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And They’re Off!
Bush’s climate plan will kick-start a new era of bargaining over the planet’s future
Bill McKibben, Grist
And so the bargaining has begun.
After almost two decades of inaction, at long last America seems ready to start considering some kind of action to address global warming. With states setting conflicting standards, with the scientists announcing weekly updates on the speed and size of the approaching cataclysm, with shareholder activism starting to push business, and with green stirrings even from the evangelical wing of American Christianity, the time when the fossil-fuel lobby could get away with total obstruction may be passing.
Not too quickly, mind you — yesterday’s announcement from the White House that their new climate plan consists of a few billion dollars in odds and ends, mostly to help build a few reactors, was about as tiny a sop as one could imagine. Pressed for a moon-shot-style program to lift us toward renewable energy, the president offered a cherry bomb in a tin can.
His announcement was apparently designed to undercut Bill Clinton’s call for international action on global warming this week. And it came a few days after Al Gore’s truly landmark speech — the missing reel from the end of An Inconvenient Truth — in which he became the first major American politician to call explicitly for stringent carbon taxes. His plan to replace the payroll tax with a levy on fossil fuel might even make political sense.
But for the moment, it serves as a kind of starter pistol for the congressional battle.
(21 Sep 2006)
Beckett to warn UN on climate change
Press Association, Guardian
All countries must take their share of responsibility for tackling climate change or suffer its consequences, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, will warn the UN general assembly today.
Attempts to “free ride” will end up in “freefall”, she will say.
The speech comes after Mrs Beckett said she hoped the next US administration would “engage fully” in international discussions on how to fight global warming.
She told a gathering of Wall Street executives in New York yesterday that she was talking to them because the business community had the best chance of influencing the American government to do more on the environment. The US is not currently signed up to the Kyoto Protocol.
(22 Sep 2006)
Al Gore Interview with the Guardian (50-min video)
Guardian (UK) via Climate Change Action
TEXT
(22 Sep 2006)
Google Video (UK)
Gristmill
Two Self-Styled Outsiders Point Fingers at Those Inside
Sewell Chan, NY Times
SUNNYVALE, Calif. – They came to talk environment and exchange program ideas. But when the governor of the country’s most populous state and the mayor of its largest city got together in Silicon Valley on Thursday, it turned into much more.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg – two wealthy Republican businessmen with socially liberal views, each holding his first elected office – quickly turned to national politics and withering criticism of what they described as the partisan gridlock of Washington.
Mr. Bloomberg used the appearance, part of a two-day trip to California, to announce a plan to make New York City a “national leader” in environmental planning. He announced that the city government had begun a comprehensive inventory of all its carbon emissions – from electricity consumption in buildings to tailpipe exhaust from vehicles – and would release the results in the fall.
(21 Sep 2006)
Related story at San Jose Mercury News.
Community holds vigil for rain
ABC Rural (Australia)
The small community of Mono in Queensland’s Burnett region is turning to prayer in an attempt to make it rain.
The district’s main water storage, Cania Dam, is at just six per cent of capacity after years of drought.
(22 Sept 2006)
Sea levels are rising faster than predicted, warns Antarctic Survey
Michael McCarthy, The Independent
The global sea level rise caused by climate change, severely threatening many of the world’s coastal and low-lying areas from Bangladesh to East Anglia, is proceeding faster than UN scientists predicted only five years ago, Professor Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, said yesterday.
Climate change is causing sea levels to rise around the world because water expands in volume as it warms, and because land-based ice, such as that contained in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, adds to the volume when it melts and slips into the sea.
(20 Sep 2006)
Nitrous oxide – no laughing matter for forests
New Scientist
This is getting serious. Climate change could cause forests in Europe to spew out more and more nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas, a potent contributor to global warming.
As a greenhouse gas, N2O is 296 times as powerful as carbon dioxide and accounts for 6 per cent of the greenhouse effect. To better understand the N2O output from forests, Klaus Butterbach-Bahl of the Karlsruhe Research Centre in Germany and team members Per Ambus and Sophie Zechmeister-Boltenstern studied N2O emissions from 11 European forests (Biogeosciences, vol 3, p 135).
They found that nitrifying soil bacteria thrive on high nitrogen levels, producing mainly nitrates, which are turned into N2O by denitrifying bacteria. As human activity adds more nitrogen to the biosphere, the production of N2O by the bacteria looks set to grow.
(20 Sep 2006)
