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Gore: The Climate for Change
Al Gore, New York Times
THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.
The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.
The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.
Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.
(9 November 2008)
Stuart McCarthy in Australia writes: “Is Al Gore starting to ‘get’ peak oil?”
Dreaming the Future Can Create the Future
Kenny Ausubel, Huffington Post
Dreaming the future can create the future. We stand at the threshold of a singular opportunity in the human experiment: To re-imagine how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations. It’s a revolution from the heart of nature – and the human heart.
Then again, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
We also stand at the brink of worldwide ecological and civilizational collapse. We face a reckoning from the treacherous breach in our relationship with nature. We’ve been acting like a rock star trashing a hotel room, and it’s the morning after. But this hotel is planet Earth. The guest rules are non-negotiable. If we don’t change our ways fast, management may vote us off the island.
… Yet there’s an even deeper story behind empire crash.
Energy is a nation’s master resource. Each empire has had an idiosyncratic ability to exploit a particular energy source that propelled its rise to economic power. The Dutch learned how to tap wood, wind and water. The British Empire fueled its ascendancy on coal. The American empire has dominated with oil.
The cautionary tale is this: No empire has been able to manage the transition to the next energy source. The joker in the deck this time around is the climate imperative to transition off fossil fuels worldwide. It requires the most complex and fiercely urgent passage in the history of human civilization. Nothing like it has ever been done.
Kenny Ausubel is the Founder and CEO of Bioneers www.bioneers.org
(10 November 2008)
KunstlerCast bonanza (audio)
Duncan Crary, KunstlerCast
The KunstlerCast is a weekly audio program about the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.
Featuring: James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Geography of Nowhere”, “The Long Emergency” and other books.
Duncan Crary, host/producer, speaks with Kunstler weekly about the failure of suburbia and the inevitable end of this living arrangement with no future.
(November 2008)
I hadn’t seen any postings for KunstlerCast for several weeks, so I looked at the site. Good news – the podcasts are continuing. There is even an archive of past podcasts. Some of the more recent include “Impotent Politics” (#37) and “On Hope and Despair” (#34). Is it my imagination or is the fiery Kunstler mellowing? -BA
