Block conservative governing the United States does not believe global warming is a reality despite the overwhelming evidence and insist on blocking the policies needed to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Conservatives showed a spectacular display of scientific ignorance in June in the U.S. Senate. During the debate on the Climate Security Act Lieberman-Warner, which would regulate carbon dioxide to establish a cap on emissions, allowing emitters to trade carbon allowances, most Republican senators questioned the reality of change human-induced climate and ignored the climate threat completely and repeated the argument that the Act would increase gasoline prices, and electricity. It was as if they had been locked in an isolation chamber throughout the past decade. Let the most important.
Senator (sen) James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma: "The vast majority of scientists believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change."
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona: This law means that "people should turn off your air conditioner in summer."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia: "This law will attack citizens at the gas pump" and "increase loss of jobs. "
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama: "This bill will make us less competitive in the global marketplace."
Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota: This bill "could bankrupt the U.S. aircraft carrier."
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri: "No one who is sane," think we can get our energy from wind and solar or drive a "fleet of golf carts."
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colorado: "In regard to the temperature of the Earth, it is unclear what the long-term trend."
Conservatives are good at sticking to his message, even one that is not based on facts. None of his claims are true scientific or technological and economic most are crazy exaggerations based on studies funded by fossil fuel companies. According to increasingly desperate climate scientists, this could be a defining moment for mankind, but to many conservatives apparently is just another moment to score political points at the expense of future generations.
is a scary thought. If science in recent years and the painful reality of a changing climate have not persuaded the conservative movement dire nature of global warming caused by man, I can not imagine what disasters could convince chain. We've had droughts, heat waves, wildfires, floods, super storms and flooding in the U.S. and abroad, who have broken records, as predicted by climate science. And we had much less ice in Iceland, Antarctica and the Arctic Sea than expected.
In June, a National Journal survey found that only 26 percent of Republican members of Congress believe that "it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of pollution by man. " This also applies to Republican voters, only 27 percent say the Earth is warming because of human activity. It goes without saying that if he does not believe that humans are causing global warming, does not believe that humans are the solution to it.
Those who deny global warming and delay managed to crush the Lieberman-Warner bill, although its authors promise to return next year. Still, the policies needed to avoid catastrophic climate change requires both hard-and policy consensus that conservatives are likely to be blocked. The truth is that the law would not have put the country in a way to avoid catastrophe. Science has come a long way, leaving behind the legislation. We can not base our efforts to tackle climate change in hopes of reducing our emissions at some point in the future, or allow others to cut emissions by us. Stop playing
Progressives should stop playing the game of conservative and radical redesign to promote a climate policy focused on the aggressive deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency. At this point, liberals and moderates, both inside and outside Congress, are pushing for a cap on emissions economy-wide gas emissions, creating a market-based price for carbon, which in turn increases the cost of all carbon-based fuels, including oil. Not only that gives conservatives a powerful point against the law, but does little to reduce emissions from the transport sector. It takes a ridiculously high price for carbon to have a modest impact on oil consumption.
To avert disaster, we need to reduce carbon emissions in the transport sector between 60 and 80 percent by 2050. How high should the price of gasoline? Would have to exceed $ 10 (U.S.) per gallon. However, a price hard for a carbon fee of $ 400 per tonne (which is three times the current carbon price in the European System of Emission Reduction) raise the price of gasoline only one dollar per gallon. That price for carbon and an increase in gas prices is, almost certainly doomed in the U.S..
If I were writing a climate legislation would leave out the transport and trading system. Why legislate what is inevitable? The price of oil, gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel will rise a lot in the coming years, because we have not had an intelligent energy policy in decades. Let our previous stupidity and myopia over the price rise in the future.
To inaugurate the real change, lawmakers should make an aggressive package of "energy independence" as part of climate law. The package should focus on tougher standards for fuel economy, a standard low-carbon fuel and an aggressive drive towards the adoption of hybrids.
In fact, the overall message of climate law must change. The public should realize that higher prices for fossil fuels are inevitable unless we take aggressive action directed by the government to deploy technologies clean energy. We must understand that even the Department of Energy says the Bush administration to drill for oil offshore or in Alaska will never have a significant impact on gasoline prices. The supply is very low, the rise in global demand is too inexorable. If the public does not understand this, it is difficult to see how the actions needed to support obfuscation and demagoguery of the Conservatives.
After all, why abandon conservatives who believe it is a politically winning? Why get mad at energy supply companies that give them great contributions policies to defend the anti-climate? Given the many pressing issues that are concentrated in the public and the economy, housing, education, food costs, gasoline prices, Iraq, terrorism, health care, I do not think Conservatives pay a significant price in the voting until the reality of climate change is too painful to bear and too obvious to deny.
"Planetary Purgatory"
Conservatives are likely to enjoy another decade or so, to ignore climate science and to negotiate with the laws of climate. Yes, the climate will become even more extreme as we drift toward permanent changes in it. But most of what happens in the next decade will only be a more frequent and intense version of what happened in the last decade.
Unfortunately for the planet, the next decade will generally be the last chance to reverse course as "easy." By easy I mean the deployment of clean energy technology to an aggressive pace with a very small net economic cost of 0.1 percent of GDP a year or less. It is a strategy that can display the private sector with the help of government programs and well-designed regulatory reform.
If conservatives block serious action until the 2020s, then the country and the world will begin a desperate race to avert catastrophe. By then, global emissions of carbon dioxide concentrations so high that it will be relatively simple strategy of market-based technology can not prevent us from crossing the point of no return, when you get major problems and undermine all efforts to avoid catastrophe. Probably the most important problem is the melting of permanent ice and tundra, which could release a billion tons of carbon over total contained in the atmosphere in the present, much of it in the form of methane, which is 20 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
I call the period from 2025 to 2050 "Planetary Purgatory." Assuming that the Conservatives blocked a reversal higher in the U.S. policies in the next decade to the 2020s all know the fate that awaits the next 50 generations, including a comprehensive desertification, loss of terrestrial glaciers, which provide water to one billion people, up from the sea of \u200b\u200b24 meters or more at a rate that could reach 15 inches per decade, and the extinction of most terrestrial and marine species. Maybe then, when the miseries of global warming will take over daily life, begin to emerge against the conservative opposition and pull it to the trash can of history to all this political movement.
Because if we turn the political tide against James Inhofe and his band of deniers now, very soon we will be forced to act out of desperation. If we delay serious action until 2025, then we need to cut global emissions by 75 percent in a quarter century or so. That would require a massive intervention, supported by the government in all aspects of our lives, a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II. I can not see how the conservative movement as it exists today could survive having been responsible for causing decades or centuries of untold misery and intrusive government.
What is particularly ironic is that the main reason that conservatives do not accept climate science, and in place preclude serious action is that they hate the solution, government regulations and an effort by the government to accelerate clean energy technologies. Ignoring the threat of global warming, George Will wrote: "The fears seem to require, invariably more government subservience to environmentalists and more government oversight in our lives. "
In his column on the Lieberman-Warner, Charles Krauthammer said that based on "speculation, environmental activists, attended by scientists conformist and opportunistic politicians, are advocating a radical social and economic regulation ... that will tell you how you can travel, what kind of light you can read and at what temperature you can put the thermostat in your bedroom. "
Note to Krauthammer: have you ever met a scientist? "Conformist" is the last word anyone would use to describe them.
Without a trace of self-consciousness, Krauthammer continues: "There is no greater social power than the power to ration. And apart from rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society. "
Krauthammer and conservatives have understood backwards. The solution to global warming does not require the rationing of energy, or anything else. Requires government-industry partnership to accelerate the placing on the market for clean energy technologies, existing and medium term. This strategy preserves the abundance of energy that has enabled the modern civilization and sustained economic development.
But if we stop the government's action today, we can almost guarantee the need for extreme and intrusive actions by the government in the future. Only big government can relocate tens of millions of citizens, build massive dams and managing severe and rapid reductions in certain types of energy. Peak oil prices, for which we have not prepared will make the cost of gasoline earlier this look like an offer from Costco. In a shaky world because of global warming and desertification, we have thousands of millions of people to be fed. We rationed food, of course. And water. And arable lands. Most of our national political struggles will be meaningless replaced by a very significant global struggle for survival.
Conservatives can not stop the impending catastrophe with anti-government rhetoric. But they can prevent progressives and moderates to avoid it by blocking aggressive climate legislation. Progressives and moderates will need all his political skill and tenacity to overcome the obstructionism of the anti-conservative anti-science and technology. This is unlike any previous political struggle is a struggle to save the health and welfare of the next 50 generations, a fight to preserve our way of life. Losing is not an option.
London / Joseph Romm
Conservatives showed a spectacular display of scientific ignorance in June in the U.S. Senate. During the debate on the Climate Security Act Lieberman-Warner, which would regulate carbon dioxide to establish a cap on emissions, allowing emitters to trade carbon allowances, most Republican senators questioned the reality of change human-induced climate and ignored the climate threat completely and repeated the argument that the Act would increase gasoline prices, and electricity. It was as if they had been locked in an isolation chamber throughout the past decade. Let the most important.
Senator (sen) James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma: "The vast majority of scientists believe that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are a major contributor to climate change."
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Arizona: This law means that "people should turn off your air conditioner in summer."
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia: "This law will attack citizens at the gas pump" and "increase loss of jobs. "
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama: "This bill will make us less competitive in the global marketplace."
Sen. John Thune, Republican of South Dakota: This bill "could bankrupt the U.S. aircraft carrier."
Sen. Kit Bond, R-Missouri: "No one who is sane," think we can get our energy from wind and solar or drive a "fleet of golf carts."
Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colorado: "In regard to the temperature of the Earth, it is unclear what the long-term trend."
Conservatives are good at sticking to his message, even one that is not based on facts. None of his claims are true scientific or technological and economic most are crazy exaggerations based on studies funded by fossil fuel companies. According to increasingly desperate climate scientists, this could be a defining moment for mankind, but to many conservatives apparently is just another moment to score political points at the expense of future generations.
is a scary thought. If science in recent years and the painful reality of a changing climate have not persuaded the conservative movement dire nature of global warming caused by man, I can not imagine what disasters could convince chain. We've had droughts, heat waves, wildfires, floods, super storms and flooding in the U.S. and abroad, who have broken records, as predicted by climate science. And we had much less ice in Iceland, Antarctica and the Arctic Sea than expected.
In June, a National Journal survey found that only 26 percent of Republican members of Congress believe that "it has been proved beyond reasonable doubt that the Earth is warming because of pollution by man. " This also applies to Republican voters, only 27 percent say the Earth is warming because of human activity. It goes without saying that if he does not believe that humans are causing global warming, does not believe that humans are the solution to it.
Those who deny global warming and delay managed to crush the Lieberman-Warner bill, although its authors promise to return next year. Still, the policies needed to avoid catastrophic climate change requires both hard-and policy consensus that conservatives are likely to be blocked. The truth is that the law would not have put the country in a way to avoid catastrophe. Science has come a long way, leaving behind the legislation. We can not base our efforts to tackle climate change in hopes of reducing our emissions at some point in the future, or allow others to cut emissions by us. Stop playing
Progressives should stop playing the game of conservative and radical redesign to promote a climate policy focused on the aggressive deployment of renewable energy and energy efficiency. At this point, liberals and moderates, both inside and outside Congress, are pushing for a cap on emissions economy-wide gas emissions, creating a market-based price for carbon, which in turn increases the cost of all carbon-based fuels, including oil. Not only that gives conservatives a powerful point against the law, but does little to reduce emissions from the transport sector. It takes a ridiculously high price for carbon to have a modest impact on oil consumption.
To avert disaster, we need to reduce carbon emissions in the transport sector between 60 and 80 percent by 2050. How high should the price of gasoline? Would have to exceed $ 10 (U.S.) per gallon. However, a price hard for a carbon fee of $ 400 per tonne (which is three times the current carbon price in the European System of Emission Reduction) raise the price of gasoline only one dollar per gallon. That price for carbon and an increase in gas prices is, almost certainly doomed in the U.S..
If I were writing a climate legislation would leave out the transport and trading system. Why legislate what is inevitable? The price of oil, gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel will rise a lot in the coming years, because we have not had an intelligent energy policy in decades. Let our previous stupidity and myopia over the price rise in the future.
To inaugurate the real change, lawmakers should make an aggressive package of "energy independence" as part of climate law. The package should focus on tougher standards for fuel economy, a standard low-carbon fuel and an aggressive drive towards the adoption of hybrids.
In fact, the overall message of climate law must change. The public should realize that higher prices for fossil fuels are inevitable unless we take aggressive action directed by the government to deploy technologies clean energy. We must understand that even the Department of Energy says the Bush administration to drill for oil offshore or in Alaska will never have a significant impact on gasoline prices. The supply is very low, the rise in global demand is too inexorable. If the public does not understand this, it is difficult to see how the actions needed to support obfuscation and demagoguery of the Conservatives.
After all, why abandon conservatives who believe it is a politically winning? Why get mad at energy supply companies that give them great contributions policies to defend the anti-climate? Given the many pressing issues that are concentrated in the public and the economy, housing, education, food costs, gasoline prices, Iraq, terrorism, health care, I do not think Conservatives pay a significant price in the voting until the reality of climate change is too painful to bear and too obvious to deny.
"Planetary Purgatory"
Conservatives are likely to enjoy another decade or so, to ignore climate science and to negotiate with the laws of climate. Yes, the climate will become even more extreme as we drift toward permanent changes in it. But most of what happens in the next decade will only be a more frequent and intense version of what happened in the last decade.
Unfortunately for the planet, the next decade will generally be the last chance to reverse course as "easy." By easy I mean the deployment of clean energy technology to an aggressive pace with a very small net economic cost of 0.1 percent of GDP a year or less. It is a strategy that can display the private sector with the help of government programs and well-designed regulatory reform.
If conservatives block serious action until the 2020s, then the country and the world will begin a desperate race to avert catastrophe. By then, global emissions of carbon dioxide concentrations so high that it will be relatively simple strategy of market-based technology can not prevent us from crossing the point of no return, when you get major problems and undermine all efforts to avoid catastrophe. Probably the most important problem is the melting of permanent ice and tundra, which could release a billion tons of carbon over total contained in the atmosphere in the present, much of it in the form of methane, which is 20 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide.
I call the period from 2025 to 2050 "Planetary Purgatory." Assuming that the Conservatives blocked a reversal higher in the U.S. policies in the next decade to the 2020s all know the fate that awaits the next 50 generations, including a comprehensive desertification, loss of terrestrial glaciers, which provide water to one billion people, up from the sea of \u200b\u200b24 meters or more at a rate that could reach 15 inches per decade, and the extinction of most terrestrial and marine species. Maybe then, when the miseries of global warming will take over daily life, begin to emerge against the conservative opposition and pull it to the trash can of history to all this political movement.
Because if we turn the political tide against James Inhofe and his band of deniers now, very soon we will be forced to act out of desperation. If we delay serious action until 2025, then we need to cut global emissions by 75 percent in a quarter century or so. That would require a massive intervention, supported by the government in all aspects of our lives, a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II. I can not see how the conservative movement as it exists today could survive having been responsible for causing decades or centuries of untold misery and intrusive government.
What is particularly ironic is that the main reason that conservatives do not accept climate science, and in place preclude serious action is that they hate the solution, government regulations and an effort by the government to accelerate clean energy technologies. Ignoring the threat of global warming, George Will wrote: "The fears seem to require, invariably more government subservience to environmentalists and more government oversight in our lives. "
In his column on the Lieberman-Warner, Charles Krauthammer said that based on "speculation, environmental activists, attended by scientists conformist and opportunistic politicians, are advocating a radical social and economic regulation ... that will tell you how you can travel, what kind of light you can read and at what temperature you can put the thermostat in your bedroom. "
Note to Krauthammer: have you ever met a scientist? "Conformist" is the last word anyone would use to describe them.
Without a trace of self-consciousness, Krauthammer continues: "There is no greater social power than the power to ration. And apart from rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society. "
Krauthammer and conservatives have understood backwards. The solution to global warming does not require the rationing of energy, or anything else. Requires government-industry partnership to accelerate the placing on the market for clean energy technologies, existing and medium term. This strategy preserves the abundance of energy that has enabled the modern civilization and sustained economic development.
But if we stop the government's action today, we can almost guarantee the need for extreme and intrusive actions by the government in the future. Only big government can relocate tens of millions of citizens, build massive dams and managing severe and rapid reductions in certain types of energy. Peak oil prices, for which we have not prepared will make the cost of gasoline earlier this look like an offer from Costco. In a shaky world because of global warming and desertification, we have thousands of millions of people to be fed. We rationed food, of course. And water. And arable lands. Most of our national political struggles will be meaningless replaced by a very significant global struggle for survival.
Conservatives can not stop the impending catastrophe with anti-government rhetoric. But they can prevent progressives and moderates to avoid it by blocking aggressive climate legislation. Progressives and moderates will need all his political skill and tenacity to overcome the obstructionism of the anti-conservative anti-science and technology. This is unlike any previous political struggle is a struggle to save the health and welfare of the next 50 generations, a fight to preserve our way of life. Losing is not an option.
London / Joseph Romm
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