. . . what a job, come to us, saying at last, over & over . . .
fossil fuels
according to the most-who-know, we got left little more than a decade
. . . damn, ARE WE READY FOR THIS ??
electric road’s coming
. . . more than just new cars
thanks again, guardian
traffic now more than all this heat
overwhelming too here at home
as wifeling & me on the way out
mother sure on her way back
our kids swallow red
hopefully growing greener
thank you, al gore +
my first climate reality project presentation
south east volusia aububon society ( sevas )
12/8/16, new smyrna beach FL
before the flood – more
czech video editor mirek lefou shares this
10 days after i posted dicaprio’s new preview
a much better chance to see his super work
one great movie, even if restricted under nat georgraphic’s new $$ fox-top
keeping it down past leonardo welcoming us all to see his best
so ok, we’ll all take part in sharing our planet first-class
i did buy the dvd soon as i could. you could too
or take a look instead at mirek’s better preview above
past that, david goncalve’s accurate, full version below, in portuguese subtitles
past these elections . . .
. . . before the flood
thanks moving-leo for reminding us
what’s going on beyond today’s voting triffles
to what’s here & ahead – planetwise
” Before the Flood, directed by Fisher Stevens, captures a three-year personal journey alongside Academy Award-winning actor and U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio as he interviews individuals from every facet of society in both developing and developed nations who provide unique, impassioned and pragmatic views on what must be done today and in the future to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet. ” ( National Geographic )
enough, enough !
time to go right to the top – for ma herself
if not recognizing what happened right here, this weekend
full ICN quote below
what only make’s sense this morning
after yet more trump-awful from last night
meantime, thanks pres obama for all you’re doing
along with everyone pulling the paris agreement into action
Published on INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS
CLIMATE CHANGE TREATED AS AFTERTHOUGHT
IN SECOND PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE
Following the devastation from Hurricane Matthew
and a campaign urging moderators to ask a climate question,
the issue was again ignored.
By Marianne Lavelle, InsideClimate News
Oct 10, 2016
Hillary Clinton affirmed her commitment to fighting climate change, while Donald Trump pledged to take advantage of what he called “clean coal” stores that will last a thousand years, in response to a question on energy policy in Sunday night’s presidential debate.
Climate change was treated as an afterthought, despite a campaign by environmental activists urging moderators to press the candidates on the issue—especially on a weekend that saw the southeast U.S. coast battered, and Haiti devastated, by the extreme weather conditions from Hurricane Matthew.
The debate focused on topics that drove much of the presidential campaign coverage over the weekend, in particular the revelation of a video in which Trump made lewd and aggressive comments about women.
The query on energy came near the end of the contentious evening, designed in a town-hall style with undecided voters reading many of the questions. The energy question didn’t mention climate change but was focused on the nation’s production of energy. “What steps will your energy policy take to meet our energy needs,” a member of the audience asked, “while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly, and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?”
Republican Trump, answering first, launched into an attack on environmental regulators. “Energy is under siege by the Obama administration, under absolute siege,” he said. “The Environmental Protection Agency is killing these energy companies.
“Now, I’m all for alternative forms of energy, including wind, including solar, but we need much more than wind and solar,” he said.
“Hillary Clinton wants to put all the miners out of business,” Trump claimed. “There is a thing called clean coal. Coal will last for 1,000 years in this country.”
He also spoke of the fracking boom and pledged to continue to encourage it: “Now we have natural gas and so many other things because of technology. Over the last seven years, we have found tremendous wealth right under our feet. I will bring our energy companies back. They’ll be able to compete, they’ll make money, they’ll pay off our national debt,” Trump said.
In sum, it was a repetition of Trump’s all-of-the-above, drill-baby-drill “America first” energy policy. And it continued his denunciation of the “war on coal” that he and his running mate have articulated as they dismiss the climate crisis as a meaningful issue.
Democrat Clinton, as she did often during the evening, walked close to the questioner to answer and said to him that it sounds as though he works in the energy industry. She said it was good that the U.S. was energy independent “for the first time ever,” but said the Middle East still controls the price of oil.
Clinton then turned to alternatives, beginning with natural gas, a sign that she, too, favors the all-of-the-above approach to fossil fuels.
“We are…producing a lot of natural gas, which serves as a bridge to more renewable fuels, and I think that is an important transition,” Clinton said. “We have got to remain energy independent. That gives us a lot more freedom and power than to worry about what goes on in the Middle East.”
“I have a comprehensive energy policy,” Clinton told the questioner, “but it really does include fighting climate change, because I think that is a serious problem. And I support moving to more clean, renewable energy because I believe we can be the 21st century clean energy superpower.”
Clinton said that her policy included a plan to revitalize coal communities along the way: “I want to make sure we don’t leave people behind.”
Some climate activists put out statements immediately after the debate expressing disappointment that the global crisis had been given short shrift. “We finally got a question about energy policy in the 89th minute of the debate, although it left out any mention of climate change,” said 350 Action Executive Director May Boeve. Nevertheless, Boeve said the answers revealed the “fault lines” in the election. “Trump doubled down on fossil fuels, while Hillary talked about a clean energy future that doesn’t leave anyone behind.”
Boeve did take issue with Clinton’s reference to natural gas as a bridge fuel: “It’s just a fast lane to more climate destruction,” she said. But she added that the group would work for her election: “350 Action will do everything we can to defeat Trump and then get to work pushing Hillary Clinton to move our country off all fossil fuels, including natural gas.”
Greenpeace USA Executive Director Annie Leonard likewise lamented the debate’s handling of the subject. “The candidates spent very little time talking about climate change during tonight’s debate but it is on the minds of so many Americans, especially as Hurricane Matthew continues to take a heavy toll here and in Haiti,” she said in a statement. “Climate change demands the attention of both candidates and their parties, and it is shameful that it was given so little.”
Environmental and social activist groups, led by the League of Conservation Voters and Media Matters for America, a media watchdog grop, organized a social media drive that gathered 150,000 signatures urging moderators to bring up the topic.
“This summer, the climate crisis has fallen right into America’s front yards—from devastating floods in Louisiana to damaging droughts and sweltering heat, we are feeling the impacts of climate change every day,” said the environmentalists’ petition. “Yet according to a recent Media Matters study, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox collectively spent five percent less time covering climate change in 2015 despite landmark actions to address global warming.”
Four questions on climate and energy were voted into the top 30 questions in the online poll organized by the Open Debate Coalition [1]. The organization, started in 2008 by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and progressive and conservative groups, has pushed for a debate format that allows for crowdsourced questions. The moderators of Sunday’s debate had agreed to “consider” the 30 most upvoted questions on the site. More than 3.8 million votes were recorded for some 15,900 questions.
“What are the steps you will take to address climate change? [2]” was the fourth most popular question on the site. It received 46,470 up votes, coming behind two queries on guns and one on Social Security.
The moderators asked one question from the online forum, about new Clinton emails posted on Wikileaks.
The high priority that poll participants gave to climate change contrasts with the topic’s near invisibility during the campaign. Trump’s only public statements on climate change were regarding a tweet he sent in 2012 claiming global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese.
During the candidates’ first debate on Sept. 26, Clinton brought up Trump’s hoax statement as an example of the contrast between the two candidates. After Trump responded bluntly that it wasn’t true, his 2012 post became the most retweeted tweet during the debate.
CNN columnist John Sutter has called climate change “the most important issue [4] almost no one is talking about this campaign season.” And New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote on Friday that it would be “almost criminally irresponsible [5]” for the debate moderators to ignore it. “There is, quite simply, no other issue this important,” he wrote.
After last week’s vice presidential debate ended with only a brief mention of climate change, Heather Hargreaves, vice president of NextGen Climate, a political group run by Clinton supporter Tom Steyer, said in a statement: “Voters rely on debate moderators and the media to hold the candidates accountable for their views—a clear debate on the differences between the candidates’ climate policies is vital in helping inform citizens who will be making critical choices for their futures on November 8th.”
Although President Obama and his Republican opponent John McCain were asked about climate change [6] by an audience member in their 2008 town hall debate, global warming did not come up in the 2012 presidential debates. Clinton and her primary opponent Bernie Sanders faced off extensively [7] on climate and energy in an April debate. But Media Matters [8] noted that Trump did not have to field a single climate change question through 11 GOP primary debates. He has not had to address his climate denial in media interviews.
TV news coverage leading up to the debate focused on the revelations of recordings of Trump, which touched off a crisis in the Republican party. Some prominent Republicans withdrew their endorsements of him and the GOP suspended its Trump campaign activities.
Environmental scientist Peter Gleick, who has been calling for more attention to climate change in the campaign, tweeted before the debate that a climate question might come as a welcome relief for Trump.
Here are the other three climate and energy questions that made it into the top 30 on the Open Debate Coalition’s website:
Ranked 10th most upvoted: What is your plan to combat climate change & build a green economy? [11]
Ranked 14th: What will you do to protect the rights of Native Americans and their land? [12] ( related to the fight over the Dakota Access oil pipeline)
Ranked 29th: Is Climate Change a national security issue? Why or why not? [13]
Published Under:
Politics [14]
Election 2016 [15]
© InsideClimate Newsn
time to actually listen
to native americans, after 525 years
~ bill mckibben
grist online, 8/22/16
dakota access protest
photo by joe catron, flickr
The center of the fight for our planet’s future shifts. But this week it’s on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation straddling the border between North Dakota and South Dakota. There, tribal members have been, well, standing like a rock in the way of the planned Dakota Access Pipeline, a huge hose for collecting oil out of the Bakken shale and carrying it off to the Midwest and the Gulf where it can be made into gasoline.
The standoff has been picturesque and dramatic, featuring American Indians on horseback. But mostly it’s been brave and lonely, far from most journalists and up against the same forces that have made life hard for Indigenous Peoples for centuries.
The U.S. Army, for instance. It’s the Army Corps of Engineers that last month granted Energy Transfer Corporation the permit necessary to start construction near the reservation, despite a petition signed by 150,000 people, and carried—on foot—by young people from the reservation all the way to Washington. That would be the same U.S. Army that—well, google “Wounded Knee.” Or “Custer.” “Washita River.” “Pine Ridge.”
That’s not really ancient history, not any of it. It’s the reason that Native Americans live confined to bleak reservations in vast stretches of the country that no one thought were good for much of anything else. But those areas—ironically enough—now turn out to be essential for the production or transportation of the last great stocks of hydrocarbons, the ones whose combustion scientists tell us will take us over the edge of global warming.
And if former generations of the U.S. Army made it possible to grab land from Native people, then this largely civilian era of the Army Corps is making it easy to pollute and spoil what little we left them. As the corporation said over the weekend, it was “constructing this pipeline in accordance with applicable laws, and the local, state and federal permits and approvals we have received.”
But it’s not constructing it in accordance with the laws of physics. July was the hottest month ever recorded on our planet, and likely, say scientists, the hottest month since the beginning of human civilization. And in any event, those “applicable laws, permits, and approvals” are merely the cover for the latest plunder.
A spill from this pipeline would pollute the Missouri River, just as spills in recent years have done irreparable damage to the Kalamazoo and Yellowstone rivers. And that river is both the spiritual and economic lifeblood of the Standing Rock Reservation, one of the poorest census tracts in the entire country.
Forget, for a minute, the threat to the reservation, and forget, for a minute, the endless history of unfairness. Think instead of what it might mean if the Army Corps, or the Obama administration, simply said: “You know what, you’re right. We don’t need to build this pipeline.”
It would mean that after 525 years, someone had actually paid attention to the good sense that Native Americans have been offering almost from the start. It’s not that American Indians are ecological saints—no human beings are. But as the first people who saw what Europeans did to a continent when given essentially free rein, they were the appalled witnesses to everything from the slaughter of the buffalo to the destruction of the great Pacific salmon runs.
And in recent years they have been the vanguard of the movement to slow down climate change. Why did the Keystone XL pipeline not get built? Above all because Indigenous Peoples on both sides of the border took the lead in a battle that stretched over a decade. Why did Canadian leaders fail in their efforts to replace it with the Northern Gateway pipeline? Because tribes and bands across the west of that country made it clear they could not be bought off. Why will the easiest-to-access deep-water port on the Pacific coast not be turned into the country’s biggest new coal export terminal? Because the Lummi Nation at Cherry Point joined with protesters across the region to say no. This same dynamic is at play around the world, where Indigenous Peoples from the Amazon to the coral atolls of the Pacific are doing more than anyone else to slow down the grinding destruction of our earth.
One has the ominous sense of grim history about to be reenacted at Standing Rock. North Dakota authorities—who are in essence a subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry—have insisted that the Sioux are violent, that they have “pipe bombs.” There are rumors about calling in the National Guard. The possibility for renewed tragedy is very real.
But the possibility for a new outcome is there as well. The Army Corps of Engineers might back off. The president might decide, as he did with Keystone, that this pipeline would “exacerbate” climate change and hence should be reviewed more carefully. We might, after five centuries, actually listen to the only people who’ve ever successfully inhabited this continent for the long term.
—
If you’re interested in joining the fight but can’t get to North Dakota, there’s a rally on Aug. 24 from 1:00–5:00 p.m. in Washington, D.C., outside the federal court that’s considering challenges to the permits, at 333 Constitution Ave NW.
Bill McKibben is Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, and a founder of 350.org. He is a member of Grist’s board of directors.
what’s left of us who worry most, act less
. . . A new study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that even members of the public who are “alarmed” about a warming planet show relatively low levels of public-sphere action, such as volunteering or protesting. The paper then sought to get to the bottom of why that is, investigating “what drives public actions of the certain segment of the population that’s already really concerned about climate change,” said Kathryn Doherty, a research associate at the Social and Environmental Research Institute in Massachusetts and lead author of the paper.
Why even the people who worry the most about climate change often take little action, Chelsea Harvey, May 16, 2016, The Washington Post, Energy and Environment
* * *
( my return note yesterday . . . )
thanks seri & wash post – that’s where i am too
nearby activist friend john of clearly charged living
must also be asking that of me
ok, these goings on of my own don’t take me there
yet some do keep me chasing what to do for our ma
this retirement age – these final days
free at last, oh so happy keeping it so simple
plugged into earth’s sensitivity
what can be this beautiful, so very natural !
then too, what to do if wife & me really could ?
yes, live so in public – join an ecovillage
meantime every roadtime’s loaded with bumps
” why am i pumping so much carbon too ? ”
that’s when a cool intellect starts its message
” simply member of a culture; not your fault ”
get them to do it first, as naomi’s been showing
tax those fossil fuels for all the mess they’re giving us
meantime am doing what i can to spread the word
. . . compost too
that’s about it
not that much here either, wash post
tho at least this, an old familiar thing –
admitting as much of ME before saying so of OTHERS
~ jim rucquoi
shemovesme.com
she moves me 