“By the time you panic, it is way too late.”

July 7th, 2008

“As GM goes, so goes the nation” was the old saw — those were the days when the only real conflict between American’s was their position on the superiorities of Ford vs.. Chevy. Ahhhh … the good old days.

Now GM is constantly one step ahead of bankruptcy, shifting quarterly in search of new products and repositioning to keep from closing. In 2002, General Motors workers opposed legislation to increase fuel efficiency standards because they thought it might eliminate the S.U.V. This kind of short-term thinking keeps us in a loop, dancing as fast as we can — sadly, we’ll do some more of that at the G8 this week … and pass a disaster to our children and grandchildren.

I’d bet there are millions of S.U.V.’s parked in driveways today, awaiting a weekly trip to get all the errands done in one outing — and their resale value is plummeting. Makes you wonder what GM might look like today … and our geopolitical adventuring, as well … if we’d listened to Jimmy Carter and started to slowly withdraw ourselves from big oil.

We put somebody on the moon, dearhearts — we can’t replace fossil fuels? Pfffft!

This is an environmental post, we’ve even got Tom Friedman today. Of course, you’ll find news about war and oil here too; sadly, it’s all of a whole cloth. There’s an interesting Frank Rich piece that focuses on Wall-E, the new futuristic Pixar movie. [In browsing around today, I ran across a political bash of the film, and usually when I disagree with someone’s point of view, I shrug philosophically and say, “Well, somebody was bound to write it.” Not this time — I’m including the link in case you want to read something so entirely off the wall as to get you thinking about the differences in brain function in humankind and the absurdity of sincere irrelevancies. Lordy! Think of that as a dubious bonus, I guess.]

In other news, we’ve massacred another wedding party in Afghanistan, and a car bomb claimed 40 lives at the Indian embassy in Kabul. Obama has it right that this is the worrisome war, being ignored. 27 of our soldiers died in Afghanistan in June, as compared to 29 in Iraq. And … get this … today McRib is going to make a pledge to balance the budget on the bones of the entitlement programs, but he’s promising to give us “victory” funds instead … just as soon as they’re available:

“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.

“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

And we thought BUSH was delusional!! Crikey!

Jude

GM Weighs More Layoffs, Sale of Brands
Worries Over Cash, Plunging Share Price
Prompt Strategy Shift; Saturn Gets Scrutiny
JOHN D. STOLL, WallStreetJournal
July 7, 2008; Page A1

G-8 Climate Scorecard Puts U.S. In Last
HuffPo

Climate deadlock seen at G8 despite ‘constructive’ Bush
RawStory

GETTING ALL OUR LEMMINGS IN A ROW

The G8 nations — the world’s eight richest countries — will meet in Hokkaido, Japan next week to put the finishing touches on their plan to pass their carbon dioxide (CO2) problem along to all the world’s children.

The G8 plan — now fully spelled out in official documents — is to bury carbon dioxide in the ground, hoping it will stay there forever, but in any case making it our children’s problem, not ours.

The G8 is an exclusive club that includes Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, and the U.S. Since 2005, the G8 has been systematically putting together the pieces of its CO2-burial plan, which will be endorsed again at next week’s meeting in Japan.

Burying carbon dioxide in the ground is called “carbon capture and storage”, or CCS for short. CCS is being promoted as a “silver bullet” to the global warming problem, as a kind of speculative bubble of expectations has developed around it. CCS has been used for 35 years on a very small scale in oil fields, to loosen up sticky oil and help force it to the surface (the CO2 comes back out with the oil). But on a large scale CCS is untested and untried. Despite this fact, CCS is the basis for claiming that “clean coal” is a viable energy option for the world’s future.

The U.S. had been building a coal-fired power plant to demonstrate large-scale CCS (and thus “clean coal”) at Mattoon, Illinois — a project called Futuregen — but runaway costs forced the federal government to abandon the project in January.

In early June, at a meeting in Aomori, Japan, G8 representatives agreed to start 20 large-scale CCS projects by 2010 — just two years from now. This extremely aggressive schedule perhaps indicates that the pressure on major CO2 emitters is becoming intolerable and they are growing desperate for a way out.

“We strongly support the recommendation that 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects need to be launched globally by 2010… with a view to supporting technology development and cost reduction for the beginning of broad deployment of CCS by 2020,” the G8 said in a statement after the Aomori meeting.

Notably, the Aomori meeting was attended by not only Britain, Canada, Italy, Japan, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States, but also by China, India and South Korea.

In late June, 80 chief executive officers (CEOs) of transnational corporations issued their own endorsement of CCS as the “solution” to global warming. Their report, “CEO Climate Policy Recommendations to G8 Leaders, July, 2008″ acknowledged that CCS is essential, but also that free markets would not provide CCS, so taxpayers would have to do it:

“For non-mature technologies, however, markets will not be sufficient and enhanced RDD&D [research development, demonstration and deployment] policies will have to be encouraged. Photovoltaics, fourth generation nuclear and the area of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies for coal are good examples. Acceleration of the demonstration and deployment of a range of CCS technologies is particularly important because if all new coal fired electricity generation plants are not operating with CCS by 2015 to 2020 onward, it will be difficult to realize the target of 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050.” (pg. 16, …)

Still, no one has ever addressed the most fundamental question about CCS: what would constitute a demonstration of “success?”

To make a dent in the global warming problem would require burying trillions of tons of CO2 a mile our more below ground thus creating a reservoir of hazardous gas that could leak back into the atmosphere at any time and begin to cook the planet and acidify the oceans. Even if only 0.01% of it leaked out each year — a suggested industry standard — two-thirds would escape in 10,000 years. Even CCS advocates acknowledge that this would be a catastrophe. How could a leak of only 0.01% per year be measured? How could humans remain alert to this enormous underground threat for centuries to come? Even if 0.01% leakage were detected, could anything be done about it? Who would be responsible for taking action? Who would pay?

The plain fact is, if the goal is to bury CO2 forever, success will be impossible to demonstrate. On whatever day such a demonstration is declared a “success,” leakage could begin the following day. So any such demonstrations will be meaningless. Everyone involved knows this is true. This raises the possibility that the G8’s goal isn’t actual scientific verification of the technology — but 20 “demonstrations” intended merely to lull the public into thinking that it’s OK to build more coal plants because somehow someday CO2 will be safely captured and stored forever. By the time this bit of fakery is widely understood, the present generation of CEOs and politicians will be long dead and all the world’s children will be left holding the bag.

By definition, the G8’s CCS plan is intended to force future generations to deal with the consequences of our present-day cupidity — a position that is morally indefensible.++

Wall-E for President
Some conservatives have objected to Wall-E’s message of love, loyalty, friendship and concern for the environment.
Frank Rich, The New York Times
Sunday 06 July 2008

So much for a July Fourth week spent in idyllic celebration of our country’s birthday. This year’s festivities were marked instead by a debate - childish, not constitutional - over who is and isn’t patriotic. The fireworks were sparked by a verbally maladroit retired general, fueled by two increasingly fatuous presidential campaigns, and heated to a boil by a 24/7 news culture that inflates any passing tit for tat into a war of the worlds.

Let oil soar above $140 a barrel. Let layoffs and foreclosures proliferate like California’s fires. Let someone else worry about the stock market’s steepest June drop since the Great Depression. In our political culture, only one question mattered: What was Wesley Clark saying about John McCain and how loudly would every politician and bloviator in the land react?

Unable to take another minute of this din, I did what any sensible person might do and fled to the movies. More specifically, to an animated movie in the middle of a weekday afternoon. What escape could be more complete?

Among its other attributes, this particular G-rated film, ‘Wall-E,’ is a rare economic bright spot. Its enormous box-office gross last weekend swelled a total Hollywood take that was up 20 percent from a year ago. (You know America’s economy is cooked when everyone flocks to the movies.) The ‘Wall-E’ crowds were primed by the track record of its creator, Pixar Animation Studios, and the ecstatic reviews. But if anything, this movie may exceed its audience’s expectations. It did mine.

As it happened, ‘Wall-E’ opened the same summer weekend as the hot-button movie of the 2004 campaign year, Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ Ah, the good old days. Oil was $38 a barrel, our fatalities in Iraq had not hit 900, and only 57 percent of Americans thought their country was on the wrong track. (Now more than 80 percent do.) ‘Wall-E,’ a fictional film playing to a far larger audience, may touch a more universal chord in this far gloomier time.

Indeed, sitting among rapt children mostly under 12, I felt as if I’d stepped through a looking glass. This movie seemed more realistically in touch with what troubles America this year than either the substance or the players of the political food fight beyond the multiplex’s walls.

While the real-life grown-ups on TV were again rebooting Vietnam, the kids at ‘Wall-E’ were in deep contemplation of a world in peril - and of the future that is theirs to make what they will of it. Compare any 10 minutes of the movie with 10 minutes of any cable-news channel, and you’ll soon be asking: Exactly who are the adults in our country and who are the cartoon characters?

Almost any description of this beautiful film makes it sound juvenile or didactic, and it is neither. So I’ll keep to the minimum. ‘Wall-E’ is a robot-meets-robot love story, as simple (and often as silent) as a Keaton or Chaplin fable, set largely in a smoldering and abandoned Earth, circa 2700, where the only remaining signs of life are a cockroach and a single green sprout.

The robot of the title is a battered mobile trash compactor whose sole knowledge of human civilization and intimacy comes from the avalanche of detritus the former inhabitants left behind - a Rubik’s Cube, an engagement ring and, most strangely, a single stuttering VCR tape of ‘Hello, Dolly!,’ a candied Hollywood musical from 1969. Wall-E keeps rewinding to the song that finds the young lovers pledging their devotion until ‘time runs out.’

Pixar is not Stanley Kubrick. Though ‘Wall-E’ is laced with visual and musical allusions to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey,’ its vision of apocalypse now is not as dark as Kubrick’s then. The new film speaks to the anxieties of 2008 as specifically as ‘2001′ did to the more explosive tumult of its (election) year, 1968. That’s more than upsetting enough.

Humanity is not dead in ‘Wall-E,’ but it is in peril. The world’s population cruises the heavens ceaselessly on a mammoth luxury spaceship that it boarded in the early 22nd century after the planet became uninhabitable. For government, there is a global corporation called Buy N Large, which keeps the public wired to umpteenth-generation iPods and addicted to a diet of supersized liquefied fast food and instantly obsolete products. The people are too bloated to walk - they float around on motorized Barcaloungers - but they are happy shoppers. A billboard on the moon heralds a Buy N Large outlet mall ‘coming soon,’ not far from that spot where back in the day of ‘Hello, Dolly!’ idealistic Americans once placed a flag.

And yet these rabid consumers, like us, are haunted by what paradise might have been lost. How can they reclaim what matters? How can Earth be recolonized? These questions are rarely spoken in ‘Wall-E,’ but are omnipresent, like half-forgotten dreams. In this movie, a fleeting green memory of the extinct miracle of photosynthesis is as dazzling and elusive as the emerald city of Oz.

One of the great things about art, including popular art, is that it can hit audiences at a profound level beyond words. That includes children. The kids at ‘Wall-E’ were never restless, despite the movie’s often melancholy mood and few belly laughs. They seemed to instinctually understand what ‘Wall-E’ was saying; they didn’t pepper their chaperones with questions along the way. At the end they clapped their small hands. What they applauded was not some banal cartoonish triumph of good over evil but a gentle, if unmistakable, summons to remake the world before time runs out.

You have to wonder what these same kids make of the political show their parents watch on TV at home. The fierce urgency of now that drives ‘Wall-E’ and its yearning for change is absent in both the Barack Obama and McCain campaigns these days.

For me, Mr. Obama showed signs of jumping the shark two weeks back, when he appeared at a podium affixed with his own pompous faux-presidential seal. It could have been a Pixar sight gag. In fact, it is a gag in ‘Wall-E,’ where, in a flashback, we see that the original do-nothing chief executive of Buy N Large (prone to pronouncements like ’stay the course’) boasted his own ersatz presidential podium.

For all the hyperventilation on the left about Mr. Obama’s rush to the center - some warranted, some not - what’s more alarming is how small-bore and defensive his campaign has become. Whether he’s reaffirming his long-held belief in faith-based programs or fudging his core convictions about government snooping, he is drifting away from the leadership he promised and into the focus-group-tested calculation patented by Mark Penn in his disastrous campaign for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama’s Wednesday address calling for renewed public service is unassailable in principle but inadequate to the daunting size of the serious American crisis at hand. The speech could have been - and has been - delivered by any candidate of either party in any election year since 1960.

What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.

The Republican’s digital ignorance is not a function of his age but of his intellectual inflexibility and his isolation from his country’s reality. To prove the point last week, he took a superfluous, if picturesque, tour of Colombia and Mexico, with occasional timeouts for him and his surrogates to respond like crybabies to General Clark’s supposed slur on his patriotism.

For connoisseurs of McCainian cluelessness, the high point was his Wednesday morning appearance on ABC’s ‘Good Morning America.’ The anchor, Robin Roberts, asked the only important question: Why in heaven’s name was Mr. McCain in Latin America when ‘the U.S. economy is really at the forefront of voters’ minds’?

‘I know Americans are hurting very badly right now,’ he explained, channeling the first George Bush’s ‘Message: I care.’ As he spoke, those hurting Americans could feast on the gorgeous flora and fauna of the Cartagena, Colombia, tourist vista serving as his backdrop. ‘It’s really lovely here,’ Mr. McCain said. Since he can’t drop us an e-mail, a video postcard will have to do.

Mr. McCain should be required to see ‘Wall-E’ to learn just how far adrift he is from an America whose economic fears cannot be remedied by his flip-flop embrace of the Bush tax cuts (for the wealthy) and his sham gas-tax holiday (for everyone else). Mr. Obama should see it to be reminded of just how bold his vision of change had been before he settled into a front-runner’s complacency.

Americans should see it to appreciate just how much things are out of joint on an Independence Day when a cartoon robot evokes America’s patriotic ideals with more conviction than either of the men who would be president. ++

Can Love Change The Wording of Laws?
Elizabeth Sawin, CommonDreams
Saturday, July 5, 2008

The was given as the Keynote Address at the Regional Sustainable Energy Summit sponsored by Co-op Power on June 20, 2008:

Tonight I would like to talk about acceptance and the kind of action that flows out of acceptance.In particular, I would like to talk about accepting the reality of climate change, the size and scope of what we must accomplish to address it, and the shortness of the time we have remaining for that task.

There is a power that is unleashed in people when they accept the facts of climate change. That it is real. That it is big. And also that it is solvable. Should we summon the collective will to do so, we can take actions to avoid its worst consequences.

Deeply accepting these facts changes your world, your thinking, your priorities. You know this. In some way that is why you have chosen to be here tonight. Accepting the reality of climate change, you couldn’t NOT be here.

Accepting the reality of climate change and the reality of our moment in time as one when we can still make a difference, changes us; it taps into our courage, our persistence and our caring, which is a very good thing, as these are the most powerful tools ever discovered for changing the world, tools that can be used to address not only climate change but also the deep habits of thought and action which have created it.

Tonight I would like to share some ideas about making full use of our courage, persistence and caring, but first I need to be clear about what I mean with all this talk of acceptance.

Accepting what?

Accepting the realities of climate change, as best we understand them, through the lens of science.

Accepting, first of all, of the fact that climate change is already here, not some distant future possibility.

The newspapers are saying that the flooding in the Midwest this month is a once in five hundred year event. What they aren’t saying is that the incidence of major floods is up, dramatically up, on every continent. They aren’t linking the flooding in the Midwest with the 12 out of 13 major disaster relief operations of 2007 that the UN says were ‘climate-change related’ or with the fact that last year saw record melting of the Arctic sea ice.

They aren’t mentioning that in 2007 major insurance companies - like State Farm, Allstate and Liberty Mutual - stopped offering new homeowners policies along the entire coast of the Northeastern United States. Liberty Mutual. Allstate. State Farm. This is not the judgment of radical tree-huggers. This is the determination of sober, conservative, statisticians, who are projecting a rising tide of risk.

Accepting the reality of climate change means really taking in how much and how quickly we have changed the atmosphere. For the last 800,000 years (since the Neanderthals diverged from modern humans) levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have stayed in a narrow range - between 180 and 280 ppm. When we developed our staple crops, CO2 was somewhere between180 and 280. When we settled coastlines and river deltas, CO2 was somewhere between 180 and 280. When each of the hundreds of cultures on the planet adapted to particular geographies and patterns of weather, CO2 was between 180 and 280. Accepting the reality of climate change means facing the fact that today CO2 is at 385 ppm. We must accept that we have already have created a different planet than the only one we have ever known.

At 385 ppm we have already surpassed safe levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Respected climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues tell us that safety lies behind us, at 350 ppm or less, a level we zoomed through in the late 1980s. In the Earth’s past when CO2 was at 385 ppm, sea level was many feet higher than today - disaster for many of the world’s largest cities. The alpine glaciers that provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of people today didn’t exist on a world with sustained levels of CO2 at 385 ppm. The Arctic didn’t have summer sea ice at 385 ppm.

Every year spent above 350 increases the odds of triggering ‘runaway’ warming, where warming causes more warming in a cycle humans would be powerless to stop. Accepting the reality of climate change means facing the fact that if runaway warming begins, solutions that might once have been sufficient and successful will have become insufficient and doomed to fail. We must accept that climate change, not our wishes, other plans, or other needs, sets the timetable for action.

Accepting the realities of climate change also means accepting the judgment of science about what magnitude of change is required. James Hansen’s group has run computer simulations that show it is possible to bring the Earth back to 350 ppm. We could do it in 100 years if we were to end deforestation by 2015, phase out the burning of coal by 2030, and refrain entirely from using low quality fossil fuels such as oil shale and tar sands.

I’ll repeat that, because these numbers represent important signposts on the road to safety, signposts all of us need to recognize, signposts all of us need to point out to others.

Phasing out coal, starting today. Reaching zero in twenty-two years. No more coal burned, anywhere on Earth, in 22 years, on this planet where the current trend is towards new coal plants, lots of them, every month.

No more deforestation by 2015, seven years from now.

No use of tar sands, oil shale or methyl hydrates, anywhere, ever.

Take a moment to let these extra-ordinary numbers sink in. Phasing out coal, starting today, reaching zero in 22 years? Imagine that. Imagine ending deforestation in seven years.

It is physically possible to do this - physically possible to return CO2 levels in the atmosphere to safety quickly enough to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change. Physically speaking it is a simple matter of leaving already sequestered carbon where it is, underground. The part that demands our smarts and our capacity to cooperate is the challenge of making arrangements to meet our needs by other means. Do we, in this country and around the world have the collective will to do this, quickly enough? On a planet with hundreds of millions in hunger and poverty, and in a country with a growing gap between rich and poor, do we have the collective will to share and help one another so that we all make this transition, all have our needs met?

When I talk about acceptance that’s what I mean. Really absorbing that the things you care about, the things I care about, require from us actions of sufficient power and effectiveness that, in the next twenty-two years not only will new coal plants not be built, but also existing coal plants will be shut down, coal miners will be re-trained, and whole communities will find clean renewable ways to power themselves. It means facing the fact that the underlying forces of growth, consumption and poverty must be addressed. It means accepting that the change we need to participate in will transform our society and the world.

Hansen’s computer runs are just one scenario for the road to safety. We could get there burning more coal if we were willing to curtail oil. We could give ourselves longer to save the forests if we were willing to cut the coal faster. The details are not what is important. What is important is the magnitude and the time scale of the changes needed.

Hansen’s paper with the 350ppm target came out a few months ago. Its seriousness has been sinking into my heart ever since and has planted a question there. Knowing all of this, how do I act?

When I teach about climate change I find myself speaking calmly, in even tones, as I have here tonight, speaking normally about the most abnormal of situations.

Talking about terrible tragedy unfolding and more tragedy that is not YET inevitable but could become so. Talking about a huge task to be accomplished in a short amount of time.

As I go from place to place I speak. People listen. They nod. They take notes. Many are moved to action, like the pastors of many churches in Massachusetts who are pledging to ring their church bells 350 times to spread the word that 350 is the safe level for CO2 in the atmosphere. People form new alliances, work harder, do amazing and inspiring things. They go ever farther in their personal lives, walking, biking, growing their own food, installing solar panels, building cars that run on vegetable oil. They scheme about green jobs and make connections between social justice and climate change and launch new initiatives and start new investments.

It is all exciting and full of potential and has the power to become much more than the sum of its parts.

And still the numbers loom in my mind. Twenty-two years. No coal at all. Anywhere. Seven years to end deforestation.

And I wonder, do those folks ringing the church bells and running the petition drives and tinkering with their new PV installations feel like I do, excited by the real change happening, but feeling in the quieter moments between the actions and the events, that they are not quite being fully used? Feeling as though, this big truth they have seen and understood about twenty-two years to contribute to a global transformation is calling forth something from them that has not yet found its channel?

I would guess that most of you know what I am talking about. I would guess that you are feeling some version of this within yourselves and that that is why you are here tonight, some sense of courage gathering, of a new willingness to trust your own intuition that things are not right and that significant change is needed, some sort of energy, looking for an outlet, some willingness, maybe a lot of it, to keep doing the important things you are doing while also stepping forward into something new. Something big.

If you are at all like me, the intensity of what is stirring within you may be a bit surprising. It may be more than a little disorienting. Who am I - a middle-aged woman with children who need me, a house to keep, a farm I share the work of, a community that needs my participation - to be feeling like a warrior searching around for the battle? Who am I - trained as a scientist to value poise and objectivity - to feel the rising urge to create a ruckus and demonstrate in some way how much this matters, how much I love my kids and their future, how much I want us to address this challenge of climate change in way that is fair and just for our whole society?

Who am I, who are you, to think we have a role to play in ending the burning of coal around the world by 2030?

But who are we not to? I may not look like society’s stereotype of the radical, but I’m feeling - like mothers do around the world and in every species - the pull to act to protect that which has been entrusted into my care. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling that pull, and I know you do not have to be a parent to feel that pull. I know I am not alone in my commitment to the possibility of the society we could create if we trusted that pull, if we gave ourselves over to it.

Everything we are doing matters, and needs to keep going. The communities we are building, the farms and coops and bike lanes and community gardens and wind turbines and ballot initiatives and legislative lobbying. All of it.

But I feel within myself the need for something else, something different. I realized this most starkly on the day a few weeks ago, when the Climate Security Act was defeated in the Senate. That bill wouldn’t have been enough to bring us safely to 350 ppm, but it was a small step in that direction.

Few of the things I love and care about showed up in the debate that killed that possibility, and the reality of twenty-two years to wean ourselves from coal didn’t show up, either. Yet national legislation sets the rules of the game that will determine the degree and the timetable for limiting fossil fuels and sparking the collective investment in a clean, fair, renewable energy system.

There are two pieces of a puzzle, sitting here right in front of our eyes, waiting to be hitched together.

The first puzzle piece is the deep personal need I feel, and which many, many others must feel, to do something that feels stronger than one more workshop conducted in a calm and reasonable manner, something more than one more step towards energy efficiency in my own life.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’ll keep giving the workshops and working on my personal carbon footprint. But I’m looking for that other mode of action, the one that is bold enough and brave enough to honor my level of concern and my conviction that a much better future is possible if only we’d get down to the collective work of it. I’m looking for ways to act that acknowledge the shortness of time and the failure of polite requests to impact the laws that are being written or the public investments that are being made. I’m looking for some action consistent with the depth of my caring.

The other puzzle piece is the clear need to provide more support to state and national elected leaders so that they can stand for the long-term public future, even when such a stance is in opposition to the interests of the fossil fuel lobby. To keep elected representatives from being pushed over by the special interests there must be an equivalently strong push in the other direction, prodding them toward a strong national policy that commits us to what the science says we need to do - phasing out coal by 2030, committing in international negotiations to the target of 350 ppm.

When I put these two puzzle pieces together here’s what I see:

I see myself and others walking into the places where the most important decisions are being made about the future of our atmosphere, armed with nothing beyond our understanding and acceptance of the significance of this moment and our caring for future generations, other species, and the people in our own country and around the world who are most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change. I see us carrying not signs of protest or angry demands, but visible representations of what we love and what is at stake. I see us gumming up the business as usual workings of the political machine by the sheer power of our love and conviction, and I see us getting in the way until we have what survival demands - a policy consistent with what the science says we must do to avoid the most dangerous consequences of climate change.

I think of the way that Kentucky Senator McConnell, in the debate over the Climate Security Act, blocked movement towards 350 and safety by insisting that the entire bill be read into the record (it took eight hours) and I see myself and others using the force of our caring and concern to block movement towards disaster, instead. I picture hundreds of ordinary people showing up in Senate offices before critical votes, each of us carrying our own scripts, humble one-page statements describing the people and places we treasure, the reasons to act on climate change. Isn’t there something astounding and beautiful about that image?
About using our little everyday loves and our big long-term hopes, our words about grandchildren, seacoast neighborhoods, forest slopes, and alpine glaciers to take up space, slow down the rush to disaster, turn policy towards sanity? Call it a new version of the filibuster - the love buster. Our presence would be a reminder of what is at stake, and of the ethical responsibilities of today’s decision makers to future generations.

Could a few of us doing this make a difference? Or even hundreds of us? I don’t know. Love and concern may be fragile tools to take on the $35 million dollars the coal lobby is spending on public relations this year. But love and concern and the hard-wired desire to protect the future are evolutionary forces that have shaped millions of years of life on this planet. If we are smart and thoughtful about planting self-organizing seeds in the minds of the many others we will never meet who are feeling the same excruciating disconnection we are between what needs to happen and the ability of our leaders to get it done, we just might tap into that evolutionary force. I’d like to see that happen.

I know that even if we never changed a single line of a single law, we’d provide some comfort to our fellow citizens who right now doubt their own assessment of danger because nobody is acting very bothered. “You aren’t crazy,” we’d say, by our actions. “You are sane. You can trust yourself.” And we would be paying ourselves the very great respect of trusting our own judgment.

At the very least, if some of us try something like what I am imagining, we will provide ourselves with a better answer for the next generation when they ask us what we did during this crucial decade.

When I put these two puzzle pieces together I see something else as well. Because there is something that is very freeing when you accept the needed scale of change. “No more coal in twenty-two years” and “business as usual” are just not compatible ideas.

Accepting the reality of climate change means accepting the inevitable reality of social change. The beautiful thing about that is the way it opens up your creativity.

Once you stop believing that we will solve this problem without changing some of the foundations of our world, you can begin to see all the ways that a world that has addressed climate change could be so much better than our polluted, violent, inequitable one. You can see the cleaner air once the coal stops burning. You can imagine city children who will breathe so much easier and the Appalachian
mountains that will keep their tops. You can see the green jobs for youth from communities of color, you can see the healthier people on the streets of walkable cities and the vibrant local economies thriving all around them.

Those visions of possibility are the final thing I see us bringing with us to the halls of power, along with our acceptance of current reality and our tokens of all that we love. Once we read our statements about what’s at stake, if we haven’t yet been arrested for trespass, I see us starting to read those portraits of the possible.

So that’s where my mind is going lately. We’ll see what comes of it, whether I find the courage to try, whether others feel called to try, whether anyone can help to strategize about when and where and how to use our love and concern and vision of the possible as tools that can change the outcome of votes and the wording of laws.

I would love to hear your ideas about actions, drawn out of our concern and love, that could make a difference in the places where these decisions are being made that will affect all of us and the generations yet to be born. Better than that, I would love to hear your news of the actions you take, using the power of your love to move our leaders, and our society, onto a new path. ++

Ezabeth R. Sawin is the Director of Sustainability Institute’s Our Climate Ourselves program and is a writer, teacher, and systems analyst who lives with her family as part of an intentional community and organic farm in Hartland, Vermont. For more of her writing visit www.ourclimateourselves.org

Tom Friedman Calls For Green Revolution
Huffington Post
July 4, 2008

At the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday, New York Times columnist and The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman gave a preview of his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, which comes out in September. The book’s main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century.

Friedman argues that those five trends — energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty — have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.

“We’re not post-something anymore,” Friedman said. “We’re not post-war, we’re not post-Cold War, we’re not post-post Cold War. We’re pre-something. And what we’re pre-…is the energy climate era, defined by these five problems going over a tipping point. And how we manage these five problems, I believe, is really gonna define the stability or instability of the 21st century.”

Friedman also warns of strange new weather patterns — what he refers to as “global weirding” — coming in the energy climate era.

“The weather is gonna get weird,” he said. “We’re gonna get hotter hots, longer droughts, heavier rains, heavier snowfalls.”

In addition to strange weather patterns, Friedman warns that we are in an “extinction period,” witnessing extinction rates 1,000 times the norm, giving rise to what he calls “the age of Noah.”

“We are the first generation of human beings that are going to have to think like Noah,” he said. “We are the first generation of humans who are going to have to think about saving the last two pairs.”

Friedman argues that the solution to these problems will require “a serious revolution,” and he calls for the development of an “energy internet,” which he defines as “basically a smart grid that goes into a smart home that’s connected to a smart car, basically, where all your devices are on the internet and can day-trade electrons for you.”

“Without an energy internet that basically connects clean electrons to a smart home to a smart car,” he said, “you will never get the scale that you need.”

“Only if we got abundant, cheap, clean reliable electrons could we deal with climate change, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, energy poverty, and energy resource supply and demand. That is the cure.”

To get there, Friedman explained, we will need both a price system and focus on innovation.

“This is an innovation problem,” Friedman said. “We don’t need a Manhattan Project….What we need is 100,000 Dean Kamens [Segway inventor] in 100,000 garages trying 100,000 things, so maybe ten of them will come up with that holy grail of abundant, cheap, clean reliable electrons.”

But despite what Friedman called “a bubble in articles on green investing,” venture capital investing in green technologies is currently at a fraction of what it was at the height of the IT revolution. Friedman attributes this to the lack of a market and called for economic policies that would create a market for green technologies.

Friedman said that because there is no market signal, big companies are “afraid the price [of gas], even when it’s $4.50 a gallon, is gonna go back to two or three dollars and their green investing is all gonna go up in smoke.”

“Without a carbon tax, without a floor on gasoline or oil, you are never gonna have a market,” he continued. “Without a market you will not have scale, without scale all you have is a green hobby.”

[open link to] Watch:

Part I: Friedman discusses the five trends and presents the book’s main argument
Part II: Friedman discusses global weirding and the age of Noah
Part III: Friedman discusses solutions and calls for policy reform ++

American Energy Policy, Asleep at the Spigot
NELSON D. SCHWARTZ, NYT
July 6, 2008

JUST three years ago, with oil trading at a seemingly frothy $66 a barrel, David J. O’Reilly made what many experts considered a risky bet. Outmaneuvering Chinese bidders and ignoring critics who said he overpaid, Mr. O’Reilly, the chief executive of Chevron, forked over $18 billion to buy Unocal, a giant whose riches date back to oil fields made famous in the film “There Will Be Blood.”

For Chevron, the deal proved to be a movie-worthy gusher, helping its profits to soar. And while he has warned about tightening energy supplies for years and looks prescient for buying Unocal, even Mr. O’Reilly says that he still can’t get his head around current oil prices, which closed above $145 a barrel on Thursday, a record.

“We can see how you can get to $100,” he says. “At $140, I just don’t know how to explain it. We’re surprised.”

For the rest of the country, the feeling is more like shock. As gasoline prices climb beyond $4 a gallon, Americans are rethinking what they drive and how and where they live. Entire industries are reeling — airlines and automakers most prominent among them — and gas prices have emerged as an important issue in the presidential campaign.

Ninety percent of Americans, meanwhile, expect the pain at the pump to pose a financial hardship in the next six months, according to a recent Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. Stocks now trade inversely to crude prices, and the Dow Jones industrials are in bear-market territory. Old icons have been written off, with Starbucks boasting nearly twice the market value of General Motors, which some on Wall Street say faces the possibility of bankruptcy.

Outside the thriving oil patch, it makes for a bleak economic picture. But it didn’t have to be this way.

Over the last 25 years, opportunities to head off the current crisis were ignored, missed or deliberately blocked, according to analysts, politicians and veterans of the oil and automobile industries. What’s more, for all the surprise at just how high oil prices have climbed, and fears for the future, this is one crisis we were warned about. Ever since the oil shortages of the 1970s, one report after another has cautioned against America’s oil addiction.

Even as politicians heatedly debate opening new regions to drilling, corralling energy speculators, or starting an Apollo-like effort to find renewable energy supplies, analysts say the real source of the problem is closer to home. In fact, it’s parked in our driveways.

Nearly 70 percent of the 21 million barrels of oil the United States consumes every day goes for transportation, with the bulk of that burned by individual drivers, according to the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan research group that advises Congress.

SO despite the fierce debate over what’s behind the recent spike in prices, no one differs on what’s really responsible for all that underlying demand here for black gold: the automobile, fueled not only by gasoline but also by Americans’ famous propensity for voracious consumption.

To be sure, the American appetite for crude oil is only one reason for the recent price surge. But the country’s dependence on imported oil has only kept growing in recent years, undermining the trade balance and putting an added strain on global supplies.

Although the road to $4 gasoline and increased oil dependence has been paved in places like Detroit, Houston and Riyadh, it runs through Washington as well, where policy makers have let the problem make lengthy pit stops.

“Much of what we’re seeing today could have been prevented or ameliorated had we chosen to act differently,” says Pete V. Domenici, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and a 36-year veteran of the Senate. “It was a bipartisan failure to act.”

Mike Jackson, the chief executive of AutoNation, the country’s biggest automobile retailer, is even more blunt. “It was totally preventable,” he says, anger creeping into his affable car-salesman’s pitch.

The speed at which gas prices are climbing is forcing a seismic change in long-held American habits, from car-buying to commuting. Last week, Ford Motor reported that S.U.V. sales were down 55 percent from a year ago, while demand for its full-size F-series pickup, a gas guzzler that was the country’s best-selling vehicle for 26 consecutive years, is off 40 percent. The only Ford model to show a sales increase was the midsized Fusion. A Ford spokeswoman says the market shift is “totally unprecedented and faster than anything we’ve ever seen.”

If the latest rise in oil prices isn’t just another spike — like those of the 1970s and 1980s — but is instead a fundamental repricing of the commodity responsible for much of modern American life, the impact of that change will affect everyone from home builders and homeowners in exurbs to corporate leaders, landlords and commuters in cities.

Although Asian consumers have begun emulating America’s love affair with the automobile, with the commercial booms of China and India playing pivotal roles in increased oil demand, the largest energy appetite in the world is still found in the United States. Home to only 4 percent of the world’s population, the nation slurps up about a quarter of the planet’s oil — and Americans’ daily use is nearly twice the combined consumption of the Chinese and Indians, according to an annual energy survey published by BP, the British oil giant.

Indeed, low-priced gasoline has long been part of the American social contract, according to Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and Republican leader. While in office, Mr. Gingrich battled efforts to modulate demand through tools like increased gas taxes and tighter fuel standards, and he argues that voters won’t support such measures even now.

“They will work if you coerce the entire system and if you pretend the American people are Japanese and Europeans,” Mr. Gingrich says. “Our culture favors driving long distances in powerful vehicles and the car as a social expression.”

Perhaps, but on Capitol Hill, members of both parties now say they are furious with Detroit for fighting so hard, and for so long, against higher fuel-efficiency standards.

Though analysts say automakers who shoveled out highly profitable and highly inefficient road hogs like S.U.V.’s and pickups deserve much of the blame, they also criticize legislators who failed to provide an incentive for consumers to switch to fuel-sipping cars. Some politicians are quick to acknowledge the problem.

“We’ve got to fix it or our standard of living will change within a decade,” says Senator Domenici, who is retiring this year. “Oil was too damn cheap, it’s too high now and it’s going even higher. I hope I’m wrong, but the problem is, we can’t catch up soon enough.”

According to energy policy experts, it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s — during the administrations of President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — that things began to go wrong.

Before that point, the country reaped the benefits of the first fuel-economy standards, passed in 1975, known as corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE. Between 1974 and 1989, the efficiency of a typical car sold in the United States almost doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon from 13.8.

LARGELY as a result, oil consumption in 1990 totaled 16.9 million barrels, basically on a par with the 17 million barrels consumed in 1980, even as the economy grew substantially. Oil prices were in the middle of a long downward slide that would take them from well above $30 a barrel in 1980 to a low of just under $10 in late 1998 and early 1999, interrupted only by brief spike in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

In 1990, Richard H. Bryan, a Nevada Democrat, teamed up in the Senate with Slade Gorton, Republican of Washington, and proposed lifting fuel standards again over the next decade, with a goal of 40 m.p.g. for cars. Amid furious opposition from Detroit, liberal Democrats from automaking states, like Carl Levin of Michigan, joined conservative Republicans like Jesse Helms of North Carolina to block new CAFE standards. “It was one of the most frustrating issues in my Senate career,” says Mr. Gorton, who left the Senate in 2001.

Dan Becker, then a lobbyist for the Sierra Club, still remembers his shock when he saw Mr. Levin and Mr. Helms, diametrically opposed on most issues, walk amiably together onto the Senate floor to cast their votes. “This wasn’t East-West, right-left, or North-South,” he says. “But had we passed that bill, we’d be using three million barrels less oil a day now.”

That amount may not sound like much, given total global consumption of 85 million barrels a day, but it’s more than OPEC’s spare capacity now.

Mr. Levin didn’t return calls for comment. (Mr. Helms died on Friday.) But Representative John D. Dingell, the powerful Democrat from Detroit who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argues — as he did more than a decade ago — that tightening CAFE standards unfairly penalizes domestic automakers while rewarding foreign rivals who make more small cars.

Mr. Dingell, who has defended the automakers fiercely during his 52 years on Capitol Hill, decided to support the stronger CAFE standards last year. But he does not apologize for his longtime stance. “The American auto industry has sold the cars people wanted,” he says. “You’re going to blame the auto industry for that or the American consumer? He likes it sitting in his driveway, he likes it big, he likes it safe.”

A much more effective approach would be to simply raise taxes on gasoline, Mr. Dingell says, because higher prices are the easiest way to change buying habits. Some Europeans agree with this, noting that policy changes engineered through taxation can alter consumer choices without impeding economic growth.

Consumers overseas might not like higher taxes on gasoline, but they’ve adapted, says Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, the European energy giant. “A society can work, can function and can grow even at higher fuel prices,” he says. “It’s a way of life — you get used to it.”

In Mr. van der Veer’s native Holland, for example, gasoline sells for more than $10 a gallon, with $5.57 of that going to taxes. Even in Britain, which has substantial North Sea production, gasoline sells for $8.71 a gallon.

A SUBSTANTIAL gas tax increase was considered during the administration of the first President Bush, recalls William K. Reilly, who ran the Environmental Protection Agency at the time. But it was whittled down in 1990 to just 5 cents after Mr. Gingrich and other conservatives in the Republican Party broke with the president.

“This was a stark lesson and people decided the gas tax was the third rail of public policy,” Mr. Reilly says.

Even as Congress idled when it came to tightening CAFE standards or substantially raising levies on gas, the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 made offshore drilling yet another unpalatable option. “That caused a sea change and after that no one had any sympathy for the oil industry,” Mr. Becker says.

In 1990, three months before the effort to raise fuel-efficiency standards failed on Capitol Hill, President Bush issued an executive order making large swaths of the continental shelf off-limits to new exploration. That policy remains in effect today.

When Senators Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Frank H. Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, attempted to put together a grand bargain of opening up more of Alaska in exchange for raising auto efficiency in 1998, the two couldn’t persuade enough members of either party to go along.

“It was a no-action policy,” says Lee R. Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, who has had a ringside seat for most of the energy policy debates of the last 25 years. “By the time there is panic, people need to realize this: There is no quick-fix on this. By the time you panic, it is way too late.”

Still, many analysts argue that increased drilling alone is no panacea. They note that many of the oil giants don’t drill in areas to which they already have access. Exxon, in particular, has been criticized as spending too much to buy back its own stock and not enough on exploration. Chris Welberry, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil, defends the company̵