National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association throws a big bucket of reality all over the Republican magical thinking climate denier brigade:
The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years.
And the bottom line:
Each of the last three decades has been much warmer than the decade before. At the time, the 1980s was the hottest decade on record. In the 1990s, every year was warmer than the average of the previous decade. The 2000s were warmer still.
That said, there is little chance, in my opinion, that conservation and recycling are going to save civilization should warming continue or accelerate, as appears probable. Even if everyone in the US stopped driving SUVs, as it were, global economic growth will keep carbon levels rising and push us closer to potentially devastating environmental transformation. The only way out that I can see is national investment in renewable low-carbon energy sources. They have to become cheaper than fossil fuels on a real basis: then people will adopt them and carbon levels may stop increasing. Interestingly, this is an approach that the fraction of the G.O.P. that has not been captured by the oil and gas industry (does it exist?) may find appealing, since it will create a vast new energy industry.
Discuss
7 Comments . Comments are closed.Climate: this is why it goes nowhere
Because you couldn't get the public to back a tax which would reduce energy consumption, you will push for more taxes to fund companies with grants for renewable energy etc.
I'm sure the GOP would be for this, because they can set up useless companies as well as anybody and take government money to produce nothing. In addition the oil companies can always set up "green" subsidiaries to take the money too (see B.P.) The oil companies were always for cap and trade because they were the ones who could build carbon-offsetting dams in the Amazon and get paid by European and American taxpayers.
The only thing oil companies love more than getting paid to pump oil is to get paid NOT to pump oil.
Wow, that's just full of FUD.
(Fear, uncertainty and doubt)
Because you couldn't get the public to back a tax which would reduce fossil fuel energy consumption, you will push for more
taxesspending to fund companies with grants for renewable energy etc.Fixed that for you.
The first bit is really important -- the problem is not energy consumption, it is the burning of fossil fuels. There are two reasons to conflate the two: ignorance or malice. I'll assume it's the former, and consider you no longer ignorant as soon as you can't resist the urge to respond to my post, thereby establishing that you've actually read it.
It's true that all things need to be paid for, but I suspect that there are plenty of liberals who would be all to happy to cut the military budget by far more than the total of all renewable energy subsidies times five. The goal isn't necessarily to spend more, but to spend differently.
P.S. If the oil companies were for cap-and-trade, then you wouldn't expect the folks who receive the most money from oil company employees to be decidedly against cap-and-trade, despite it being a free-market mechanism created by the right wing out of the Reagan administration and championed by the HW Bush administration.
The GOP is against any...
... democratic proposal. The Dems propose the GOP health care reform from 93 and they get no support. They proposed the GOP answer to climate change (cap and trade) and they get no support. They decide to do immigration reform before cap and trade and get Graham to filibuster his own bill.
The GOP can't be counted on for anything, including their own proposals, as long as it would count as a Democratic accomplishment.
We will all be affected
There is also the extraordinarily disturbing story about the drop in phyloplankton in the Ocean attributed to rising ocean temperatures. Less Phyloplankton means less oxygen. (http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2010/0728/Vital-ocean-phytoplankton-a-casualty-of-global-warming)
With less oxygen all other issues will eventually become meaningless.
The costs of continuing to ignore this problem..
far exceed even the most extravagant estimates of what it would cost to address it. I'm talking in purely economic terms, leaving out the human costs of the vast suffering that global warming will cause and leaving out the aesthetic costs of the ravaging of the environment that global warming deniers are in effect advocating.
This is a basic fact that is too often ignored.
When I voted against Dog Tracks...
Unfortunately no one will pay 40k for a Chevy, so we gotta find a cheaper way. This is also a national security issue considering where we get our oil from, not to mention the devastation (economically anyway) of the oil spill is far more devastating and lasting than a terror attack. The President and Congress should lead on this by making it a national security issue and diverting defense funding to this kind of R&D. Ike was smart enough to fund the interstate using DoD money and rationale, why can't we do that now with energy?
The problem with using the national defense angle...
is it gets mucky. Should we drill more domestically, or hold off so that we've got bigger reserves? Is domestic nuclear power good for national defense (domestic production of power, with fuel not in the hands of bad guys) or bad for national defense (another target in the case of an aerial invasion or terrorist attack)? Is buying lots of solar cells from Japan and China good because we then have the means to generate electricity locally, or bad because we're further stimulating the profitability of companies which aren't American, potentially trading Middle East energy reliance for Southeast Asian energy reliance?
These questions have good answers which diverge significantly. It's not so simple as "national security". It's worth noting that had Ike funded national rail in addition to highway, we'd be in a much better position now to reduce our foreign oil consumption, but that's another story for another day.
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