The Reality is a future we must change for all who will inherit the future we have left them, my children, your children and theirs.

The Reality is that those with vested interests to protect (big oil and coal; amongst others) have the status quo to protect. They have successfully done this with misinformation about climate change, as others have done in the past. :– Smoking is not addictive or a heath hazard!

The Climate Reality Project is to raise awareness of a need for collective understanding that the single (multiple) ‘extreme weather events’ around the world over recent times are related to a change in climate, directly resulting from the pollution of our atmosphere by the burning of once safely stored carbon (fossil fuels ) along with the increase of other greenhouse gases resulting from positive feedbacks linked with these emissions. We have entered unknown and very dangerous territory with our giant chemical experiment with the atmosphere.

Join with us now on this global action day to ask those still sitting on the inactive fence of comfortable complacency, to demand action from our policy makers, to move to a future, safe, for those who will inherit what we are leaving behind; my children and yours.

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A year or so earlier I was talking on Skype to a dear friend Gregory Hilbert of the US based Green Education Network. He like myself, has been working for some years to alert those unconscious to the human effects on the future, of our complacent consumption of finite resources and the pollution of our shared atmosphere with climate changing greenhouse emissions. In that conversation I said to Greg “If one of my daughters came home and told me she was pregnant, I would weep.” The context of the comment was that we as environmental activists are doing all we can to change the mindset of the complacent global majority, but not getting very far with the enormity of the task, and the future for those to come looked very bleak at best. Sure; some are waking up to many of the indisputable facts, but no action is, or will be taken to avert the inevitable by those in power to take such action.

When Lisa told me 9 months ago that she and her partner had decided to have a baby, I indeed had very mixed emotions. I wanted to be happy for them (and was) while knowing that the future of their child, would not be the future I had seen and dreamed of for my own children. Morgan Bevan Slattery will be one of the last generation, to grow up on a planet that supports life as we know and live it today.

I read a book by Fred Pearce called the Last Generation which was released shortly after my book ‘ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World’ came out in the US. In his book he asserts that humanity will go on; just not in the way we live today. My book agrees with his while laying out the reality if we do not act now and with global conviction.

I have been told many times that the fight cannot be won. Well I’m not about to relinquish the battle to those who would have me do so. Morgan Bevan Slattery will not say his Grandfather gave up on him….. Good luck young Morgan. I’m sorry that I was a contributing part of the problems you will face in the years to come. I’ll keep trying to be inspired to be a part of the solution…………………

Hansen’s own testimony to the US Congress in 1988 brought world attention to global warming. His latest book Storms of my Grandchildren carries the subtitle, “The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity”.

Read the rest of the STORY and watch the video here at the ABC Click BROADBAND to the right of the transcript

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain — at levels below what they were in 1980. This legislation allowed power plants that reduced emissions to levels below the cap to sell the credit for these excess reductions to other utilities whose emissions were too high, thus giving plant owners a financial incentive to cut back their pollution. Sulfur emissions have been reduced by 43 percent in the two decades since. Great success? Hardly.

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate. If every polluter’s emissions fell below the incrementally lowered cap, then the price of pollution credits would collapse and the economic rationale to keep reducing pollution would disappear.

Worse yet, polluters’ lobbyists ensured that the clean air amendments allowed existing power plants to be “grandfathered,” avoiding many pollution regulations. These old plants would soon be retired anyway, the utilities claimed. That’s hardly been the case: Two-thirds of today’s coal-fired power plants were constructed before 1975.

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

Yet cap-and-trade schemes are still being pursued in Copenhagen and Washington. (Though I head the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, I’m speaking only for myself.)

To compound matters, the Congressional carbon cap would also encourage “offsets” — alternatives to emission reductions, like planting trees on degraded land or avoiding deforestation in Brazil. Caps would be raised by the offset amount, even if such offsets are imaginary or unverifiable. Stopping deforestation in one area does not reduce demand for lumber or food-growing land, so deforestation simply moves elsewhere.

Once again, lobbyists are providing the real leadership on climate change legislation. Under the proposed law, some permits to pollute would be handed out free; and much of the money actually collected from permits would be used to pay for boondoggles like “clean coal” research. The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.

If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives. All the profits of this pollution trading system would be extracted from the public via increased energy prices.

There is a better alternative, one that would be more efficient and less costly than cap and trade: “fee and dividend.” Under this approach, a gradually rising carbon fee would be collected at the mine or port of entry for each fossil fuel (coal, oil and gas). The fee would be uniform, a certain number of dollars per ton of carbon dioxide in the fuel. The public would not directly pay any fee, but the price of goods would rise in proportion to how much carbon-emitting fuel is used in their production.

All of the collected fees would then be distributed to the public. Prudent people would use their dividend wisely, adjusting their lifestyle, choice of vehicle and so on. Those who do better than average in choosing less-polluting goods would receive more in the dividend than they pay in added costs.

For example, when the fee reached $115 per ton of carbon dioxide it would add $1 per gallon to the price of gasoline and 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour to the price of electricity. Given the amount of oil, gas and coal used in the United States in 2007, that carbon fee would yield about $600 billion per year. The resulting dividend for each adult American would be as much as $3,000 per year. As the fee rose, tipping points would be reached at which various carbon-free energies and carbon-saving technologies would become cheaper than fossil fuels plus their fees. As time goes on, fossil fuel use would collapse.

Still need more convincing? Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country’s. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. — because the total emissions are set by the cap.

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

The plans in Copenhagen and Washington have not been finalized. It is not too late to trade cap and trade for an approach that actually works.

James Hansen is the author of the forthcoming “Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.”

Source New York Times

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, is one of the world’s most famous climatologists. He testified at a 1988 U.S. Senate hearing that the emission of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels was already producing a greenhouse effect, and during the administration of George W. Bush, political appointees tried to keep him from speaking out about global warming. Hansen, 68, has become increasingly convinced that a climate crisis is upon us, warning this summer that the climate system is racing toward “tipping points” which, if passed, would lead to irreversible and catastrophic effects. On the eve of the publication of his first book, Storms of My Grandchildren, which he finished while recovering from treatment for prostate cancer and which will be published in December, he spoke to me by phone. Excerpts:

How serious a setback would it be if no agreement on a climate treaty is reached in Copenhagen, where 192 countries are meeting starting Dec. 7?
It’s not a setback at all if it allows a careful reassessment of what is needed. The cap-and-trade scheme [that the Copenhagen negotiations were working toward] is just not going to be effective at controlling greenhouse emissions. Political leaders have to realize that the fundamental problem is that fossil fuels are the cheapest form of energy, so they will continue to be burned unless we put a gradually increasing price on carbon emissions [through a carbon tax]. That’s a much better approach than national goals for emissions reductions, which will probably not be met.

Policymakers who deny the threat of climate change cite the research of Richard Lindzen of MIT and other scientists, who question the link between carbon dioxide and global warming—as the last head of NASA, Michael Griffin, also did. As long as there remains this scientific dispute, why should policy makers act?
These contrarians are not having much effect. None of the major countries are denying the problem anymore, though in the U.S. these contrarians are still widely heard, and when it comes to passing a bill in Congress they may still be an obstacle.

In the 1980s scientists worried about a doubling of pre-industrial levels of carbon dioxide, to 550 parts per million. Then 450 started to look like a problem. Now you and others say that 350 is dangerous, and we’re already at 387. What did climatologists learn that caused them to lower the estimate of dangerous CO₂ levels?
The new information came from observations of how the system is responding to 387ppm and to more detailed information on how earth responded in the past to different atmospheric compositions. For instance, we see that the ice sheets are not stable at 387ppm; the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass even with current warming. The Greenland ice sheet had been losing between 150 and 200 cubic kilometers a year in 2002, and now is losing almost 300 cubic kilometers a year. Antarctica had been losing less than 100 cubic kilometers a year, and is now losing more than 150, so it seems like we’re heading into a period of much more rapid ice sheet loss. Also, in the arctic we’ve lost 40 percent of the sea ice in the warm season, and that will soon be 100 percent. Mountain glaciers are retreating rapidly  and could be gone in 50 years. These are not model results but observations: 387ppm is already too high, and 450ppm will be far worse.

In Storms of My Grandchildren , you describe climate tipping points. What are some and why are they so dangerous?
Things like methane hydrates on the continental shelf and the tundra: as they warm up they release their methane [which is a greenhouse gas], which we’re already seeing in the tundra and elsewhere. Tipping points are so dangerous because if you pass them, the climate is out of humanity’s control: if an ice sheet disintegrates and starts to slide into the ocean there’s nothing we can do about that.

What caused you to move beyond research and become an outspoken advocate for addressing climate change?
The realization that there was a gap between what had become clear scientifically and what policymakers knew. Then, when I wrote papers and gave talks on climate change, it became clear that the political system just didn’t want to react to this. Scientists have to help politicians connect the dots.

George F. Will has argued that reducing U.S. carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 would leave us with per capita emissions we last had in the 1800s, implying we’d be back to a horse-and-buggy, pre-electricity era. Is he right?
Not at all. We don’t have to decrease our energy use, we just have to decrease our carbon emissions. That’s why you want to increase the price of carbon, so let other technologies take over, like energy efficiency and renewables. We’ll be moving into a better world, not a worse one, not to a horse-and-buggy world but to one with cleaner air and water once we stop burning coal.

You are critical of the Kyoto climate treaty. Why?
Because it allows carbon offsets and uses cap-and-trade. Emissions from oil, gas, and coal have actually increased under Kyoto. If we just set goals for emissions reductions and allow people to miss them and to use offsets, we’re not going to stabilize and reduce greenhouse emissions at the rate needed.

Do we still have time to avert climate calamity, and if so what would it take?
We do, but just barely. If we phase out coal linearly by 2030, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere will peak at 400 to 425 ppm, which is low enough that it allows you to get back to 350, especially if there is extensive reforestation of degraded areas. So a fundamental requirement is to phase out the use of coal in 20 years, which means you have to start now and not build any more coal-burning power plants: these have a lifetime of decades, and once they’re built utilities don’t want to retire them before their lifetime is up.

You write that energy efficiency and renewables won’t be enough to meet the energy needs of China and India in the next few decades. So what do we do?
They will require nuclear power for electricity. They are both moving in that direction, and we really should help them. They have such polluted air and water that they’d love to get off dirty fuels like coal. Of course, you also want to do energy efficiency and renewables, but I think India and China will turn more toward nuclear. I think the prospects for that are quite good, but we have to get going now.

What do you think of the climate bills now before Congress?
They’re disasters. We can’t allow the polluters to write the bill, but that’s what happened. What’s needed is putting a price on carbon, not cap-and-trade.

What do you think of Obama’s performance on this issue so far?
A lot of individual things have been good, like using EPA to apply pressure for improved vehicle mileage, but I’m disappointed that he hasn’t taken a leadership role. He’s let the politicians in Washington come up with these bills rather than offering them some guidance. Climate change is analogous to Lincoln and slavery or Churchill and Nazism: it’s not the kind of thing where you can compromise. He needs to have some understanding of this [climate] problem himself, and not just listen to his advisers.

Are policies like Cash for Clunkers, or “cash for caulkers” [home weatherizing], or green jobs initiatives useful or just more greenwashing?
They’re useful but costly. What you want to do is address [climate change] in the most cost-effective way possible, which is to put a price on carbon. For example, there’s a program to let people fold the cost of improving the energy of their home or of adding clean energy [by installing solar panels or other forms of renewable energy] into their monthly mortgage payment. You decrease your monthly energy costs by more than the amount that gets added to your mortgage, since you’re averaging the cost over several years. This works best if you have a rising price on carbon.

You write about the need to take to the streets and engage in civil resistance. Such as? Anything that draws attention to the fundamental problem. We just had this example of the student in Utah who upset the Bureau of Land Management by bidding on oil and gas leases, without even intending to pay for them, in order to stop energy companies from acquiring them and drilling on public lands.

You make it sound like now that you’ve written the book, you’re going to go hole up in your lab. Really?
I wish I could. But when I started to speak out about climate change in 2004, after 15 years of avoiding it, I saw that the problem is not going to be solved easily. I’m afraid this is going to continue.

Source NEWS WEEK

 
These are personal choices that we can all make to bring about change. As I say in the book:

Feel no guilt for being part of the problem, but feel responsible and inspired to be part of a solution. A few great men and women may start out being the power of one, but no single great man, no single great woman, from the start of history or into the future, will make a change without collective will.

We need collective will, collective effort, and collective vision, for our collective future.

You and yours. Me and mine. Them and theirs.

But it’s only your choice.

Yet, as deniers of climate change, they’re amateurs compared to us.  Us activists, environmentalists, scientists, and certainly Copenhagen politicians.

Even though we’re believers, not skeptics, our denial is far more insidious and subtle.  So subtle, in fact, that we’ve managed to convince ourselves that we’re not in denial at all.  Quite the opposite.  Why, the thought is too absurd even to contemplate.

But it’s true.

We’re deniers every time we say “80 percent by 2050,” or even “80 percent by 2020”; every time we refer to tipping points in the future tense; every time we advocate substituting “clean” energy for “dirty” energy; every time we buy a squiggly light bulb or a hybrid vehicle; every time we advocate for cap-and-trade, or even a carbon tax; every time we countenance the mention of loopy geoengineering schemes; every time we invoke the future of our children and grandchildren and ignore the widespread suffering from global climate disruption today.

Every time we say these things and more, we’re promoting denial of dire climate reality, the reality that’s spinning out of our grasp so fast that we conduct our frenetic climate “solutions” efforts in a kind of stupor, obsessing with parts-per-million statistics, keeping desperately busy to ward off our own utter collapse borne of despair.

The reality we’re denying?  We’re denying that we’ve put so much carbon into the atmosphere already that positive feedback loops are well on their way to amplification hell. We’re denying that time lags between carbon emissions and their effects are frighteningly relevant, and that the disastrous effects we’re seeing now are from emissions of 30 years ago.  We’re denying that non-linear responses of physical systems cannot be calculated and therefore are perilously ignored. We’re denying that our consumption and waste have far exceeded planetary capacity, possibly irreparably so.

We’re denying reality because we’re not talking about it; we’re invoking fantasies and free lunches instead.

Why do we act like this?  Because just like the skeptics, we are inordinately fond of our cushy lives.  Because we don’t want to give up our privileged, well-stocked existences any more than the skeptics do (and enter the realms of unthinkable thoughts, to wit, go back to the jungles? the caves? the starving, thirsting millions—or is that billions?—never, never, never, not us).  Because in our heart of hearts, we want the skeptics to be right.  We are brothers and sisters.  And so we join them.

But our denial is much, much worse, because we are the ones presumably advocating for action on global climate disruption.  And when we fall short, who’s left to do the job?

Click the link to Read More on this from Grist  ……

Please note:
This article is for information purposes only. The Greenhouse Neutral Foundation does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any information provided.

A Reality Check From the Brink of Extinction

PLEASE NOTE. The Greenhouse Neutral Foundation determined this provocative discussion in the article below deserved full exposure on the site and has reproduced the piece in its entirety. It gives full credit to AlterNet.org and to Chris Hedges.

Chris Hedges in TruthDig channels the radical thinking of Derek Jensen and argues that there is no possible way to address the release of carbon dioxide without addressing the way industrial society without addressing corporate power: “The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits.”

We can join Bill McKibben on Oct. 24 in nationwide protests over rising carbon emissions. We can cut our consumption of fossil fuels. We can use less water. We can banish plastic bags. We can install compact fluorescent light bulbs. We can compost in our backyard. But unless we dismantle the corporate state, all those actions will be just as ineffective as the Ghost Dance shirts donned by native American warriors to protect themselves from the bullets of white soldiers at Wounded Knee.

“If we all wait for the great, glorious revolution there won’t be anything left,” author and environmental activist Derrick Jensen told me when I interviewed him in a phone call to his home in California. “If all we do is reform work, this culture will grind away. This work is necessary, but not sufficient. We need to use whatever means are necessary to stop this culture from killing the planet. We need to target and take down the industrial infrastructure that is systematically dismembering the planet. Industrial civilization is functionally incompatible with life on the planet, and is murdering the planet. We need to do whatever is necessary to stop this.”

The oil and natural gas industry, the coal industry, arms and weapons manufacturers, industrial farms, deforestation industries, the automotive industry and chemical plants will not willingly accept their own extinction. They are indifferent to the looming human catastrophe. We will not significantly reduce carbon emissions by drying our laundry in the backyard and naively trusting the power elite. The corporations will continue to cannibalize the planet for the sake of money. They must be halted by organized and militant forms of resistance. The crisis of global heating is a social problem. It requires a social response.

The United States, after rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, went on to increase its carbon emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels. The European Union countries during the same period reduced their emissions by 2 percent. But the recent climate negotiations in Bangkok, designed to lead to a deal in Copenhagen in December, have scuttled even the tepid response of Kyoto. Kyoto is dead. The EU, like the United States, will no longer abide by binding targets for emission reductions. Countries will unilaterally decide how much to cut. They will submit their plans to international monitoring. And while Kyoto put the burden of responsibility on the industrialized nations that created the climate crisis, the new plan treats all countries the same. It is a huge step backward.

“All of the so-called solutions to global warming take industrial capitalism as a given,” said Jensen, who wrote “Endgame” and “The Culture of Make Believe.” “The natural world is supposed to conform to industrial capitalism. This is insane. It is out of touch with physical reality. What’s real is real. Any social system–it does not matter if we are talking about industrial capitalism or an indigenous Tolowa people–their way of life, is dependent upon a real, physical world. Without a real, physical world you don’t have anything. When you separate yourself from the real world you start to hallucinate. You believe the machines are more real than real life. How many machines are within 10 feet of you and how many wild animals are within a hundred yards? How many machines do you have a daily relationship with? We have forgotten what is real.” 

The latest studies show polar ice caps are melting at a record rate and that within a decade the Arctic will be an open sea during summers. This does not give us much time. White ice and snow reflect 80 percent of sunlight back to space, while dark water reflects only 20 percent, absorbing a much larger heat load. Scientists warn that the loss of the ice will dramatically change winds and sea currents around the world. And the rapidly melting permafrost is unleashing methane chimneys from the ocean floor along the Russian coastline. Methane is a greenhouse gas 25 times more toxic than carbon dioxide, and some scientists have speculated that the release of huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere could asphyxiate the human species. The rising sea levels, which will swallow countries such as Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands and turn cities like New Orleans into a new Atlantis, will combine with severe droughts, horrific storms and flooding to eventually dislocate over a billion people. The effects will be suffering, disease and death on a scale unseen in human history.

We can save groves of trees, protect endangered species and clean up rivers, all of which is good, but to leave the corporations unchallenged would mean our efforts would be wasted. These personal adjustments and environmental crusades can too easily become a badge of moral purity, an excuse for inaction. They can absolve us from the harder task of confronting the power of corporations. 

The damage to the environment by human households is minuscule next to the damage done by corporations. Municipalities and individuals use 10 percent of the nation’s water while the other 90 percent is consumed by agriculture and industry. Individual consumption of energy accounts for about a quarter of all energy consumption; the other 75 percent is consumed by corporations. Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States. We can, and should, live more simply, but it will not be enough if we do not radically transform the economic structure of the industrial world.

“If your food comes from the grocery store and your water from a tap you will defend to the death the system that brings these to you because your life depends on it,” said Jensen, who is holding workshops around the country called Deep Green Resistance [click here and here] to build a militant resistance movement. “If your food comes from a land base and if your water comes from a river you will defend to the death these systems. In any abusive system, whether we are talking about an abusive man against his partner or the larger abusive system, you force your victims to become dependent upon you. We believe that industrial capitalism is more important than life.”

Those who run our corporate state have fought environmental regulation as tenaciously as they have fought financial regulation. They are responsible for our personal impoverishment as well as the impoverishment of our ecosystem. We remain addicted, courtesy of the oil, gas and automobile industries and a corporate-controlled government, to fossil fuels. Species are vanishing. Fish stocks are depleted. The great human migration from coastlines and deserts has begun. And as temperatures continue to rise, huge parts of the globe will become uninhabitable. NASA climate scientist James Hansen has demonstrated that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with maintenance of the biosphere on the “planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” He has determined that the world must stop burning coal by 2030–and the industrialized world well before that–if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number. Coal supplies half of our electricity in the United States.

“We need to separate ourselves from the corporate government that is killing the planet,” Jensen said. “We need to get really serious. We are talking about life on the planet. We need to shut down the oil infrastructure. I don’t care, and the trees don’t care, if we do this through lawsuits, mass boycotts or sabotage. I asked Dahr Jamail how long a bridge would last in Iraq that was not defended. He said probably six to 12 hours. We need to make the economic system, which is the engine for so much destruction, unmanageable. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta has been able to reduce Nigerian oil output by 20 percent. We need to stop the oil economy.” 

The reason the ecosystem is dying is not because we still have a dryer in our basement. It is because corporations look at everything, from human beings to the natural environment, as exploitable commodities. It is because consumption is the engine of corporate profits. We have allowed the corporate state to sell the environmental crisis as a matter of personal choice when actually there is a need for profound social and economic reform. We are left powerless.

Alexander Herzen, speaking a century ago to a group of Russian anarchists working to topple the czar, reminded his followers that they were not there to rescue the system. 

“We think we are the doctors,” Herzen said. “We are the disease.”