The “Extinction Rebellion” is wide-spread demanding action to prevent climate change

Essay by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post, May 21, 2019

VIDEO: ‘We don’t have any choice’: Protesters participate in Earth Day demonstrations (Extinction Rebellion, the group behind the ongoing demonstrations in London, has mobilized thousands across the globe to protest climate change)

Amid the daily infamies of Donald Trump’s presidency, his greatest dereliction of duty is his decision not to confront but to accelerate the greatest threat facing this country: the clear, present and growing danger of catastrophic climate change.

Trump is called a climate denier. He is actually a warrior for climate calamity. In many ways, Trump is the first president of the climate catastrophe era. We’ve already witnessed the undeniable first terrors: the fires that erased Paradise, Calif., in a day, the storms that savaged Houston and Puerto Rico, floods in the Midwest, droughts that forced millions to migrate from what used to be called the Fertile Crescent. In the face of this and more, Trump has chosen to go all in on the side of this direct security threat to our people, our country and our world.

Last week in Hackberry, La., Trump celebrated his collusion with the furies that threaten us, hailing the United States as the “energy superpower of the world.” Trump’s speech consisted of his stale stew of lies, exaggerations, boasts and insults, claiming credit for transformations that began long before his presidency, and scorning alternative views and opponents. Yet in the midst, he made it clear: He is proud to contribute to the horrors that now threaten us.

The reality is no longer in dispute by anyone willing to be honest about the science. We are on a path that has already begun to take casualties and rack up staggering costs. A recent U.N. report warns of the extinction of a million species — and the imperiling of humanity itself — in the next few decades.

The conservative scientific consensus is that we have about 12 years to transform how we produce energy to avoid unimaginable destruction. Continuing the current course will cost trillions over the next decades (more than the Green New Deal) and, more importantly, displace hundreds of millions in forced migrations, and spread disease, starvation and death at levels far beyond any war yet witnessed. No wall Trump succeeds in building would be able to deal with the 140 million climate refugees that the World Bank predicts by mid-century.

In Louisiana, Trump bragged that “American energy independence” would make our nation “wealthier” and “safer.” “We have an America First energy policy,” he brayed. “We don’t need anybody. And we don’t need to be ripped off by the rest of the world, either, because those days are over.” He boasted about getting out of the Paris climate accord, “replacing the EPA,” torpedoing President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan, “unlocking” the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, and more.

And, of course, Trump repeated his mockery of the Green New Deal, calling it a “hoax, like the hoax I just went through.” He continued, “We will never let radical activists, special interests, and out-of-control bureaucrats wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, or destroy your future.” In fact, that is exactly what Trump is doing. Lining up with the radical fossil-fuel activists and special interests, installing energy lobbyists and lawyers into government, and empowering them to make decisions that will — if not reversed rapidly in the next years — “wreck our economy, eliminate our jobs, [and] destroy your future,” to say nothing of your children’s lives and possibilities.

The stakes could not be higher. As Bill McKibben, the climate expert who first warned of the climate change threat 30 years ago, noted, “The problem with climate change is that it’s a timed test. If you don’t solve it fast, then you don’t solve it. No one’s got a plan for refreezing the Arctic once it’s melted. … We’re not playing for stopping climate change. We’re playing — maybe — for being able to slow it down to the point where it doesn’t make civilizations impossible.” And we are facing an opposition led by a president throwing in with powerful fossil-fuel interests and corporations that have pumped millions into disinformation and deception, and corrupted politics and politicians to preserve their profits while posing a direct threat to our lives.

The betrayal of Trump and the Republican Party is self-evident. Sadly, the leadership of the Democratic Party has also been AWOL, as have too many voices in media, particularly television. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), former vice president Joe Biden and too many other Democrats mistakenly seem to think that the best response to extremism is moderation. Rather than seeking a mandate for the change we need immediately, they choose to woo a mythic center with modest reforms.

Biden promises only to return to the Paris accord, a policy that might have been promising in the late 1980s, but simply represents inadequate moral signaling now.

In the end, as McKibben writes, the fossil fuel interests and their collaborators like Trump will lose this battle. Already insurance companies are refusing to guarantee against losses that are coming to coastal properties and elsewhere. The only question — and it is fundamental — is how long it takes for the climate destroyers to lose and how much damage is done in the interim. This is why Trump’s collusion is his greatest dereliction of duty.

The change we need will come — as it usually does — from independent citizen movements calling our compromised and corrupted leaders to account.

It’s the Extinction Rebellion that brought traffic to a crawl in London last month. It’s millions of children walking out of school. It’s the young activists of the Sunrise Movement vowing to force Democratic presidential contenders to take a position on the Green New Deal — and demanding that this debate be at the center of the next presidential election. These efforts would be amplified if the media stepped up with heightened urgency to report on the climate crisis and on the growing movements to address it. Toward that end, the Nation magazine, which I edit, and the Columbia Journalism Review are launching a new project — Covering Climate Now — to bring journalists together to try to find ways to dramatically improve media coverage of the climate crisis and its solutions.

Fifty years from now, McKibben says, we are going to run the world on sun and wind. The only question is whether the world will be completely broken, or whether we will have acted in time to avoid the worst. Trump has committed his administration to buttress the immensely rich and powerful fossil-fuel interests in accelerating the worst. Now we will see who has the courage and the conviction to stop them.

The Allegheny Front speaks out . . .

An Interview by The Allegheny Front of Elizabeth Kolbert, November 6, 2015

In a few weeks, world leaders will head to Paris for the United Nations climate conference, where they’ll be looking to set targets for reducing greenhouse gases. Before the talks get going, The Allegheny Front interviewed Elizabeth Kolbert to shed some light on the key issues and what’s at stake internationally—and closer to home.

On the most striking examples of climate change

“I think the most extraordinary place that I went was the Great Barrier Reef, which is off the eastern coast of Australia. When you’re on a reef, there’s this extraordinary richness. It’s almost indescribable. You cannot simply see that many species gliding by you on land—turtles and rays and sharks, all passing by you. It seems to a land creature sort of unreal, almost like a dream landscape. And the scientists I went to the Great Barrier Reef with all are predicting the end of the Great Barrier Reef—and really, to be honest, all reefs in the world—by the end of this century. And that’s a very sobering thought. To imagine that these things could cease to exist is pretty horrifying. It certainly had a big impact me.”

On how dramatic our impact really is

“The unifying theme of the book, and of the science on this subject, is that humans are taking the place of the great forces of nature—the great geological forces of the past. We are now basically in control of the planet. We may not be controlling it consciously. But unconsciously, we are changing the composition of the atmosphere; we are changing the chemistry of the ocean. And we’re moving species around in ways that they cannot move on their own. So we’re effectively bringing the continents into contact again.”

“White nose syndrome [in bats] is a very vivid example of this. It’s a fungus that’s been traced through very sophisticated genetics to Europe. And it has now spread to at least 22 states and five Canadian provinces in this classic way in which an epidemic spreads—killing millions and millions of bats.”

On how quickly humans are changing the planet

“There have been vast stretches of time before humans arose as a species, and presumably, there will be vast stretches of time afterwards on this planet. Life will continue on. But one of the amazing things is that, in this relatively short time that modern industrialized society has existed, massive changes have occurred on planet Earth—changes on a geologic scale. So we are changing the planet very rapidly by any standard. Even if you look across all of the history of the planet, the rate of change right now is way, way up there.”

“It’s sometimes compared to the last major upheaval in the history of life, which was the extinction of the dinosaurs, which seems to have been caused by an asteroid impact. So you will often hear very sober-thinking scientists compare human impacts to an asteroid. And one day when an asteroid strikes the Earth or 200 years when humans are burning through the Earth’s store of fossil fuels—they’re going to look very much the same in the geological record when many millions of years have past.”

On the potential impacts of the upcoming Paris climate talks

We’re really choosing between different versions of the future. But we don’t have the luxury of a choice at this point where the world does not change quite significantly. What we’re trying to avert is really catastrophic change that human society just can’t cope with. And whether Paris will get us there—I don’t think anyone thinks that one moment in time or one global treaty or one meeting of world leaders is enough to do that. I think the question is, do we reach some kind of inflection point, where the world basically gets behind the idea that we need to start bringing our carbon emissions down? And I think that we don’t know what’s going to happen in Paris. People were very optimistic a couple months ago, and I think they’re slightly less optimistic now.

>>>  Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction. She has about as wide a perspective as anybody. Over the last decade, she has traveled from Alaska to Panama reporting on these issues.

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Scientists Square Off Over Fracking’s Impact on Climate

Robert Howarth at Cornell University published a controversial paper about fracking in the journal Climatic Change which touched off a heated debate. So much so that both sides accuse one another of bias, advocacy, and practicing politics, not science.

See the articles on the Gas Planet from The Allegheny Front.

From: Mike Tidwell, The Chesapeake Climate Action Network

Dear Friend of the CCAN: Date: May 5, 2015

Tell Your U.S. House Representative: Co-sponsor the “cap-and-dividend” climate bill.

What if we could click our ruby slippers and transport ourselves to a magical place where polluters pay for their pollution and every three months we get money put into our bank accounts?

It’s not a dream. It can happen — if support keeps growing for a “cap-and-dividend” bill co-sponsored so far by 20 members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

The Healthy Climate and Family Security Act (HR 1027), introduced by Maryland Congressman Chris Van Hollen, is the best climate solution bill ever introduced in Congress. It would cap carbon emissions nationwide, forcing polluters to pay for their emissions and rebating 100% of the collected funds with a quarterly “dividend” check to every U.S. citizen.

And eventually, it will pass. I’m sure of it. Because tackling climate change while boosting the incomes of struggling American families is an idea that can prove absolutely contagious. Won’t you help? Please urge your member of Congress to co-sponsor this vital climate legislation!

By putting a price on carbon, the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act encourages energy conservation, energy efficiency and a shift to clean, renewable sources of power. (See the reference below.) U.S. families will benefit both economically and environmentally from cleaner air, water and land, millions of jobs created in energy efficiency and renewable energy, and money in family bank accounts during the transition.

It’s not just Capitol Hill where support is growing. Forty organizations have signed on to a statement endorsing the bill, including 350.org, Sierra Club, Public Citizen, National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, Center for Biological Diversity and the National Community Action Foundation.

As the number of House co-sponsors and organizational supporters grows, this legislative approach to solving the climate crisis could also become part of the 2016 presidential election-year debate. In addition, growing support will bring pressure on the U.S. to take a stronger position at the important United Nations Climate Conference in Paris at the end of the year.

You can help. You could urge your members of Congress to co-sponsor the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act!

Our families deserve to benefit from this innovative, and truly American, approach to achieving scientifically targeted reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, while economically assisting our families.

Sincerely, Mike Tidwell, Director, Chesapeake Climate Action Network

1. For more information and resources on the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act and the “cap-and-dividend” approach to tackling climate change, select:
http://climateandprosperity.org

TITLE: Accelerating extinction risk from climate change

From an Article by Mark C. Urban, Science,  May 1, 2015, Vol. 348 no. 6234 pp. 571-573

By Mark Urban, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Connecticut, 75 North Eagleville Road, Unit 3043, Storrs, CT 06269, USA.

ABSTRACT — Accelerating extinction risk from climate change

Current predictions of extinction risks from climate change vary widely depending on the specific assumptions and geographic and taxonomic focus of each study. I synthesized published studies in order to estimate a global mean extinction rate and determine which factors contribute the greatest uncertainty to climate change–induced extinction risks. Results suggest that extinction risks will accelerate with future global temperatures, threatening up to one in six species under current policies. Extinction risks were highest in South America, Australia, and New Zealand, and risks did not vary by taxonomic group. Realistic assumptions about extinction debt and dispersal capacity substantially increased extinction risks. We urgently need to adopt strategies that limit further climate change if we are to avoid an acceleration of global extinctions.

 SUMMARY — Predicting extinction in a changing world

There is great interest in understanding how species might respond to our changing climate, but predictions have varied greatly. Mark Urban looked at over 130 studies to identify the level of risk that climate change poses to species and the specific traits and characteristics that contribute to risk (see the Perspective by Hille Ris Lambers below). If climate changes proceed as expected, one in six species could face extinction. Several regions, including South America, Australia, and New Zealand, face the greatest risk. Understanding these patterns will help us to prepare for, and hopefully prevent, climate-related loss of biodiversity.

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Ecological Perspective — Extinction risks from climate change

By Janneke Hille Ris Lambers, Department of Biology, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.

Biologists worry that the rapid rates of warming projected for the planet will doom many species to extinction. Species could face extinction with climate change if climatically suitable habitat disappears or is made inaccessible by geographic barriers or species’ inability to disperse (see the figure, panels A to E). Previous studies have provided region- or taxon-specific estimates of biodiversity loss with climate change that range from 0% to 54%, making it difficult to assess the seriousness of this problem. On page 571 of this issue, Urban provides a synthetic and sobering estimate of climate change–induced biodiversity loss by applying a model-averaging approach to 131 of these studies. The result is a projection that up to one-sixth of all species may go extinct if we follow “business as usual” trajectories of carbon emissions.

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

The Noatak National Preserve (Alaska) permafrost thawing from global warming

The Shocking Climate Threat Nobody’s Even Talking About: Permafrost

From an Article by Chris Mooney, Washington Post, April 6, 2015

When we think about the Arctic in a warming world, we tend to think about sharp declines in sea ice and — that powerful symbol — the polar bear. But that’s far from the only problem that a melting Arctic brings.

In the past decade, scientists have been training more attention on another deeply troubling consequence. Rapid Arctic warming is expected to lead to the thawing of a great deal of frozen soil or permafrost, which, as it thaws, will begin to emit carbon dioxide and methane to the atmosphere. And if this occurs in the amounts that some scientists are predicting, it could significantly undermine efforts to reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, scientists have discovered a simple statistic that underscores the scale of the potential problem: There may be more than twice as much carbon contained in northern permafrost as there is in the atmosphere itself. That’s a staggering thought.

Permafrost is simply defined as ground that stays frozen all year round. There’s a lot of it – it covers 24 percent of the surface of the northern hemisphere land masses, according to the International Permafrost Association. But more and more of it is thawing as the Arctic warms, and these frozen soils contain a vast amount of organic material — largely dead plant life — in a kind of suspended animation.

“It’s built up over thousands and thousands of years,” says Robert Max Holmes, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. “It’s all stored away in a freezer, and as we’re warming the Earth, and warming the Arctic, it’s starting to thaw.”

As permafrost thaws, microbes start to chow down on the organic material that it contains, and as that material decomposes, it emits either carbon dioxide or methane. Experts think most of the release will take the form of carbon dioxide — the chief greenhouse gas driving global warming — but even a small fraction released as methane can have major consequences. Although it doesn’t last nearly as long as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, methane has a short-term warming effect that is many times more powerful.

Among the potential mega-problems brought on by climate change, including melting ice caps as well as the slowdown of the ocean conveyor system, permafrost emissions are unique. For it’s not merely about sea level rise or weather changes — it’s about amplifying the root problem behind it all, atmospheric carbon levels.

The emission of carbon from thawing permafrost is what scientists call a “positive feedback.” More global warming could cause more thawing of Arctic permafrost, leading to more emissions of carbon into the atmosphere, leading to more warming and more thawing of Arctic permafrost — this does not end in a good place.

Moreover, in a year in which the world will train its attention on Paris and the hope for a new global climate agreement, permafrost emissions could potentially undermine global climate policies. Even as the world starts to cut back on emissions, the planet itself might start replacing our emissions cuts with brand new carbon outputs.

All of this, and the Arctic permafrost problem hasn’t received much attention — yet. “The concept is actually relatively new,” says Kevin Schaefer of the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “It was first proposed in 2005. And the first estimates came out in 2011.” Indeed, the problem is so new that it has not yet made its way into major climate projections, Schaefer says.

“None of the climate projections in the last IPCC report account for permafrost,” says Schaefer. “So all of them underestimate, or are biased low.”

To understand why northern soils contain so much carbon it helps to understand why southern or tropical soils don’t. It all comes down to temperature, and how that affects how quickly microorganisms break down dead organic material (plant and animal life), causing it to release its carbon back into the atmosphere.

In temperate latitudes, it’s simple: Plants grow and pull carbon dioxide from the air — then they die, decompose and emit it back again. “In warmer temperatures, microbial activity will go on over all of the year,” says Vladimir Romanovsky, a permafrost researcher at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “So even if productivity in warmer climates [is] larger, there’s not much sequestration (storage) of carbon in the soil.”

But in permafrost regions, it’s very different. Plants grow much more slowly, and there are fewer of them — but their decomposition is also much slower, explains Romanovsky. So a large amount of organic material gets stored in the frozen ground. And this has been happening, in some cases, over tens of thousands of years since the last ice age, leading to a truly vast carbon store that is stuck in place — or, at least, it used to be.

“As long as the carbon stays frozen in permafrost, it’s stable,” says Schaefer. “It’s kind of like broccoli in your freezer. But if you take that out, it eventually thaws out and goes bad.”

The problem, in this case, is the size of the freezer. Just consider some basic numbers. According to a 2013 report from the National Academy of Sciences, northern permafrost contains 1,700 to 1,850 gigatons of carbon — a gigaton is a billion metric tons — which is more than double the amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere (730 gigatons, says the NAS). And over 1,000 of those gigatons are thought to be stored in the top three meters of permafrost soil.

Nobody’s saying all of that is going to come out — certainly not immediately, and maybe not ever. However, as the Arctic continues to warm over the course of the century, emissions from permafrost could ramp up, and they could eventually reach a scale that could begin to offset climate gains. “It’s certainly not much of a stretch of the imagination to think that over the coming decades, we could lose a couple of gigatons per year from thawing permafrost,” says Holmes.

So far, permafrost emissions, if any, are pretty small. But by 2100, the “mean” estimate for total emissions from permafrost right now is 120 gigatons, says Schaefer. That’s no small matter, considering that according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the National Academy of Sciences (see above), the world can only emit about 1000 total gigatons of carbon if we want to have a good chance of limiting the temperature rise to less 2 degrees Celsius of warming since 1860-1880.

According to the IPCC, the world had already emitted 515 gigatons by 2011, leaving a pretty tight remaining carbon “budget.” Permafrost emissions, if they’re big enough, could lead to busting the budget a lot quicker.

The world has been focused on some Arctic emissions problems lately that sound a lot like the thawing permafrost emissions problem, but should probably be distinguished from it. For instance, there is the concern about weird craters that have been found in northern Siberia, and the idea that these might be the result of methane explosions from permafrost.

While there’s still debate over how the craters were formed, though, it’s not clear that we’re talking about the same phenomenon. One reason? The craters are very far to the north in the area around the Yamal Peninsula, and that’s not where the thawing permafrost emissions problem is expected to first emerge. Rather, it should be the opposite — at the southern rim of where permafrost is found.

“The further south you go, the warmer it is, so the more vulnerable the permafrost is to thawing,” says Schaefer. “So all the emissions will be dominated by the southern margins, southern Alaska, Hudson Bay.”

Nonetheless, the craters have gotten vastly more media attention — because they’re mysterious, and because they’re thought to reflect dramatic methane explosions. But ultimately, the steady, long-term problem of carbon loss from permafrost may be scarier.

Later this month — on April 24 — the United States takes over the chairmanship of the Arctic Council, a group of eight nations with Arctic territories that helps to coordinate policy for the region. The State Department has specifically indicated that one of the focuses of the two-year chairmanship will be the issue of climate change. So, will permafrost emissions enter into policy considerations?

“This is a dangerous feedback loop as Arctic warming drives permafrost thaw, and the permafrost releases more GHGs into the atmosphere, accelerating change,” said a State Department official. “However, many questions remain about the processes by and time scales over which such emissions could be released into the atmosphere.”

The official said that through the Arctic Council, the United States will emphasize better monitoring and observation systems to detect emissions from permafrost. But the officials also underscored the importance of “an ambitious international climate agreement in Paris – this is where we need action to slow climate change.”

The concern is whether such an agreement will arrive soon enough to stop or at least blunt the permafrost problem. It’s “a true climatic tipping point, because it’s completely irreversible,” says Schaefer. “Once you thaw the permafrost, there’s no way to refreeze it.”

See also: www.FrackCheckWV.net

Activities Sept. 19th thru 24th

Climate Activists to Converge on NYC for UN Summit, People’s Climate March (9/21/14) and More

From an Article by Anastasia Pantsios, EcoWatch.com, September 9, 2014

For one week surrounding the UN Climate Summit 2014, the focus of the environmental movement will be in New York City. A dizzying array of events will take place, sponsored by hundreds of nonprofit organizations, businesses and religious groups all demanding immediate climate action.

One of the most high-profile events of the week that will capture widespread international attention is the People’s Climate March on September 21st.

Busloads of marchers are coming from all parts of the country and international participants are expected as well. With more than a thousand partnering groups, including nonprofits, religious groups, advocacy organizations, schools and businesses, tens of thousands—maybe more—could show up, with expectations of this event being the largest climate action in world history.

March organizers hope to impress on the world leaders who will be meeting at the UN on September 23rd that there is mass public demand for action on climate change and to take that level of public engagement to an even higher level.

“We believe that world leaders will only act (or be able to act) on climate change when everyday people express the desire, and create the political mandate for them to do so,” said organizers of the march. “Therefore, we aren’t opposed to this summit happening, and it is generally a good thing for heads of state to discuss climate change. We don’t have blind faith that the summit will solve the crisis either. We think that organizing, mobilizing and building social movements are ultimately what changes the course of history.”

While the UN Climate Summit on September 23rd is not open to the public (although it will be broadcast for public viewing), the schedule of activities is so dense that finding time to sleep that week might be a concern for any activist heading to NYC.

There are many small preliminary events including sign-making parties, rallies, meetings, concerts, forums and social gatherings. There are conferences, lectures, meetings and other events, both public and invitation only, listed at Climate Week NYC.

Here is a small sampling of some of the events going on in NYC that week:

NYC Climate Convergence from Sept. 19 – 21, an alternative to the UN Climate Summit. It will feature speakers like The Shock Doctrine author Naomi Klein, workshops, teach-ins, music and more.

Join Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance as part of NYC Climate Convergence Sept. 20 at St. Johns University in Room 112 from 10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. Hudson Riverkeeper Paul Gallay will moderate an all-star panel of leaders and experts on the climate-water nexus.

Religions for the Earth Conference: This event will gather together more than 200 international religious and spiritual leaders at the Union Theological Seminary.

Solutions Grassroots Tour: Nightly music and theater performance and film screening at the Irondale Center in Brooklyn. Sept. 22-26, it’s “an interactive music, theater and film event that motivates towns to adopt renewable energy solutions.” Watch the trailer here.

People’s Climate Justice Summit hosted by the Climate Justice Alliance will feature workshops, interactive panels and other activities to provide an alternative voice to the UN Climate Summit. This event is at the New School University Auditorium & UN Church Center from Sept. 22-23.

Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) is hosting “Women Leading Solutions on the Front Lines of Climate Change” with an international panel of women leaders at the UN Church Center on Sept. 22. The following day it’s co-sponsoring “Rights of Nature and Systemic Change in Climate Solutions” with the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature on Sept. 23.

Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting: The theme of this four-day event, Sept. 21-24, is “Reimagining Impact” and it will stress the effectiveness of various climate strategies. It features plenary sessions, breakout groups, workshops and a star-studded lineup of speakers including President Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Matt Damon.

The UN Climate Summit itself will be broadcast online Sept. 23. “The Summit will consist of an opening ceremony; announcements by heads of state and governments; announcements by the private sector; and the launch of new initiatives that address key action areas by coalitions of governments, businesses and civil society organizations,” according to the UN. The Secretary-General will summarize the outcome of the day at the closing ceremony.”

See also: China and UK Join Forces on Climate Change Agreement

Wendell Berry of Henry Co. KY, Farmer & Scholar

Senate Democrats to stage climate all-nighter

From an Article by Laura Barron-Lopez, The Hill Blog, March 9, 2014

At least 28 Senate Democrats are pulling an all-nighter on Monday to wake up “stubborn” climate change deniers in Congress. With substantial climate change legislation all but dead in Congress, the senators involved in Monday’s climate-fest just want to get to a point where lawmakers can agree that climate change is a scientific fact.

And having the Senate Democratic leadership on their side doesn’t hurt, said Sen. Brian Schatz, (D-Hawaii), who helped spearhead the push for congressional action on climate change.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) will be among those participating in the talk-a-thon on the Senate floor, along with Sens. Dick Durbin (Ill.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), and Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.), along with 22 others.

Notably absent from the marathon session will be the four most vulnerable Senate Democrats up for reelection this year: Sens. Mary Landrieu (La.), Kay Hagan (N.C.), Mark Pryor (Ark.) and Mark Begich (Alaska) are not scheduled to take part, according to a list of speakers.

However, they were invited, Schatz said, adding that their Republican colleagues were verbally invited as well. The response, Schatz admitted was far from enthusiastic. Republicans aren’t budging anytime soon and they likely won’t take being cornered by Democrats on climate change lying down.

“Republican’s aren’t anti-climate policy or anti-mother earth but the policies put forward by Democrats aren’t achievable,” said Robert Dillon, a top energy adviser to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, (R-Alaska), adding that Republicans are open to real legislation on climate change. “We just don’t want to drive the economy off the cliff to do it,” he said.

And it’s those climate change policies that have Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fired up. McConnell renewed his skepticism of climate change ahead of the all-nighter. ”For everybody who thinks it’s warming, I can find somebody who thinks it isn’t,” McConnell said in an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer on Friday.

“You’re not going to have global cooperation to do it,” McConnell said of climate rules on the coal industry. “Even if you conceded the point, which I don’t concede, but if you conceded the point, it isn’t going to be addressed by one country. So the idea is, we tie our own hands behind our back and others don’t. I think it’s beyond foolish and real people are being hurt by this,” McConnell said.

There aren’t any Republican senators signed up for the all-night climate-fest, but Democrats hope to get their attention.

“The impact on our communities is not confined to traditional environmentalist issues anymore, Schatz said in an interview with The Hill. “This is really harming our economy and changing our way of life.”

“There is a stubborn group of climate change deniers and we are hoping to shrink that number. It’s hard to predict what their response will be but we welcome a debate on this issue and there is room for conversation for what suite of policy solutions we aught to undertake,” Schatz said.

While legislation that establishes a carbon tax on the nation’s biggest polluters isn’t possible this year, Schatz agrees with Sen. Whitehouse’s timeline that one may be be able to pass it a year or two from now.

Still, climate policy advocates are optimistic. ”There are some bright spots,” Schatz said. “John Podesta, the president’ new [adviser] is a very good sign. The president has been focused on this issue and is working it into his remarks and every agency is getting involved from the Defense to State Departments.”

In their Quadrennial Defense Review released this week, the Department of Defense cited climate change as a valid threat to military installations worldwide.

On Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry stuck by his vow to put climate change at the front of all diplomatic efforts when issuing his first policy guidance to diplomats on the issue.