is yes. Which is why I am a strong supporter of environmental justice, clean air and water laws and their enforcement, renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and climate protection overall.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m also a scientist – I also believe that unless we stop having so many children as a civilization, we’ll deplete our resources and use more energy than we can sustain; and I say that meaning as a human civilization, not just Americans. But that’s what Fred Branfman, writing for the Sacramento News and Review, is saying in his article “Do Our Children Deserve to Live?”

He proposes that a “human movement” will be required to avert the a global climate crisis, and that what’s going on in Copenhagen doesn’t give him much faith that movement is going to come, or that this meeting will be the turning point. I agree, but I also admit that getting buy-in from the nations of the world takes time- as you can see at home with our own gridlocked energy and climate policies and bils locked up in Congress now.

A strange cloud envelops human civilization as its leaders fail to take the measures to protect it that they themselves endorsed just five months ago. It is oddly fitting that the latest act in humanity’s climate-crisis drama will occur next week in the city where history’s most famous Dane, brooding in his fog-enshrouded castle, failed to act decisively upon the very question hanging over the upcoming conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It will not be on the agenda. But whether civilization is or is not to be will be the real question haunting the shadow play about to ensue at the United Nations-sponsored talks.

A child under 13 today can expect to live into the 2080s, by which time civilization as we know it will have disappeared if we continue to fail to reduce carbon emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, according to our climate scientists. Although world leaders accept this recommendation, they are presently overseeing a steady increase projected to be more than double the maximum our climate scientists think safe.

The stark figures reveal just how much Copenhagen will fail our children, despite PR efforts to obscure them. The climate scientists’ minimal 25 percent cut would see the United States emitting 3.94 billion metric tons in 2020. President Barack Obama’s 2020 target is 4.99 bmt, only 5.5 percent lower than U.S. 1990 emissions of 5.26 bmt, or less than 1/4 of the minimum 25 percent cut urged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The United States packages its nonreduction target as a 17 percent cut from the sky-high 2005 level of 5.99 bmt.) The Chinese, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi, will increase their CO2 emissions by 72 to 88 percent by 2020, i.e., from 6 bmt today to more than 10 bmt. (The Chinese package their increase by pledging a 45 to 50 percent reduction in “carbon intensity,” or carbon per unit of gross domestic product, even though averting disastrous climate change requires reducing CO2 emissions, not just intensity.)

What will occur in Copenhagen thus continues a pattern seen since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Scientists I spoke with there were anguished that the treaty only sought to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. None foresaw that the treaty would be ignored and that world emissions would be 40.8 percent higher (and U.S. emissions 19.8 percent higher) in 2007 than in 1990.

Copenhagen will fail because the great publics of the world have not been involved in the great human questions underlying the technical issues the scientists discuss. It is not only that the conference will fail to protect our young, but that the rest of us will barely notice.

Pretty depressing, eh? Branfman goes into a damning critique of our modern society, and how we’re dreaming and ignoring the entire problem, which I agree with to some extent but I’m not quite as scathing about I don’t think:

We live today as if in a trance, conducting business as usual in times so unusual that they pose an even greater threat than 20th-century wars that killed more than 100 million people. It seems incredible, for example, that nonscientists barely discuss how the human climate crisis undermines so many of their basic assumptions—in philosophy, law, psychology, sociology, economics, the arts and humanities, education and health—about human beings and their society.

If a new “human movement” working beside today’s environmentalists can help more people see that we are the first adults in history to pose the single greatest threat facing our children, however, there is much reason to believe that human civilization can still be saved.

Branfman definitely subscribes to some of the most worst-case climate scenarios, but it’s important to sit up and take note that what he’s describing very well may be our global future if something isn’t done. If everything goes on the way it does now, the best case is that he’s only partially right, and the worst case is that he’s completely and totally right.

[ Do Our Children Deserve to Live? - Copenhagen Won’t be Enough. Only a ‘Human Movement’ can Save Civilization from the Climate Crisis. ]
Source: The Sacramento News and Review

Let’s start off with some of the opening text from this article, written for The Campaign for America’s Future by Natasha Chart:

Sen. Claire McCaskill said last week that the Senate wasn’t going to tackle the Clean Energy Jobs and American Protection Act this year because it would be “really, really hard.” If the Senate doesn’t handle it this year, will they deal with it in an election year? I think everyone working in progressive politics has heard the ‘it’s an election year’ excuse for why something terribly important can’t be done.

While McCaskill’s comment in particular was frustrating, she has a lot of colleagues in the Senate who obviously feel the same way. So I’d like to talk about some of the hard things people who aren’t Senators are facing that the CEJAPA legislation could begin fixing.

Chart goes on to discuss a number of amazing points – all things that the Senate really needs to take up before they get bogged down in election-year politics in 2010 and wind up doing little, if nothing at all in order to try and save their skins for re-election. Whether it’s health care, climate change, jobs, or transportation, all the Republicans need to do in order to prove to the public that the Democrats haven’t brought the change they swept in promising is continue to be obstinate and block any progress they can, and all the Democrats in the Senate have to do to play into their hands is do nothing for fear or not being bipartisan. At the same time, if they’re too aggressive, they risk earning the same rep that Republicans earned when they tried to push through changes using dirty tricks. It’s a fine line, but I’d rather see them push the barriers of progress than do nothing at all.

Let’s take a look at some of those issues that need to be addressed, shall we?

Earlier this year, a report came out on how the bottom 15 percent of the work force was having its wages stolen to the tune of $2.9 billion per year in, if you can believe it, three US cities. Workers in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City are getting almost $3 billion dollars per year stolen from them by their employers. Workers can try to fight wage theft, but they can lose their jobs in the process, and face having to fight court battles against employers who lie and falsify records.

…

Speaking of climate, scientists’ concerns over the state of our planetary life support system are growing. While the scientific community was hopeful even three years ago that we could hold warming to 2 degrees Celsius, a global temperature increase that would already mean the loss of the Arctic sea ice and heat waves that might end corn production in the US Midwest, more of them are seeing signs that a business-as-usual approach will get us 6 degrees Celsius in global warming. If 6 degrees of warming happen, not only will many coastal cities go under water, but the North American and Eurasian temperate zones could become uninhabitable.

As some 350.org activists wrote, “There is no Planet B.”

…

The world can’t wait, and neither can Americans who need good jobs and fair pay. Our leaders need to step up and correct these problems responsibly, which they were hired to do by a public that is increasingly too sick, broke and tired to keep hounding them about it all the time.

The Senate needs to do its duty by the planet and their voters. They need to start cranking the gears down on emissions and get America back to work with all possible speed.

This is critical – the issues of climate change and jobs and unemployment are closely related – they can be fixed with some of the same forces, and those forces don’t involve leaving people to fend for themselves or shaming them into vanishing into the shadows away from the light of the public. Smarter energy solutions and green energy technologies could go a long way to putting the millions of Americans currently out of work back to work in high-paying, high-skill jobs that, as the President so often says, cannot be outsourced. It’s absolutely true – if only we have the political will to make it happen and private industry would get moving on it.

I’m doing Chart a horrible injustice here by snipping her post up to snag some of what I think are her most poignant paragraphs. You should very definitely head over and see her post in its original context. In the end though, her critical point is that the Democrats in the Senate can’t shy away from the issues in front of them because they’re “hard,” or because they require a great deal of political will. We elected them to do the hard things, work through the difficult problems, and help make America a better place. There’s a lot of work to do, I understand, and there are some seriously obstructionist Republicans on the other side, I understand that as well, but if anything that only adds to the urgency.

[ The Hard Things We Elect Them To Solve ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

There are still people out there with their heads in the sand, claiming that global warming and climate change aren’t caused or at least exacerbated by human influence, that climate change is a “religion” instead of scientific fact. To these people, the phrase “just because you want it to be the case doesn’t make it so” applies ten-fold. Just because these people don’t want to share responsibility for the damage we’re causing to our ecosystem (ironically, these are the same people who nihilistically and stupidly claim that you can’t “harm” the Earth because there’s nothing we can do to really really damage it that it won’t recover from) doesn’t mean the damage isn’t happening, and doesn’t mean that we don’t need to do something about it now.

The Obama administration recently declassified satellite imagery that the Bush administration had kept under lock and key for years, mostly with the intent of keeping the so-called climate change “debate” alive long enough that they didn’t have to risk their pocketbooks by doing anything about it, and they didn’t want to have to present even more clear and damning evidence in front of the American people that climate change is real, is happening now, and is having a very visceral impact on the environment.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

When you talk to the people who live there; who make their livelihoods in those waters, they’ll tell you the same thing. Let’s be clear – weather does not climate make, and the two are not the same thing by any stretch, but there are some disturbing trends that simply can’t be ignored.

The Obama administration is already taking steps to bring science back to its proper place of investigation, observation, and limited recommendation in public life. Now comes the hard part – getting the American people and their elected representatives to garner the guts and will to do something about what the scientific community has been telling us for years.

[ Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide ]
Source: The Guardian UK