Kate Sheppard at Mother Jones, writing abut the diminishing chances for meaningful climate legislation, has this to say about Claire McCaskill’s leadership or lack thereof on the issue:

Other senators are just getting testy about the issue. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), one of the few Democrats still considered “on the fence” when it comes to including climate provisions, flatly refused to discuss the issue with reporters. “I’m not going to talk about energy. I got burned twice last week,” said McCaskill, indicating that some unnamed reporter had misquoted. McCaskill is one of the Democrats folks are watching most closely on this issue, since she has yet to weigh in publicly one way or another. I have no idea what quote she is referring to as having been wrong.

She claims she was misquoted so now she’ll say nothing?  Typical McCaskill. I wonder if this Politico article might be what’s got McCaskill clamming up?  The author makes the argument that McCaskill’s allies, the so-called “brown dogs,” are the reason we’ll get a safely neutered climate bill if we get anything at all:

… despite months of legwork by the president’s Senate allies, few of these so-called Brown Dogs are biting.

He continues, quoting McCaskill:

I think it’s still a work in progress,” said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, who worries that a cap would be a loser for Democrats in November. “You know, it took 50 years on health care.”

…

The party that has moderates is the party that governs,” McCaskill said. “If we don’t have moderates, we’re the minority.

This quote is These quotes are certainly outrageous enough to leave McCaskill feeling burned if she was misquoted. But if she was truly misquoted, why doesn’t she just put the record straight instead of equivocating? All I can say is that if she is not trying to play both sides against the middle, she had better get hustling to do just that – because if this quote is not a misrepresentation of her beliefs, she deserves whatever grief she gets.  

And if this putative statement is an accurate representation of what McCaskill said, she may have inadvertently put her finger on exactly what is wrong with Washington D.C – anyone who thinks that we’ve got fifty years to “fix” the climate problem, or that a party of impotent “moderates” gets points for governing without doing anything of substance in the face of a genuine crisis is right there at the heart of the problem. There is no reason that I can think of  to send folks to Washington to sit on their hands and make mealy-mouth sounds while the crap piles up – or even, as is closer to McCaskill’s case, to make a few prissy gestures about cleaning up around the edges of the mess while shuddering with genteel horror at the thought of tackling the biggest piles.

As the struggle over Senate energy legislation, the Kerry-Lieberman American Power Act, is getting ready to heat up, the Environmental Defense Action Fund has prepared  ads targeting, among others, Missouri’s Kit Bond:

However, even if everyone who sees the ad contacts Bond and implores him to support the legislation, I doubt that it would have much effect. Bond has already made it clear that he’s glad that he’s had his chance to dance, and he’s just as willing as ever to pay the Big Oil and King Coal pipers (who have supported him to the tune of $446,000 over his career).

In fact, Bond has already stepped up and taken a leadership role in the Republican fight against clean energy legislation. He and his partner in crime, Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), dusted off and reissued as new last October’s widely disputed “report” in which they attempted to present clean energy legislation as a “$3.6 trillion gas tax.” Needless to say, this new iteration of the same ole, same ole was just as quickly and easily discredited as it was last fall. A spokesperson for Senator John Kerry responded to Bond’s and Hutchison’s latest effort to cast clean energy legislation as an “energy tax” with the following comment:

The only thing Senator Bond and Senator Hutchison have to worry about today is if we start taxing bad math and misinformation, because it could cost them billions.

Actually, the American Power Act proposes relief and refund programs that would mitigate the impact of nearly 69 percent of the carbon fees it would impose. Numerous studies show that the legislation would cost relatively little – for instance, according to EPA modeling results, it would add between $80 to $150 a year to the average household budget. As Senator Lieberman put it:

“There’ll be some people who will want to demagogue that politically, but that’s less than $1 a day,” Lieberman told reporters. “Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so we don’t have to buy oil from foreign countries, so we can create millions of new jobs, so we can clean up our environment? I think the answer is going to be yes.”

Ah yes, demagoguery. And, of course, Senator Lieberman ought to remember that “yes” has little currency with members of the Party of No – who, oddly enough, used to really like the idea of cap-and-trade – back when they thought Democrats would never go for it.

Senator Claire McCaskill, in a statement posted today on The Hill’s Congress Blog, said that she was voting no on Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) resolution to weaken the ability of the EPA to regulate greenhouse emissions, because:

… it would eliminate EPA’s ability to regulate emissions from vehicles. The government and the auto industry have agreed to set these new standards for vehicle emissions and it would be a mistake to jeopardize this historic agreement, which will reduce our dependence on oil by 1.8 billion barrels.

But wait just a minute before you start celebrating. The glass is only half-full. McCaskill quickly added that she was, instead, collaborating with Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) to hamstring the EPA in a slightly less onerous fasion (automobile emissions could be regulated by the EPA in the proposed Rockefeller legislation) for two years in order:  

… to give Congress time to figure out how we can reduce emissions without burdening consumers and small businesses in Missouri, while still allowing the EPA to move forward on regulating auto emissions.

Give Congress time …. hmmm, where have I heard that before. Isn’t this the mantra of all the obstructionists for whom it’s becoming fashionable to bellyache about usurping congressional privilege while refusing to let the Congress ever do anything? Seems to me that Congress has had lots of time, but I don’t see that they’ve made much progress.  It is hard not to agree with Davis Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center:

….Blocking the Clean Air Act will do nothing to bring Congress closer to passing comprehensive climate and energy legislation. Rather than fighting global warming solutions, we need to focus on cutting carbon pollution in a way that will spur clean energy investment and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Oh well, I guess I should be happy that the glass is half-full and not empty, and that McCaskill won’t back Murkowski’s particular obstructionist efforts. I’ll call her and let her know that I appreciate her vote – and that I really wish she’d reconsider endorsing Rockefeller’s efforts.  There are issues where there’s room to hew to the center; but the climate crisis is not one of them.

UPDATE. The Murkowski resolution was defeated 47-53. So give McCaskill her props on this one.

Remember Climategate – the manufactured controversy over some emails stolen from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain? If so, you remember lots of right-wing noise, and little or no substance, right? But lots and lots of noise.

Do you also remember the Missouri congressman who grabbed onto the so-called controversy and used it like a big, ugly club to batter cap-and-trade legislation? If you guessed that it was Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R. 9th) you would be right.

Remember Luetkemeyer’s strident demands for a  congressional investigation into Climategate? Why? Because, as he put it:

… the “Climategate” emails seem to indicate that the same scientists who were sending data to the UN climate panel were suppressing scientific evidence and manipulating data that was used in part as justification for liberals to pass cap-and-trade legislation.

Recently, though, the first of the actual British investigations (as opposed to bloviating press releases and general bullyboy behavior on the part of climate-change deniers in the U.S. Congress) presented its findings which have “largely vindicated the scientists involved”:

The House of Commons’ Science and Technology Committee said Wednesday that they’d seen no evidence to support charges that the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit or its director, Phil Jones, had tampered with data or perverted the peer review process to exaggerate the threat of global warming – two of the most serious criticisms levied against the climatologist and his colleagues.

In their report, the committee said that, as far as it was able to ascertain, “the scientific reputation of Professor Jones and CRU remains intact,” adding that nothing in the more than 1,000 stolen e-mails, or the controversy kicked up by their publication, challenged scientific consensus that “global warming is happening and that it is induced by human activity.

None of which is at all surprising to those who were actually paying close attention to the claims and counter-claims when the so-called scandal broke. At that time the incendiary emails didn’t seem to amount to much more than some trash talk among scientific colleagues directed, understandably enough, towards climate change skeptics, some ambiguous phrases pertaining to data display mechanisms, etc.  

Nor, however, will this finding probably quiet critics such as Rep. Luetkemeyer. The fact that the report did chide the scientists at the CRU for refusing to share their raw data and for their reluctance to respond to freedom of information requests has already provided the usual suspects with a pretext to claim that their lurid fantasies about the content of the emails have not yet been disproved.

It will be interesting to see how Luetkemeyer responds to this report – if he ever does. The controversy, after all, was never really about what the emails really said or did not say, but what they could be made to seem to say – and Blaine Luetkemeyer did yeoman’s duty trying to present them as the requisite smoking gun that could prove climate science fraud. He will, doubtless, be as loth to let facts stand in the way of his anti-science bluster now as he was earlier.  

As far as our climate crisis goes, you either get it or you’re part of the problem. Unfortunately, Claire McCaskill just can’t seem to get it; she has, along with a gaggle of other “coal-state” Democrats, just signed onto Senator Rockefeller’s letter to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), challenging the agency’s efforts to regulate green-house gases from stationary (i.e. industrial) sources:

In their letter, the Democratic senators do not object to the EPA regulating greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light-trucks, but they do question the agency’s power to do anything else under the Clean Air Act. The letter asks Jackson clarify the EPA’s timetable and suspend any regulations for coal-fired utilities and other industrial facilities until Congress acts on climate and energy legislation.

Let’s see … “until Congess acts” … guess their big-coal contributors and lobbyist pals won’t have to get their knickers in a twist for a long, long time if we have to wait for these clowns to get serious.

But this isn’t the worst of it. Alaska big-oil proxy, Lisa Murakowski, has already introduced legislation to block EPA action; the signatories to the Rockefeller letter indicated possible support for this or a related measure:

… Among their concerns were whether Congress would be able to review the EPA’s carbon regulations and how the agency would assess the “direct and indirect cost implications” of its new rules.

Do you ever wonder why these folks are so unconcerned about the “direct and indirect cost implications” of the climate crisis for the welfare of their states? Or why almost none of them have ever admitted that the proposed House legislation includes safeguards for the welfare of coal dependent states?  In McCaskill’s case, do you think it could have anything to do with the

$10 million that Peabody Coal has spent since 2008 to stop climate-crisis legislation?  

Happy December 26th ! I hope you had a lovely Christmas or at least a happy gastronomic experience !!   A few weeks ago, while cleaning out old files, I came across a copy of the Post Dispatch editorial from 12/25/04.  I knew right away why I must have kept it.  It’s a great summary of how Christmas traditions have changed over the centuries.  I emailed the editor of the paper and asked him to re-run it this year.  Which he did, on 12/24.

I think it’s even more relevant now than it was five yrs ago because the “believers” are getting ever more intimidating and demanding.  When I see signs here and there saying “Jesus is the reason for the season,” etc., I want to find the person who wrote that and invite him/her for a cup of coffee and a chat.  No, actually, Jesus isn’t the reason for the season, at least not until very recently (to historians, “very recently” means within the last 100 yrs or so.)   I celebrate the solstice and return of the light just as my German and English ancestors did centuries ago. I also enjoy giving gifts to families who aren’t as lucky as I am materially.  To me, Christmas is a secular holiday celebrating the passage of time, an opportunity to recall happy days of childhood and a time to pretend that most people really do want a world full of peace and love.  

Although I haven’t been to one in many years,  madrigal dinners are still a popular entertainment in many parts of the world with lots of music, feasting, wassailing.  And for millions of people around the globe, 12/25 is just another day of the week.  I read an article recently about Jews and Muslims in Detroit who combine efforts to do community service projects on 12/25 in an attempt to get to know each other better and as a way of honoring their Christian friends. Wow, I’m impressed, especially since members of the three  Abrahamic religions  have been killing each other for a millenium and a half.

At a children’s church service I attended two nights ago, a couple with a baby played the part of Mary, Joseph and Jesus.  The baby was an adorable chubby fair-skinned boy.  After the service, in the refreshment area, a woman said to the father, “That’s exactly how Jesus must have looked.”  Say what?  What are the chances that a Jewish couple from  what we now call “the Middle East” would have a chubby, blonde baby?

 I know this sounds picky, but my point is that our culture is becoming more and more subservient to “beliefs” and less grounded in science, historical fact and rational discussion.  It may not matter when it comes to how we celebrate or don’t celebrate 12/25, but it does matter when it comes to issues of importance like climate change, evolutionary biology, civil rights and medical research.

While other countries are spending their economic and human capital on preparing for the consequences of global warming and researching new technologies, we are arguing about whether store clerks can say “Happy Holidays” without offending someone who insists we join them in their fantasy world.  We’ve been so harassed and intimidated by “believers” that we’re afraid to say “Enough already.”  

The last straw for me was reading about how the CEO of Build-A-Bear, Maxine Clark, had to apologize for a totally appropriate and inspired children’s video about protecting the North Pole from global warming.  She wanted to “inspire children” and encourage them to “make a difference in their own individual way.”   Horrors !! Educating children about how the melting ice is affecting polar bears is now “fear-mongering.”  Clark’s critics said she was “politicizing” the issue of climate change.  No, it’s not a “political issue,”  it’s a life-threatening issue.  The climate change deniers may not base what they believe on religious dogma, but they are just as  irrational and dangerous as the “end times” cult.  They can deny all they want, but the science is irrefutable.  Millions of human beings are already being displaced as ocean levels rise. The Pentagon has  focused for over a decade on climate change and environmental problems as a real national security issue.  This is REAL, folks, and we’d better start responding vigorously in defense of science and scientists.  Corporate power + misinformed masses = a tragic chapter in world history.

I suggest choosing an issue and getting behind the leaders in that field.  Missourians for Life Saving Cures is a good place to start because there are already several attempts to overturn the decision by Missourians who voted in support of stem cell research.   Or rally to the defense of scientists such as Peter Raven of the Missouri Botanical Garden who have been publicly attacked for teaching others about the consequences of of climate change. There are dozens of ways we can organize a push back effort.  Speak up.  Don’t wait for someone else to write that letter to the editor or attend that rally.  Like it or not, the name of the game is showing up and being counted.  It’s called democracy, and ours is being diminished daily by people who would drag us back into the Dark Ages.

I will respect someone’s “beliefs” as long as they respect my right to access  solid scientific information and the freedom of decision makers to form policy  based on facts and informed opinions.  This shouldn’t even have to be an issue, but it is.  How we deal with it is literally a matter of life and death.

“…I will ask those among my fellow citizens who share my sense of urgency to join in asking President Obama and the leadership of the United States Senate to set a deadline of April 22, 2010 — the 40th anniversary of Earth Day — for final action of US legislation.”

God love him, Al Gore just keeps on ticking like an old Timex watch.  The more the fossil fuel flunkies dump on him, the stronger his message gets. According to his citizen action group polls show that the majority of Americans recognize the need for climate protection despite the insane blatherings of the likes of S. Palin, the Washington Times and Sen. James “save our oil” Inhofe.  

Knowing that it will have to be the younger generation that forces us to wake up and smell the roses before they disappear, I am giving my 20-year-old granddaughter Al Gore’s book for Christmas (after I take notes from it !)

On page 189, there’s a photo of pine trees in Colorado that are dead and dying because the winters have not been cold enough to kill off the mountain pine beetle larvae. More than 600,000 acres of forest are now more brown than green. When my husband and I checked into a hotel in Winter Park last summer, the clerk handed us a flyer explaining and apologizing for the ugly destruction of Colorado forests.

Who is going to apologize to the millions of human beings being displaced by rising sea levels and destructive storms?  How can anyone deny what thousands of scientists all over the world know and continue to learn about the future of our planet if we don’t jam the brakes on carbon dioxide and other dangerous emissions?

I’ve purchased several copies of the National Geographic Special, Six Degrees Could Change the World and am lending them out, showing them to small groups at libraries, and giving them as gifts to teachers.  

Most of us can’t remember the facts, statistics, etc., but no one can watch this film and forget the images of fires in Australia, dusty cattle ranches in Nebraska and ocean waves swallowing up Wall Street (gives a whole new meaning to “bail out,” doesn’t it?)

I don’t for a minute think I’m going to stop global warming, but I’m sure as hell not going down without a fight.

On Thursday at Mizzou, students, faculty and alumni bundled up against the cold and gathered outside the office of UM System President Gary Forsee to protest his opposition to climate change legislation.

Forsee, who had previously signed a statement supporting a climate neutral campus, which would go far beyond any current legislation being considered, recently talked out of the other side of his mouth in opining that cap-and-trade would be bad for the university system’s bottom line. Apparently, he’s in the “We wanted to save the planet, but it would have cost too much” camp.

So the crowd that gathered sported signs like “It may be cold out right now, but if we don’t act we’ll be on the hot seat”, “Gary Forsee lacks foresight”, and “Keep your climate commitment, Gary.” The protesters would like him to know that the Union of Concerned Scientists believes that Missouri households and businesses can save $800 per year by 2030 with comprehensive action on energy issues.

Thursday’s action is commendable. It’s a start. The protesters probably know that Forsee can swat their demonstration aside like a gnat and that if they want his full attention, they’ll have to become a swarm of persistent gnats. As Vince Lombardi observed: “The dictionary is the only place that success comes before work.” Surprising how much, for a football coach, Lombardi knew about political activism.

Update: FiredUp! has the story about Forsee starting to walk back from his opposition to Cap and Trade.

We hear a lot about what will happen in the future if nothing is done to stop anthropogenic climate change, and we also regularly witness the on-going efforts of the big corporte stakeholders and their tame politicians to pretend that it isn’t so, or, when that line won’t wash, that the “anthropogenic” part can’t be proven. However, deny it until the cows come home, there is no way to avoid the fact that increased CO2 results in warming, and that humans have been pumping historically unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Nor is there any way to avoid the fact that we are experiencing the catastrophic effect of escalating climate and weather changes right now:

* Many citizens of the island nation of Kiribati have relocated to New Zealand because the rising sea level has washed away their villages.

* The President of the Maldives Islands is making desperate plans to forestall the effects of rising water levels, and to relocate thousands of Maldives citizens if his endeavors prove futile – if nothing is done and palliative measures come too late, “we will die” he says.

* Last summer, one of the increasingly more frequent and more violent tropical storms, Cyclone Aila, left the entire island of Gabura off Bangladesh completely submerged, displacing over 20,000 islanders.

These are only a few examples of what has happened last year, is happening this year, and will happen next year – not twenty, thirty, fifty years in the future. If nothing is done the future will be worse, thousands more will be displaced, and all of us will likely live in a world where massive starvation, epidemic disease, and war are commonplace.  

The U.S. will not be exempt – say good-bye to New York City, write off the Eastern third of Maryland.  Don’t believe me?  How about when you hear it from a hard-edged business trying to save its profit margins:

In 2006, Allstate announced it was no longer issuing new homeowners’ policies in states up and down the East Coast. In Maryland, the company shut its doors to new customers across 11 eastern counties, including parts of Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties. Why? First, the company said, sea levels are definitely rising worldwide based on irrefutable science. Second, Atlantic hurricanes are getting bigger and more intense as the planet warms.

Meanwhile, here in Missouri, too many of our intellectual and political leaders temporize, equivocate, pander and lie, while others seem too stupid to actually understand the urgency of the problem with which we are faced. Consider the following examples:

* University of Missouri President Gary Forsee thinks cap-and-trade legislation isn’t good for the University system’s bottom line – so to hell with the rest of the world!

* Rep. Roy Blunt, taking full advantage of the confusion engendered by climate denial goons in order to help out all the nice folks who keep his campaign kitty overflowing, asserts that “There isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth.”

* Rep. Todd Akin, who assures us that his science advisors have passed high school science, thinks it’s all a big chuckle, and is looking forward to the time when there will surf at the steps of the capitol building.

* Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer has introduced legislation to forbid U.S. funds going to the  United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents the thought of the majority of the world’s leading climate scientists, because, he asserts confidently, it “is engaged in dubious science.”

* Sam Graves voted against the House cap-and-trade legislation on the basis of a questionable claim that it would constitute a “national energy tax” that would “devastate rural America.” Wasn’t he aware of measures in the bill that were explicitly designed to mitigate any potential hardships?  Or was it just too inconvenient to explain why he opposed trying to making cap-and-trade work for everyone.

*  According to Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, cap-and-trade is risky because “Now the only experience that we’ve seen on this is what Europe has, and they have a cap and trade program that is not doing well, and so I think it is a stupid idea… .”  Of course, maybe Emerson’s just a bit too quick to put down the European experience; she probably ought to read up on what initial European cap-and-trade efforts have taught us.    

* Senator Kit Bond cites junk reports in his effort to destroy cap-and-trade legislation.

* Claire McCaskill, who claims to share progressive values in her fundraising letters, is insistent that climate legislation demands a “very gradual implementation,” otherwise Missourians might have to pay somewhat more for electricity.

* In Jefferson City, state legislators, whom Senator McCaskill so aptly described as a “vast sea of neanderthals,” have begun rumbling about the evils of cap-and-trade; a  trio of freshmen state representatives, Sue Allen, Cole McNary, and Andrew Koenig, have been working up the rural and tea-party contingent with state-of-the art climate denial propaganda. Probably much worse will be coming down the pike in the months ahead.

While most of the Missouri establishment has joined the chorus of the self-serving and the brain-dead, a few courageous souls deserve our thanks – at least for the time-being.  Ike Skelton, Lacy Clay and Emanuel Cleaver all come to mind.  One wonders, however, as the pressure builds, as the denialist lies proliferate, and the teapartiers rage, how long they will manage to hold out against expediency which seems to trump the ugly reality of global warming.

Like many of you, I had become anesthetized by the overabundance of TV specials on global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it.  I figured, at my age, what’s to worry about?  I’ll be long gone when NY City and Miami are under water.  It’s up to the young folks to deal with this issue, not me.

Then yesterday, I attended a lecture by political science prof David Robertson of UMSL and came home and watched the National Geographic documentary, “Six Degrees Could Change the World.”

Holy Burnt Toast, Batman.  We are really cooking our own goose by ignoring the damage we are doing to the Earth’s atmosphere.  The more advanced nations of Europe (what Donald Rumsfeld called “old Europe”) are pleading with us to wake up and smell the cinders.

 

But the Republicans in Congress, led by Sen. James (the sky isn’t falling)  Inhofe, continue to ridicule the science of climate change and obstruct any rational discussion of what needs to be done.  Ironically and maybe with a tinge of poetic justice, Inhofe’s state of Oklahoma will look like the Sahara in just a few decades.

Dr. Robertson explained yesterday that the men who set up our form of government meant to make it incredibly complex to avoid the usurpation of power by a tiny minority.  Of course those men of the Enlightenment assumed that members of Congress would live in the rational world.  I wonder what they’d think of idiots like Inhofe who defy scientific evidence and make bold claims based on nonsense.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up by the World Meteorological Society and the UN.  They don’t claim to know everything about what’s happening to our planet, but I’m damned sure they know more than James Inhofe.  So I’ll go with what the IPCC tells me, thank you very much.

Surprisingly, the messiah of modern conservatives, Ronald Reagan, played a major role in getting an international agreement passed to save the ozone layer from CFC’s at the 1987 Montreal summit of world leaders.  What happened between then and today’s Republican party someone else will have to explain.  I suspect it has something to do with oil companies.

The 1992 United Nations Rio conference hammered out a framework for dealing with climate change and, specifically, with greenhouse gases.  President Clinton proposed a tax on BTU’s but withdrew it because of stiff opposition.  In 1995, there was another Rio conference.

In 1997, the Kyoto Treaty was signed by Clinton but the Senate never confirmed it.  (At the lecture yesterday, a Republican sitting in front of me asked Dr. Robertson why Clinton didn’t use some of his political capital to get that treaty ratified.  Dr. Robertson said Clinton was “busy being impeached.” – grumble, grumble from the Repub and “well he shouldn’t have been fooling around.”)

In 2001 and 2007, the IPCC issued reports calling for urgent action.  The fossil fuel industries will fight pick and shovel to protect their profits.  The craziness of the health care reform debate will look like a tea party (oops, sorry) compared to the fight against climate change legislation.  The states that President Obama picked up last year that had  been “red” states in the past are not going to help bring sanity to the discussion because they are also the states that profit the most from the use of fossil fuels.  Obviously, the coastal states are more in favor of reducing the amount of carbon we send into the atmosphere because they will lose not just shoreline but whole chunks of landmass.  

How will continued warming affect Missouri and the central states?  We are already seeing a change in what the Ag Dept calls “planting zones.”  Check the back of a package of seeds next spring and see how much earlier we can start our gardens.  Eventually, we’ll be more like Louisiana and the major “breadbasket” states will be in Canada.  Already the ice is open in northern Canada to the point cargo ships can pass through in the summer.  Eventually, that will be open year round and it will be cheaper to haul cargo that way from Asia to Europe instead of having to go through the Panama Canal.

According to the scientists, the tipping point beyond which we will not be able to stop the cycle of change caused by an overabundance of carbon in the atmosphere is an increase of  2 degrees Celsius in the Earth’s average temperature.  Since the industrial revolution of the 1800’s, we’ve increased it by .8 degrees.  Anything beyond 3 degrees is too catastrophic to even consider.  The Pentagon and CIA take the science of global warming very seriously and have already started studying what the national security implications are.  Not the least of these will be tens of millions of climate change refugees around the globe.  And some of those refugees will be Americans who are displaced and looking for a place to survive.  

Sadly, polling data shows that concern about climate change peaked a few years ago and has declined recently.  Dr. Robertson said that this is understandable given the economic problems we have and how many people are just trying to feed their families.  But the climate change deniers are certainly adding to the confusion.

Here’s the status of legislation now.   In June, the House of Representatives passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act to limit the amount of carbon dioxide companies can release into the atmosphere.  This week, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee voted 11-1 in favor of its version of the House bill, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. The legislation, co-sponsored by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA), has been met with intransigence by both Republican and Democratic senators.  The fossil fuel companies and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are already spending millions on anti-climate change legislation TV ads and lobbyists.

The special interests fighting health care reform showed us that they are more highly motivated than progressive Americans who want universal health care.  The same thing will probably happen with climate change legislation because money talks.  I hope I won’t be around when the trees outside my window go into survival mode and reverse the photosynthesis cycle.

I’m hosting a showing of “Six Degrees Could Change the World” at the library in Union, MO, next Friday evening.  West County (St. Louis) Dems movie night on November 18 will feature a similar movie.  The public is invited to either or both.