Tag: climate change

UPDATE ON THE CLEAN ENERGY REVOLUTION


Bill & Hunter's Revolution“What once seemed impossible now seems inevitable.” – Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben and Hunter Lovins just wrapped up an inspiring conference call on the Whole Earth Summit, a virtual global gathering aimed at bringing anxious and sleepless followers up to date on how the revolution is going. There are signs of hope:

More solar panels were installed in California last year than all previous years combined. Major divestitures of fossil fuel stocks is now shaking and waking the industry. The beast is growling.  The resistance is growing.  The revolution is on, and here’s what they say we should be focused on doing now to support it.

1. DIVEST. McKibben’s divestiture campaign has been successful. While we can’t make them bankrupt (Exxon earned more last year than any year or any company ever on Earth) we can make big oil and its destructive enterprises morally bankrupt. Which is all it has ever taken to bring down a big ugly monster. (Think Apartheid.) We are de-legitimizing the industry, he says, and it is working.  A global leadership has coalesced which agrees that fossil fuels have become a moral issue. Smart businessmen know their futures are also at stake in a collapsing ecosystem. The world is coming around to knowing that something must be done quickly to put the brakes on carbon.”What once seemed impossible now seems inevitable.”

2. LIVE LOCALLY. To do your share as an individual, Hunter Lovins calls on us to spend locally, and with our morality. If we live, work and spend closer to home, supporting businesses that support our community, we will greatly reduce our carbon footprints. If we trade with our neighbors for things that we need, we will put less into the landfills. If we grow and eat locally grown food, we will know exactly what we are eating.”What you do every day with your money and your life can serve your community, build your community’s economy, and also save the world,” said Lovins. Maybe it’s time to end that long stupid commute to nowhere? Get back to the garden somehow.

3. BECOME STUDENTS OF NATURE. “We must set our sights on creating a regenerative world,” said Lovins. “We know that nature is in charge, not us, which is why there is a clean energy imperative now.”  Nature can sweep us off like a bad case of fleas, she said, and Nature is now giving us her final warning, that we must do everything we can, both globally and locally, to curb the amount of carbon pollution we are creating. For example, from nature’s standpoint, if you drive a long way to work, there is virtually nothing you can do in the course of the day to make up for the damage you have done, and you haven’t even driven home yet.

We must learn to want what nature needs from us. A regenerative, resilient, sustainable existence. And, painfully and improbably, but necessarily, America must lead the world on this — since we have been among the world’s worst offenders up until now, and since developing countries want to be like us. 

4. JOIN THE REVOLUTION. SHOW UP. Join http://www.350.org and get updates on what you can do locally to support clean energy. There’s a big anti-fracking event on March 15 in Sacramento. I am hoping to be on that bus!

5. HAVE HOPE. McKibben and Lovins were less than visionary on the whole “what is your vision” thing, so I will share Bucky’s.  In a clean energy world, we will be able to labor less for our daily energy supply, meaning we could enjoy more in our lives.  We could give up the specious notion that everyone has to work for a living.  Once we have crossed over to the other side of fossil fuels, we will be able to relax more, live more and find new freedoms.

ULTIMATE FREEDOM FOR HUMANITY CAN ONLY COME FROM A CLEAN ENERGY WORLD.

PLEASE ANSWER THIS POLL AND THEN SHARE THIS POST to help keep this amazing and necessary revolution going.

Thank you.

AMERICA’S MEMORY LOSS: What we knew in ’82.

This is the line STRUCK from NASA’s mission statement after James Hansen’s 1982 presentation to Congress about greenhouse gas emissions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The greenhouse effect has been well understood for over a century, and by 1982, conclusive proof was delivered to the US Congress that global warming was a real threat, and that our use of fossil fuels was the primary cause. So says former NASA scientist James Hansen, who testified before Congress back in the 1980s.  Hansen gave scientific proof back then that greenhouses gasses were acting like a blanket over the Earth, and that increasing levels of carbon would exacerbate both ends of the weather extreme.  His report predicted more heat, floods, droughts, fierce storms, rising oceans, melting icecaps, all things happening now as carbon levels continue to rise.

Hansen was attacked for his statements, especially when he pointed out that the White House had altered transcripts of his testimony. “I decided to go back to being a scientist, and leave the communication to others,” he says. But a couple of years ago, Hansen realized that nothing was happening. Our governments were continuing to force us to subsidize fossil fuels.  This made Hansen feel he needed to speak out again, motivated by love for his grandchildren, who he said “did not deserve to inherit a climate that was spiraling out of control”.What we knew back when.

In a 2012 Ted Talk, Hansen brilliantly proposes a simple fee and dividend system, instead of a tax, that would be paid by the fossil fuel companies directly to the American people. Putting a price on carbon, which more accurately reflects its true cost to the world, Hansen says, is the chief requirement for making a transition to clean energy in time to avoid a collapse of our climate.Screen Shot 2014-03-04 at 3.23.18 PM

Hansen patiently explains that the longer we dither the more expensive and difficult it will become: “If we’d done this in 2005,” Hansen says, “we would have only needed a 2 percent reduction in carbon to regain a balanced environment.” By 2013, he says it would have taken 6 percent. A few more years from now and it will be fifteen percent, which will be very difficult, painful and expensive to accomplish.

This soft spoken Midwestern scientist is asking for all our help in communicating the need to put a price on carbon NOW, before it is too late.

He’s doing it for his grandchildren. I’m doing because I don’t want to be part of the first generation to know conclusively that we screwed it all up, even though the solution was right in front of us.

Hansen’s Ted Talk has under a million views. It should have at least one billion.

Thank you for all the Facebook shares. I hope you and your friends will follow Buckyworld — to help keep these important ideas alive.

HOW TO BE A CLIMATE HERO.

fracking protestBuckminster Fuller said the sabotage of clean energy development was the greatest crime ever perpetrated against humanity.  Today, scientists agree, and say it is time for a revolution against the entrenched profit-motivated fossil fuel interests that are destroying the fragile ecosystem of our planet.

When he died in 1983, Bucky predicted we would have another twenty years or so to wean ourselves off fossil fuels. This puts us about ten years behind schedule. Today, in 2014, chaotic climate events, poisoned water supplies, record drought, fires, storms, floods, species extinction, bee death, cancer increases and other ecosystem breakdowns are at  bringing the fossil fuel issue to the front burner where it must remain until the transition is complete.

Leading climate scientists are calling for outright revolt to demand this transition occur immediately. Some of our most respected and outspoken environmental leaders, like Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein say its time to go to jail if necessary.  A recent story in the New Statesman about Klein‘s new book clearly points a finger at the oil industry for intentionally destroying the planet’s biosphere. For those of us who have been waiting decades for this revolution to get underway, it is unbelievable that fracking and tar sands excavations are still happening, and are even on the increase, even in former environmental havens like California! And to think the American taxpayer still subsidizes these fossil fool’s “energy solutions” to the tune of more than $50 billion per year!

In allowing these subsidies to continue, we subsidize our own demise!

What can individuals do to support this essential transition in the evolution of humanity? Many things. One place to start is to make sure you can speak effectively to friends, relatives and neighbors about climate change.

This was the subject of a strategy session at the the recent Bioneers Conference in Marin, in which a company called Breakthrough Strategies and Solutions in Washington DC presented “a guide for engaging and winning on climate change and clean energy”. The group had researched how to communicate effectively about the climate problem, and they came up with three steps, and some well chosen words and ideas:

1) RESPONSIBILITY:  Gain acknowledgement of reality.  “We can’t ignore the growing reality of so many destructive weather events.  We owe it to our children and grandchildren to protect them by addressing climate change before it becomes irreversible.” 

2) ACCOUNTABILITY:  Present the challenge: “Big oil is working to block clean energy. They have rigged the game. It’s time to break its stranglehold on Washington.”

3) PATRIOTIC PRIDE:  Tap into America’s can-do spirit:  “No one should doubt American ingenuity and resolve. We have risen to great challenges before, and we can do it again.”

Use true stories and actual facts for support:

Fossil fuel subsidies total $1.9 TRILLION a year. Imagine if we put that into clean energy development instead.

Exxon and other rogue companies pay millions of dollars to at least forty different organizations which exist only to craft arguments to deny the reality of climate change. C02 levels have risen more in the last fifty years than in the previous 2000 years.

As Bill McKibben put it, “Denial must become a political liability”.  We must hold leaders accountable for their climate actions. We live in a time when Governor Jerry Brown of California accepted an environmental award the same week he signed to allow fracking in California.

Check out the guide to learn more about how to talk effectively about climate change.  Then, remember to follow Woody Allen’s rule — that 99% of life is just showing up. Be there when the revolution happens. Show up for the protests.  Share serious posts on Facebook, not just the cute puppies and kittens. Dare to Wield your mighty keyboard. Speak truth to power. Do it daily.  Use the email links for the president and media on this page. Let’s Bucky our ideas up and make this happen!

The world is going Bucky!

Bucky would be dancing in the street today for the people in Egypt and the women in Texas who are revolting beautifully, just days after President Obama revealed just how hard he’s been working on climate change, and and the Supreme Court decides it’s okay to love the person we love. So many good things are happening aboard Spaceship Earth these days!

Obama’s climate change plan, which was not reported on by a single national television network, is “all of the above”, except it does not include a carbon tax or anything equally effective, or politically combustible. These omissions may help slip the initial measures through more quietly. Obama must have been stealthily at this task for years now, figuring out how to use his executive power through the EPA rather than waiting for “another meeting of the flat earth society”.

Count me among the thousands (millions?) of American women who dreamt about Obama the night of that glorious climate change speech. (Barry and I were buying a condo in Manhattan. I have no idea where Michelle was. My husband gave me away for the good of the country, good man that he is.)

Doesn’t it make perfect sense now that climate change wasn’t even mentioned in last year’s presidential debates? Obama was too smart to let it come up, knowing he would only mobilize his opposition. With this action, Obama has thrown his enemies a great sucker punch, and possibly a lifesaver to the rest of us. And to think the GOP was already a wailing and failing beast. How far they have fallen,

The women putting their foot down in Texas are amazing — 100% Bucky women. Part of Bucky’s recipe for a better world was to consider “Nurturance AS Governance”. Once women take over leadership the world, which is exactly what we are already doing, we will be on a better path. Bucky’s idea would then be to begin to transform our military bases into heath and human services centers, using our soldiers as warriors of good, which might actually help us win some “hearts and minds”.

Women can be the “trim tabs” to make this kind of “world that works for everyone” happen. It’s time for everyone to recognize that humanity’s choice is utopia or oblivion. “There is not likely to be a middle ground,”said Bucky. If we make the right moves, we can create a beautiful clean energy world where we humans won’t have to toil so hard and long for our daily energy supply. As Bucky said “Grass doesn’t pay for the rain.” So why is it, he said, that nature’s more sophisticated species has to work so hard? Bucky suggested that “we should all go back to doing whatever it was we were doing before someone told us to go out and get a job.”

You could almost feel the cosmic gears turning this week. As I sat down to the computer on the day Bucky died, something clicked, like a reverse earthquake. Everything felt more solidly in place somehow. It was thirty years ago this week that Bucky died on his wife’s death bed. Anne always said she was afraid to go alone into death, so Bucky tidied up his desk and affairs, left a completed manuscript behind, and returned to Anne’s hospital room. They were married 67 years; she was nearly 90 and had dropped into a coma. Witnesses say that after sitting with Anne for several hours, Bucky called out “She’s squeezing my hand!” and had a massive heart attack. Despite the best attempts by doctors, Bucky died as intentionally as he lived.

Today, Bucky’s ideas and integrities hold great promise. My book specifically relays Bucky’s ideas for saving humanity. Some of them are already happening but many are not. I’m hard at work on the rewrite this summer and fall, but will definitely be taking a nice celebratory break this Thursday, July 4, to give thanks for our continually emerging freedom from stupidity and denial.

Time for some excellent summer reading? Tackle at least part ofBucky’s Synergetic Geometry, now available free online, as Bucky specified in his will of 1983. Happy Independence Day!

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The hippies were right!

http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=32340

The best summary of the hippie days I have yet to come across. Love this video. The best six minutes you will spend all day.

The Second American Revolution

A story of what could be, inspired by Buckminster Fuller.

“Middle Americans held their own economy hostage, then came together and created a clean energy world. It was brilliant!”

large-antique-brown-duracord-rope-hammock-xx2035 – America’s second revolution was painful, but worth it. It began about twenty years ago, in 2015, with a series of events that today’s historians  call The Middle American Movement (MAM), which is also a play on the fact that this was a movement led mostly by women; females of all ages, nationalities, and political leanings came together and led with common sense, compassion and a global sense of community.

There was wide sweeping social and political upheaval, which resulted in the successful transference away from fossil fuels and the long-awaited creation of a clean energy world. Bucky started calling for this in the early 1940’s, just as World War II was starting.

A clean energy world held magic for humanity.  Because carbon levels dropped and everything green flourished, United Spaceship Planet Earth became a healthier and more relaxed place. We gave up the specious notion that everyone had to “earn a living”, and came to understand that we could thrive if we only paid a little more attention to nature, and her needs.  This was another part of the new feminine paradigm of leadership that came to pass in the early 2020s.

The opening of the Second American Revolution is traced to a small neighborhood’s show of solidarity for a popular Midwestern family. The family was losing their home. Armed guards showed up at the door one unusually warm evening in early summer. The family had posted on Facebook and Twitter that they were not going to answer the door, that they would rather die than be forced out of their home of 20 years, and would kill themselves if guards forced their way in.

When bank guards arrived, friends and neighbors were waiting, many of them also armed. After a long standoff on a warm summer evening which eventually involved a group of neighbors showing up with fresh margaritas and grilled burritos.  Faced with the burritos, the guards, who were also marginalized middle Americans, sympathized with the family, relaxed and enjoyed dinner and a margarita and they all went home to think things over.

Not a single shot was ever fired. There was a celebration in the street that warm night and the next, and became the “not-a-shot” heard round the world.

Americans everywhere, all recruited through the new digital democracy of social media, took to the streets to protect their neighbors like it was their job.

The line “we’d rather die than lose our home” ended up symbolizing much more than a fight against the banks. It was also overthrowing corporate rule of the American government, focused on big oil’s environmental degradation and our complicit government. People knew development of solar, wind and other technologies was being sabotaged by the fossil fuel industry. They struck in protest.

The very idea of  “home” grew to be about planet Earth itself. Herself.  A highly educated generation of humanity rose to a more highly evolved conscience, through which they placed Earth’s needs first.

In this simple peaceful revolution, Middle Americans learned how to create a new and sustainable world. We traded for things, shopped at second hand stores, stayed close to home and learned how to grow our own food, create our own energy, and share our resources.  In cities, neighbors come together to build high rise greenhouses, and even floating community gardens. Cooperative farms popped up all over the country. Seeds became more valuable than money for awhile, especially ones that were clean and not genetically modified. (People finally figured out it was not such a good idea to eat grains that were engineered to blow up inside an insect’s stomach.)

Wind, solar, geothermal and wireless electromagnetic energy are now everywhere.  The fossil fuel reserves are in safely in the ground, our nature’s saving account, in case of planetary emergency, just where Buckminster Fuller always said we should put them.

The whole world has been intentionally greened up like a Chia Pet. Lush green carbon sinks installed in all the big cities help immensely. Even China is all greened up these days. Huge storms, droughts and rising oceans are still happening, but the carbon numbers are dropping and things are starting to settle down. as we drop to a record low 250 ppm. Oil spills and water contamination from fracking are gone for good. The world is a much healthier place now that women’s ideas about governance and nurturance are now in place.

The most remarkable result of this revolution is how many people never had to go back to their meaningless jobs. Our high unemployment rate is now something we brag about – 38% and climbing, and soon, no one will have to “work” unless they really want to, otherwise it is no longer necessary to “earn a living”  since energy is now free, and we have learned how to sustain ourselves even without money.

Creating a good life and raising happy families is what humans were always meant to do. In the new world, we all pitch in to educate our children through cooperative schools. We can turn out creative thinkers, not just non-thinking robots like we used to do.

Now people have more time to read and write and think, and there’s a renaissance of thought underway, a homespun enlightenment of mind and spirit.

Thank Nature we woke up in time! Oh, that was the other big change: Religion evolved when it dawned on humanity that God is Nature and Nature is God. In every area of life, once we learned to play by Nature’s rules, everything fell in place and Nature supported us.

“In Nature we Trust!” was the proclamation that officially acknowledged the revolutionary Middle American Movement. That’s exactly how it’s written on the new one dollar bill. Right under President Chelsea’s picture.  Life is sure good in 2035!

How to start a revolution

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My self appointed task is to bring back Buckminster Fuller’s important ideas and serve them up in meaningful bite size pieces, so that average individuals can use them to help change the world. I believe this is do-able, because true genius is actually quite simple. Take Einstein’s E = mc2 for example. It’s easy to understand if explained simply: E represents units of energy, m represents units of mass, and c2 is the speed of light squared, or multiplied by itself. Because the speed of light is a very large number and is multiplied by itself, this equation points out how a small amount of matter can release a huge amount of energy, as in a nuclear reaction. The core of Bucky’s genius is even more simple. It’s all about triangles. Bucky’s Synergetic Geometry explains that a triangle is the fundamental building block of the universe, the strongest structure in existence. Modern science is proving him right. But what difference does this big scientific idea make to “ordinary little individuals” like you and me? Can a basic understanding of the physical realities of the universe actually affect our daily life? The answer is yes, if, that is, we want to survive as a species.

Bucky knew that if we understood how nature worked, we could use that knowledge to design a world that’s livable for humans and also works for nature. Nature is, after all, the perfect designer. She has been on the job for billions of years. Any living thing that doesn’t abide by nature’s rules becomes extinct. This is the pathway that many scientists fear the human race is on right now. To change that path, Bucky called for an “Anticipatory Design Science Revolution.” It sounds like an monster of an idea, but breaking it down makes it much more simple:
Anticipatory – Figuring out which way things are headed.
Design – Creating technologies and artifacts that work with that future.
Science – Accepting the absolute truth and priority of nature’s principles.
Revolution – Turning things upside down if necessary to make it happen.

The good news is that Bucky’s Design Science is happening. Designers all over the world are using nature’s design principles to inspire breakthrough inventions. Solar powered butterfly wings are teaching us how to make more efficient solar panels. Shark skins inspire better bathing suits. Velcro imitated prickly burrs. It’s become a whole new exciting field of design science, called Biomimicry. The question is whether or not the “revolution” part is happening. Is it scaling up quickly enough? There is no longer a question as to whether or not fossil fuels are contributing to our increasingly precarious relationship with mother nature. As Bucky put it so simply, using fossil fuels is “like burning up the house to keep the family warm.” The fact that we are currently allowing, even subsidizing, more and more desperate measures to extract fossil fuels (through fracking and Tar Sands and building huge new pipelines across continents) is surely evidence that the revolution has not yet begun. As Bucky put it in a myriad of ways, because tax-hungry government and money hungry corporations have not figured out how to place a meter between us and the sun, we are not allowed to enjoy the vast supplies of free (solar, wind, geothermal, wave, etc) energy that could be powering the world.

A recent study by the Nature Conservancy shows that the older generation still puts the economy first, ahead of the environment. Younger people are smarter. Young people instinctively know that economic cycles come and go, but that environmental change is forever. Nearly 70% of teens say the needs of the environment should come first, ahead of the economy. If our leaders were listening to them, the revolution would be well under way.

Another of Bucky’s favorite rules of nature is leverage, which explains how even a little individual can have great power. No matter what your age or station in life, you have power to influence others. Even if you cannot vote, you can post, you can tweet, you can speak and you can influence those who can and do vote. Bucky would have loved Facebook. In fact, Bucky knew the democratization of media technology was coming. When I met with Bucky in 1982, he explained a couple of times that in the future “We would be able to vote just by thinking.” I gave him my stupid blank look, thinking he meant we would all soon become psychic and that government would read our minds and carry out our will. Social media brings us pretty darn close to realizing the same objective of communicating instantly with each other and the world. Now if we could only figure out how to get people in power to listen to the will of the people. But wait, there are signs that this is also starting to happen. There was the whole Arab Spring thing, where students used social media to spread the word about when and why and how to gather in Tahrir Square in Egypt. In the 2011 elections in Nigeria, Africa, an estimated one million young people on smart phones connected with one another, even in areas where there is still no electricity. When Planned Parenthood let the world know that the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s had withdrawn their funding, the outcry on Facebook and Twitter was so great it only took four days for the Komen Foundation to reverse its decision. The anti-slavery You-tube video called KONY2012, aiming to stop a brutal man named Kony, got a million views faster than either Gaga or Justin Bieber ever had. If Facebook users were a country, it would be the third largest, behind China and India. The United Nations, which provided that statistic, also predicts that virtually everyone on the planet will have access to mobile technology by the year 2015.

This is affecting media too. People don’t just tweet and post about what’s going on, we comment about how the media is covering it. This is creating a whole new check on our government. These kinds of ‘checks and balances’ were the whole idea behind America’s new government back in 1776. The three branches: Legislative, Executive and Judicial, would keep checks on each other. And the fourth estate, the Media, would keep checks on it all. But then the other great power, the corporations, took over the reigns. By using their dollars to buy legislative representatives who would pass the right (wrong) laws and appoint the right (wrong) executives and judges, the checks and balances have been weakened. Social media can help build them back up. We can be the fifth estate. We can take power into our hands every time we pick up our phones. We can voice our opinions louder, quicker and easier than ever before. We can demand that government support technologies to create a clean energy world. We can demand a focus on the environment to create a better working relationship with our undeniable boss, mother nature. And guess what? All this will also create real jobs and a better economy.

If Bucky were alive today, I think he would ask us all to make political expression part of our daily routine. Twice a day: Brush your teeth, comb your hair, and speak your mind. Speak out about something you care about. Put some of that time you spend on digital media to work for the planet and the future and your fellow humans. Focus on the environment, peace and justice, whatever you care most about. If even a small percentage of the (seven plus billion) of us started doing this, the revolution would be underway in no time. Just like Einstein’s law, such a big concentration of something very small could release a huge amount of energy. Let’s get this revolution started.

US is Earth’s #1 Fossil Fuel Subsidizer!

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Are we nuts, America? We are subsidizing the demise of the entire planet at record breaking rates. The International Monetary Fund just reported that global fossil fuel subsidies in 2012 were $1.9 trillion annually. Of that, $502 billion comes from US taxpayers, to enable the oil industry to continue to enslave us with cheap and plentiful supplies, and to deter development of clean alternatives. Global warming and catastrophic climate change are the "negative externalities" of these subsidies, and we are the greatest enablers of both.

To put things in perspective, the independent website GlobalIssues.org estimates that we could provide universal access to all basic social services to all people in all developing countries for a mere $40 billion as follows: education for all: $6 billion; water and sanitation for all $9 billion; reproductive health for women $12 billion; basic health and nutrition $13 billion.

America spends $8 billion on cosmetics, $17 billion on pet food, and gives a whopping $502 billion each year to subsidize dirty fuels that are destroying the environment for all living things.

What is wrong with us? Why aren’t caring, smart Americans screaming in the streets, or at least sharing this information by the millions? My prayer for this Good Friday is that we wake up, as the great nation we still can be, and demand that America start to behave as a responsible global citizen.

And no, I do not hate America. I love this country, but only as a parent still loves a child who’s become a maniacal beast.

Here’s the link to the IMF REPORT released today.

Here’s a Marketwatch summary of the report. Good to know the money guys and economists are finally getting involved!

Here's link to http://www.globalissues.org
P.S. America also supplies 44% of all weapons to the world. Our sales of weapons to developing countries more than doubled in recent years. We are now selling weapons to both sides of almost every conflict on the planet.

Can we avoid global collapse? (Stanford biologists want to know!)

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It’s a beautiful morning in Marin County, except for an inbox item entitled “Can a Collapse of Global Civilization be avoided?” by Stanford biologists Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich. More shattering than an exploding meteor, this report explains in detail (just 6 pages, easy to read) how and why our world is clearly and eminently threatened with collapse, by an array of environmental problems created by our use of fossil fuel and other chemicals.  “Overpopulation, overconsumption by the rich, and poor choices of technology are major drivers; dramatic cultural change provides the main hope of averting calamity,” states the report.

Can we avoid it?  Yes, the report concludes, but it’s not likely. “Humanity has the assets to get the job done, but the odds of avoiding collapse seem small because the risks are clearly not obvious to most people and the classic signs impending collapse, especially diminishing returns to complexity, are everywhere.” Here’s a link to the report. Time to breath, think, and act. Demand climate solutions now.  This is a PR job, people. We just need to wake up the rest of the world and get them to demand action. Attend a climate rally tomorrow. There’s one in San Francisco, at Justin Herman Plaza, from 1 to 3 pm. I’ll be there. Find one near you.  And check out a trailer for a poignant movie that might help improve our collective understanding of what’s really going on : http://www.greedylyingbastards.com

 

 

PROOF:The Right’s Denial of Climate Change is a LIE.

In doing research for my Bucky book I found this quote from The Energy Task Force report to (corrected) President George Bush in 2001 (Wikipedia showed it as 1981):

“Given the magnitude of the potential threat represented by global climate change, it is equally in the strategic interest of the United States to identify and implement cost-effective measures at home and abroad to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses at levels that will not lead to catastrophic climatic change.”

It goes on to say:

“Many different constituencies within the U.S. government will need to work together to develop a unified and integrated energy policy framework with well-defined and orchestrated goals—a policy that addresses not only today’s energy bottlenecks, but also will seek to provide affordable, clean, and reliable energy supplies five to fifteen years into the future, in order to underpin long-term economic growth in an environmentally acceptable manner and to promote the security of the United States, and its allies” Here’s the LINK to the PDF Go to page 35, and please let me know if you go there and it has been taken down. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

So just to review, this republican task force sponsored by the James Baker Institute and the Foreign Affairs Council from 2001 said they knew and understood that we had a serious problem. At the time, they said it would take 5 to 15 years to provide alternatives, which would, in their words, promote the security of the United States. That should have meant we would have made the transition by now, at latest.

What the heck happened?

Have they known all along that they were throwing all Americans and every living thing on the planet under the bus?  Just for their own measly little careers and fortunes, they have been forsaking the future for the rest of us? Since 2001?

How did we come to “unknow” what we already knew in twelve years ago?

When will it be time for torches and pitchforks in the streets?

What are we going to do, Mr. Obama?  What are we going to do?