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The Big Picture
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Al Gore Still Won't Talk About Meat |
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Tuesday 09 March 2010 by: Mickey Z., t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed Al Gore penned a lengthy New York Times op-ed entitled, "We Can't Wish Away Climate Change," on February 28, 2010. As expected, Gore was wordy, made no effort to discuss the planet's top polluter (US Department of Defense), and, most of all, the former vice president once again opted to ignore the No. 1 cause of climate change: the meat-based diet. In fact, I ran a search on the nearly 2,000 words, but none of the following terms were found: meat, cow, livestock, methane, farm, diet or vegan. Accepting the (unfortunate) reality that Al Gore is the planet's best-known climate change spokesperson, he has yet again squandered an ideal opportunity to educate, inform and provoke real change. Just as they served burgers and hot dogs at the Gore-inspired Live Earth concerts in 2007, the high-profile, green crowd simply refused to accept the convenient truth: According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, "the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent - 18 percent - than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation." Yes, it's much more than just climate change. What about the aforementioned water degradation? As the Sierra Club explained, groundwater is "frequently contaminated by factory farm pollution, generally in the form of nitrates. Nitrate pollution, which can cause serious human health problems, seeps out of manure lagoons and into community sources of drinking water." Let's consider deforestation. "In the Amazon the cattle sector is the largest driver of rainforest destruction, accounting for 60 to 70 percent of deforestation," wrote Nikolas Kozloff, author of "No Rain in the Amazon: How South America's Climate Change Affects the Entire Planet." "To put it in concrete terms: every eighteen seconds on average one hectare of Amazon rainforest is being lost to cattle ranchers. As if the carbon emissions resulting from cattle deforestation were not enough, consider bovine methane emissions." |
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For Developing Nations, Exports Boost CO2 Emissions |
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Go to Original March 8, 2010 by Richard Harris | NPR
If you want to know how much carbon dioxide Americans emit into the atmosphere, it's not enough to look just at the gases that pour from our smokestacks and tailpipes. We also import goods that were made in factories that produced carbon dioxide. In fact, a new study finds that worldwide, about a quarter of emissions are actually the result of imported and exported goods and services. Take China, for example. A few years ago, China overtook the United States as the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide, but Steve Davis of the Carnegie Institution for Science says, "Nearly a quarter of the emissions that are produced in China are ultimately exported to consumers elsewhere." The United States consumes a lot of those carbon-intensive exported goods. So we are in some ways responsible for those emissions. It's still the case that most of the U.S. carbon emissions come from burning coal and oil and natural gas. But if you add our imports and subtract our exports, the study shows our carbon footprint is about 11 percent bigger than our official emissions numbers suggest. Imports make up an even bigger fraction of Europe's emissions. "It was pretty surprising to see that between a third and a half of all the emissions related to goods consumed in European countries actually occur outside of their borders," Davis says. |
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Climate Change's Secret Weapon |
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Wednesday 24 February 2010 by: Khadija Sharife | Foreign Policy in Focus The water is crystalline, the sand is whiter than white, and elegantly bent palm trees sway in the breeze. This is how the Seychelles markets itself: as “another world.” Tourism is the mainstay of this heavenly island, averaging 20 percent of GDP and 60 percent of foreign exchange earnings. But given the climate crisis, prospects are dim for climate-vulnerable island nations like the Seychelles. Half of its population lives in coastal areas directly exposed to rising ocean levels, coastal erosion, flooding, and erratic rainfall. The island is also heavily dependent on agriculture, with 70 percent of crops located in the coastal areas and subject to increasingly common saltwater tidal surges. The rising waters thus threaten the livelihoods of the people of Seychelles, as well as the existence of the island itself. According to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, many of these island nations are likely to disappear by the end of 21st century. One reason may be the increasing scarcity of fresh water sources. “The Seychelles, in particular, is almost entirely dependent on surface water and therefore highly vulnerable,” revealed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The future of this paradise isn't as immediately dire as the Maldives, its fellow member of the Alliance of Small Islands States (AOSIS) formed in the lead-up to the Copenhagen Climate Summit. The lowest country on the planet, the Maldives has a maximum ground level of 7.5 feet (one inch below the height of Chinese basketball player, Yao Ming). But the Seychelles would be one of the next islands in line if the water level doesn’t stop rising. The sad irony, however, is that despite producing little in the way of carbon emissions, both island nations may have contributed to their own demise. After all, the Seychelles and the Maldives share the same secret underpinning to their respective economies. More than 50 percent of AOSIS members are secrecy jurisdictions, misleadingly labeled as offshore centers and tax havens. These economies — characterized by opaque legal and financial services ensuring little or no disclosure, high levels of client confidentiality, and few requirements for substantial economic activity — are recipients of illicit capital. These laundered profits have been siphoned from resource-rich but artificially impoverished developing nations. |
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Nuclear Plants Back in Vogue, as Climate Bill Stalls |
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Tuesday 16 February 2010 by: Matthew Berger | Inter Press Service Washington - After decades of debate, the United States is poised to build its first new nuclear reactors since the early 1970s. Speaking at a job training centre northeast of Washington Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced the federal government would underwrite the construction of two new reactors to be built in Georgia. The loan guarantee will be for 8.3 billion dollars, meaning a sizable percentage of the reactors' 8.8 billion price tag will be put up by the government – and absorbed by it, were Southern Company, the energy firm building the plants, to default. This investment in nuclear power is not unexpected and has two main objectives in addition to addressing the omnipresent objective of job creation. Obama hopes recharging the country's nuclear industry will help usher in an era of cleaner energy and help build a bridge between those, including the president, who want Congress to pass significant climate change legislation and those, mainly Republicans, who do not. "Even though we’ve not broken ground on a new power plant – new nuclear plant – in 30 years, nuclear energy remains our largest source of fuel that produces no carbon emissions. To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It's that simple," Obama said Tuesday. |
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Obama Orders Cut in Federal Government's Greenhouse-Gas Emissions |
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Go to Original Friday 29 January 2010 by: Mark Clayton | The Christian Science Monitor President Obama Friday told federal agencies to cut energy use to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 28 percent by 2010. Agencies are taking measures ranging from using more solar energy to switching from gasoline vehicles to hybrid vehicles. The White House Friday announced it would move ahead with plans to enact major cuts in energy use that are expected to reduce the federal government’s greenhouse-gas emissions by 28 percent by 2020. “As the largest energy consumer in the United States, we have a responsibility to American citizens to reduce our energy use and become more efficient,” President Obama said in a prepared statement. “Our goal is to lower costs, reduce pollution, and shift federal energy expenses away from oil and towards local, clean energy.” The president last fall issued an executive order requiring federal agencies to “measure, manage and reduce” greenhouse-gas emissions to agency defined goals. As the single-largest energy consumer in the US economy, the federal government spent more than $24.5 billion on electricity and fuel in 2008 alone. If it achieves its target, the government would slash federal energy use by the equivalent of 205 million barrels of oil use annually – the equivalent of taking 17 million cars off the road for one year. The government would also save a cumulative $8 to $11 billion in avoided energy costs through 2020 from the 2008 baseline, according to the White House. |
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