TURNING BACK CLIMATE CHANGE

Taking the Initiative: Climate Dawn
Carl Pope, January 1, 2011 (Sierra Club)

"…You might be surprised to learn that I think climate protection may have posted its best quarterly results ever in the last three months of 2011…[despite] an unprecedented concentration of extreme weather events…[and 2010’s] record amounts of greenhouse pollutants…[But in Q4 of 2011] the Obama administration completed setting a comprehensive set of carbon emission standards for cars and trucks, standards that, overall, will reduce the carbon footprint of a mile of driving by more than 50% by 2025. It took three rounds of reform…

"…It took 20 years…[but on] December 21 President Obama finally signed…a firm [EPA] standard requiring that mercury and other toxic pollutants finally be cleaned up -- or shut down…How much of America's carbon belching coal fleet will go down because of the mercury rule is not clear -- some estimates were 50 GW, a sixth of the total fleet…[And] a whole series of other federal and state and local actions are making clear to utilities that if they can't burn coal clean then they can't burn it at all…[and when] the price of extending unemployment insurance and social security tax moratoria was a rapid decision on the Keystone Tar Sands Export Pipeline, the President…made it clear that a rushed, rapid decision would have to be -- 'No.'"

click to enlarge

"As a result of these three victories, the U.S. is poised not only to meet the 17 percent pollution curbs that President Obama promised in Copenhagen by 2020, but to go beyond them -– because these regulations and limits set the stage for further reforms…[T]he Durban UN Climate Conference made no fundamental breakthroughs…[but] the world stuck at it…[and] the European Union stuck to their guns by… requiring airline passengers, the world's richest, to take responsibility for their climate emissions…

"What these five successes have in common is their connection to a quality that doesn't often get discussed when we worry about global warming –- tenacity…Tenacity is the Rodney Dangerfield of virtues -- we underestimate it…[but in] the last quarter of 2011…common sense broke through to the surface -- because important chunks of the human community have been sticking at the task of climate rescue…So here's to tenacity -- the virtue we need more of. May the year 2012 be filled with it…"


From YouTube