Foreign Policy: The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2008

This is a MUST READ. Be sure to check out #6: "Greenhouse Gas Comes from Solar Panels."

What you don't know can hurt you.

Technorati tags: Foreign Policy, top ten, stories, missed, solar panels, solar energy

Who is the More Green Candidate? Compare.

Know the facts before you vote. Compare the Candidates Policy Proposals:

Click on the Chart for Larger View.

For more information see: See at a glance where the presidential candidates stand on climate and energy issues | Grist

Technorati tags: Energy, Climate, Climate Change, Green, Energy Policy, Global Warming, Environment, Energy Policy, Barack Obama, John McCain, 2008, Election, Presidential

Obama McCain and the "Worst Case Scenario"

The Real News Network interviews Cass Sunnstein:

Sunnstein: The climate change crisis, not terrorism, is the real "worst case scenario"

Bio

Cass R. Sunstein (born 1954) is an American preeminent legal scholar, particularly in the fields of constitutional law, administrative law, environmental law, and law and behavioral economics. Sunstein taught at the University of Chicago Law School for 27 years, where he continues to teach as the Harry Kalven Visiting Professor. Sunstein is currently the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

And Then There Was One

Thomas L. Friedman, NY Times, writes:

"As we emerge from Labor Day, college students are gathering back on campuses not only to start the fall semester, but also, in some cases, to vote for the first time in a presidential election. There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that...."

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Also See:

• Friedman: A Vote for Obama

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Energy, Environment, 2008 Election, Barack Obama, John McCain, Green, op ed

How Green is Your Candidate?

Grist has done the research and provided valuable information about where the presidential candidates fall on the Green scale.

Interviews and information on the presidential candidates' energy plans and environmental positions are provided. You can also compare the candidate's green positions in this chart allowing you to quickly contrast where the presidential contenders stand on climate and energy issues.

Finally, you can watch video of "some of the candidates speaking at the first-ever presidential candidate forum focused on climate change and energy policy, cosponsored by Grist."

"Grist also teamed up with Outside to interview presidential contenders about green issues. [They've] published Q&As with all of the Democrats and a number of the Republicans. [They've] also compiled fact sheets on the candidates, with their current platforms, voting records, video, audio, and more" to be updated "as the campaigns unfold."

Illustration: Grist.org

Technorati tags: 2008 Presidential Election, Presidential Candidates, Green, Global Warming, Energy Policies, Environment

"The Mother of All Energy Paradigm Shifts"

Go Green and Save Money
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Have your eyes recently popped out of your head when you opened your electric bill? Do you, like me, live in one of those states where electricity has been deregulated and the state no longer oversees the generation price so your utility rates have skyrocketed since 2002?

If so, you need to listen to a proposal being aired by Jim Rogers, the chairman and chief executive of Duke Energy, and recently filed with the North Carolina Utilities Commission. (Duke Energy is headquartered in Charlotte.) It’s called “save-a-watt,” and it aims to turn the electricity/utility industry upside down by rewarding utilities for the kilowatts they save customers by improving their energy efficiency rather than rewarding them for the kilowatts they sell customers by building more power plants.

Mr. Rogers’s proposal is based on three simple principles. The first is that the cheapest way to generate clean, emissions-free power is by improving energy efficiency. Or, as he puts it, “The most environmentally sound, inexpensive and reliable power plant is the one we don’t have to build because we’ve helped our customers save energy.”

Second, we need to make energy efficiency something that is as “back of mind” as energy usage. If energy efficiency depends on people remembering to do 20 things on a checklist, it’s not going to happen at scale.

Third, the only institutions that have the infrastructure, capital and customer base to empower lots of people to become energy efficient are the utilities, so they are the ones who need to be incentivized to make big investments in efficiency that can be accessed by every customer.

The only problem is that, historically, utilities made their money by making large-scale investments in new power plants, whether coal or gas or nuclear. As long as a utility could prove to its regulators that the demand for that new plant was there, the utility got to pass along the cost, and then some, to its customers. Mr. Rogers’s save-a-watt concept proposes to change all of that.

“The way it would work is that the utility would spend the money and take the risk to make its customers as energy efficient as possible,” he explained. That would include installing devices in your home that would allow the utility to adjust your air-conditioners or refrigerators at peak usage times. It would include plans to incentivize contractors to build more efficient homes with more efficient boilers, heaters, appliances and insulation. It could even include partnering with a factory to buy the most energy-efficient equipment or with a family to winterize their house.

“Energy efficiency is the ‘fifth fuel’ — after coal, gas, renewables and nuclear,” said Mr. Rogers. “Today, it is the lowest-cost alternative and is emissions-free. It should be our first choice in meeting our growing demand for electricity, as well as in solving the climate challenge.”

Because energy efficiency is, in effect, a resource, he added, in order for utilities to use more of it, “efficiency should be treated as a production cost in the regulatory arena.” The utility would earn its money on the basis of the actual watts it saves through efficiency innovations. (California’s “decoupling” systems goes partly in this direction.)

At the end of the year, an independent body would determine how many watts of energy the utility has saved over a predetermined baseline and the utility would then be compensated by its customers accordingly.

“Over time,” said Mr. Rogers, “the price of electricity per unit will go up, because there would be an incremental cost in adding efficiency equipment — although that cost would be less than the incremental cost of adding a new power plant. But your overall bills should go down, because your home will be more efficient and you will use less electricity.”

Once such a system is in place, Mr. Rogers added, “our engineers would wake up every day thinking about how to squeeze more productivity gains out of new technology for energy efficiency — rather than just how to build a bigger transmission or distribution network to meet the growing demands of customers.” (Why don’t we think about incentivizing U.S. automakers the same way — give them tax rebates for save-a-miles?)

That is how you produce a more efficient energy infrastructure at scale. “Universal access to electricity was a 20th century idea — now it has to be universal access to energy efficiency, which could make us the most energy productive country in the world,” he added.

Pulling all this off will be very complicated. But if Mr. Rogers and North Carolina can do it, it would be the mother of all energy paradigm shifts.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Energy Efficiency, Conservation, Global Warming, Duke Energy Corporation, Jim Rogers, news, op ed

Be A Part of 'The Shift'

With all the destruction and negativity and pessimism in the world today, here is something positive you can be a part of:

The Shift

A massive worldwide phenomenon is in progress, offering seeds of great hope for the future.

Millions of individuals, organizations and corporations around the world are waking up and embracing a new outlook with an emphasis on their responsibility to contribute positively to our collective future.

We are in the middle of the biggest social transformation in human history, The SHIFT.



At this critical point, it is imperative we make the masses aware of this global movement quickly. This evolutionary phenomenon is broader and deeper than the most visible SHIFT, the environmental movement. It involves our very understanding of who we are as human beings, and our responsibility to the world and to life itself.

THE SHIFT movie raises awareness to the story of our roles in an evolutionary shift in our collective consciousness.

As it chronicles the faces, the stories and leaders assisting in this social transformation, the film reveals its emergence & meaning.

Be a part of The Shift: Visit http://theshiftmovie.com

Hat tip to Al Buono.

Technorati tags: film, movies, The Shift, Global Warming, Environment, news, activism, video

Friedman's Green Folly

Friedman gets it half right in today's Times op ed: Politicians continue to play "energy politics" instead of crafting meaningful energy policy.

But despite the fact that certain of "America’s corporate icons — G.M., G.E., A.I.G., DuPont, PepsiCo — 'have all come out in favor of a national mandatory limit on carbon emissions,'" the problem will never be solved until we demand public financing of our elections. Politicians beholden to corporate campaign donations will never get serious about solving the environmental problem or any other problem as long as they fear biting the hand that feeds them.

Further, Friedman's assertion that the only way to solve the energy crisis is to slap a slew of taxes on gasoline guaranteeing that its price will remain at unaffordable levels to millions of Americans whose budgets are already stretched to the limit is shortsighted, elitist, and dead wrong.

That kind of thinking makes as much sense as the Energy bigwigs rational for gas price gouging: if we don't keep our prices high, despite our obscene profits, and despite the fact that we have not invested in refineries in years and they are not operating at peak performance -- people will continue to demand gas which we won't be able to provide because we are pocketing those obscene profits instead of investing them in refineries to meet that demand.

The government can fashion a green policy that uses tax incentives instead of the present policy of free handouts to oil companies. They can offer all kinds of pro-green tax incentives as well as many of Friedman's suggestions. But to believe that any of this will happen on the scale it needs to happen without cutting the umbilical cord between politicians and corporations is, as Tom-Tom says, "only contributing to global warming by adding hot air."

It's not our "energy prices" that we have to get right, Tommy, it's our democracy.

Our Green Bubble
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Surely the most glaring contrast in American political life today is the amount of words, speeches and magazine covers devoted to the necessity of “going green,” “combating climate change” and gaining “energy security,” and the actual solutions being offered by our leaders to do any of these things. You could very comfortably drive a Hummer through the gap between our words and deeds.

We are playing pretend — which, when you think about it, is really troubling. Here are the facts: Our worst enemies, like Iran, have been emboldened by all their petrodollars. The vast majority of scientists tell us that global warming caused by our burning of fossil fuels is a real danger. And with three billion new consumers from India, Russia and China joining the world economy, it is inevitable that manufacturing clean, green power systems, appliances, homes and cars will be the next great global industry. It has to be, or we will not survive as a species.

And yet ... and yet our president and our Congress still won’t give us an energy bill that would create the legal and economic framework to address these issues at the speed and scale required.

If you were President Bush, wouldn’t you want to leave behind something big, bold and important on energy, just in case — you know, just in case — Iraq doesn’t turn out so well?

I sure would. But the president still has not challenged Congress or the country to undertake a radical departure on energy. So we still have only “energy politics,” not “energy policy.” Like previous energy bills, the packages working through the House and Senate today represent more “the sum of all lobbies,” as the energy expert Gal Luft, co-chairman of the Set America Free Coalition, puts it, not the sum of our best ideas.

Some lawmakers are pushing corn ethanol from Iowa, either because they hail from that area and are looking to give more welfare to farmers by wasting money on an alternative fuel that will never reach the scale of what is needed, or because they plan to run in the Iowa caucuses. Others are pushing huge subsidies to turn coal into gasoline, because they come from coal states. Those who don’t come from Michigan want higher mileage standards imposed on Detroit, while those who come from Michigan prefer to continue their assisted suicide of the U.S. auto industry by blocking tougher mileage requirements.

“The only green that they are serious about in Congress right now is the one with Ben Franklin’s picture on it,” Mr. Luft said.

Yes, it is helpful that Mr. Bush expressed a desire last week to work with other nations to limit greenhouse gases. His bully pulpit matters. But no one will — or should — take him seriously unless his government first leads by example. What would that look like? It has to start with a clear, long-term price signal. That is, a carbon tax or gasoline tax — or a cap and trade system with a binding national ceiling on carbon dioxide emissions — which would set a price for dumping carbon into the atmosphere or driving a gas-guzzling car.

Get Washington to signal that gasoline is never going to retreat from a level of $3.50 or $4 a gallon — and that wind and solar subsidies will be there for a decade, not stop and start as they always have before; get Washington to commit to buying a fixed volume of solar and wind power for government buildings and Army bases for 10 years, with only U.S.-based manufacturers able to compete for contracts; get Washington to set a new fleet average of 35 miles per gallon for Detroit within 10 years — with no loopholes; establish government loan guarantees for any company that wants to build a nuclear power plant; and, finally, build a national transmission grid — a green power superhighway — so that solar energy from Arizona or wind from Wyoming can power homes in Chicago. Do all that and our private sector will take America from green laggard to green leader.

Unfortunately, Congress is brewing instead a hodgepodge of incrementalism. This is particularly disappointing when America’s corporate icons — G.M., G.E., A.I.G., DuPont, PepsiCo — “have all come out in favor of a national mandatory limit on carbon emissions,” notes Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense. “But Democrats and Republicans in the Senate have not risen to their challenge.”

We have a multigenerational problem that requires a systemic, multigenerational response, and that can happen only if we get our energy prices right. Only that will guarantee green innovation and commercialization at scale. Anything less is wasted breath and wasted money — and any candidate who says otherwise is only contributing to global warming by adding hot air.

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Global Warming, Politics, Congress, Energy Policy, news, commentary, op ed

The Witness Next Door

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

One of the most unusual people in New Jersey these days is a tall 34-year-old black man named Daoud Hari. Others may lose their tempers at traffic jams on the turnpike, but he’s just glad he’s no longer being tortured.

Mr. Hari has just arrived in the U.S. from Chad and Darfur, where he says he was beaten and told repeatedly he was going to be executed. He is one of just a handful of Darfuris — his lawyer knows of two others — whom the U.S. has accepted as refugees.

I knew Mr. Hari in his previous life, because he interpreted for me early last year. We journeyed together along the Darfur-Chad border through a no man’s land of villages that were being attacked by Sudan’s janjaweed militia.

Mr. Hari helped me interview two orphan boys living under a tree, a 13-year-old girl shot in the chest, a 6-year-old boy trying desperately not to cry as doctors treated shrapnel wounds to his leg and a 15-year-old girl gang-raped by the janjaweed.

It is a different world there. It is the antipodes of New Jersey.

When our vehicle became stuck in the sand in one janjaweed area, we strained side by side to push it out before trouble arrived. We slept in the sand under the stars, we saw gruesome injuries, we witnessed people preparing to be killed, and we saw each other dusty and frightened. In that crucible, I grew steadily more impressed with Mr. Hari’s courage, for as a local person he was at greater risk of immediate execution than a foreigner like me.

He was scared, of course, but what drove him was a relentless determination to get out the story of what was happening to his fellow Darfuris. He was determined to fight genocide with the best weapon he had, his training in English.

Interpreters and drivers are the secret to good international reporting, and they do much of the work, take most of the risks and get none of the credit. Mr. Hari regularly interpreted for other journalists, repeatedly putting himself in danger to get out the stories.

Last August, he accompanied an ace Chicago Tribune reporter, Paul Salopek, into Darfur, but they were seized by an armed faction. Once, he said, a commander ordered his soldiers to execute him, but they were from the same tribe and balked. Another time, he says, a commander untied him and told him to escape — but he refused unless the driver was freed as well. So Mr. Hari was tied up again, and he was beaten as he was interrogated about his work with me and other journalists.

Finally, after more than a month, Sudan freed Mr. Hari along with Mr. Salopek and the driver. Eventually Mr. Hari made his way back to Chad, and the U.S. granted him status as a political refugee. It is disorienting to be with him here, where we are both clean, rested and safe.

Yet even here Mr. Hari is haunted by Darfur. He knows one brother was killed; the other was attacked and beaten, but Mr. Hari assumes he is still alive. Of his three sisters, Mr. Hari last saw one in 2003 and the others in 2006.

He plans to study and is also determined to speak out about Darfur and tell Americans what is happening to his people.

Mr. Hari’s presence in the U.S. underscores a profound difference between Darfur and past genocides: In the past, we could always claim that we didn’t fully appreciate what was going on until too late.

It was only a faint reed of an excuse, for in fact information always did trickle out about past genocides even as they were underway. But this time we can’t even feign ignorance.

A superb new documentary, “The Devil Came on Horseback,” provides a wrenching tour through the eyes of a tormented American military observer there. A handful of books chronicle the killings; one of them, “Not on Our Watch,” has hit the best-seller list with its suggestions for what citizens can do. President Bush has described the slaughter in Darfur as genocide since 2004.

Google Earth has developed a first-rate program to observe the devastation from above. On my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, you can see a man whose eyes were gouged out by the janjaweed as well as video from the journey last year with Mr. Hari.

Or, if you live in New Jersey, you can simply turn to one of your newest neighbors, and see the pain in his eyes as he wonders if his sisters are still alive.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Darfur, Sudan, War Crimes, Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Immigration, Refugees, civil war, guerrilla warfare, news, commentary, op ed

Minimum Security

By Stephanie McMillan

Technorati tags: Stephanie McMillan, Cartoons, Global Warming, Environment

Angry Soldier

The post below from "Angry Soldier" originally appeared on Craigslist. It has since been flagged -- unjustly -- for removal. Yes, it uses an abundance of profane language. But the anger and truth behind those profanities justifies them. The post, in this blogger's opinion should not have been removed -- profane or not.

If you are sensitive or offended by profane language, stop reading here. (I have semi-edited out the profanities, but not entirely.)

As for the rest of you, this is an incredibly powerful statement which, as my friend Liz wrote, "deserves to be read far and wide." (Thanks, Liz, for passing this on.)

Without further ado, here is the post from "Angry Soldier:"

I'm having the worst damn week of my whole damn life so I'm going to write this while I'm pissed off enough to do it right.

I am SICK of all this bullshit people are writing about the Iraq war. I am abso-f__king-lutely sick to death of it. What the f__k do most of you know about it? You watch it on TV and read the commentaries in the newspaper or Newsweek or whatever g_d damn yuppie news rag you subscribe to and think you're all such f__king experts that you can scream at each other like five year old about whether you're right or not. Let me tell you something: unless you've been there, you don't know a g_d damn thing about it. It you haven't been shot at in that f__king hell hole, SHUT THE F__K UP!

How do I dare say this to you moronic war supporters who are "Supporting our Troops" and waving the flag and all that happy horse sh_t? I'll tell you why. I'm a Marine and I served my tour in Iraq. My husband, also a Marine, served several. I left the service six months ago because I got pregnant while he was home on leave and three days ago I get a visit from two men in uniform who hand me a letter and tell me my husband died in that f__king festering sand-pit. He should have been home a month ago but they extended his tour and now he's coming home in a box.

You f__kers and that g_d-damn lying sack of sh_t they call a president are the reason my husband will never see his baby and my kid will never meet his dad.

And you know what the most f__ked up thing about this Iraq sh_t is? They don't want us there. They're not happy we came and they want us out NOW. We f__ked up their lives even worse than they already were and they're pissed off. We didn't help them and we're not helping them now. That's what our soldiers are dying for.

Oh while I'm good and worked up, the government doesn't even have the decency to help out the soldiers whose lives they ruined. If you really believe the military and the government had no idea the veterans' hospitals were so f__ked up, you are a g_d-damn retard. They don't care about us. We're disposable. We're numbers on a page and they'd rather forget we exist so they don't have to be reminded about the families and lives they ruined while they're sipping their cocktails at another fund raiser dinner. If they were really concerned about supporting the troops, they'd bring them home so their families wouldn't have to cry at a graveside and explain to their children why mommy or daddy isn't coming home. Because you can't explain it. We're not fighting for our country, we're not fighting for the good of Iraq's people, we're fighting for Bush's personal agenda. Patriotism my ass. You know what? My dad served in Vietnam and NOTHING HAS CHANGED.

So I'm pissed. I'm beyond pissed. And I'm going to go to my husband's funeral and recieve that flag and hang it up on the wall for my baby to see when he's older. But I'm not going to tell him that his father died for the stupidty of the American government. I'm going to tell him that his father was a hero and the best man I ever met and that he loved his country enough to die for it, because that's all true and nothing will be solved by telling my son that his father was sent to die by people who didn't care about him at all.

F__k you, war supporters, George W. Bush, and all the g_d damn mother f__kers who made the war possible. I hope you burn in hell.

Technorati tags: Iraq, Craigslist, military, war, anti-war

Least Responsible Pay The Most

Upsetting the Balance
Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

"...'We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming,' President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told an African Union summit in Ethiopia last February. 'Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?'

A study by Oxfam, entitled 'Africa -- Up in Smoke,' noted that in line with climate models, droughts in northwest Kenya appear to becoming more frequent. It profiled the impact on the nomadic pastoralists of Kenya's northwest Turkana region, who graze cattle, camels and goats. They've always known droughts, but because they are now more frequent, families and animals have less chance to recover.

The Turkana people, said Oxfam, call this more persistent drought ' 'Atiaktiak ng'awiyei' or 'the one that divided homes' because so many families split up to survive, migrating in all directions.'

It really is wrong that those least responsible for climate change should pay the most. 'My recommendation is that the biggest polluter pays,' said Mr. Kipng'etich. 'We are one planet, one system.' He has a point. He deserves an answer."

Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Non-TimesSelect Subscribers can read Friedman's entire op ed HERE.

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, New York Times, Kenya, Global Warming, Environment, Drought, news, commentary, op ed

Climate Mash

Watch the video.

"The Climate Mash" is hilarious - but the effects of global warming aren't. Global warming puts our health, our economy and our environment at risk. It's time to demand that major polluters like ExxonMobil and others stop resisting solutions that could make a real difference.

This Halloween, you can help SaveOurEnvironment.org send a message to Congress that they'll never forget. Click on the link above to watch "The Climate Mash" and take action today!

The truth about global warming

Climate scientist John M. Wallace tried to steer Vice President Al Gore away from global warming theories back in 1994. Today, Wallace has changed his thinking and has joined the overwhelming scientific consensus that says that climate change is a serious threat to the planet.

Read all about it: HERE.

Markets, Climate And Katrina

Joseph Stiglitz (TomPaine.com) reports:

"Last January, after the tsunami, in response to widespread calls for an early warning system, I observed that the world had been given an early warning on global warming. The rest of the world has begun to take heed, but Bush, having ignored warnings about Al Qaeda’s plans prior to 9/11, and having not only ignored the warnings about New Orleans levees, but actually gutted funding to shore them, has not led America to do likewise...."