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On the Move to Outrun Climate Change
Self-Preservation Forcing Wild Species, Businesses, Planning Officials to Act
Blaine Harden and Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post
SEATTLE — As the Bush administration debates much of the world about what to do about global warming, butterflies and ski-lift operators, polar bears and hydroelectric planners are on the move.
In their separate ways, wild creatures, business executives and regional planners are responding to climate changes that are rapidly recalibrating their chances for survival, for profit and for effective delivery of public services.
Butterflies are voting with their wings, abandoning southern Europe and flying north to the more amenable climes of Finland. Ski-lift operators in the West are lobbying for leases on federal land higher up in the Rockies, trying to outclimb snowlines that creep steadily upward.
Polar bears along Hudson Bay are losing weight and declining in number as the ice shelf melts and their feeding season shrinks. Power planners in the Pacific Northwest, which gets three-quarters of its electricity from hydroelectric dams, are meeting in brainstorming sessions and making contingency plans for early snow melts, increased wintertime rainfall, lower summertime river flows and electricity shortfalls during hotter, drier summers.
With the issue of a warming planet shifting rapidly from scientific projection to on-the-ground reality, animals and plants are being compelled, along with businesses and bureaucracies, to take action aimed at self-preservation. They are doing so even as the Bush administration eschews regulations, laws or international treaties that would require limits on carbon dioxide emissions, which scientists say are the main cause of global warming.
(26 Nov 2006)
Would the World’s Largest Science Teacher’s Organization Ignore Climate Change Education?
(Why did the NSTA say no to free “An Inconvenient Truth” DVDs?)
John Borowski, Common Dreams
The National Teachers Association (NSTA) has spurned 50,000 free DVDs of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” and is squandering a golden opportunity to educate tens of millions of youth in the United States! Why? This 55,000- member organization of teachers and scientists could use Al Gore’s film to orchestrate the single most influential educational goal in human history: the awareness and subsequent solving of climate change. …
Laurie David, a producer on the film An Inconvenient Truth, helped to broker a “sweet deal” for the NSTA. Sitting in an LA warehouse are 50,000 free DVDs just waiting to be given out to every member of the NSTA. No strings, no catches, just a clear and simple agenda: provide teachers with a spectacular and scientifically acclaimed production to engage millions of students nationwide. And the NSTA states, “No?”
Is the NSTA placing economic expediency over “true science education”, do they fear the alienation of funders such as Exxon and the fossil powerhouse the American Petroleum Institute? Laurie David, who is also the founder of StopGlobalWarming.org received an email refusal of the free teaching materials from the NSTA that is ominous and foreboding.
The NSTA wrote that acceptance of the DVDs would place an “unnecessary risk upon the (NSTA) capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters.” Also in the email, NSTA claimed that they didn’t want to offer “political” endorsement of the film and they saw “little, if any benefit to NSTA or its members” in accepting the free DVDs. No benefit to teachers? Science teachers across the country are under-funded, overworked and often grab on to free lessons and materials as a matter of “educational survival 101.” What I find despicable is that the NSTA if fully aware of that need and sadly, often aids and abets the “Fossil fuel cartels.” They often deny or mislead on climate change and provide teachers with everything from “coal coloring books” to misleading videos such as “Fuel-less-You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel.” Simply stated, the NSTA’s refusal to distribute Al Gore’s film is an unmitigated disaster that will tarnish their reputation as “brokers” of credible science materials, while squandering a prolific moment in educational history: the chance to allow students to become energy pioneers.
…Exxon recognizes the incredible power of distributing its materials to teachers. Exxon-Mobil makes no apologies for their anti-climate change stance, funds “misinformation campaigns” like the American Petroleum Institutes’ (API) 1998 “Science Education Task Force” created to debunk climate change and publishes ads in newspapers to cast doubt on climate change. And the NSTA has the brazen nerve to state that they expressed concern over taking Al Gore’s movie because of “special interests?”
(27 Nov 2006)
Top court to hear emissions argument
Justices to decide if greenhouse gases are air pollutants
Bob Egelko, Chronicle
The U.S. Supreme Court often hears disputes over how much authority the federal government has to stop businesses from polluting.
But rarely, if ever, in nearly four decades of environmental regulation has the government argued that it has no power over an entire category of potential pollutants — or that if it had the power, it wouldn’t use it.
That’s the position, though, that the Bush administration is taking in a lawsuit seeking federal limits on vehicles’ emissions of greenhouse gases. The Supreme Court is to hear arguments Wednesday in the case, which was filed by California, 11 other states and most of the nation’s major environmental organizations.
The court’s ruling, due by next summer, also will resolve a similar lawsuit over the government’s power to regulate greenhouse gases emitted by factories and other industrial sources.
(27 Nov 2006)
Related from the LA Times.
Canada Liberals propose sweeping ‘green’ changes
Philip Authier, Vancouver Sun
MONTREAL — A Liberal policy committee is proposing a sweeping environmental program which they say would make their party greener than the Green Party if adopted intact.
The policy — to be released today in Montreal — calls on the party to adopt a more radical greenhouse gas emission standard than the Kyoto accord currently foresees, national speed limits on commercial vehicles, a ban within one year of toxins such as asbestos, an end to ocean-bottom trawling and the scrapping of fossil-fuel tax breaks for Alberta oilsands projects.
The report, drawn up by a party task force chaired by prominent Montreal Liberal Desiree McGraw, is to be debated at this week’s Liberal policy convention which winds up with the selection of the new leader next Saturday.
McGraw Sunday recognized the Liberal record on the environment is far from sterling.
(17 Nov 2006)
