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White House goes green with solar panels
Adam Vaughan, Guardian
As of spring 2011, Barack Obama and family will be making their morning toast via solar photovoltaic panels
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Solar panels will be installed on the White House roof a quarter of a century after they were removed by Ronald Reagan, the Obama administration said today.
A mix of solar thermal and photovoltaic panels will be fitted in spring 2011 to generate hot water and renewable electricity, said Nancy Sutley, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, and energy secretary Steven Chu at a conference on how federal government can green up.
It will be the first time since 1986 that panels have sat on the White House, since Reagan removed a solar thermal system installed by Jimmy Carter. In 1979 Carter held a conference on the rooftop, showing off the 32 solar panels and his desire to reduce America’s dependence on oil.
The move will come as a surprise to many green campaigners, after the White House apparently snubbed a request to install the technology from leading environmentalists last month.
… Bill McKibben, who led the campaign, said he welcomed Obama’s decision to fit new panels: "It’s great news … he listened to the American people, who clearly want far more progress on energy than a paralysed congress has provided. We’d rather have a climate bill, but under the circumstances it’s a great win."
(5 October 2010)
The New Yorker on how the Senate & White House missed their best chance to deal with climate change
Joseph Romm, Grist
… It may be true that Obama “profoundly” understands what failing to address global warming means. Certainly I (and many others) thought that was true — until he basically punted on the issue without a serious fight.
The lengthy New Yorker piece, “As The World Burns,” however, suggests that if Obama did understand the transcendent nature of human-caused climate change, he personally didn’t try bloody hard to put together 60 votes for a bill.
The piece is well worth reading …
Obama just didn’t try hard enough or competently enough.
But the White House didn’t merely fail to try hard enough, fail to twist arms with Senate Democrats, fail to become engaged in the process enough to make a workable deal. It did some genuinely incompetent things, as the New Yorker explains: …
Finally, for the sake of completeness and so as not to be misunderstood by those who aren’t regular readers, most of the blame for this failure should go to the anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues. They have spread disinformation and poisoned the debate so that it is no longer even recognizable. Who could have guessed just a couple of years ago, that the GOP champion of climate action would now trash a bill considerably weaker than the one he tried to pass twice?
And if you are keeping score at home in the blame game, the media is the second most culpable group for their generally enabling coverage
(4 October 2010)
Business is changing the landscape of the climate battleground
Bryony Worthington, Guardian
The fight to regulate a cleaner future is becoming more balanced as more businesses switch their bottom line to carbon reduction
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As long-time trackers of climate change policy at Sandbag we readily acknowledge, like George Monbiot, that the record of governments to date has been dismal. It’s not that lots of things haven’t been tried, particularly here in the UK where we enjoy an overlapping mishmash of climate policies. It’s just there hasn’t been the political will to implement anything with genuine ambition. The reason? Lobbying to protect vested interests.
Civil servants and politicians perceive themselves as rational, balanced people, weighing up the pros and cons of different arguments, eventually settling somewhere in the middle, in an attempt to keep everyone happy. Sadly this system breaks down if the forces of influence are imbalanced. Until very recently it was the woefully under-resourced green groups against the powerful industrial titans. So outflanked were the environmentalists that somewhere in the middle was a long way in favour of industry.
… But if you look around the world today something subtle has shifted. The landscape of the battleground has changed. Take two examples – the fight to save climate legislation in California and the UK’s current championing of higher and unilateral emissions cuts for the European Union.
Foreign secretary William Hague reiterated in New York this week that the UK wanted Europe to step up to a 30% emissions reduction target regardless of what everyone else in the world is doing. While it would be nice to imagine that this is the result of years of green campaigning (and this has of course played a part), the reality is that in presenting this policy the UK is representing the interests of big business.
That business is predominantly nuclear since it more than any other sector has the vested interests, connections and resources to run a successful lobbying campaign. This UK government really, really wants new nuclear power stations in the UK. But without a high carbon price across Europe it will be very expensive for the UK to arrange this on its own. The solution is higher targets.
Over in California the vested interests are less hidden. On the one hand you have the oil industry who have been bankrolling a campaign to get rid of climate legislation, that would otherwise begin introducing caps on emissions and challenging targets for renewables in 2012. The infamous Koch brothers, who have no direct interests in California, have also weighed in because this is the new battle ground: what happens in California will ripple out across the States. There is a big fightback from other businesses and fortunately California is home to a burgeoning clean tech industry and to Silicon Valley where, as well as ruling the digital world, companies like Google have been ploughing their millions into trying to solve big problems like climate change.
(4 October 2010)
California’s Proposition 23: The Real Job Killer
Brendan Smith and Jeremy Brecher, The Huffington Post
The climate denial lobby behind Proposition 23 in California argues they’re fighting to protect jobs by overturning what they like to call California’s "Job Killing Global Warming Law." But don’t be fooled: if passed, Proposition 23 will remove all hope of protecting California’s economy — and its workers — from the worst effects of climate change.
Proposition 23 seeks to suspend AB32 — the 2006 Global Warming Solutions Act, aimed at reducing California’s carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 — from going into effect until state unemployment falls to 5.5 percent or lower for at least four consecutive quarters.
Framing Prop 23 as the "California Jobs Initiative" is a clever bait-and-switch by out of state oil tycoons like David Koch to halt any and all efforts at the state level to address the climate crisis and save California’s already slumping economy.
Voters in California — and every other state — need to realize that failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions risks destroying millions of jobs and grinding California’s economy to a halt. The effects of climate change need to be thought of as a "negative stimulus" to the economy, leading to reduced profitability, decreased investment, job loss, and falling wages.
(4 October 2010)
