Past the Point of No Return

Climate change deniers are put on official notice.  Stating that greenhouse gas emissions had increased by 20% since 2000, a recent United Nations report indicated that it was unlikely that the goal of stalling global warming at the 2 degree Celsius level by 2020 could be met.  The temperature rise is more likely to be 3 to 5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century.  "So what?" you say - what's a degree or two more?  Well, the significance is that once above the 2 degree Celsius level, the projected costs for dealing with climate change escalate dramatically. 

After our own recent bout with climate change effects (aka Hurricane Sandy), the United States perhaps will awaken to become a leader in halting this doomsday march.  More than 110 deaths and an estimated $50 billion damage have been attributed to the storm that ransacked the East Coast in late October.  Sandy was dubbed a megastorm but it may soon become the norm.  Strong storms such as Sandy and higher level hurricanes will become more and more common because of the increasing global warming. 

Although China has now overtaken the United States in terms of total energy consumption, the United States remains the leading per capita energy consumer with neighbor Canada right behind.  Canada and the United States both are consuming energy at a rate over 8 tons oil equivalent (TOE) per person.  For comparison, other developed nations are generally in the range of 3 (Italy) to 6 (Finland) TOE per person.  China is below 2.   

A major UN climate change conference starts next week in Qatar.  Expect the conferrees to stress the need for drastic reductions in fossil fuels consumption and the development of alternate forms of energy.  Based on their current assessment, one would hope that they also start focusing on engineering solutions to minimize the damage that will surely come.

All of this will take money as well as cooperation among nations.  The time for narrow-minded nationalism and know nothing/do nothing attitudes is over.  The time to invest in the future of the planet, in sustainable energy and infrastructure, is now.

What can I do?
The web is filled with pages on energy conservation and stopping global warming at the personal level.  Here are three of them.
Global Warming Facts: 50 Tips
Power Scorecard: Twenty Things to Conserve Energy   
NRDC: How to Reduce Energy Consumption (This is a link to "Easy Energy Saving Habits".  On that page you will find links to Simple Household Tools and Gadgets, Long Term Efficiency and  Further Resources.)

Article- Related Links
Huffington Post Nov 23 Article
Common Dreams Nov 21 Post
Per Capita Energy Use
Total Energy Use

Forward? One Day After the Election

In the end, Team Obama pulled out a victory. The victory is a tribute to the best organized presidential campaign in history, to a massive get out the vote effort, to organized labor support, and to the campaign's messages of economic fairness and inclusivenss. Democrats will increase very slightly their non-filibuster-proof Senate majority. The House, as expected, remains in the firm control of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party.

In an election held in the midst of a struggling economy with high unemployment, the Republicans should have easily won a majority in the Senate and likewise defeated the incumbent President. They did not. All their Citizens United cash and their voter suppression efforts failed to take down President Obama and the Senate Democrats. Several of the extremist Tea Party candidates for Senate lost their races. The Republican portion of the non-white vote in the general election remained at just 20% - what it was in 2008.

Whether Republicans learned anything about the political downside of extremism on the national stage remains to be seen. While the moderate corporate media and leading Democrats are saying “surely the Republicans will stop being obstructionist” and while some in the Republican party are supporting a bipartisan approach - notably as evidenced by Romney's classy and gracious concession speech and New Jersey Governor Christie's response to President Obama's support for the hurricane-ravaged Garden State – most of the public talk from the Republican “pundits” remains the same: “Obama really has to do more to reach across the aisle. It's his fault that we've had gridlock in these miserable economic times.” They continue to be deluded about the causes of the Great Recession and their own obstructionist role in prolonging it. Most of their talk for the 2016 presdiential campaign has been on how can they recapture the 20% of Hispanic voters they've lost since W's years – not on how they can help instead of hurt the economic recovery.

Will wiser heads prevail or will last night's ranting of Donald Trump be the norm for Republicans? I would like to say I'm cautiously optimistic but I am not yet there. Where is the leadership going to come from in the Republican Party? As a defeated candidate, Mitt Romney will certainly not be the leader of the Republican Party any more than defeated candidate John McCain was. Representative Boehner has shown zero ability to reign in the Tea Party extremists in the House. We will likely continue to see Paul-Ryan-Draconian budgets cutting up the social safety net, increasing military spending, and continuing the advantages of the wealthiest from that house of Congress. What about the Senate? Well, thanks to Presidential term limits, Senator McConnell no longer can have his number one goal be preventing another Obama term. Maybe he should declare victory here – “See we did it, President Obama will never have another term after this one.” But that doesn't necessarily mean that McConnell will be any more willing to compromise. The only sure way to prevent the Senate from obstructing is to change the Senate rules on the filibuster – maybe requiring 55 votes instead of 60 to pass legislation (Senator Reid – please note.)

Given this state of affairs, what will the next four years look like and what has to be done to improve the country?

On the plus side, Obamacare survived, we won't be getting a voucher system for Medicare, we won't be privatizing Social Security, and we will be able to keep the Republican Supreme Court majority at 5-4. The financial reforms of Dodd-Frank will remain in place. We will be out of Afghanistan in 2014 and probably will not go to war with Iran.

The challenges will be to maintain the social safety net for the neediest in our society – the Food Stamp Program, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Medicaid, to improve educational opportunities, and to create jobs (including rebuilding our transportation infrastructure) to get us out of the Recession. None of this will be possible without increasing the taxes on the wealthiest and without reducing wasteful and unnecessary military expenditures.

More leadership from Obama and the Democrats is needed on the environment and climate change. This is the major long-term challenge for America – to lead rather than lag on this issue which continues to worsen with time. That the issue was virtually ignored by both campaigns was somewhat understandable – politically this issue is yet to resonate with Americans. That's why leadership is needed. If Hurricane Sandy was “unprecedented” in 2012, it may well become the norm by 2020 if nothing is done.

Where else is leadership needed? Campaign finance reform plus a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and to reassert Americans' right-to-vote are must's if we are to prevent what one WBAI commentator rightly called the “desecration of democracy” seen in this election. Real movement towards a two-state Israel/Palestine solution in the Middle East would go a long way to improve America's relations in the Middle East and restore our moral ability to lead globally. It would also allow Obama to earn his admittedly premature Nobel Peace Prize. Finally, we have seen a serious erosion of civil liberties since 9/11. The policies begun under Bush have continued under Obama. To point out two of the most glaring examples: Guantanamo is still open and the President has the right to indefinitely detain Americans without due process. If the Tea Party really cares about “freedom”, they should turn their attention here rather than to their freedom to not have health care and to carry guns. As attributed to Benjamin Franklin and as inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell at the Statue of Liberty, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” 

 

Links

National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms' 2011 Post: "A Decade of Civil Liberties Erosion in America"

Also see The Left Bank Cafe's four posts on Global Warming from August 2011:  Link to the first of these posts.