Motley Moose – Archive

In a speech that was highly praised by those who saw it, President Obama presented a sweeping policy vision to combat climate change and provide for our energy future.

Unfortunately, the cable networks apparently had bigger fish to fry. MSNBC devoted a total of 41 seconds to the speech, Fox news 4:37 and CNN 8:05. Only the Weather Channel and CSPAN3 covered the entire speech.

The President opened by presenting the reality of climate change, stressing that there was no room for question about humankind’s impact on our climate.

The 12 warmest years in recorded history have all come in the last 15 years. Last year, temperatures in some areas of the ocean reached record highs, and ice in the Arctic shrank to its smallest size on record – faster than most models had predicted it would. These are facts.

Now, we know that no single weather event is caused solely by climate change. Droughts and fires and floods, they go back to ancient times. But we also know that in a world that’s warmer than it used to be, all weather events are affected by a warming planet. The fact that sea level in New York, in New York Harbor, are now a foot higher than a century ago – that didn’t cause Hurricane Sandy, but it certainly contributed to the destruction that left large parts of our mightiest city dark and underwater.

The potential impacts go beyond rising sea levels. Here at home, 2012 was the warmest year in our history. Midwest farms were parched by the worst drought since the Dust Bowl, and then drenched by the wettest spring on record. Western wildfires scorched an area larger than the state of Maryland. Just last week, a heat wave in Alaska shot temperatures into the 90s.

(snip)

Farmers see crops wilted one year, washed away the next; and the higher food prices get passed on to you, the American consumer. Mountain communities worry about what smaller snowpacks will mean for tourism – and then, families at the bottom of the mountains wonder what it will mean for their drinking water. Americans across the country are already paying the price of inaction in insurance premiums, state and local taxes, and the costs of rebuilding and disaster relief.

So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science – of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements – has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They’ve acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.

So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.

As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act. (Applause.)

Thursday June 6th President Obama came to Palo Alto, CA for a fundraiser. 350 Silicon Valley was determined to make sure he heard our opposition to the KXL pipeline.

Thursday was also my nephew’s high school graduation. Our family is very proud of him; school has not been easy for him because of ADHD, he had to work harder than most to achieve this goal. My sister with her famous stubborn determination kept him focused and busy. He has exceeded expectations by excelling at school, dance and sports. After receiving his diploma the crowd chanted for him to do a flip, which he did to cheers. I have complete faith he will continue to impress people with his innocent charm and determination as he heads to college and beyond.

Afterwards I drove with my wife and our 9 year-old to join 350 Silicon Valley. In the back of my mind were the 282 recent graduates, wide-eyed and hopeful, but what is their future? A crappy job market, overbearing student loan debts and severe weather are already stacked up against our new graduates. As a father, uncle and human being I feel the need to work towards improving these conditions. None are more urgent than Climate Change.

When the going gets tough, the tough say “too difficult!!” and throw their hands up in despair claiming “no one cares about the environment or candidates who are passionate about the environment”??!!??

I don’t buy it … and President Obama doesn’t buy it either.

Yesterday this arrived in my Inbox from Organizing for America:

Jan —

Right now, way too many lawmakers in Washington flat-out refuse to face the facts when it comes to climate change.

We’re never going to make real progress on this issue unless members of Congress get serious. Instead, some of them have made a habit of publicly mocking it.

We thought it was time to call them out for denying what’s basic science.

Watch this embarrassing video of climate deniers in Congress — and say you’re ready to help hold them accountable:

The science matters in this.

That’s the message way too many people in Washington need to hear right now.

In 2011, there were 240 members of Congress who voted to say that climate change is a hoax.

Most of them are still around today, and they’re getting away with it — some of them are actually proud of it. They think the whole debate is pretty funny.

If we want to make progress on climate change, we need everyone in Congress on board for a solution. It’s our job to show them there’s a price to pay for being a climate denier.

Take a look at this video and join the fight:

http://my.barackobama.com/Climate-Change

Get ready — more on this coming soon.

Thanks,

Jon

Jon Carson

Executive Director

Organizing for Action

@JonCarsonOFA

Crossposted from the Forward on Climate blogathon at Daily Kos. There is a schedule of diaries and info about the blogathon at the end of the DK diary.

This week, we’ve had an impressive crop of diaries about the Keystone XL project — an pipeline that hooks us more deeply into one of the more damaging fossil fuel extractions we’ve ever seen. Selling oil from the tar sands promises to make Canada a player in the fossil fuel game…

Margaret Atwood, a Canadian, who recently observed that Canadians with The Tar Sands are Hobbits with The Ring. All of the riches in the world belong to he who holds that power. What Canada decides to do with the tar sands will affect energy policy for most of the next century.

With that against all of us — we who want to slow the rate we are pulling carbon out of the ground and putting it into the sky — there are few things we can control directly about Canada’s decision to mine the tar sands. What we can do is address the horse apples. Slowing the process enough could grind it to a halt. Slowing the process will have an impact.

For today’s horse apple, let’s have a few words about what happens when we try to regulate novel energy technology.

The Obama administration has done environmentalists a favor by delaying the Keystone XL pipeline decision until June. This will allow activists across the country extra time to raise awareness. Of course it would be easier if he just nixed the whole project, but he seems to like a slower, more reasoned approach with wide public support. This is why it is so important that we take it to the streets. He wants our voice… he wants our support. The Sierra Club, 350.org along with many other organizations are coming together next Sunday for the Forward on Climate rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC. If you can’t make it to the DC event, worry not, chapters of 350.org have coordinated events in solidarity across the country.

The GOP wants to excuse this based on the prevailing opinion that we need to reduce the deficit, but the whole thing is ridiculous. There are stupid cuts all over the place, but let’s get down to the science.  

While Waxman may have accused Republicans of presiding over the “most anti-science” Congress in history, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tells Mother Jones that his colleague’s characterization doesn’t even go far enough: “This is the most anti-science body since the Catholic Church ostracized Galileo for determining that the earth revolves around the sun.”

Mother Jones, emphasis added

I wish it were possible to collect information about all the wrongdoing of the GOP into one diary, but even a series of books would probably find such an endeavor impossible. Even fully covering a specific topic is, realistically, far beyond the scope of any single diary. In trying to provide an aggregate summary of any currently relevant topic, the best I can give is a brief overview of the most recent and egregious Republican transgressions.

Today we address in brief (kind of) the GOP’s war on science.

On an icy day in January, a new President in the United States took the oath of office with soaring words of hope, idealism and courage. At a time of the worst global recession in living memory and a multitude of challenges, he did not shrink from reality but embraced the capacity to change it. Those who heard him were lifted.

Speaking to the millions in America, but heard by billions around the world, President Barack Obama said:

“What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them – that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.”

Obama spoke of America, but he could have been speaking of the world. We are everywhere in need of renewal and hope. None more so than on the climate challenge where we need fresh vision and a politics that looks forwards not backwards.  The stakes are so high that anything less than an audacious, global effort to reconcile our differences and make peace with the planet will fail humanity. We will not regret it in our parochial nationalisms as Indians or Americans, but as humans – as a species that failed itself, and condemned the rest.

This is why 2009 matters and why this year’s UN Conference on Climate Change (COP15) in Copenhagen in December must not fail.