The Broken Legs of the Biggest Elephant in the Room, the US Climate Bill
A brilliantly written article by Lee Wasserman, director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, writing for the NY Times and Huffington Post. Wasserman recognizes the US Senate climate bill for what it was, born to fail. This is not to say we don’t need legislation to fight dangerous climate change. We need a strong, simple, equitable bill, and we need it now.
“Cap and Trade” Would Make Getting to Zero Emissions of Carbon Dioxide Impossible
Jean Matlack, one of our trusted 350.org organizers in Maine, recently wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Bangor Daily News which was published on April 13. Her letter, titled “Cap and Dividend might work”, stresses the importance of passing effective climate legislation in the U.S. as soon as possible, and goes on to explain why the cap-and-dividend approach, proposed by Sen. Susan Collins, R-ME and Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-WA, could fit the bill (no pun intended). Please take a moment to read her letter, posted below, and consider writing a Letter to the Editor of your own local newspaper. We can’t afford to stay silent when it comes to solving the climate crisis, so now is the perfect time to get your ideas and opinions published.
Exciting News on the Clear Act: Weekly Policy Update from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network
March 29-April 2 Overview: Despite the U.S. Congress being on recess this past week (and next), interest in and support for the cap and dividend/CLEAR Act approach to climate legislation continues to grow. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter wrote positively about what he calls cap-and-rebate in his latest column. Mother Jones magazine carried a story on its website blog about The Other Climate Bill. Senator Susan Collins was interviewed by Clean Skies News; during the interview she suggested that the CLEAR Act could be paired with legislation, The American Clean Energy Leadership Act, passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last year. On Tuesday, March 30th, in what is probably the first such action in the country, the Santa Rosa, Ca. City Council unanimously passed a resolution in support of the CLEAR Act. And at the end of the week, on Good Friday, the Philadelphia Daily News came out with an editorial supporting the CLEAR Act.
Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).
What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.
The CLEAR Act: A Clean, Green and Clear Choice
It’s time for the climate movement to come together, right now, to defend the best option that we have to get decent, badly-needed legislation on climate passed this year, and to push back against the fossil fools. Passage of the CLEAR Act would be a definite step forward, a political tipping point, not the end game but a victory for sure.
Is Cap and Trade Really Dead? Part III
Different models of carbon cap legislation serve different interests. Videos of Parts 4 and 5 of The Real News Network’s coverage of Carbon Cap Legislation. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who is also associated with the PERI Institute
Is Cap and Trade Dead? Part II
Continuing with our coverage of pending Cap-and-Trade and Cap-and-Dividend legislation, here are three videos from the Real News Network on different models of Carbon Cap legislation and the corruption that could be caused by Carbon Offsets and Trading. Paul Jay interviews Professor James Boyce, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He’s associated with the PERI Institute, the Political Economics Research Institute. The Real News Network has yet to publish the final one, but we will post it as soon as we get it.
Let us hope a better understanding of this issue will precipitate a new effort on the part government in the Western World to enact honest, equitable, and effective measures to reduce and remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.
Is “Cap and Trade” Really Dead?
Sadly, many large environmental organizations – as well as Goldman Sachs, big oil and big coal – have also been pushing for the adoption of Cap and Trade legislation, citing concerns that this may be the only politically possible solution for controlling carbon emissions. They have ignored the fact that the flawed multi-billion dollar economic infrastructure Cap-and-Trade would create will be impossible to dismantle once it is shown – and it will be – as disruptive, inefficient and dangerous. But President Obama is going for an energy bill alone, so Cap-and-Trade is dead, at least for now.
Our Planet, on Climate Life Support
Efforts are underway by a coalition of environmental, climate and other groups to mount an effort to build support for several strengthening amendments to this bill on the House floor. Groups involved are 1Sky, Environment America, Sierra Club, MoveOn, Green for All, ACORN, Oxfam, USAction, Health Care Without Harm, Democracia Ahora and Rock the Vote. This effort is certainly called for and should be supported.
An Analysis of the Waxman-Markey Climate Bill
On May 21st, following months of work, the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACESA), a 932-page piece of climate legislation. There have been mixed reactions from environmental and climate groups, but most groups are in agreement that it needs to be strengthened going forward. For some groups the problems they see with the bill have led to their public withdrawal of support. These groups include Greenpeace USA, Public Citizen and Friends of the Earth. The Chesapeake Climate Action Network also does not support the bill in current form.
