With inauguration day in mind, there is no doubt President Obama has made excellent choices for his science and energy team, but as I wrote over at DeSmog, do not declare victory quite yet... There are also signs that the administration could falter when it comes to dealing with global warming in the strongest possible fashion. In particular, other high level picks suggest there may be serious impending battles in the White House over climate policy. Here is an excerpt:
While global warming may be the world's greatest threat, the climate in Washington, DC is probably tepid at best toward taking on the massive challenge of emissions policy reform. Our looming economic crisis gets priority this year and change will most likely be achieved by way of developing green technologies and creating green jobs, not sweeping regulatory action. Emphasis will be placed on achieving less dependence on foreign oil for a myriad of purposes including national security and lowered energy costs rather than CO2 output.
Read the full post over at DeSmogBlog and weigh in with your perspective.
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Leadership of a not-so-great generation passes into history on this day.
It appears that a single generation, my not-so-great greed-mongering generation, will be remembered for having first recklessly plundered and then ravenously consumed the lionâs share of all Earthâs limited resources. No generation before mine, and certainly no generation to follow, will behave so arrogantly and avariciously because the resources to do what my generation has done will have already been devoured and, therefore, unavailable to future generations. In the pernicious process of global plundering and conspicuous per capita over-consumption, many too many leaders of my generation will also have allowed the unhealthy pollution of the environment, the unrestrained depletion of natural resources and the unconscionable mortgaging of our childrenâs future. My generationâs leaders will have lead us to threaten the children and coming generations with the likelihood of dangerous ecological conditionsâ¦a situation for which my generation is responsible but for which my generation refuses to take responsibility. Many leaders in my generation have determined to âpass the buckâ to the children, come what may. So grave and unfortunate a situation cannot longer be ignored just because the leading perpetrators of this ominously looming ecological wreckage choose to remain willfully blind, hysterically deaf and electively mute when called upon to account for their (and our) behavior.
If I had to put this colossal tragedy in a single set of sentences I would speak out in this way,
âNever in the course of human events has so much been given to so few consolidators of great wealth and power, who then did so poorly by everyone else and everything else but themselves. A tiny minority of supremely greedy, self-proclaimed Masters of the Universe in my generation have directed the human community toward the extirpation of biodiversity, degradation of the environment and the depletion of natural resources. The fitness of Earth as a place for habitation by our own children has been put at risk. The abject failure of so many of my generationâs leaders to assume responsibility for such incredible arrogance, poor judgement and stupendous wrongdoing is somehow not quite right and, at least to me, difficult to tolerate in silence.â
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on the Human Population,
established 2001
http://sustainabilityscience.org/content.html?contentid=1 â¦
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/index.php
http://www.panearth.org
This kind of attitude drives me crazy. Put a bandaid on the economy while the world is dying and wait for the catastrophe to become irremedial. Yes the economy is a problem. But there are opportunities to work on the economy while providing incentives to make it a green economy through regulation instead of throwing money at dead dinosaurs.
Nobody can stem the rampant tides of history. But we can go down saying that we tried.
By the way, some scientists also support carbon tax over cap and trade simply because they say that CO2 sources are so many that cap and trade may not be practically feasible. There's an old Science editorial by Donald Kennedy that I can dig up.
I struggle to see anything other than wide-reaching and radical lifestyle changes making any difference here, and god knows how you convince the population to make those changes. As Ashutosh mentioned, the idea of regulating any 'cap and trade' approach to emissions seems nightmarish and the idea of trying to control emissions in developing nations is almost a non-starter.
Didn't mean to get my pessimism hat on there, sometimes the situation just seems hopeless. We can but try though.
I rarely hype my own blog, but in a post today I commented on the fact that the developer of a long anticipated real estate project on San Francisco's Treasure Island is now facing the problem, and costs, of dealing with a projected 3 ft. sea level rise in the next 30 years. So, they plan to build on additional land fill in an earthquake zone.
Tell me one more time why it is too expensive to deal with global warming first. We are all ready seeing the costs hit home.