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Obama says climate change a matter of urgency | Reuters

CHICAGO, Dec 9 (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama said on Tuesday attacking global climate change is a "matter of urgency" that will create jobs as he got advice from Al Gore, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the issue.

In remarks to reporters, Obama made clear he would adopt an aggressive approach to global warming when he takes over the White House on Jan. 20.

He and Vice President-elect Joe Biden met for nearly two hours with former Vice President Gore at Obama's presidential transition office in Chicago.

"All three of us are in agreement that the time for delay is over, the time for denial is over," Obama said.

He said he would work with Democrats and Republicans, businesses, consumers and others with a stake in the issue to try to reach a consensus on a bold, aggressive approach to tackling the problem.

"This is a matter of urgency and of national security and it has to be dealt with in a serious way. That's what I intend my administration to do," Obama said.

Obama had a willing accomplice in Gore, whose won a Nobel in 2007 for his years-long effort to educate people about the gradual warming of the planet and to argue against those scientists who believe a warming trend is a naturally occurring event.

There was no talk of offering Gore a job in the Obama administration. Gore has indicated he is not interested in a position of climate "czar" or any Cabinet post.

Just two days after Obama won the Nov. 4 election, Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection rolled out a media campaign to push for immediate investments in energy efficiency, renewable power generation like wind and solar technology and the creation of a unified national power grid.

Gore and his group are in line with most U.S. environmental groups, which believe the Obama administration has a chance to stem global warming.

Critics have accused the outgoing Bush administration of stalling on the issue, but the White House insists it is taking steps aimed at addressing the problem without damaging the U.S. economy.

"We have the opportunity now to create jobs all across this country, in all 50 states, to re-power America, to redesign how we use energy, to think about how we are increasing efficiency, to make our economy stronger, make us more safe, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and make us competitive for decades to come, even as we're saving the planet," Obama said.

Labels: Al Gore, Climate change, Global Warming, Green/Energy related, President-elect Obama

Op-Ed Contributor - The Climate for Change - NYTimes.com

THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.

The electrifying redemption of America’s revolutionary declaration that all human beings are born equal sets the stage for the renewal of United States leadership in a world that desperately needs to protect its primary endowment: the integrity and livability of the planet.

The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.

Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis.

Economists across the spectrum — including Martin Feldstein and Lawrence Summers — agree that large and rapid investments in a jobs-intensive infrastructure initiative is the best way to revive our economy in a quick and sustainable way. Many also agree that our economy will fall behind if we continue spending hundreds of billions of dollars on foreign oil every year. Moreover, national security experts in both parties agree that we face a dangerous strategic vulnerability if the world suddenly loses access to Middle Eastern oil.

As Abraham Lincoln said during America’s darkest hour, “The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” In our present case, thinking anew requires discarding an outdated and fatally flawed definition of the problem we face.

Thirty-five years ago this past week, President Richard Nixon created Project Independence, which set a national goal that, within seven years, the United States would develop “the potential to meet our own energy needs without depending on any foreign energy sources.” His statement came three weeks after the Arab oil embargo had sent prices skyrocketing and woke America to the dangers of dependence on foreign oil. And — not coincidentally — it came only three years after United States domestic oil production had peaked.

At the time, the United States imported less than a third of its oil from foreign countries. Yet today, after all six of the presidents succeeding Nixon repeated some version of his goal, our dependence has doubled from one-third to nearly two-thirds — and many feel that global oil production is at or near its peak.

Some still see this as a problem of domestic production. If we could only increase oil and coal production at home, they argue, then we wouldn’t have to rely on imports from the Middle East. Some have come up with even dirtier and more expensive new ways to extract the same old fuels, like coal liquids, oil shale, tar sands and “clean coal” technology.

But in every case, the resources in question are much too expensive or polluting, or, in the case of “clean coal,” too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate. Indeed, those who spend hundreds of millions promoting “clean coal” technology consistently omit the fact that there is little investment and not a single large-scale demonstration project in the United States for capturing and safely burying all of this pollution. If the coal industry can make good on this promise, then I’m all for it. But until that day comes, we simply cannot any longer base the strategy for human survival on a cynical and self-interested illusion.

Labels: Al Gore, Climate change, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Oil

US climate bill dies; hope for 2009 | Reuters

WASHINGTON, June 6 (Reuters) - A U.S. carbon-capping bill aimed at curbing climate change died on Friday in the Senate but its supporters looked to the next president to enact a global warming law as early as 2009.

The bill aimed to cut total U.S. global warming emissions by 66 percent by 2050. Opponents said it would cost jobs and raise fuel prices in an already pinched American economy.

Far from being discouraged, Sen. Joe Lieberman said international observers would be gratified that the measure got support from a majority in the Senate, including presumptive presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama.

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming, Senate

Myanmar believes 10,000 dead from cyclone | Reuters

By Aung Hla Tun

YANGON (Reuters) - Myanmar's military junta believes at least 10,000 people died in a cyclone that ripped through the Irrawaddy delta, triggering a massive international aid response for the pariah southeast Asian nation.

"The basic message was that they believe the provisional death toll was about 10,000 with 3,000 missing," a Yangon-based diplomat told Reuters in Bangkok, summarizing a briefing from Foreign Minister Nyan Win. "It's a very serious toll."

The scale of the disaster from Saturday's devastating cyclone drew a rare acceptance of outside help from the diplomatically isolated generals, who spurned such approaches in the aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

The secretive military, which has ruled the former Burma for 46 years, has moved even further into the shadows in the last six months due to the widespread outrage at its bloody crackdown on protests led by Buddhist monks in September.

The official toll on state media stands at 3,394 dead and 2,879 missing, although those figures only cover two of the five declared disaster zones, where U.N. officials say hundreds of thousands are without shelter or drinking water.

Labels: Climate change, natural disasters, World news

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming

The Associated Press: Howard Defeated in Election

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) — Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, one of the Bush administration's staunchest allies, suffered a humiliating election defeat Saturday at the hands of an opposition leader who has vowed to pull troops out of Iraq.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd, a Chinese-speaking former diplomat, has also promised to sign the Kyoto Protocol on capping greenhouse gas emissions, leaving the U.S. as the only industrialized country not to have joined it.

Rudd, speaking Sunday in the northeastern city of Brisbane at his first news conference as incoming prime minister, promised "action, and action now" on climate change. Rudd said Labor lawmakers were due to meet on Thursday, and he hoped that he and his ministers would be sworn in soon after that.

Rudd said he planned to visit Washington next year, and that atop the agenda would be his plan to pull Australia's 550 combat troops out of Iraq. Howard had rejected withdrawal plans for Australia's troops in Iraq, and refused to ratify the pact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Labels: Climate change, Iraq War, World news

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize - Climate Change - MSNBC.com

OSLO, Norway - Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for their efforts to spread awareness of man-made climate change and lay the foundations for counteracting it.

"I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize," Gore said in a statement released after the award was announced. "We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity," he added.

Gore won an Academy Award this year for his film "An Inconvenient Truth," a documentary on global warming, and had been widely expected to win the prize.

Labels: Al Gore, Climate change, Global Warming, Nobel Prize

U.N.: Record extreme weather in '07 - Climate Change - MSNBC.com

GENEVA - The world experienced a series of record-breaking weather events in early 2007, from flooding in Asia to heat waves in Europe and snowfall in South Africa, the United Nations weather agency said Tuesday.

The World Meteorological Organization said global land surface temperatures in January and April were likely the warmest since records began in 1880, at more than 1 degree Celsius higher than average for those months.

There have also been severe monsoon floods across South Asia, abnormally heavy rains in northern Europe, China, Sudan, Mozambique and Uruguay, extreme heat waves in southeastern Europe and Russia, and unusual snowfall in South Africa and South America this year, the WMO said.

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming

Global-Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine - Newsweek Technology - Sharon Begley

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate's Environment Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," concluded a report by 600 scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with "the overwhelming science out there, the deniers' days were numbered." As she left a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based on. "I realized," says Boxer, "there was a movement behind this that just wasn't giving up."

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming

Floods strike Britain; Thames rising - Yahoo! News

TEWKESBURY, England - Emergency workers rescued hundreds of trapped people Monday as water swallowed swaths of central England in the worst flooding to hit the country for 60 years. Officials said some rivers were still rising, with the western section of the rain-swollen River Thames on the verge of bursting its banks.

Roads and parking lots were submerged, trains suspended, buses canceled. Hundreds of thousands of people were without electricity or drinking water, and farmers saw their summer crops destroyed.

Torrential rains have plagued Britain over the past month — nearly 5 inches fell in some areas on Friday alone — and more downpours were predicted this week.

"This emergency is far from over and further flooding is extremely likely," Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

Labels: Climate change, World news

Al Gore, on his new book, "The Assault On Reason."

Labels: Al Gore, Climate change

Activists: U.S. to reject climate deal - Yahoo! News

LONDON - The United States is preparing to reject new targets on climate change at a Group of Eight summit next month, dashing German and British hopes for a new global pact on carbon emissions, according to comments on a document released by the environmental group Greenpeace.

The White House on Saturday declined to confirm the comments were from U.S. officials, but said discussions continued about what the G-8 leaders will say.

'Our challenge and opportunity is in developing an approach that is appropriate and conducive to all these major emitting countries,' said Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, holding the rotating presidency of both the G-8 bloc of industrialized nations and the European Union, wants the June meeting to agree to targets for cuts in greenhouse gas output and a timetable for a major agreement on emissions reduction to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

Labels: Climate change

C4 accused of falsifying data in documentary on climate change - Independent Online Edition > Media

The makers of a Channel 4 documentary which claimed that global warming is a swindle have been accused of fabricating data by one of the scientists who participated in the film.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was broadcast on 8 March and has been criticised by leading scientists for errors, distortions and misrepresentations.

The film has also been referred to the regulatory watchdog Ofcom which is considering a complaint from 37 senior scientists that the programme breached the broadcasting code on the misrepresentation of views and facts.

Now even a climate sceptic whose dissenting views were used by the film- makers to bolster their claims about the "lies" and "swindles" of global warming has accused the documentary of promulgating falsehoods.

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming, Media, World news

U.N. chief: Warming as dangerous as war - Climate Change - MSNBC.com

UNITED NATIONS - Human-induced global warming poses as much danger to the world as war, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Thursday as he urged the United States to take the lead in the fight against global warming.

In his first address on the subject at the U.N. General Assembly hall, Ban said he would emphasize the climate crisis with the leaders at a June meeting in Germany of the Group of Eight industrialized nations — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, the United States and Russia.

Labels: Climate change, Global Warming, U.N.