Gore and R.K. Pachauri, head of the International Panel on Climate Change, talk with the media at the May gathering of The Climate Project in Nashville.Associated Press photo
Al Gore is drawing lessons from the Obama campaign as he works to rally support for the Waxman-Markey climate and energy bill.
While the environmental movement will never have the cash of ExxonMobil and its fossil-fuel friends, it does have legions of grassroots supporters. Gore’s two groups—the Alliance for Climate Protection and The Climate Project—are putting thousands of “boots on the ground” in key congressional districts around the country to help build momentum for climate legislation.
“In order to win this struggle, we have to go to the constituents of the Congress,” Gore told Grist recently. “Just laying the facts on the table and playing an inside-the-Beltway game is not going to do it on this issue. We have to win the feelings and opinions of voters in the country as a whole ... We have to go to the grassroots.”
Gore founded the Alliance for Climate Protection and The Climate Project in 2006 with money he earned from An Inconvenient Truth and other ventures. He’s built them into “multi-hundred-million-dollar” organizations “aimed at getting the facts before the people,” he told Grist. Up to this point, their work has been largely separate: The Climate Project has trained 2,600 people to present versions of Gore’s famous slideshow, while the Alliance has run major advertising campaigns to convince Americans of the need to address the climate crisis.
But now the two groups are coordinating closely as they enter a new campaign-style phase with a focused mission: passing a solid climate bill.
The plan, according to Alliance CEO Maggie Fox, is to organize “the biggest mobilization that the climate movement has ever seen.”
Getting into the field
Fox came to the Alliance in March from America Votes, a coalition of progressive groups that coordinates get-out-the-vote drives in swing states. She replaced Cathy Zoi, who left to join the Obama administration as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy.
The Alliance recently brought on other veterans of national political campaigns: Steve Hildebrand, the Obama campaign’s deputy national campaign director, is working as a consultant for the project. Steve Bouchard, a veteran of the 2004 and 2008 Democratic presidential campaigns, is campaign manager for the Alliance. Brian Rogers, spokesperson for John McCain’s presidential campaign last year, has come on board as research director.
The group is hiring a fleet of veteran field organizers who cut their teeth during the Obama campaign, and who bring a wealth of grassroots organizing skills. Since the beginning of the year, the group’s paid staff has grown from 20 people to 120, with plans to expand up to 250 in the next few months. The Alliance has moved its headquarters from California to Washington, D.C., but at the same time sent many of its organizers far outside the Beltway. New hires include 16 state directors and 55 regional field organizers, working in a total of 28 states, with a particular emphasis on the districts of swing-vote representatives in the Midwest and South who need encouragement to support climate legislation.
The group’s annual budget hasn’t changed—it’s still in the range of $80 million to $100 million, Fox confirms—but now, instead of spending the bulk of its money on big ad campaigns, it’s dividing funds between advertising and on-the-ground staff.
“We know we can’t win this through just paid media,” said Bouchard. “The idea was to develop a comprehensive campaign, just like you would in any electoral context.”
“If we’re going to make a difference, it’s going to be in people’s congressional districts and people’s states,” said Hildebrand. “What happens in Washington oftentimes is very important, but where we’re going to apply pressure is back home. I wish everyone in the environmental community would empty out their offices in Washington and ship them back to these states and districts to create a lot of noise.”
Fox, citing lessons learned in her time with America Votes, notes the importance of spreading organizers out to crucial districts. The Alliance has been coordinating with partners from environmental, labor, religious, and progressive groups to figure out which areas are already covered and which need people on the ground.
“It’s not just that you have to agree on the elements of a legislative package,” said Fox. “What we are agreeing on now is how to cover the map, how to engage, involve, and reach out to constituencies across the map.”
Rallying the troops
Hildebrand touts a community-organizing model—which was quite successful for his former boss last year.
“The big lesson from the Obama campaign is let people help develop their destiny,” said Hildebrand. “Everybody knows how to be active in their community. You don’t have to teach them, you don’t have to hand-hold them. You need to give them encouragement, you need to make sure they buy into what the mission is, and they will go to town, and they will do the job that you need them to do.”
As in an electoral campaign, the paid Alliance staff have expectations each day, including how many phone calls, letters to the editor, and press events they’re supposed to generate or organize.
“You need to create noise, you need to get calls into these members’ offices, demand meetings,” said Hildebrand.
The Alliance has a large pool of supporters to call into action, including an email list of 2.3 million, more than double the number of names it had a year ago. The group is encouraging volunteers within its network to gather community members in a room, talk about the importance of passing climate legislation, and start assigning jobs: a phone-bank captain, a letter-to-the-editor captain, a scheduler, a press person, a community-outreach leader.
Alliance organizers don’t want their troops to delve too deeply into the specifics of climate policy, like how deep emissions cut should be or what percentage of power should be drawn from renewables. They’re focusing on a straightforward goal, according to Fox: “Bold climate action this year.” And right now that means supporting the Waxman-Markey climate bill, “even if the prettiness of it is not what I might want or you might want or the vice president might want,” said Fox.
This approach has already started paying off. In the weeks leading up a critical vote in the House Energy and Commerce Committee on the bill, the Alliance’s network of activists sent 20,000 letters to 960 newspapers in key congressional districts, according to Fox. The Alliance also hosted more than 30 town hall meetings in the districts of committee members. The committee passed the bill on May 21.
This week, during Congress’ Memorial Day recess, Alliance organizers are coordinating another 30 or so town halls to draw attention to the issue of climate change while representatives are in their home districts.
As debate over climate legislation moves forward in Congress, the Alliance is building a “legislative war room” that can do rapid response, sending out action alerts and directives to supporters around the country.
A slideshow, reborn
Gore’s other group, The Climate Project, is proving a critical partner in these efforts. It has trained 1,200 volunteers in the U.S. and 2,600 worldwide over the past two and half years to deliver the slideshow on global warming that Gore made famous in An Inconvenient Truth. These activists have reached 5 million people through 50,000 presentations.
Now, in a new phase of the project kicked off at its North American summit in Nashville, Tenn., earlier this month, Climate Project volunteers will be pushing for a climate bill—and using a retooled slideshow to do it.
“Phase two is entering into a more activism phase, an issue campaign to give them the tools and other information that they’re going to need to go forth and increase public engagement in this issue,” Jenny Clad, executive director of The Climate Project, told Grist at the summit. “One hundred percent of the people here will be pushing for the toughest, strongest climate legislation that we can possibly pass in this country.”
The climate presenters have been successful so far because they use “peer-to-peer persuasion,” said Clad. “[People] are more likely to be persuaded by people that they go to church with, go to school with, work with. They are more likely to listen to this person when they say ‘We’ve got to listen and start doing something’ than they are perhaps to great scientists and icons when they say it.”
Press wasn’t permitted to see the new slideshow yet, but summit attendees report that it includes updated (and scarier) climate science data, as well as new info about the technological and legislative solutions that could help address the problem. The new presentation, said Clad, is “not just how do we change light bulbs, but how do we change laws as well.”
Storming the airwaves
Though there’s a new emphasis on grassroots engagement, the Climate Alliance isn’t abandoning its ad campaigns.
Its best-known advertising blitz was the “We Can Solve It” campaign, with the memorable ad featuring Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich sitting together on a couch and calling for climate action. In November 2008, the Alliance launched its Repower America campaign supporting Gore’s call to shift to 100 percent clean energy in 10 years.
The group recently ran a new set of Repower America TV ads around the country, calling on 14 swing-vote legislators on the Energy and Commerce Committee to support the Waxman-Markey bill—and 10 out of 14 did, voting to pass it out of committee last week. Another ad currently airing on national cable features a blue-collar worker asking Congress to take on the “big oil boys” and support clean energy.
With all these efforts combined, Gore and his team are confident they’ll be able to influence the debate at least as much as dirty energy interests have thus far.
“They have their billions and billions of dollars in record profits ... We don’t think we’ll ever compete head to head,” said Hildebrand. “We just have enough to create the kind of noise that’s really needed to get something serious done.”
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Watch Repower America ads:
Climate talks timeline: From 350 to Kyoto to Copenhagen and beyond
Comments
View as Flat
Steven Earl Salmony Posted 10:52 am
28 May 2009
In order to preserve their own selfish interests, perverse speechlessness by many too many people with great wealth and power has been knowingly employed to willfully orchestrate the denial of global threats looming ominously before the family of humanity. Thanks to President Barack Obama, Al Gore and Rajendra Pachauri, perhaps free speech and corrective action can begin to occur now.
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RootsRunDeep Posted 1:35 pm
28 May 2009
The workshops, briefings, plenary sessions & breakout groups were well-organized & entertaining. I make my living as a lobbyist and the training was top-notch.
Still, I came back from the Summit feeling as if I'd been at a religious revival. We were told what to do and ask no questions and express no doubts nor concerns about the Waxman-Markey bill. I then checked with a couple of others who had the same response.Unfortunately, the problem I have is that the more I read about W-M, the less I am able to support it. I've received at least two dozen analyses taking it apart so I asked my husband to download & print it for me to look at first-hand. I'm about 200 pages into it as of this writing.
I'll grant that there are some strong elements in the current version, but there are serious - if not fatal - flaws which have to be taken out for the bill to get us anywhere NEAR the goals set by both scientists & environmentalists
In addition to the issues raised about cap & trade/carbon tax, there is a killer clause in the proposed bill which prohibits states from passing more stringent standards than those at the federal level. That means states which have taken extremely strong positions on GHGs, energy standards, etc., etc., will reduce them.Is this what we really want?
Furthermore, it bothers me greatly to note that there was almost no mention of James Hansen at the Summit - and when he was, it was with disrespect because he opposes Waxman-Markey. He feels that it will do little to stop global warming.
In a post-Summit encounter I had with one of main speakers, he told me - actually yelled at me - that Hansen is "just a scientist and doesn't know anything about politics and should stop talking."
We had a brief, but heated exchange about his comments and he stalked off.
That really resonated very strongly with me given the responses I received from dozens of people to whom I sent "real" letters between February - August, 2007, about making presentations to their organizations. Although they framed it much more nicely, what they said was: Why should we listen to you? You're not a scientist - you're a policy person!
Scientists can't be politically smart? Policy analysts cannot understand science? Neither should be speaking on topics outside their areas?Gore & his colleagues have made the decision internally that climate change is not on the general public's Top Ten Priority List and that the way to get support for any clean energy legislation is to emphasize national security rather than environmental issues such as off-shore drilling, the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, "clean coal," mountaintop removal, etc., when speaking with the media, the general public, and initially with lawmakers & administrators.
I have to agree with them about the public's perception. I went to Nashville to learn the skills to help change that perception.
The problem is that some? many? within the rank & file object to specific decisions so we're being slowly but surely pushed aside as "nice-2-haves" not "need-2-haves."In retrospect, the thing that probably bothers me more than anything else is the atmosphere generated by the Summit's leadership - you're either with us or against us and are even more the enemy than "clean coal" advocates and the Republicans.
I AM NOT THE ENEMY, DAMMIT!!
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F James Handley Posted 4:28 pm
28 May 2009
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enviroperk Posted 5:57 pm
28 May 2009
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megaloptera Posted 7:47 am
29 May 2009
…Is still CO2!!A carbon dioxide molecule from a wood burning biomass electric power plant is the same as that from a car’s tailpipe or a coal plant’s smokestack. Each molecule is just as “dirty” – it has the same impact on global warming: polar ice caps melt just as fast and human health impacts are no different.
Though it may appear that our state and federal governments are passing laws to curb emissions of CO2 to ameliorate climate change impacts, we’re being duped. According to the New York Times [5/25/09], twenty seven states have declared that emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases from wood and trash burning incinerators used to generate electricity “don’t count” because the trees grow back and trash is also “renewable.” Now Congress is in on the charade-- release the CO2 but pretend it's not there-- and we are really in trouble. On May 24, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a 946 page bill called the “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009.” This tome is filled with endless compromises and unverifiable regulatory schemes for emissions credits and carbon offsets that will make the most dedicated regulator cringe. The House Committee, headed by Reps. Waxman and Markey, labeled incineration “waste-to-energy” and “biomass” renewable to justify ignoring CO2 emissions from these plants. The bill provides billions in taxpayer grants and ratepayer subsidies to power utilities, oil refiners, and the corporate forest industry to make sure all this burning happens pretty darn quick, before we figure out what’s happening. And the atmosphere, in the meantime, will of course magically absorb the CO2 and other greenhouse gases from all this subsidized "green" burning without any short term effects--because the CO2 will theoretically be reabsorbed over the next century as trees re-grow. The only problem is, we don’t have a century to wait, since the climate crisis is now.The Markey-Waxman ACESA bill will result in total U.S. total greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise until 2026. The “renewable energy industry” doesn’t dispute that every megawatt of electricity generated incinerating forests and trash creates 50% more CO2 than burning coal. Nor could Reps. Markey and Waxman dispute that all the incineration subsidized by the ACESA bill will cause a near term increase in CO2 emissions. So not only does the bill itself not address climate change now, it makes it worse by promoting incineration as “renewable energy.” It subsidizes new incinerators to burn everything in sight, including our treasured federal forests and state parks, so we will be losing trees and adding more CO2 to the atmosphere. The ACESA allows polluters to ignore their emissions impacts by spending billions to buy “offsets” to save forests, primarily in developing nations, while giving billions to US incinerators to burn our forests. That is a costly paradox and ratepayers will bear those costs.Rather than promoting trash incinerators and calling it “waste-to-energy”, whatever happened to reduce, reuse and recycle? Under the Markey-Waxman bill, that mantra is eclipsed by the “energy industrial complex” [WSJ 5/22/09] lingo that burning those recyclables is “qualified renewable energy”. Never mind the CO2 -- we’re generating “renewable energy"! Here in Western Massachusetts, we have much at stake beyond increased air pollution from incinerators: tons of “woody biomass” -- 3,000,000 pounds of wood from our forests each day for each of five proposed power plant incinerators. Reports show that extracting this wood will clearcut our state parks, such as Mt. Greylock State Park, the state's highest peak, cherished by generations of factory workers from nearby North Adams and students from Williams College.Fifteen wood burning plants are proposed for New England, and as the energy industry is swooping down on the Berkshires and the Pioneer Valley, citizens are exposing the “industrial energy complex” schemes as the biggest public scam since sub-prime mortgages were hailed as “safe". Supplying biomass incinerators means clearcuts and removing “slash” – that is vacuuming up the forest floor, eliminating those decaying logs that host the same CO2 retaining ecosystems that our kids grow in their classroom terrariums made from 48-ounce plastic bottles.Governor Patrick’s administration is promoting biomass incinerators and shirking its responsibility to require environmental impact statements for the 1,000,000,000 pounds of CO2 per year from the each of the proposed plants. In the meantime, citizens are pointing to Massachusetts’ precedent setting lawsuit against the George Bush EPA in which the U.S. Supreme Court that CO2 and greenhouse gases from tailpipes must be regulated. Citizens want to know why CO2 from smokestacks on wood burning incinerators are exempt from regulation– since CO2 by any other name is, after all, CO2.Incinerating forests for megawatts makes no sense. Reduce, reuse, recycle does make sense, and generates ten times more jobs than incinerating our trash. A climate change bill could promote real renewable energy and conservation while using transparent financing mechanisms that won’t further bankrupt our country. It is not too late for Congress, especially the Senate, to show real courage and leadership to produce a bill that will actually meet these goals.I'm a liberal environmental activist and attorney representing citizens promoting wise renewable energy choices from the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts. I've carefully studied this law, and like Greenpeace, I believe we can do better.
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alturn Posted 8:32 am
29 May 2009
To achieve this goal, men must change dramatically the present way of life, and embrace simpler forms of living and working. Gone are the days in which men raped and ravaged the planet at will, without a thought for the generations still to come, neither seeing nor caring ought for the environment which has gradually and inevitably decayed.
Each year, and for many years, huge areas of ancient primal forest are cleared of life-giving trees for purely commercial benefits. Commercialization indeed bodes ill for humanity as it tightens its grip on the throats of men. Commercialization, says Maitreya, is more dangerous to men than the atomic bomb, and is showing its destructive power in the economic chaos which rules in the world today.- from May 2009 Share International - http://www.share-international.org
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Doug350 Posted 8:18 pm
30 May 2009
ROOTSRUNDEEP WROTE: "Is this what we really want?"
F JAMES HANDLEY WROTE: "No offsets, no free allowances, no other gimmicks"
MEGALOPTERA WROTE: "I believe we can do better."
It looks to me that we are essentially of the same mind ... Waxman-Markey (H.R. 2454) as it emerged from committee is merely a good start -- if not a miserable start -- and must be strengthened before it reaches President Obama's desk in the Fall.
It seems to me that we agree that meaningful legislation must be given to President Obama before Copenhagen.
So what do we do about it?
I, too, believe that Jim Hansen is sincere in his disappointment in the current incarnation of Waxman-Markey, and I share his grief that it is too little too late. I, too, attended Al Gore's North America Summit of The Climate Project last week, and I came away with a different conclusion than my fellow presenter. I missed that session as I was working with folks focused on getting "too connected to fail" (to use Paul Krugman's words). Rather than grovel in the minutia and semantics, let's take the high road and connect with our common goal ...
PAUL KRUGMAN RECENTLY WROTE: After all the years of denial, after all the years of inaction, we finally have a chance to do something major about climate change. Waxman-Markey is imperfect, it’s disappointing in some respects, but it’s action we can take now. And the planet won’t wait. ... And some influential environmental figures -- most notably James Hansen, ... have to ask themselves whether they're making the perfect the enemy of the good."
AL GORE SAID: "I encourage Congress to further strengthen this excellent legislation during floor consideration and move to pass this bill in both the House and the Senate this year."
MAGGIE FOX (CEO OF GORE'S ALLIANCE FOR CLIMATE PROTECTION) SAID: "We will now look to the full Congress to strengthen and to pass this legislation that will repower America."
I believe Gore understands political realities and strategies better than most, and that he has thought long and hard about this. If his strategy is to get sometimg passed -- even if it is not perfect -- with the prospect of strengthening it later, that is good enough for me. I'll go along with that strategy and "make noise" to let it be known that it is unacceptably weak based on the science.
We simply need to get started going in the right direction, and gain momentum, make course corrections as we progress, and demonstrate what is possible -- ratcheting up the targets as time goes on -- rather than despair the negatives.
We shoot ourself in the foot if we reject Waxman-Markey and have nothing to show in Copenhagen.
Let's get behind Waxman-Markey with all our might and political pressure as it is debated and amended in the House and Senate.
Let's connect in support of passing this one and only bill ... but demand that our respective Representatives and Senators put back the key elements that will achieve the CO2 reductions that Jim Hansen and the rest say is needed to avert catastrophic climate change.
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megaloptera Posted 7:36 am
31 May 2009
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megaloptera Posted 9:45 am
31 May 2009
It would be great if the Waxman/Markey/Gore Team would respond this article from the Berkshire (MA) Eagle:Fuzzy logic on wood-burning
David BaumannSunday, April 12 RICHMOND MA Burning wood is carbon neutral. But wait. According to a Web site published by the Energy Information Agency, the statistics and data providing arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, hardwoods produce around 195 pounds of CO2 per one million British thermal units (mmBtu's). Coal ranges from soft, 205 pounds/mmBtu, increasing up to anthracite at 227 pounds/ mmBtu. Natural gas is 115 pounds/mmBtu and most motor and aviation fuels are in the 150-pound/mmBtu range. That puts wood right up there with coal.
Why then do we consider wood "carbon neutral"? I cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (from the Kyoto meetings). In a discussion of CO2 emissions they include a footnote on CO2 emissions from plant materials, including wood, in the following way: These biofuels contain "biogenic" carbon. Under international greenhouse gas accounting methods developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, biogenic carbon is part of the natural carbon balance and it will not add to atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide.
Notice the phrase "accounting methods" above. OK, now I understand, it's like war. War doesn't cost anything because it's off the balance sheet. The Patrick administration is pushing every manner of alternative energy including the construction and implementation of three biomass plants in Massachusetts that will burn almost exclusively wood. Based on the EIA's numbers it's essentially the same thing as building three coal-fired plants. To assess the impact these wood-burning biomass plants will have on our carbon footprint and their impact on global warming, we should revisit our raison d'être. Here are a couple quotes from Al Gore:
Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could � within as little as 10 years � make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization.
And this quote: first of all, we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not. In light of the urgency we've all readily accepted from Al Gore's Oscar- and Nobel Prize-winning work, this notion, that we can go out and burn burn burn, as long as it's wood, boarders on bizarre. No question, wood can be re-grown and will re-sequester the carbon that is put in the atmosphere so on that, we all agree. But there's one little word that's never discussed, except by Al Gore to alarm us, and that word is time.
Any 5th grade science student learns that time is one of the most critical factors in chemical reactions. React hydrocarbons quickly with oxygen, we get explosions. Slow reaction times, we get decay. It's a matter of common sense to know that if we burn a 50-year-old tree those carbon emissions will exist in our atmosphere at earlier and higher concentrations until a new tree has grown to replace it taking, well, 50 years to achieve complete carbon neutrality. If we allow the tree to decay naturally, a new tree will grow at close to the same rate, striking a balanced approach to carbon neutrality over the entire decay/ growth cycle. In Russell, Massachusetts a 50-megawatt biomass plant is making its way toward operating despite a myriad of environmentally damaging issues, which have been pointed out, fought over and roundly ignored by Governor Patrick. A 50MW plant, by the way, equates to 170 million Btu's per hour. Using the EIA numbers above, Russell Biomass, operating at full capacity, will contribute 33,000 pounds of CO2 per hour to the atmosphere. Russell is just one of three like it in Massachusetts and five in New England that are in the works. According to Al Gore there's not lot of time to monkey around with CO2 emissions so, I checked out some approximate weights of various aged trees. It would take over 100,000 one-year old trees to equal the weight of one 50-year old tree of similar species. Five-year old trees take around 30,000. So you see for every tree we cut down and burn we'd have to plant 100,000 to re-sequester that much carbon in one year, 30,000 in five years. We'd also have to find the space to plant them. That's just one tree. If we assume a mature tree contains about 300 pounds of burnable wood, a 50MW plant like Russell would consume around 80 each hour. We'd best get to plant'n.
The politicians I understand, but the silence of the majority of the scientific community baffles me. Gore whips up near hysteria over global warming's urgency while a privileged few are allowed to charge headlong into burning wood, a CO2 emitter on par with coal, because of an accounting interpretation from a committee in Kyoto which decided that wood can grow as fast as it can be burned. Where are the outrages, the outcries, the accusations of collusion and corruption? Anyone questioning the logic of such a ridiculous scheme is accused of being a NIMBY while those who have the policy makers' ear, choose instead, to flow with political winds against scientific principals.
Make room Al, I'm going to produce a movie too. Mine will be titled "The Science of the Lambs."
David Baumann is an occasional Eagle contributor.
(c) 2009 The Berkshire Eagle. All rights reserved. Reproduced with the permission of Media NewsGroup, Inc. by NewsBank, Inc.
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Doug350 Posted 8:31 am
01 Jun 2009
been an environmental activist for 26 years in Massachusetts. The
Waxman Markey bill will make climate change worse in the short term. ... We can do better - since we are not getting actual CO2
reductions under Waxman Markey until 2026 anyway, why not do something
that will really address the issue and not bankrupt the country?Meg, this is Doug ... for some reason the Grist editing functions failed so my moniker Doug350 does not show up in my comment above. Mine is the post that shows up in duplicate ... victim of a technical malfunction in the editing features. Not sure whether your post yesterday was in response to mine or if there as an interim post by "Maggie" that has since been deleted.In any event ...If you are making an implicit argument for something along the lines of a "carbon tax at the source and 100% dividend" as espoused by Peter Barnes, Jim Hansen (and variations on that theme proposed by Rep. Pete Stark and others in the House Ways and Means Ctee) ... I agree. And I believe that many who support W-M in the short term would also agree, but they are realists. Knowing that a carbon tax has no political backing at this time, I believe they would rather get something -- rather than nothing -- in place this year. Something can be massaged and reworked; nothing is nothing.As Thomas Friedman said recently, "It's too late for later." R.K. Pachauri has said similar in more definitive terms.Dr. Jon Krosnick has found through decades of research that skeptical people will accept "outlandish" new solutions if they are demonstrated to be not only possible but effective. But you cannot build confidence in a vacuum -- we need to build some inertia by demonstrating small initial successes.We all agree that we cannot wait until 2026 ... we probably also agree that we cannot let 2012 come and go without at least minimal reductions, followed by accelerating reductions in CO2 emissions. If we are going to do anything, it has to be now. So start calling your friends and enlist them to call their Representatives and demand in no uncertain terms that W-M must be delivered to Obama this year, but that it is not good enough -- it must be strengthened.
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Konstantin Posted 2:51 pm
05 Jun 2009
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