Ignoring Climate Change
Ignoring climate change is surely the stupidest thing we can do at this point. We need to honor the science, break away from fossil fuels and do the right thing for future generations.
"Climate change is real, caused by human activity and already devastating our nation and planet. The United States must lead the world in combating climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels and toward energy efficiency and sustainability."
~ Sen. Bernie Sanders
Only Bernie offers the leadership we need on climate change.
"Every candidate running for president has got to answer the following very simple question: At a time when we need to address the planetary crisis of climate change, and transform our energy system away from fossil fuels and into energy efficiency and sustainability, should we continue to give $135 billion in tax breaks and subsidies over the next decade to fossil fuel companies?"
~ Sen. Bernie Sanders
Do not trust anyone who is entangled with the fossil fuel industry.
The Media’s Biggest 2016 Failure Isn’t Donald Trump: It’s Ignoring the ‘Profound Crisis’ of Climate Change
Hey, did you hear the one about how the planet is dying quickly and we’re probably all doomed?
It’s true! Just this past week, the world got a fun update about just how much danger we’re in thanks to climate change. This one came courtesy of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which is, well, a giant sheet of ice in Antarctica and which is potentially disintegrating at a pace that, in the words of the New York Times, could help send sea levels rising enough to cause “a profound crisis within the lifetimes of children being born today.”
That seems like kind of a big deal, right? It kind of puts all of the more immediate fights we’re having in an ominous perspective, no? It’s the sort of topic you might expect, say, a presidential campaign to be taking more seriously, wouldn’t you think?
Forgive the heavy sarcasm. Anyone who’s been watching the 2016 race will know that climate change has taken the furthest of backseats to a host of other issues. It got an indirect injection into the whirl of the campaign on Thursday, when Hillary Clinton angrily accused Bernie Sanders of lying about the money she’s getting from members of the fossil fuel industry. (She wasn’t quite telling the truth in that moment, by the way.)
Candidates accusing each other of lying—now that is something the political media can get behind! Summaries of the back-and-forth duly popped up everywhere. Politico even got around to mentioning Clinton’s record on environmental issues—in the last couple of paragraphs of its story. Besides that, any extensive discussion of climate change has been very difficult to find. The lack of attention paid to it at presidential debates has become something of a running joke.
IMHO, Bill McKibben is our most credible voice on climate change.
Bill McKibben being arrested at the White House for righteously protesting the trashing of the earth.
And I think I might speak for at least a few other environmentalists who feel the same way. Here's why.
[Speaking of Bernie Sanders] First, he's a stand-up guy. When we told him about the Keystone Pipeline in the summer of 2011, he immediately set to work helping us block it. He strategized, he used his bully pulpit in the Senate to spread the word, and he devoted staff time to pressuring the State Department. Contrast that with, say, Barack Obama who was mostly silent about climate change his whole first term, and managed to make it all the way through the 2012 campaign without discussing it. Or Hillary Clinton, who after initially saying she was "inclined" to approve Keystone has gone entirely mum on the most iconic environmental issue of our time. Who showed up in New York for the People's Climate March? Bernie Sanders. Who said, straightforwardly in today's official announcement, "the peril of global climate change, with catastrophic consequences, is the central challenge of our times and our planet." That would be Bernie Sanders.
But what makes that really remarkable is, it's not his defining issue. Everyone in Vermont knows Bernie pretty well (it's that kind of state) and so I can say he fits no one's stereotype of an enviro. He doesn't put on a spandex suit and go cross-country skiing; he doesn't, I'm guessing, meditate to reduce his stress levels. He doesn't go on and on about the woods and the rivers -- he goes on and on about working class Vermonters who can't afford health care and heating oil. His issue is inequality and unfairness, and it has been from the start.
And for those of us who do work mostly on the environment, that's just the kind of ally we need. Because it's a constant reminder that this battle is for people, who need renewable energy so they can break the constant cycle of struggling to pay the fuel bill, and because it will be the source of good jobs. And because it will be one of the chief ways we break with the plutocrats, many of them in the fossil fuel industry, who are ruining both our atmosphere and our democracy.
Make no mistake -- Bernie Sanders isn't really running against Hillary Clinton. He's running against the Koch Brothers, and all that they represent: taken together they're the richest man on earth. They've made their money in oil and gas (they're the largest leaseholders in the Alberta tar sands, on the far end of the Keystone Pipeline). They spend their money to break unions, to shut out solar power, to further concentrate America's wealth. They'll spend at least $900 million on the next election, and my guess is that if Bernie Sanders catches fire they'll spend far more than that -- because he knows he's got their number. They know, in their heart of hearts, that there's two of them and hundreds of millions of us, and that's got to be a little scary.
"...the planet is happy that Bernie Sanders is running for president..." ~ Bill McKibben
photo credit on the pic of Cooksey is Blake Richards
Thanks for permission to use the masterful photographs in this diary to illustrate the happy earth by the photographer, Ralph Cooksey-Talbottt. See more of his amazing photography at his gallery
[video:https://youtu.be/ocwVHGbYb3c width:640 height:480]
How and when to vote for Bernie, state-by-state.
Comments
Hey everybody.
Climate change, it's what's for dinner.
Thanks OPOL
Please help the Resilience Resource Library grow by adding your links.
First Nations News
Great Essay as always, OPOL!
But if you post this on TOP, I daresay you'll finally get the bojo.
Truth is getting shorter and shorter shrift there these days.....
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
When will democrats stop screaming,
"SCOTUS" and start screaming, "CLIMATE CHANGE"?
When they stop take YUGE donations from fossil fuel
Robber barons.
Orwell was an optimist
I work in conservation law
and when the harvesters are saying that something is happening - the lobsters are coming in earlier and earlier, the green crabs are decimating the shellfish stocks, ground fish aren't where they should be - the rest of the world should be listening. The oceans are sending out an SOS, and yet not enough of us are hearing the cry.
Thanks for a great posting.
Think off-center.
George Carlin
Thanks for posting it here, OPOL
I'm tired of your diaries being trolled by the same people and then the threads get so long I keep collapsing them and before I know it, im at the end of the diary.
Don Midwest posted a link to the Nation article where Tom Hayden has decided to vote for Hillary. Even though he supports every one of Bernie's positions. He especially rails against the thousands of jobs that has decimated his area, yet can't quite seem to write what might have caused that.
But he says that his main reason for supporting Hillary or Bernie is because of how she is going to pay for her climate plan. Oh and that Bernie apparently doesn't know how he will pay for his.
But does anyone actually believe that Hillary will do this?
Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.
Disappointing about Tom Hayden. What an ass.
Hayden is getting absolutely filleted in the comments there
And rightly so. Great to read them.
Glad to hear that
I started that piece but didn't bother to finish it. Seems pretty lame, but hey, why should we find that surprising? He too will twist himself in knots trying to explain why the status quo candidate really isn't. Please. Waste of time.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
Thank You, OPOL, much appreciated you post your
beautiful essays here. I hope you are doing fine in these times.
https://www.euronews.com/
Very glad
That you are posting here, I actually get to read them without the constant reloads. Much more enjoyable this way.
Be well and be loved, Brother.
Ya got to be a Spirit, cain't be no Ghost. . .
Explain Bldg #7. . . still waiting. . .
If you’ve ever wondered whether you would have complied in 1930’s Germany,
Now you know. . .
sign at protest march
I shared
I shared this lovely essay on facebook, twitter, and the Green Party facebook page.
Life is strong. I'm weak, but Life is strong.
We don't have a democracy anymore
After watching Chomski's latest movie "Requiem For The American Dream" it's clear that the government is totally under control of the banks and the oligarchs. I also listened to an interview with Bill Black, they guy that prosecuted the S&L crisis and it's clear the government has no will whatsoever to go after the corrupt oligarchs, or any of them. It's now control and a free pass. Also the FBI has been decimated in its white collar crime group.
No wonder they are so afraid of Bernie. We do have a remnant of a democracy and it is possible in theory for Bernie to get elected. I just can't believe the Hillary supporters. The banks are the crux of the problem, and she is one of them and a neocon on foreign affairs. How many cabinet members will be from the big banks in a Clinton admin?
One of the reasons that we don't make more progress in eliminating our use of fossil fuels is that the financial sector is still addicted to oil and gas. If you want money for a major project it had better be oil or gas powered. We cannot achieve major national goals with our current government controlled by the financial sector. Black said outright the the financial sector makes most of their money from fraud. The concept of a nation of laws only counts now if you are a whistle blower, in which case you will be prosecuted because you are a thorn in the side of the oligarchs.
We really have very little time to wake up, and they will protect the status quo since that makes them rich and in control.
Capitalism has always been the rule of the people by the oligarchs. You only have two choices, eliminate them or restrict their power.
Glad you are here also.
As the good and interesting folks leave, TOS gets more and more boring. Open thread for Hillary. She's my hero. I thought blackwaterdog was silly, but these make her posts look full of deep content in comparison.
Three separate teacherken diaries on the Rec List,
all promoting Hillary. The Hillbots won't listen to reason. I don't know what has them in her grip. Her message? Ha! Her charisma? She's charismatically challenged. Her ethics? C'mon. What is it about Hillary that causes her supporters to turn a blind eye to the truth?
"Just call me Hillbilly Dem(exit)."
-H/T to Wavey Davey
Finally, an easy question!
The young vote with their hopes.
The old vote with their fears.
Democracies only work well when life expectancy is 50 years old.
____________________
The political system is what it is because the People are who they are. — Plato
Don't underestimate all the paid Hillary shills
So many interesting HRC Diaries Showing up at TOP
Wonder if he will get a private message
You know, cautioning about writing too many diaries in a day...fair play and all...
Just a couple things
11 April marked the beginning of the Greenland melt season, defined as 10 percent of the ice sheet experiencing melt. It hit 12 percent. The previous earliest date was 5 May (2010), and typically is late May to early June.
10 April Mona Loa Observatory recorded 409.29 ppm CO2.
Source: https://robertscribbler.com/
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
Time is running out
and faster than we were first told. I suspect as early as 2020 we will see some majorly bad signs of ecological collapse. We may see it later on in 2030, but I am doubting it. politicians of the established kind in cahoots with the Corporate suits and the billionaires who do not care for anything but their own gratification grind slowly to do anything. It takes them at least 5yrs minimum to make changes. Profits over Life will be the end of Humanity and other species, just so a measly few folks can hoard all the resource based wealth and not care as the planetary biosphere crashes down around their ears!
So long, and thanks for all the fish
This is THE issue for me too.
This is THE issue for me too. I'm building a "green" house and organic farm business in WA state and instructed the builder to insure that nothing used in the build is made by a Koch affiliated firm. We also powered up about 7 weeks ago an 18kWh solar array that has already produced, in northwest WA state right up next to Canada, over 2 megawatts of power (that's a lot). So we're "building with sunshine" (powering all tools with solar power). Our intent is to demonstrate clean and comfortable living in a "net positive" (not net negative--our intent is to produce more power than we use) powered house and business. The point of the business is to demonstrate how to grow organic plants and animals in a "low carbon" high tech manner using aquaponics and other low and high tech methods that will provide proven metrics that we produce food for the local market that has, by far, the lowest carbon footprint of anything else in the restaurants or stores, even our coop and natural food stores. I really appreciate seeing OPOL publishing here, but we also need to keep this battle for the earth in front of as many eyes as possible wherever we can.
that would be 2 megawatt-hours, not megawatts.
apologies for the pedantry
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
Thanks. Actually I
Thanks. Actually I appreciate it. I've been trying to figure out an easy way to explain the energy generated by the array. Any ideas? I've seen explanations that a megawatt (hour) is equivalent in energy terms to about 300 gallons of gasoline, or enough to power 60 average homes for an hour (or one home for 60 hours I guess). The gasoline equivalent is a fixed metric in energy terms while the houses measure varies with what an "average" house uses and that will surely change over time. I'm also trying to find a way to state the power output in tons of coal or mcf of natural gas offset as a way to get a better metric on measuring the carbon footprint of our produce. Measuring carbon footprint is a lot more complex for real world, or I should say, living world outputs like produce (unlike factory production where there's an easy measure of what goes in and out the doors).
GHG equivalency
Try this:
https://www.epa.gov/energy/ghg-equivalencies-calculator-calculations-and...
Without looking it up, you probably get an average of 4 solar equivalent hours per day there (maybe less due to cloud cover), so your 18 kW array should deliver 72 kWhr per day, which is about 0.05 metric tons of CO2 saved per day, according to their calculator.
Note that their calculator uses non-baseload power (baseload power is largely coal, and so the CO2 equivalent would be much higher).
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
I wonder how many kwh it takes to drive a Tesla from
LA to Miami and back.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
It would be
2700 miles X 2 = 5400 miles
Wikipedia says the Tesla S has an EPA rating of 38 kWhr per 100 miles. Thus 2052 kWhr round trip.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
If correct, the implication is that the "gasoline equivalent"
of a megawatt-hour must be closer to 100 gallons, rather than 300 gallons, given that I could drive a 2005 Subaru Forester 5400 miles on just about 200 gallons of gas, and in fact, I could drive a 2016 Prius that distance on just over 100 gallons.
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
This is a terrific resource.
This is a terrific resource. Thanks for the link! Very much appreciated.
Climate control has a domino effect
Add too much pollution of whatever kind to something, and several industries or groups of people or cities or states are affected.
Bernie is correct: Climate change (pollution, stopping global warming, etc.) is THE dominant issue of our time. This cannot be stressed enough.
We have MANY critical issues that need to be taken care of, like, yesterday, but the first in importance is climate change or stopping global warming by reducing pollution and the damage we humans have done to this planet. We need to implement solar and wind power wherever it's possible, add alternative energy sources for transportation. If we do not, extinction of human beings and many other life forms is in our future.
And, seriously, since it's been proved that fracking causes earthquakes, we really do not need to build any more nuclear facilities that are near fracking sites (if Bernie is elected, fracking will stop, but he only gets two terms...). Think in terms of Fukushima at an inland site, not on the edge of the sea where the runoff affects sea creatures and ocean environments and starts traveling ever eastwards to other locations, like the west coast of the US. No more nuclear power plants!
So, in importance, we need to deal with:
1) Climate change
1-a) everything else on the list of critical issues that need to be addressed.
If we don't do something about climate change and global warming, everything on the 1-a list won't matter because we'll be in the process of going extinct. Think about it. Really. Think long and hard about what that means....
[This won't affect me all that much. I just entered my septuagenarian years so I will die sometime in the next 30 years on the way to my goal of living to age 100 in spite of health issues. However, I have a granddaughter and a new great-grandson who will be affected, and I'd rather they not go extinct.]
Vote for Bernie Sanders!
I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute ..., where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference. — President John F. Kennedy, Houston, TX, 12 September 1960
dadfdsfasdf
and double dafdada
The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.
I once caught this horrid show called Preppers
daughter and I watched an episode or two of it. What a trainwreck of a show.
None of the fools who were hoarding food and guns were worried about climate change. It was all prepping for
1. The Apocalypse
2. The Government!
3. Some type of natural disaster .. but no mention of climate change.
And all of them had to have GUN. Just in case anyone came around needing help or food.
I know that my country will go insane once climate change is fully realized.
I don't want to PREPARE. I want to SHARE.
"Love One Another" ~ George Harrison
Ha! Preppers... yeah. What a show...
I've only seen it once or twice, but they obviously find the "craziest" people they can to highlight.
Although, I do think we should all be "prepping" to some extent. I don't mean crazy-style - but learning as much as we each can about growing some food and herbs, how to do certain things locally, live more sustainably, etc.
I've have never had or wanted a gun, they hold no interest for me and I've never felt the need for one. But I find myself a little tempted sometimes when I think of possible future scenarios. NOT, obviously, for turning away those in need, but for protecting people from those who would take advantage of them or harm them. Or worse yet, for a way out if things get too bad. Isn't that terrible? It IS terrible to fear the future that much. But try as I might, I see a whole lot of turmoil coming, and its just a matter of whether it will happen in my lifetime or not.
I am right there with you on the gun
No, it isn't terrible to think of as a way out either. At least not in my opinion. When I get to the point where I can no longer take care of me, then I can't take care of anyone else either and will become a drain on them and I hate that thought more than the thought of taking a way out.
And one other reason to have one, in case hunting for food becomes a necessity. God, all those years my dad tried to get me to learn to hunt and I refused, would be the final irony if I have to really learn to do that. He once offered to teach me how to wring a chicken's neck, couldn't do it.... He will laugh his ass off wherever he is if I have to actually do it one day.
Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur
To save your lambs from a coyote (more likely a dog pack) attack
Or to save your chickens from a foraging raccoon. You don't want to take on either a coyote (or a hunting dog pack) or a raccoon barehanded.
Also, there once was an article in Western Horseman by a veterinarian on how to shoot your horse. He said, suppose you're 20 miles out in the back country and your horse breaks a leg. He can't walk out (broken horse legs can't be fixed, anyway). Are you going to walk out and leave him there for the wolves? You'd better know how to do it right.
This was pre-cell phone, but there are still dead zones.