Talk show host David Letterman has talked about global warming on his show for years. He seems honestly concerned about it and he was talking about it long before it became ‘acceptable’ on TV to mention it. Bill McKibben of 350.org was on his show recently and said the government needs to invest in renewable energy and be an example for everyone else. McKibben is the climate change activist in the U.S. most effective at communicating what needs to be done.
A longer description of the interview from Huffington:
Environmentalist and author Bill McKibben sat down with David Letterman on the Late Show to discuss climate change and the actions desperately needed to confront it.
McKibben says that the dire environmental problems we face aren’t entirely unmanageable, and we have the capabilities to provide some solutions, but there are certain groups — like the oil and gas industry — that don’t want that kind of progress to be made. “Until we build a movement big enough to challenge them, we won’t solve it,” McKibben tells Letterman.
Thanks to some errant WordPress plugins, (that’s the software that runs Futurism Now) this site has been unavailable for about 24 hours. But it all seems to be fixed now. (Until I find replacements for the plugins I had to trash, one or more things on this site might not work correctly, so be forewarned.) Meanwhile, I have a backlog of interesting things I’ve found in only the last two days. It would be nice if an article like the one below was widely spread around and actually had some effect on policy makers. Don’t be too put off by the title — this is something that people with even the most minimal powers of observation already knew.
No doubt NASA would be telling us that this year is now, so far, the hottest since humans began keeping records. The weather satellites would show that even when heat from the sun significantly dipped earlier this year, the world still got hotter. Russia’s vast forests would be burning to the ground in the fiercest drought they have ever seen, turning the air black in Moscow, killing 15,000 people, and forcing foreign embassies to evacuate. Because warm air holds more water vapor, the world’s storms would be hugely increasing in intensity and violence — drowning one fifth of Pakistan, and causing giant mudslides in China.
News from NASA: unlike what some people have claimed and speculated, climate change and warming temperatures are not good for plant life. Warming temps are not increasing the amount of plant life on earth, but are actually responsible for diminishing plant growth.
Drought map provided by NASA
Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth
Earth has done an ecological about-face: Global plant productivity that once flourished under warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline, struck by the stress of drought.
NASA-funded researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running, of the University of Montana in Missoula, discovered the global shift during an analysis of NASA satellite data. Compared with a six-percent increase spanning two earlier decades, the recent ten-year decline is slight — just one percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels, and the global carbon cycle.
“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested that global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said.
Despite a temporary moratorium, somehow oil drilling in very deep ocean water continues. A relatively new platform called “Perdido” is one of the riskiest, exploring for oil so far out the oil is two miles deep under the water.
This ultra-risky drilling proceeds, even as the oil in the Gulf of Mexico is still floating out there, and it’s still poisoning the coast and killing wildlife.
The survival instinct seems to be getting weaker in people. Apparently, we will not stop drilling for and burning fossil fuels until some day we are forced to, or it all just runs out. If we use it until the latter scenario, survival for many could get very difficult. Our political leaders also seem completely unable to protect us from the worst instincts and riskiest behaviors of those whose greed and thirst for oil knows no bounds. From the NYT:
Perdido platform, from the NYT
In a remote reach of the Gulf of Mexico, nearly 200 miles from shore, a floating oil platform thrusts its tentacles deep into the ocean like a giant steel octopus.
The $3 billion rig, called Perdido, can pump oil from dozens of wells nearly two miles under the sea while simultaneously drilling new ones. It is part of a wave of ultra-deep platforms — all far more sophisticated than the rig that was used to drill the ill-fated BP well that blew up in April. These platforms have sprung up far from shore and have pushed the frontiers of technology in the gulf, a region that now accounts for a quarter of the nation’s oil output.
Major offshore accidents are not common. But whether through equipment failure or human error, the risks increase as the rigs get larger and more complicated.
Yet even as regulators investigate the causes of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the broader dangers posed by the industry’s push into deeper waters have gone largely unscrutinized.
Many energy industry CEOs want a carbon tax, yet politicians in our government are not acting on climate change legislation to give them one. Some politicians have made a name for themselves labeling “cap and trade” as “cap and tax” but they’d actually be doing energy corporations a favor if they’d stop this wrong-headed campaigning. Dick Kelly, CEO of Xcel Energy, is calling for a carbon tax. So is the CEO of Duke Energy.
It makes sense when you think about it. It’s easier for companies to know what their costs will be with a carbon tax in legislation up front, than to worry about the unknown costs that will come from the EPA regulations that are sure to be imposed on them down the road. Increasing regulations is how EPA is handling climate change and energy, in the absence of Congressional action. What the EPA is doing is probably more effective than legislation alone, but it’s still not enough. We also need strong legislation on renewable energy so that it grows, becomes less expensive, and therefore more common. This will eventually allow dirty energy like fossil fuels to be edged out of the market completely.
But first, Congress has to pass some legislation. Here is a recent local story about the energy company in my area, Xcel Energy.
Mr. Kelly is “irked that Congress hasn’t raised his taxes.”
“We need a price on carbon,” said Kelly, who runs a multistate utility in the vanguard of next-generation efficiency and cleaner-energy programs.
Kelly, Duke Power CEO Jim Rogers and other utility executives have been expecting Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which would effectively place a tax on carbon emissions. Both Xcel and Duke have moved expeditiously in recent years to modernize old coal-fired plants, switch to wind and natural gas, and implement conservation programs in a bid to cut their carbon dioxide emissions by up to 25 percent by 2025 and meet state mandates to reduce pollutants that climate scientists say lead to global warming.
“The industry could have worked with the ‘Kerry-Lieberman’ bill in the Senate, but the Republicans backed away and started calling it ‘cap-and-tax,’” Kelly said.
. . . . “But we need a long-term plan,” Kelly said. “Bad things happen without a plan. We need a price on carbon. The industry, through innovation and alternatives, will take care of the carbon problem.”
Unfortunately, the industry isn’t moving nearly fast enough. James Hansen, NASA scientist, is still saying that we are reaching climate tipping points. If that happens, all bets are off. Nothing we can do then short of geoengineering will be able to stop climate change. That’s not “apocalyptic” speech, that’s a scientific probability.
A Pakistani woman holds a baby outside an army relief camp for flood victims Thursday in Sukkar. A Taliban spokesman warned today that any foreigners trying to aid flood victims are in danger of attacks.
Below are today’s most interesting environmental news headlines. But first, a disturbing development from Pakistan and the flooding victims there: Members of the Taliban are threatening foreign aid, especially from the United States. One man said, “We will not tolerate American aid. They want to use it for their own interest and don’t want to help the people of Pakistan. They have their own nefarious designs.”
Read more here. The flooding victims badly need our help, so I hope this is only the opinion of a few who have no real way to disrupt aid and supplies.
California regulators on Wednesday approved a license for the nation’s first large-scale solar thermal power plant in two decades.
The licensing of the 250-megawatt Beacon Solar Energy Project after a two-and-a-half-year environmental review comes as several other big solar farms are set to receive approval from the California Energy Commission in the next month.
Africa may be the next major market for carbon-reduction ventures amid investigations into Chinese certification and as the EU imposes new regulations, the International Emissions Trading Association said.
The schedule for the UK’s nuclear reactor building program has slipped behind already, the safety regulator has admitted, reinforcing concerns that the first reactor will not be built on time.
Scotland could emerge as one of the world’s leading developers of offshore wind energy within the next decade, according to a new report that predicts the industry has the potential to create up to 28,000 jobs by 2020.
How can a person show their activism for the environment through artwork? Art and environmental activism is something I’m interested in very much as an artist and as an environmentalist. This cartoonist, in this video from TED, makes it look rather easy. This is the work of cartoonist Jim Toomey.
Treehugger wrote: He has a knack for educating readers on the issues surrounding marine litter and ocean pollution without the lecture-y tinge that too often turns people away. But how does he do it, and why? Toomey was on the Mission Blue Voyage with other Tedsters earlier in the year, and gave listeners insight into how he created Sherman the talking shark and other favorite sea creatures. Plus, he sketches a few up onstage, which is always fun to watch.
From TED: “Sherman’s Lagoon is a combination of Toomey’s two lifelong passions: drawing and the sea. He’s been engaged in the former activity since he could hold a crayon, and his love affair with the sea dates back to his early childhood. The inspiration for the comic strip can be traced back to a family vacation in the Bahamas where he saw a real shark swimming in a remote lagoon.”
Something is causing the fish in the Gulf of Mexico to die by the thousands, and it’s probably not the BP oil, though it may be related to dispersants. The fish die-off is undoubtedly due to lack of oxygen in the water, or the “dead zone”. This is caused by chemicals in the water from agriculture run-off, or other sources. Here is what has been reported, from NOLA:
The fish were found over the weekend, floating near boom that had been deployed in the area to catch oil from the BP oil leak.
“St. Bernard Parish authorities have reported a large fish kill at the mouth of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, but state wildlife officials say it does not appear to be directly related to oil from the BP leak.
Randy Pausina, head fisheries biologist for the state, said Department of Wildlife and Fisheries workers are investigating the fish kill and that the initial conclusion is that it was caused by low levels of oxygen in the water.
Pausina said extreme heat can cause areas of low oxygen, especially when coupled with nutrient-rich water coming from the Mississippi River. . . . .
The fish were found Sunday afternoon, floating near boom that had been deployed in the area to catch oil from the BP oil leak, and washed up on the shoreline, St. Bernard Parish government said in a news release.
“By our estimates there were thousands, and I’m talking about 5,000 to 15,000 dead fish. Different species were found dead including crabs, sting rays, eel, drum, speckled trout, red fish, you name it, included in that kill,” St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro said.”
“Nutrient-rich” water means farm run-off. One major reason for dead fish due to lack of oxygen in the water is agriculture run-off from the midwest, and some of that is due to farming for the government — mainly growing corn and other crops for ethanol. Making ethanol takes tons of corn, literally, and pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals that are currently being tested. While I was on vacation last week I drove through parts of South Dakota and Minnesota where many corn fields, most of them that I saw in fact, being used as test fields for various chemical companies, and most of the corn fields were “growing ethanol”.
We have to stand up to big agriculture and tell them we can’t put up with a growing dead zone in the Gulf or in our lakes and rivers, year after year.
Our government really needs to stop subsidizing corn and ethanol growing or we are going to find every body of water in the U.S. polluted from these chemicals. Already the lakes in Minnesota are turning green from chemical runoff, and the dead zone in the gulf grows every single year.
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