From Common Dreams
By Dean Baker

The House’s passage of the Waxman-Markey bill raises the possibility that the United States will finally do something on global warming. This prospect has the industry hacks screaming at top volume about the horrible fate that awaits the economy. Everyone should know not to take them seriously, as I will explain in a moment.

First, we should acknowledge the obvious: The bill is awful. It gives away permits to greenhouse gas emitters that should instead be auctioned. As a result, money that could be rebated to taxpayers or used to fund the development of clean technologies instead goes to the industries that are the source of the problem.

Second, the use of tradable permits rather than a tax is a rather questionable policy. Permits will almost certainly require more government enforcement bureaucracy than a system of taxes and subsidies. And, incidentally, permits will allow Goldman Sachs and our other Wall Street friends to make tens of billions of dollars on trading fees in the coming decades, a high priority for all Americans.

But a bad bill is almost certainly better than no bill. If Waxman-Markey doesn’t get through, it is very difficult to see another bill getting through this Congress. And there is no reason to believe that the Congress that gets elected in 2010 will be any less indebted to the corporate lobbyists.

The Waxman-Markey bill should be viewed as a foot in the door. It is a modest first step toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions that both demonstrates a commitment and provides an opportunity to show the public that emissions can be lowered without imposing an enormous economic burden on the country.

Read more Lie Detector

From NY Times
By Paul Krugman

So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.

But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.

And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.

To fully appreciate the irresponsibility and immorality of climate-change denial, you need to know about the grim turn taken by the latest climate research.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

Read more Planet

From TruthOut
By Claire Gatinois

Will the economic and financial crisis degenerate into violent social explosions? Tomorrow, will there be civil war in Europe, the United States and Japan? That’s the rather alarming conclusion that the experts of European think tank LEAP/Europe 2020 lay out in their latest bulletin dated mid-February.

In that edition, which addresses the issue of the crisis entering a phase of “global geopolitical dislocation” in the third quarter of 2009, the experts foresee a state of “generalized every man for himself” in the countries stricken by the crisis. That panic would then conclude in logical confrontations, in other words, with partial civil wars. “If your country or region is an area where firearms are in mass circulation” (among big countries, only the United States is in that situation) LEAP indicates, “then the best way to deal with the dislocation is to leave your region, if that’s possible.”

According to that association, made up of independent contributors from European political, economic and diverse professional circles, the most dangerous regions are those where the system of social protection is the weakest.

Thus, the crisis would be able to spark violent popular revolts, the intensity of which would be aggravated by the free circulation of firearms. Latin America, as well as the United States, are the areas most at risk. “There are 200 million guns in circulation in the United States and social violence already manifests itself through gangs,” LEAP head, Franck Biancheri, reminds us. Moreover, LEAP experts already detect population flight from the United States to Europe, “where direct physical danger will remain marginal,” they maintain.

Read more Crisis

From Tom Dispatch
By Michael T. Klare

The global economic meltdown has already caused bank failures, bankruptcies, plant closings, and foreclosures and will, in the coming year, leave many tens of millions unemployed across the planet. But another perilous consequence of the crash of 2008 has only recently made its appearance: increased civil unrest and ethnic strife. Someday, perhaps, war may follow.

As people lose confidence in the ability of markets and governments to solve the global crisis, they are likely to erupt into violent protests or to assault others they deem responsible for their plight, including government officials, plant managers, landlords, immigrants, and ethnic minorities. (The list could, in the future, prove long and unnerving.) If the present economic disaster turns into what President Obama has referred to as a “lost decade,” the result could be a global landscape filled with economically-fueled upheavals.

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations — none as yet in the United States — your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you’re a gambling man or woman, it’s a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

Read more Brink

From The Dissident Voice
By Andrew Thomaides

There’s a major conflict brewing between two policy objectives in Washington; energy security (relying on Venezuela and the Middle East for oil) and the Obama administrations commitment to stop global warming. These two stated objectives of the current administration were put to the test on Obama’s first trip abroad as President of the United States.

Energy and global warming were at the top of the agenda when President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Stephen Harper met in Ottawa on Thursday. The two leaders emerged from their meeting saying they agreed to establish a “clean-energy dialogue” to cut greenhouses gas emissions and fight climate change. The use of such ambiguous language allows both Barack Obama and Stephen Harper to side step any concrete obligations to deal with the issue of tar sands and global warming. However, whatever ‘clean-energy dialogue’ the leaders do have, will continually be tested by internal U.S. politics concerning climate change and new environmental regulations. Developments surrounding tar sands and climate change in the United States including; low carbon fuel standards, a cap and trade system (climate change legislation), and targets for greenhouse gas reductions all pose serious threats to the importation of dirty tar sands oil from Canada, and the ‘clean energy dialogue’ that both leaders promised to on Thursday.

As Greenpeace Canada pointed out,

In January 2007 California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger established a Low-Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) by Executive Order. This unprecedented greenhouse gas (GHG) standard for transportation fuels requires fuel providers to ensure that fuel sold in California reduces GHG emissions measured on a “full fuel cycle” basis (i.e. upstream feedstock extraction, fuel refining, and transport to market). This will clearly discourage the use of tar sands oil. Schwarzenegger has also called for the U.S. to implement a national Low Carbon Fuel Standard.

Read more Tar Sands

From The Seattle PI
By Timothy Colman

President Barack Obama is now in office. Yet something is missing in all the talk about green initiatives — solar power investments, wind power and green transportation.

It’s time for something that we can get started on immediately, that will lead to clean water, prevent pollution and create thousands of good paying jobs. What is it? A Green Initiative to grow green roofs and rain gardens, bioswales and pervious pavement.

Master gardeners, master naturalists and environmentalists can make common cause this year by insisting Obama spend billions of dollars across the U.S. helping people grow green roofs, rain gardens and getting rain barrels installed.

Imagine a green city/state — and the blue green jobs we can create with a well-considered initiative.

Best of all are the benefits to our green Northwest. Ecosystem services can be restored through planting 10,000 rain gardens, green roofs and installing rain barrels. Pavement that lets rainwater through its pores to filter toxic waste instead of running off to the nearest stream, river and finally out to the ocean.

Read more Green

From AlterNet
By Alexander Zaitchik

Anyone living near a major metropolitan airport has gazed up at the sky and seen them: patchworks of crisscrossing contrails left by passing jetliners. Most of us don’t give a second thought to this common sight of a scratched-up sky. If we do, it’s likely to reflect on the explosion in air traffic and its growing contribution to air pollution.

But for an expanding minority of Americans, those hanging contrails represent something much more sinister than increased carbon emissions. Since the late 1990s, a flourishing conspiracy theory subculture has been ringing the alarm that many of these contrails aren’t normal vapor-and-exhaust contrails at all. Rather, they are chemtrails, mysterious and menacing chemical evidence of secret government programs to modify the weather and depopulate the planet.

Investigation into, and speculation over, the nature of these chemtrails has grown over the last decade from a marginal belief into a millions-strong Transatlantic Truth Quest, with chemtrails taking on the stature of celestial UFOs. If early UFO sightings were the projection of early Cold War fears, chemtrails are the climate-change-age corollary, with cultural panic over pollution and changing weather patterns projected onto the clouds and planes in the sky.

As with flying saucers, hundreds of YouTube clips purport to capture cities “getting pasted” by secret government planes. Dozens of chemtrails Web sites compete for the loyalty and business of a sprawling, gullible and increasingly global chemtrails flock. Like the white lines that are its obsession, the chemtrails scene crisscrosses with every other strand in the pantheon of cosmic conspiracy culture. Most chemtrails sites, like the lovable dontchemtrailmebro.com, also peddle in 9/11 Truth, alien contact, Northern Idaho survivalism and the “suppressed” theories of the twin martyred wizards of etheric energy, Wilhelm Reich and Nicolai Tesla.

Read more Chemtrails

From The Guardian UK
By Alok Jha

Trees in the western United States are dying twice as quickly as they did three decades ago and scientists think global warming is to blame.

In their surveys, ecologists found that a wide range of tree species were dying including pines, firs and hemlocks and at a variety of altitudes. The changes can have serious long-term effects including reducing biodiversity and turning western forests into a source of carbon dioxide as they die and decompose. That could lead to a runaway effect that speeds up climate change.

“The trend was pervasive across a wide variety of forest types, across all elevations, in trees of all sizes and among major species,” said Phillip van Mantgem of the US Geological Survey (USGS). “At the same time, the rate of new establishment of trees didn’t change.”

If these trends continued, he said, forests will become sparser and store less carbon. “It introduces the possibility that western forests could be come net sources or carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, further speeding up global warming.”

The forest survey, carried out by a team of scientists led by van Mantgem, is published tomorrow in the journal Science. It showed that death rates of trees overall had more than doubled since 1955. In the Pacific north-west and British Columbia, deaths had doubled in 17 years. In California, the death rate took 25 years to double.

The work is the first large-scale study of death rates in forests or temperate regions. Much of the world’s population – in North America, Europe, most of China and large portions of Russia – live near temperate forests so what happens in these forests has global importance, according to Jerry Franklin, a professor of forest resources at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study.

Read more Trees

From Salon
By Andrew Leonard

“You should interview Steven Chu,” the scientist at the Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., told me. “He already has one Nobel Prize. He wants to get a second one for solving the energy crisis.”

That was two years ago, and I sorely regret not following through and landing an interview with Chu, a physicist who has dedicated his post-Nobel Prize career to the development of alternative sources of energy. Because as Barack Obama’s nominee for secretary of energy, Steven Chu is going to get a chance to make his dreams come true, with the full backing of the U.S. government.

Since 2004, Chu has served as the director of the University of California-managed Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spearheading, among other things, a massive research effort in solar power. To get a sense of the man’s interests, here’s the second sentence of his bio at the LBNL Web site. (LBNL, located in Berkeley, Calif., should be distinguished from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which does weapons research for the U.S. government.)

Chu, an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, has guided Berkeley Lab on a new mission to become the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy.

Environmentalists and climate change activists are understandably delighted. Consider this: For eight years the United States has boasted an Energy Department that for all intents and purposes was a subsidiary of the U.S. oil industry. Now, should he be confirmed, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who specializes in climate change and renewable energy and already knows how to run a decent-size bureaucracy is going to be in charge of realizing Obama’s bold promises to lead the United States toward an energy-sustainable future.

Read more Energy Crisis

From The Consortium News
By Brent Budowsky

Let’s build a patriot car within five years that moves into the 21st century with leapfrogging technology, historic gains in fuel efficiency and new standards of automotive excellence.

That, in turn, will spark a new spirit of national confidence, make profits for taxpayers and spur sales across our nation and in global markets from China to India where there will be an exploding demand for autos that will last for generations.

It would be unnecessary, catastrophic and wrong to follow the course of defeatism and pessimism. Bankruptcy would be a disaster and lead to cascading failures from auto suppliers to banks, which would find more loans not repaid by out-of-work Americans.

It would be equally disastrous and wrong to take the easy way out by using the previously enacted $25 billion earmarked for retooling the industry to make better cars and diverting this money for desperation capital instead.

This would be a double disaster by preventing the industry from doing the one thing it must do: build the cars of the future.

Read more American Way