Tuesday, November 20, 2012

A chat with Al Gore on carbon taxes, natural gas, and the ‘morally wrong’ Keystone pipeline | Grist
[Fraudster Al Gore] I run into people all the time who are former deniers, former opponents of doing anything on climate who are saying, “Look, this is just getting too weird. It’s clear that this is going on, we’ve got to do something.” Now, we’re not at the tipping point, but we’re much closer than we have been.

I’ve said this before and I really do believe it’s true: Changes like this don’t occur in a linear way. The potential for change builds up, unmanifested, until it reaches a critical mass. You don’t always see it coming. There are plenty of examples of that. I believe we’re seeing just that kind of movement just beneath the surface here in the U.S.
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I understand why a lot of people think it’s unrealistic in the extreme for one of these things to be slowed down or stopped. But you know, if you take that position, then you are inherently saying, “Well, it’s not that unrealistic to destroy the future of human civilization.”
Why the U.S. Can't Stop Climate Change Alone (In 2 Graphs) - Jordan Weissmann - The Atlantic
China is also responsible for almost 40 percent of all the new coal-fired power plant capacity that's been planned across the planet. Beijing says it wants to cap its total consumption at about 3.9 billion tons by 2015, though some analysts expect it to reach around 4.2 billion -- a 27 percent leap from where it is today. Meanwhile, India is also readying to install huge quantities of coal power capacity. Unless something can be done to cap usage in these developing giants, their growth is going to eclipse any changes we make today.
C.I.A. Closes Its Climate Change Office - NYTimes.com
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, has been the most vocal critic of the C.I.A.’s climate change work. He welcomed the closing of its office.

“Closing the Climate Change Center at the C.I.A. was the right decision,” Mr. Barrasso said in a statement. “I offered an amendment on the Senate floor to eliminate the center because it was unnecessary, wasteful and totally out of place. It’s critically important for the C.I.A. to focus its resources on preventing terrorism and keeping Americans safe.”
Roxane Assaf: Fossil Fuel Fury: Climate Change Activist Barnstorms Through 21 Towns Inciting Fiscal Revolution
Chomsky asserts that as long as the news is framed in such a way that climate-change denialists like Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin get equal time with climate scientists [do they?], the public is fed an illusion that there's an authentic argument pro and con.
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South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu would be proud. And he is. He appears on the 350.org site as a boisterous endorser, as do Naomi Klein, Josh Fox and Rev. Lennox Yearwood. Other notables keeping the drumbeat steady are Obama's former specialist on green jobs Van Jones and actor/activist John Cusack who both use Twitter to combat climate skeptics and raise awareness.

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