IPCC attack: US house Republicans win day, risk epoch

US Republicans may have won the day in the recent house vote to cut all their funds to the UN IPCC, the planet's leading climate science synthesis body, but they risk losing the Holocene. For everybody.

America is to cut off all funding to the United Nations climate science panel under sweeping Republican budget cuts that seek to gut spending on environmental protection.

The funding ban to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – stripping $2.3m (£1.31m) from an international organisation that relies heavily on volunteer scientists – was among some $61bn (£38bn) in cuts voted through the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on Saturday.

Driven by the mad-hatter Tea Party astroturf outfit who, as ignorant of their own history as of science, seemingly don't see the irony of taxing future generations without representation by burdening them with an increasingly dysfunctional global climate, let alone environment:

If enacted, the cuts package would reduce spending on environmental protection by nearly one-third, or about $3bn (£1.85bn), advancing a key objective of the conservative Tea Party of dismantling government regulation.

The cuts also exhibit the strong hostility to climate science among the Tea Party activists with funding bans on the IPCC and a newly created climate information service under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – a reorganisation which was to be funded out of existing budgets.

Instead of throwing crates of British East India tea overboard, the Tea Party of today plots to arrest knowledge, understanding and accumulating know-how and throw climate predictability overboard. All without a native American Indian costume in sight.

I'm not one to tell folks how to be, but that's not a good narrative for a proud nation to build on, going forward. What kind of example does it set to other nations in their funding decisions? What if all give up?

In proposing the ban on IPCC funding, Blaine Luetkemeyer, a Missouri Republican, called the UN panel "nefarious".

"The IPCC is an entity that is fraught with waste and fraud, and engaged in dubious science, which is the last thing hard-working American taxpayers should be paying for," Luetkemeyer said in a statement.

He claimed the US funds to the IPCC were $13m, but Henry Waxman, the California Democrat, told Congress the figure was $2.3m. He argued that the contribution helped the US get access to global scientific body of work – that would not exist without American support.

This has to be stopped in the US senate. I'd like to think that, in a world where we see Wikileaks fanning freedom in Tunisia, Twitter toppling tyrants in Egypt, and Facebook defriending dictators in Libya, that we, the world, can find a way to get our say in decisions affecting our global climate, wherever they are held. Overseas friends and family of American citizens should encourage them to tell the flat-earthlings among their numbers not to impose their ignorance on the rest of us.

And to make their voices heard by their representatives. Can the US people marshal and overthrow the tyranny of big fossil-fueled ignorance? I am encouraged to think so when I look at the success of Wikileaks in promoting transparency, and Sea-Shepherd, in defeating the Japanese government-subsidised whaling industry. What Julian Assange and Capt. Watson have in common is that they are hard-core; all Davids need a bit of that to triumph over Goliath. Their results speak for themselves. It's hard not think that more of that is what is needed.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Obama wins the US elocution

I'm sure I am not the only one outside the US who has become fixated on US President-elect Barrack Hussain Obama. I was one of the lucky few who survived the long, long US election media flood by simply ignoring it all. But tuning into the thrilling finish has wet my appetite for more about Obama. The confluence of an historic presidential choice by the US electorate, a global financial crisis of historic proportions, and unprecedented climate change, is a compelling backdrop for a man who comfortably shoulders an aura of history-in-the-making.

And, apart from enjoying his obvious magnetism, it's refreshing to hear a US President-elect speak in complete sentences, let alone grammatically correct ones. It's a big addition to their international relations skill-set. Having your subjects and verbs in agreement is a must-have in a multilateral world.

But, it is Obama's vision to tackle the economic crisis by investing in projects for decarbonising their economy that is disarming the cynic in me. If there is any up-side to the world economic down-side currently being experienced, it is that this crisis represents our best opportunity to make the transition to a carbon-neutral world. It is serendipitous that those from the biggest economy are finally making noises about taking up a leadership role the rest of the world has been crying out for. Given the immensity of the task ahead, and the fact that we have to make the transition at some point, there is no better financial climate than now.

Reassuringly, Obama confirmed that he gets it by using his second Internet address as President-elect to outline his vision of rescuing the economy by rebuilding it.

Jan 20. Bring it on!

UPDATE
In a piece for posterity, just recorded for the library of the Congress and a Bush Presidency museum, lies the mangled wreckage of President Bush's construction, poignantly mirroring his record: "I'd like to be a president, as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,".

Two unfinished wars, one financial crisis, one world's largest government-subsidised housing-project, eight years of US paralysis on global warming agreement, and a hanging clause later we have this plaintiff outro.

Readers will think I hate the guy. I don't. I'm sure I would respond warmly in his presence, he seems like that kind of guy.

But presidential material? In the old days the head nodding refrain would have been 'only in America', but these are newer, hopeful days.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

The Foole is Dead. Long live the King!

Barrack Hussein Obama delivered a fine acceptance speech on becoming President Elect. So said my goosebumps. Very powerful stuff.

It was the first time I had seen and heard more than a soundbite of Obama's famed oratory — two avoidance years plus eighteen listening minutes, and I then knew why he has this reputation. Compelling cadence, great words, good looks, and authoritative body language make him a gifted messenger with a welcomed message.

His message was simple: CHANGE. Delivered with pathos, and ethos, in clear English, President Elect Obama's fine words made for a heady brew after all the dissembling, and disemvoweling of the drawled-out, last, eight, years. At last a man of stature, not swagger, to represent the US to the outside world.

Yet the flip side of getting carried away with Obama is just as good... George Bush and his neocon, crony-capitalist climate-wrecking, with-us-or-against-us, terror-obsessed, bellicose, pugilistic agenda... are all gone come Jan 20. As the Dog's Bollocks kindly puts it, "Bye Bye Bushites!"

Praise the Lord and pass the whiskey! The election of Barrack Obama to President of the United States marks the end of the toxic neocon dream - we don’t react to reality – we create reality. The Bush Administration has been the most grotesque in US history. The foxes had finally taken over the hen-house. It was bound to end in tears, and so it has. To use some Bushite vernacular – it has been the mother of all clusterfucks.

I cannot recall a single redeeming feature of the Bush Administration, let alone three. The littany of policy disasters is mind boggling both in extent and all-encompassing range. Begun by stealing the 2000 election, to the cronyism of putting Monsanto in charge of the EPA and Halliburton in charge of the administration. Deficit creating tax cuts for the uber-wealthy – the golden boys and girls of the ponzi financial schemes and scams. Two ill-advised and botched invasions which have done nothing but breed support for Al Q’aida and run up trillion dollar budget deficits. Hurricane Katrina. The failure to plan for energy efficiency, preferring instead to wage war on oil rich dictatorships under the guise of spreading democracy and liberation, all the while enriching the coffers of Halliburton and Bush’s oil cronies. The cultivation of Christian Fundamentalists within the Administration and lobby industry while undermining the fundamental principles of the US constitution in the name of an apocalyptic Never-Ending War on Terror.

All finished off with the mother of all financial distasters when the ponzi schemes collapsed – products of the great freemarket experiment allowing the proliferation of unregulated financial systems that no-one really understood. The undoing of which almost resulted in a global meltdown, narrowly averted only by massive injections of liquidity from the public purse.

To be fair, GWB's focus on Africa is a bit redeeming, and Iraq might limp home to proper democracy in 20 years. But Jesus, what a way to do it. Worst of all is his war on climate science, and his fossil fuel agenda. You fuck with reality, and it will come back and bite you hard on the arse.

Nah, there's nothing much redeeming about Bush, unless you do comedy for a living.

Two unfinished wars, two bubbles, and two recessions. Bye bye Bushites. History will, like the world did, just shake it's head at how a hegemon handed over it's moral authority for the next contender to step-up. For the last eight years we've been head-shaking. Is US democracy that malign?

Now here's Obama, American dream incarnate, stepping up to reclaim that moral authority by hitting all the right notes about embracing the global challenges that befall us, including climate change.

Even his name, Barrack, Blessed; What a fabulous story so far. We have yet to see how he goes, but right now I am hooked. I have hope. It's Mandela all over again, this time it's not my old country, but the world that needs to be brought back from the precipice.

Woah there Putin, woah, easy boy

Michael Tobias explores Sarah Palin's ability to portray foreign leaders in animal terms, and her appreciation of geography.

Palin:"it's very important when you consider even national security issueswith Russia as Putin rears his head and comes into the airspace of theUnited States of America, where, where do they go? It's Alaska. It'sjust right over the border."

...

Tobias: But if Putin were to actually visit Washington DC or the UN in NewYork, he would pass near or over Iceland and then enter US airspace inNew England, no doubt rearing his head menacingly all the while.

I guess never having had a passport means you are not really the type to pour over air corridor maps in your free-time. Or even appreciate where your country's main airports are. Didn't America just re-elect a President who had never or hardly been out of the country before? And look at the mess he made.

Global warming — bad guys found at last

The science on global warming is so clear that it's hard to understand why the public doesn't push the politicians to pass the laws necessary for our preservation.

But, as a species we do not respond to changes on a geological time-scale, even those as rapid as our anthropocene. We can intellectualise the threat of climate change, but it takes a visceral threat, say - a bushfire, to move us into survival mode.

We can be moved to action by moral threat, as Howard showed us when we stood firm against invading refugee fleets armed with nothing but children for projectiles. We weren't going to let them tell us how they were going to come into the country. No sir. Howard skilfully turned those poor refugees into the bad-guys by suggesting they use their children to evoke our sympathy.

The problem with climate change, in terms of generating public outrage, is that it had no 'bad guys'. There is no identifiable moral threat oil companies represent, considering...

Until now. NY Times reports:

Sex, Drug Use and Graft Cited in Interior Department

WASHINGTON — As Congress prepares to debate expansion of drilling in taxpayer-owned coastal waters, the Interior Department agency that collects oil and gas royalties has been caught up in a wide-ranging ethics scandal — including allegations of financial self-dealing, accepting gifts from energy companies, cocaine use and sexual misconduct.

In three reports delivered to Congress on Wednesday, the department’s inspector general, Earl E. Devaney, found wrongdoing by a dozen current and former employees of the Minerals Management Service, which collects about $10 billion in royalties annually and is one of the government’s largest sources of revenue other than taxes.

“A culture of ethical failure” pervades the agency, Mr. Devaney wrote in a cover memo.

The reports portray a dysfunctional organization that has been riddled with conflicts of interest, unprofessional behavior and a free-for-all atmosphere for much of the Bush administration’s watch.

The highest-ranking official criticized in the reports is Lucy Q. Denett, the former associate director of minerals revenue management, who retired earlier this year as the inquiry was progressing.

Never mind the intergenerational accumulating existentialist threat to the species these folk are perpetrating, what about the sex, drugs and graft renting at the very moral fabric of our society? They are the types of people who would throw their children overboard. You just know it.

Here's a report from the Globe and Mail: Sex, drugs, oil and gas

Sarah "Shapeshifter" Palin's climate change change

From this audio of a long letter of a disgruntled Alaskan, who claims to know Sarah Palin — minus lipstick — we learn that she does not believe that man-made global warming is shrinking the habitat of polar bears. Ergo, legislation protecting their habitat — from oil extraction — should be overturned.

That's from before she was thrust into the public spotlight (and into dissonance with McCain's stance). But Desmogblog now detects a subtle shift in stance:

... show me where I've said there's absolute proof that nothing that man has ever conducted or engaged in has had any effect or no effect on climate change. I have not said that. I have said that my belief is there is a cyclical nature of our planet — warming trends, cooling trends — I'm not going to argue scientists, because I believe in science and have such a great respect for what they are telling us. I'm not going to disagree with the point that they make that man's activities can be attributed to changes."

The denial lobby are boning her up as we read this. Count on it.

Hurrican Gustav to test Obama/Biden, McCain/Palin

The damage wrought by Hurricane Katrina also ruined Bush. A point clearly not lost on all presidential candidates as they prepare to respond to the 'certain political fallout' claimed for Gustav:

Republican White House hopeful John McCain and running-mate Sarah Palin will Sunday ditch their pre-convention plans and visit people in Mississippi bracing for deadly Hurricane Gustav.

The visit comes as the fearsome category four storm's approach overshadowed the buildup to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota on Monday, and stirred memories of the botched response to Hurricane Katrina exactly three years ago.

Katrina is still affecting the GOP.

Earlier, in an interview to be broadcast on Fox News Sunday, McCain suggested he might go as far as suspending the convention, if the storm turned into a huge human tragedy on the par with Katrina.

"It wouldn't be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a national disaster.

"So we're monitoring it from day-to-day and I'm saying a few prayers, " he said.

..

Forecasters said the storm could hit top category five force as it moved toward the US Gulf Coast for a direct hit Monday or Tuesday. In any case, "Gustav is forecast to remain a major hurricane through landfall along the northern Gulf coast," the US National Hurricane Center said.

Obama is keeping weather eye out as well.

Will the fallout involve a discussion on the US's response to combating global warming?

AGW Denial: Obama makes fun of wilful ignorance

Oh yea... tell it like it is.

Obama Insists Inflating Tires Better Than Oil Drilling

Obama's Energy Plan: Really good

So says Climate Spin:

Obama came out with his energy plan yesterday. I agree with Joe over at Climate Progress that its pretty darn good from a major-party candidate (I don't recall if its better then Gore's 2000 plan. Anyone?)

Here are some good points:

• cap-and-trade program with all credits auctioned
  
• Reduce emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.
  
• Raise CAFE by 4% a year
  
• Increase building, appliance and power generation efficiency (still the easiest "win")
  

And tucked way at the bottom was this nice part about building more sustainable and livable communities: "Obama is committed to reforming the federal transportation funding and leveling employer incentives for driving and public transit." Yeah!

I didn't like the mention of exploiting oil shales in Montana and clean coal but, overall, this is great. Too bad energy, except for gas prices, and climate has fallen off the radar in the campaign or this might get more attention.

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change

Al Gore rails America for a Clean Energy "Moon Shot"

Watthead have the good oil.

By Alisha Fowler and Jesse Jenkins

Today, Al Gore became a major ally in the ongoing effort to build consensus around an investment-centered approach to solving our energy crisis and inspiring our nation to tackle the energy challenge as the defining task of our era.

Gore issued a truly ambitious challenge for America "to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years." The organization he leads, the Alliance for Climate Protection, estimates the cost of making such a "moon shot call" a reality at 1.5 to 3 trillion dollars of public and private investment over 30 years. He issued this call to "all Americans - in every walk of life: to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and every citizen."

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change

George Bush proud to lead world's biggest polluter

Just how embarrassing is it to be an American these days?

On average, they are seriously and sadly thick: firstly for having bought the line that Saddam was responsible for 9/11, and secondly, for re-electing George Bush.

But even more stupid than that is their pathetic excuse for a president, himself. I don't care that he comes from a wealthy family, that does not hide their lack of class. You ain't met flashier trailer trash than George Dubya Bush.

Oh George Bush is having quite a grand time at the annual G8 conference in Japan. He’s not molesting Angela Merkel this time, but he is embarrassing everyone: “The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: ‘Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.’ He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.” Punched the air? Best George W. Bush imagery ever.

Good riddance. H/t: Wonkette

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change

G8 negotiations on track for 2009 climate deal

G8 nations have committed to working towards a target of at least halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 in a summit in Tokyo, Japan.

They are pleased with their effort.

"This is a strong signal to citizens around the world," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said, adding that the EU's benchmark for success had been achieved.

Others aren't.

"The G8 are responsible for 62 per cent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," WWF said shortly after the communique was issued.

"WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility...," the campaign group said.

The last and final hold-out is the US.

But US President George W. Bush has insisted that Washington cannot agree to binding targets unless big polluters such as China and India rein in their emissions as well.

That's what you get when your president used to be an oil man.

Technorati Tags: global warming, climate change

Cap 'n Trade on US election menu

Hot on the heels of Australia's green election (Rudd signed the Kyoto Protocol as his first act of government), follows the second US climate change election. Bush tore up the Kyoto Protocol after the first one. Waste of good lead-time.

Obama and McCain have both stated that climate change requires decisive action. Both support cap-and-trade, putting a limit (cap) on greenhouse gases and enabling the market to work by allowing the trading of permits.

Click for more on Cleantechblog's take on how it would work.

Be Obama for 50 words

Now you can orate like Obama.

Here's my effort.

Generate a Barack Obama Quote!

"You know, there's a lot of talk in this country about uneasiness. Well I think Americans are tired of the same old wet nappies. Ordinary Americans believe in mother, they want less monkey business, they just aren't sure if their leaders believe in a fair go for all."
Generate your Barack Obama quote at Buttafly.com

Technorati Tags: Obama