Bill McKibben gets arrested in front of the White House.Photo: Shadia Fayne Wood/Tar Sands Action

Seventy people from across the U.S. and Canada were arrested in front of the White House Saturday morning on the first day of a two-week sit-in aimed at pressuring President Obama to deny the permit for a massive new oil pipeline. More than 2,000 additional people are expected to join the daily civil disobedience over the coming days.

At stake is what has quickly become the largest environmental test for Obama before the 2012 election: The president must choose whether or not to grant a Canadian company a permit to build a 1,700-mile pipeline from the Alberta tar sands to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.

Environmentalists warn that the pipeline could cause a BP disaster right in America’s heartland, over the largest source of fresh drinking water in the country, the Ogallala Aquifer. The nation’s top climatologist, James Hansen, has warned that if the Canadian tar sands are fully developed, it could be “game over” for the climate.

“It’s not the easiest thing on earth for law-abiding folk to come risk arrest. But this pipeline has emerged as the single clear test of the president’s willingness to fight for the environment,” said environmentalist and author Bill McKibben, who is spearheading the protests and was arrested this morning. “So I wore my Obama ’08 button, and I carry a great deal of hope in my heart that we will see that old Obama emerge. It’s hot out here today, especially when you’re wearing a suit and tie. But it’s nowhere near as hot as it’s going to get if we lose this fight.”

McKibben was amongst those arrested today, along with NRDC co-founder and former White House official Gus Speth, gay rights activist Lt. Dan Choi, author and activist Mike Tidwell, Firedoglake founder Jane Hamsher, and many others.

Environmentalists say that the president’s failure to take any substantive steps to protect the environment and stop the climate crisis has left his base disheartened and desperate. While the president can blame Congress for the failure to pass a climate bill, the decision on whether to grant a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline is his and his alone.

The protest began with a small rally in Lafeyette Park, where participants listened to McKibben address the crowd and prepared themselves for what would likely be an afternoon in jail. At about 11:00 a.m., the group formed two lines and marched to the White House fence to the applause of onlookers. A group of participants lined the fence, holding two large banners that read “Climate Change Is Not in Our National Interest: Stop the Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline” and “We Sit In Against the Keystone XL Pipeline. Obama Will You Stand Up to Big Oil?” The rest of the group sat-in on the sidewalk in front of the fence.

Within a few minutes, police began issuing warnings to clear the area. At 11:30 a.m., a young woman from Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, was the first person to be arrested. Arrests proceeded for over an hour as van-loads of protestors were taken away from the White House.

Jane Kleeb, an outspoken opponent of the pipeline and founder of BOLD Nebraska, stood in Lafayette Park this morning and cheered on the protestors as they were arrested.

“Nebraskans are counting on President Obama to do the right thing,” said Kleeb, who is planning to risk arrest on Monday with a delegation of farmers and ranchers who are coming in from Nebraska. “Back home we are fighting to protect our land and water. We decided to bring that fight to the president’s doorstep because our families’ legacies, those that homesteaded the very land now threatened by a foreign oil company, are too important for us sit on the sidelines. We are acting on our values and expect our president to act as well.”

The coalition organizing the protest, Tar Sands Action, is seeking donations and more volunteers to participate in the sit-in throughout the next two weeks. For more information, visit tarsandsaction.org and follow the group on Twitter at @tarsandsaction.

Editor’s note: Bill McKibben serves on Grist’s board of directors.

The word tsunami is also Japanese, originating in their long familiarity of living on the knife edge of disaster, wedged between volcanoes, faultlines, typhoons, and the vastness of the Pacific ocean.

Yet, the three disasters Japan is grappling with today are showing the limits of resilience and industrial societies.

Buildings in Japan are subject to incredible standards for flexibility and strength, to survive the earthquakes that threaten cities. Mt. Fuji has incredible lava channels and barriers built to protect Tokyo from an eruption. Volcano, typhoon, and earthquake monitoring systems are linked to alarms that can be activated to warn citizens to seek shelter and/or higher ground.

These all saved lives. Yet, now as Japan should be mobilizing all its resources to feed, house, and evacuate citizens who have been impacted by this terrible disaster, it is mobilizing to prevent and third and possibly worst disaster, a nuclear catastrophe.

Numerous nuclear reactors have suffered explosions or loss of cooling systems, and three are at risk of melt downs. Radiation has already been released and much more is likely to contaminate the area and population. The resources that could be going into helping those struggling to survive post-tsunami are needed to evacuate citizens from around nuclear plants that are on the verge of total disaster.

Of the three disasters that Japan faces, while they planned and prepared for resilience to natural disasters, their reliance on nuclear energy is threatening the lives and safety of their citizens.

As a former resident of Japan, I can only imagine what is happening there as these disasters unfold but every update seems almost unreal. Yet, it is real, and as the plants have exploded, commentators have focused on how plants may be vulnerable because they are older, that new plants may be safer, or that this is only a risk due to the tsunami. These concerns are almost besides the point, because fundamentally, reliance on centralized, dangerous power sources is something we cannot afford in a modern and more disaster-prone world.

The United State rebuilt its infrastructure in two dramatic examples to defend against the catastrophic threat of nuclear war. The Interstate Highway system and the Internet were originally designed as distributed systems, where resources, people, or information could move regardless of if individual elements went down. Railroads were seen as a risk, as one interruption meant that the entire system would breakdown and the internet could move data even if one part was damaged.

However, we never designed our power system for resilience and we are still relying on outmoded and dangerous power plants that threaten communities around them with either radiation or air toxics. These plants are top targets for terrorists, they are vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes, flooding, and their power lines are go down after hurricanes, sleet, or even just a bad storm. Fundamentally, for all the talk of homeland security, we never seem to actually try and make things safe.

One of the biggest advantages of clean energy is that it is disaster insurance. Investing in clean energy is not just a preventative measure against threats like global warming, oil spills, nuclear meltdowns, or oil price shocks, it also is infrastructure that can increase our resilience.

When the power goes down, people struggle to heat their homes in the winter or cool them in summer, hospitals fire up generators to keep their patients alive, communications to coordinate search and rescue becomes more difficult.  Distributed clean energy technologies, such as solar power, community co-generation, windpower, combined with high performance buildings can transform a society to be a model of resilience, one able to protect their population.

Clean energy has been advocated for its environmental benefits, the creation of green jobs, and the foreign policy benefits. The greatest value of a clean energy powered economy might be its contribution to resilience, safety, and human security.

One of the few upsides of races so far has been skepticism of political candidates who were failed CEOs, which has been surprising in the era of golden parachutes and consequence-free decisions by executives.

Turns out that if you want to run government like a business, people don’t want government’s value to tank like the stock price of HP, which lost 60% of its value under senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina’s watch.

A major downside has been the rise of the climate skeptics running for the Senate. With Sen. Lisa Murkowski – AK, possibly losing in a primary to a Tea Party Candidate who thinks climate change is caused by sunspots, climate advocates have their work cut out for them. So, what is one of the leading responses by civil society? Voter Registration.

Yes, voter registration is one of the tools of choice that civil society, particularly 501c3 groups, turn to have an impact on the election. The Energy Action Coalition is gearing up for Power Vote again, the Sierra Club is registering voters, Rock the Vote is back with some terrific software to make it easy to register to vote online.

This is great, right? They are getting volunteers and staff out on the street registering people to vote, talking to people about the issues they care about and empowering people to make a difference. It makes sense that environmental advocates would want to register people to vote. Brian Siebel, for the Huffington Post, wrote “Student and Youth Voters Face Higher Hurdles Than Others to Register and Vote in 2010“. Other disenfranchised groups are urban and minority communities and poor rural communities. These groups are the backbone of many environmental fights, whether against mountaintop removal, urban coal plants, or fighting for clean energy on campuses.

However, the fact that civil society is registering people to vote is a legacy of the troubled history of US democracy. Voter registration has been a hard-fought battle in the United States and any expansion of voter registration was fought tooth, nail, and claw by politicians trying to maintain Jim Crow laws in the South.

The fact that a history of racism has led to young and dis-empowered voters to face hurdles at the voting booth should be a spur to modernize our nation’s voting laws, replacing a patchwork of laws that made our elections in 2000 and 2004 the world’s laughingstock with universal voter registration.

Universal voter registration would simply move the burden of voter registration from underfunded civil society groups onto government, alongside the other fundamental requirements of citizenship, like selective service. If we have passed a law to make health insurance mandatory, it is staggering that we don’t have universal voter registration.

Making election day a national holiday would also help working class people get to the polls, so that they don’t have to skip work or miss a shift in a recession to vote.

Normally, when progressive organizations look for a tool to level the playing field with corporations they look to campaign finance reform.

However, with the Supreme Court equating money with free speech, perhaps it is time to look to the ballot box and let those hard-earned dollars go towards convincing people that perhaps Senate candidates who think global warming is caused by sunspots or ‘natural cycles’ aren’t worth voting for at all.

They can be climate activists too.

But the jobs-and-security argument is just one part of why the United States needs to transition its economy away from coal and oil. A growing body of medical research suggests a strong link between increased public health and reduced dependence on fossil fuels.  Green groups and the Obama administration should adjust their campaign for climate legislation to tout the potential health benefits.

Over the last decade, as environmental organizations in the United States felt themselves besieged by a hostile political climate, they developed arguments for climate regulation centered around job creation, economic development, national security concerns, and the protection of iconic wildlife, like the polar bear. The health impacts of pollution were largely left by the wayside. As the Obama administration and Congress moved forward this year with health-care reform and climate legislation, environmental organizations remained mostly silent in the health-care debate. In the House-passed Waxman-Markey climate bill, a search for the phrase “health care” turns up only allocations to reduce carbon emissions from hospitals and clinics.

The oversight is stunning. The health-care implications of climate policy are enormous, as shown by recent ground-breaking studies from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal. The National Academy of Sciences study, “Hidden Costs of Energy,” calculated that burning fossil fuels cost the American public $120 billion a year in health-care costs and premature mortality, measured in asthma, lung cancer, and cardiovascular disease. If the health burden of fossil fuels were scored like legislation, they would cost us $1.2 trillion dollars over the next 10 years — enough money to pay for health-care reform and leave hundreds of billions of dollars left over.

Coal power plants alone impose over $62 billion in health costs annually, according to the National Academy of Sciences, yet almost half of their impact on human health comes from the dirtiest 10 percent of plants. Those dirty coal plants together only supply about 5 percent of the nation’s electricity; replacing them with renewable energy sources could save almost $27 billion dollars a year in health costs. The type of carbon cap envisioned by Congress, however, evaluates only the cost to emit greenhouse gases, not the co-pollutants sickening millions of American children and killing thousands every year. Under the legislation now being considered, the dirtiest, cheapest coal plants could be kept open indefinitely, with only nominal reductions in emissions, as they produce enough profit to purchase the offsets and permits needed to keep them open.

In fact, the health costs of coal pollution completely dispel the myth that coal power is cheap. The dirtiest coal plants are more than twice as expensive to operate as wind power, with health costs weighing in at a prohibitively expensive 12 cents per kilowatt-hour. A carbon market would have to require a price of $120 per ton of carbon to raise the price of coal power to its true cost to the communities downwind of its smokestacks. If a carbon cap is enacted, it’s unlikely that it will push carbon prices even close to that anytime in the near future.

The Lancet‘s recent study found that climate policy written without bearing health costs in mind was far more expensive, far less beneficial to communities, and left potential savings of tens of billions of dollars on the table. It found that “the measures needed to make the necessary reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions are those needed to protect and improve global health. Overall, what is good for tackling climate change is good for health.”

Politicians, listen up!

Yet, debates over climate legislation have revolved around climate targets and policies such as emissions allowances, offsets, and the design of a cap-and-trade system. In fact, the very design of the House-passed climate bill would likely do little to improve public health. The bill relies primarily on offsets and a carbon market to reduce greenhouse gases. The tools may rate highly in economics scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, but their scoring entirely neglects the health savings from climate policy. The inclusion of international offsets into a final bill actually erodes the domestic health benefits of climate legislation, as carbon financing is outsourced, with tens of billions in health-care savings not being realized to avoid relatively low costs to industry.

In the absence of coalition-building between climate and health-reform activists, Obama administration officials have started taking up the issue, particularly EPA Adminstrator Lisa Jackson and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius. Their biographies lend themselves to leadership on this issue. Secretary Sebelius had been hailed as an environmental hero for her work in blocking the construction of coal plants during her tenure as governor of Kansas. Lisa Jackson is an African-American mother with an asthmatic son, and she has made the point that families that look like her own are bearing the burden of America’s energy policy, saying “23 million American children suffer from asthma, and African Americans have twice the national rate of asthma and the highest cancer rates in the country.”

The two leaders headlined a Nov. 20 White House event about the public-health benefits of clean-energy reform. The White House invited many leaders of the environmental-justice movement, and Sebelius laid out the public-health case for climate action, arguing for climate policy as an exercise in preventative care. “As greenhouse gases go down, so do deaths from respiratory illness and disease,” she said.

But there was little discussion at the event of what’s actually in climate legislation — no hard questions about whether the bills in Congress would actually benefit those who bear the burden of our dirty-energy economy, the minority and working-class communities clustered around power plants, ports, and highways.  That was a missed opportunity.

The Obama administration has existing regulatory authority to seek real emissions reductions from the electricity and transportation sectors. Energy-efficiency standards, federal permitting rules, regulation of health-endangering pollutants like diesel emissions of particulate matter, and many more agency-level actions or executive orders could both reduce carbon emissions and provide substantial health savings.  Administrative action by the president, the EPA, and the Department of Energy could save U.S. taxpayers tens of billions of dollars a year in health-care costs, protect vulnerable communities, and restore credibility to U.S. efforts to tackle climate change in the eyes of the world.

The benefits of these actions would accrue to some of Obama’s strongest supporters, including African Americans, the mothers of the 23 million asthmatic children in the United States, and the young people worried about climate change and America’s leadership role in the world. Last but not least, this is a moral issue, for how do we calculate the human misery embodied in $1.2 trillion dollars in health costs from respiratory and cardiovascular illness, cancer, and premature death?

Whether for fiscal, social-justice, or moral reasons, the intersection of health and climate policy needs to come to the forefront as the Obama administration and the activist community push toward climate legislation in the spring of 2010.

The real scandal is not the email archive, or even how it was acquired, sorted, and uploaded to a Russian server, but rather the emerging evidence of a coordinated international campaign to target and harass climate scientists, break and enter into government climate labs, and misrepresent climate science through a sophisticated media blitz on the eve of the international climate talks.

One leaked archive could have been the result of an aggrieved staff member or rogue hacker, out to grind a political axe or wreak revenge upon a colleague. However, the University of Victoria was targeted in a similar attack, when two people disguised as network computer technicians attempted to penetrate the security of the facility and access the data servers of the Canadian Centre for Climate Modeling and Analysis. When challenged by an employee, the two individuals fled the scene. The network penetration effort was confirmed by University spokespeople in the National Post and was reported by Kevin Grandia of DeSmogBlog.

“This is disturbing news and it shows that there is an organized criminal campaign that is going to great lengths to infiltrate secure facilities and steal private data,” said Jim Hoggan, author of the new book Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. “We don’t know who is behind these criminal acts, but we hope they will eventually be unmasked by police.”

This campaign has been proved to be international in scope, with criminal acts of breaking and entering probable in both the UK and Canada, as well as coordinated with the sophisticated communications infrastructure founded and built by former tobacco lobbyists that were hired by fossil fuel interests, such as ExxonMobil, to cast doubt on the links between the sale and use of fossil fuels and the changing of the world’s climate. This infrastructure was detailed by within Hoggan’s book, as well as documented in extensive detail by projects like Exxonsecrets.org.

One major mistake these groups, including ClimateDepot and Newsbusters, made was in labeling this manufactured crisis as ClimateGate. Perhaps a little history is in order, as almost no news reports even referenced the fact that the Watergate scandal centered around the breaking and entering of the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate hotel, by a group of right-wing shadow operatives that a subsequent investigation by the FBI connected to the 1972 Committee to Re-elect the President, CREEP.

President Nixon was exposed as having commissioned the break-in, to uncover the state of the Democratic party, as he had given into fears of electoral defeat and resorted to desperate and criminal measures. Pioneering reporters Woodward and Bernstein made history for exposing the criminal conspiracy at the heart of the White House.

Conspiracy theory has recently become mainstream within the conservative movement in the United States, with both media figures and politicians implying that President Obama falsified his birth records, is setting up death panels to euthanize seniors, or impose communism upon the people of the United States.

The two policy issues that have aroused the most conspiracy theory have been Healthcare reform and Clean Energy Reform, with hugely profitable insurance and fossil fuel companies funding massive lobbying and disinformation campaigns. The Center for Public Integrity recently detailed the massive expansion in lobbying by polluting energy interests, leading to over 1,150 lobbying groups buying influence as the U.S. Congress sought to pass the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

The actual dollar amount spent is unknown, as disclosure laws require few details and have huge loopholes, but the Center calculated that an extremely conservative estimate would give you a minimum figure of more than $27 million dollars spent in direct lobbying from April to June of this year. In a major and still unfolding scandal, Bonner and Associates, an astroturf lobbying organization contracted to the coal industry’s trade association, falsified letters to lawmakers from local civil rights, veterans, and other groups opposing federal climate legislation. This comes on top of the documented campaign of industrial espionage against environmental organizations, including Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, that was exposed last year by Mother Jones magazine.

The picture painted by these facts lead to the open question to if, as huge amounts of corporate money started being spent in unregulated funds, including to ethically compromised contractors and security firms, to defeat federal and international climate regulations, some of that money was diverted to fund a criminal conspiracy?

Could there be a criminal campaign to break into the climate research centers of foreign governments, review their archives for damaging snippets of text, and then elevate a fringe conspiracy theory that climate change is a hoax by the world’s scientists, civil society organizations, and governments to impose socialism upon the people of the world? If so, this story would be an eerie and ironic echo of Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear” that was embraced by many of the same groups currently promoting the ClimateGate talking points.

However, most journalists seem content to play into the false balance trap that has served the opponents of climate action so well over the years, by looking only at cherry-picked quotes and disinformation turned out by the climate denial industry. While the surface parallels between Watergate and ClimateGate may be strong, to uncover the truth will require a serious investigation by media, law enforcement, or even international security organizations.

An investigation into who is coordinating, funding, and leading a last-ditch effort to stall climate legislation through the use of criminal tactics and a well-funded and coordinated disinformation campaign seems to be beyond the capacity of the field of journalism. An industry so critically wounded by budget and staffing cuts that it is perhaps unable or unwilling to spend the resources or staff time to tackle serious investigative issues, even if the direction of a policy critical to the future development of the global economy depends on the outcome.

If so, the question remains, who will get to the bottom of ClimateGate? This could be a scandal bigger than anybody has imagined.

Richard Graves is the Director of Fired Up Media, an Associate Producer for LinkTV: EarthFocus, and a contributing editor for It’s Getting Hot in Here.

This year, a group of leaders from humanitarian, anti-poverty, and environmental circles came together to try something new to build the political will for a global climate treaty this year. Many pundits had already written off the Copenhagen climate treaty, saying that governments had given up on climate change after the financial crisis. To get world leaders to support a global climate treaty, people all over the world need to show that they are ready for an unprecedented level of leadership. Citizens needed to call on their Presidents and Prime ministers to show that they were willing to think ahead to the future, not just the next financial quarter.

The truth is that polar bears and melting icebergs are not sufficient to more leaders to regulate the sprawling and powerful fossil fuel, agriculture, and timber industries. The language of environmentalism and political pressure from the membership of organizations that have led on responding to climate change would not have been sufficient. So a few campaigners, organizations, and leaders decided that climate change was too big for just the environmentalists to take on. Even before the Copenhagen climate conference, 2009 is shaping up as the year where the rest of civil society took up climate change.

This year has been the year where athletes, doctors, musicians, and bloggers from organizations big and small have added their voice and their efforts to secure a global climate treaty. Over just the past few weeks, from my perspective as a blogger for the TckTckTck campaign, I have watched as groups that I never expected, suddenly joining in to take action on climate change.

Freerunners, the acrobatic athletes jumping across rooflines, held the largest simultaneous freerunning event on September 26th, in over 75 cities around the world. The International Red Cross/Red Crescent joined the TckTckTck campaign, moved to act by the health and humanitarian impacts of climate change. Leading bicyclists served as ambassadors for 350.org and inspired bikers all over the world. Dozens of international musicians recorded a remake of the classic “Beds are Burning” song to inspire their fans to act. When the pictures from the organizers of the Global Wake Up Call on September 21st, streamed in last month, photos of Nepalese monks blowing horns and holding signs were next to crowds setting off their cell phone alarms in London, of people beating pots and pans in Dehli. Over 7,000 bloggers have signed up, to write about climate change on Oct. 15th, no matter what they normally write about on a day-to-day basis. Something is happening here.

I think what is happened is that the world is waking up to climate change and not just the environmentalists concerned about coral reefs and the rainforest, although we need to protect the coral reefs and rainforests, but also the people living on islands and relying on forests for their livelihoods and even their survival.

The big messy world of humanity has realized that climate change is such a huge issue; it will impact whatever they hold dearest. However, people are not just focused on the threats and dangers that climate change can hold to their community. Ordinary people, from all walks of life are getting really excited about the opportunities to make their community healthier, more secure, and a better place to live.

The beautiful thing, to see people from different cultures, different walks of life, and very different reasons to care joining an effort to take action on climate change is the example that is being made to world leaders. When diplomats and lobbyists and nonprofit groups descend on Copenhagen this fall, perhaps the cliché that the whole world is watching will, this time, be nothing but the truth. If so, this could be the start of something new, the rise of a global climate movement that actually starts to represent the cultures and societies of the world.

President Barack Obama addresses a joint session of Congress Wednesday nightWhitehouse.gov

With a summer of incendiary rhetoric and fabricated charges by the right-wing dominating the media headlines, President Obama took to the bully pulpit to sell his plan for what is now being called “Health Insurance Reform” rather than health care reform.

President Obama and congressional leaders have made health-care reform and tackling global warming their top priorities this year, yet little to no analysis has been made on what a climate policy that shuts down carbon-spewing smokestacks and tailpipes would mean to the health-care sector. Yet, the health impacts of climate legislation are likely to be enormous, one of the largest and most radical efforts ever at preventative care, by eliminating the sources of the pollutants that make us sick.

Climate legislation could save Americans more money and avoid more crippling health conditions than the other leading progressive policy solution: a public option. 

The sources of carbon emissions are also the sources of other environmental pollutants that cause high rates of cancer and respiratory and neurological disease. A properly designed climate policy could save the health sector hundreds of billions of dollars, save businesses billions by avoiding lost workdays and rising health-care premiums, and reduce government costs for providing health care to the most vulnerable groups, children and the elderly.

Research in this field is devilishly difficult to come by, despite the plethora of research into the possible health impacts of climate change and a solid body of research on air and water pollution and environmental health.  Studies on the health impacts of climate policy are mostly the province of European agencies providing health care and administering climate policy. In its 2008 report, the European Environment Agency put health care savings for the EU’s new 20 percent reduction in carbon emissions 2020 target in the range of $44 billion dollars annually. 

Last night Obama noted that “We spend one and a half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it.” Even with its smaller population, if you factor in the higher health costs in the United States and the looser environmental regulations, you can calculate a back of the envelope estimate of possible health care savings. Over ten years, we could save in the range of $450 billion dollars, a figure greater even than the savings from a public option, which has been estimated at $226 to $400 billion by the Urban Institute.

While a debate rages about how to enact health care reform, most efforts are focused on reducing the cost of providing health services to the population. A public insurance option to compete with private insurers, government negotiation with drugmakers for lower costs, the digitization of records, and mandates for insurance are all seen as solutions to reduce the cost of health care. The only major part of the health care debate focused on eliminating the need for health care services involves confronting the national obesity crisis, which is increasingly seen as linked to commuter culture and the availability of industrial food.

In his speech, President Obama embraced the importance of preventative care, because “it saves money, and it saves lives.” That same logic applies to cleaning up the health impacts of fossil fuels.

And yet, the millions of cases of asthma, heart disease, and that could be linked to the soot, ozone, toxic chemicals and heavy metals originating from the burning and refining of fossil fuels are seen as an unchanging part of any business-as-usual model for future health care costs.

Environmental advocates and congressional leaders have a different future in mind for the use of fossil fuels, calling for regulation to dramatically increase the nation’s use of renewable energy and increasing energy efficiency. Recently, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey bill, a sprawling 1,400 page effort to regulate carbon emissions from the nation’s transportation fleet and energy sector.  

Environmental justice advocate Majora Carter said this spring, “Our energy policy in the United States is subsidized by the health of poor people.” Asthma, heart disease, and other life-threatening illnesses exacerbated by air pollution kill thousands and send millions of worried parents to emergency rooms every year with children struggling to breathe. Governments are forced to pick up the check when uninsured patients seek emergency care or catastrophic health care costs force bankruptcy.

Dirty energy facilities are often sited in poor communities, which have the highest rates of being uninsured and indigent. The high cost of treating respiratory and heart disease in an emergency room is passed on to the government and the ratepayers.

Obama clearly understands how this, saying “Those of us with health insurance are also paying a hidden and growing tax for those without it — about $1,000 per year that pays for somebody else’s emergency room and charitable care”

Environmental injustice is not just a moral or social issue. It’s also a fiscal issue. Cleaning up pollution hotspots could reduce healthcare costs to government and those with health insurance by $450 billion. I think this bears repeating; environmental justice advocates have a legitimate, fiscally conservative argument that cleaning up their communities saves the country and Obama’s health care plan money.

If you are making a moral argument, as Obama did when he invoked the memory of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, the savings in lives and misery from preventing the need for healthcare, versus making that care more accessible and affordable is stronger than it has ever been. It is more ethical to prevent someone from getting lung cancer, than simply make the care for their cancer more affordable. I want to be clear though, this isn’t an either/or case, rather an example of how progressive climate and health legislation can work together to avoid misery and save the country money.

More on the climate change and public health connection

• Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century
• Climate change policy as prescription for British health care?
  
• Globesity: How climate change and obesity draw from the same roots

In the dog days of August, you can be forgiven for not wanting to think about how it could get hotter, much hotter, in summers to come. Nevertheless, Climate Central, a nonprofit focused on communicating climate science, released a study today forecasting what summers might look like in 21 American cities in 2050.

Climate Central’s analysis predicts hotter Augusts for many of America’s largest cities by mid-century. More >>The findings are startling, as the study found that even a modest amount of global warming would have a large effect on weather extremes, including extreme heat events. In a sobering set of tables, the group projected that Chicago and New York could experience more extreme heat in August 40 years from now than Atlanta experiences today. The real threat of these heat waves isn’t higher power bills and sweaty armpits; it’s the cascading set of health impacts they would inflict upon the vulnerable populations of American cities.

Extreme weather events can wreak havoc upon unprepared populations, such as the Chicago heat wave of 1995 and the 2003 European heat wave, which killed an estimated 40,000 people. These heat waves have proven especially deadly to vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and persons with respiratory illness. Health officials have found themselves besieged in unanticipated extreme weather events, as infants and the elderly succumb to extreme heat or from air pollution exacerbated by high temperatures.

Heat is a catalyst for the formation of smog, which is formed from a toxic soup of volatile organic compounds, tailpipe and smokestack exhaust, and strong sunlight. The lungs of infants, children, and the elderly are by far the most vulnerable to smog inhalation, which can lead to hospitalization and death.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, a 1.8°F increase in maximum temperature corresponded to a 4.5 percent increase in respiratory hospital admissions in 12 European cities. But what does that mean for American cities?

Climate Centrals analysis shows that Denver, in August, would go from an average of seven days a month, above 90°F and one day over 95°F, to a dramatically different climate of twenty-three days a month over 90°F, twelve days a month over 95°F, and three days a month over 100°F. This could lead to massive increases in hospitalizations and rising death rates from those with heart and lung disease, diabetes, or pneumonia.

One factor that can reduce the death rate from extreme weather events, like heat waves, is air conditioning. One reason that the death toll was so high in the Chicago and European heat waves was that the urban populations were unprepared and many of the victims did not have climate control systems. Air conditioning almost certainly would have saved lives in those two events, but it’s a solution that comes with its own costs.

Air conditioning drives peak demand for electricity in most industrialized societies and broader adoption could require the construction of expensive and polluting power plants. Air conditioners are also major drivers, along with black asphalt, of the urban heat island effect. According to the EPA, the annual mean air temperature of a city with 1 million people or more can be 1.8° to 5.4°F warmer than its surroundings. On a clear night, the temperature difference can be as much as 22°F.

In effect, climate control may reduce mortality from direct heat exposure, but could drive more global warming impacts, worsen air quality, and increase urban outdoor temperatures. This is what, in modeling, is called a feedback loop. Finally, increased energy demand could overwhelm the energy grid. A sustained power outage in a 100°F heat wave could be a public health disaster, with apartment buildings, rest homes, and public housing requiring emergency evacuation.

High temperatures affect more than people. Many tree species that are on the margin of a temperature zone will not be able to adjust to the new temperatures and may face catastrophic losses. Sure, tree huggers may be upset, but what does that mean for human health?

Urban tree cover is both a major factor in reducing the urban heat island effect and in scrubbing the air of particulate matter and dust. As natural air conditioners, their loss will increase the impact of the extreme weather events that Climate Central is projecting. The loss of shade trees also can have major impacts on home cooling costs, once again driving up electricity demand. The transition to new species of tree for urban tree cover could leave an entire generation of urban dwellers at increased risk from heat and air pollution. This is another feedback loop showing how the high temperature increases that Climate Central projects can have cascading effects on the human population.

One last impact from these elevated temperatures is on human behavior. Quite simply, there has long been a demonstrated link between elevated temperatures and aggression. The journal Environment and Behavior published research in the mid-eighties demonstrating a linear relationship between heat and horn honking, something anyone who has experienced summer driving can attest to. More recently, a study published in the journal established linkages between assault and high temperatures, with an article, “Global Warming and U.S. Crime Rates,” finding annual temperatures were associated with rates for assault, rape, robbery, burglary, and larceny. So if the heat doesn’t kill you, perhaps somebody else will.

Hot Wheels: Breaking the Cycle

Clearly, a cycle is emerging — one triggered by extreme heat events that continually increases temperatures and the exposure of the human population to dangerous air pollution, behavior, and temperatures. So, what do we do about it?

Global warming activists would say that we should avoid the whole mess by passing a climate bill in the United States and forging a global climate treaty in Copenhagen. However, Climate Central’s analysis is based on one climate model — called A1B by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Greenhouse gas emissions have exceeded the A1B scenario this decade, making the projections conservative. So we may be living with their projections, even if we do reduce climate emissions by a considerable amount.

Well, here is the good news, as many of the solutions that will see communities through the tough times to come are known climate change solutions, too. Basically, while Chicago may go from four to fourteen over 90°F days, Mayor Richard Daley’s effort to build the green roof and green space capital of the United States could lower urban temperatures, clean the air, and reduce electricity demand. Solar power produces maximum output during peak cooling demand, meaning the technology’s mainstreaming into the market could alleviate the need for additional power plants.

Finally, energy conservation and passive cooling green buildings can both reduce global warming emissions, the heat island effect, and protect vulnerable inhabitants. The same goes for reducing parking lots and building up mass transit and walkable communities. The solutions to global warming, in this case, can also mitigate its consequences. But green design, renewable energy, and urban planning are not the only solutions we can work on. Eric Klinenberg, in his book on the Chicago heat wave, explored how:

Strong local community and social networks actually can enable vulnerable populations to survive: The urban ecology that interacts with and supports the social fabric. Are the elderly living alone afraid of crime in their neighborhood, or do they feel safe seeking out help at the local grocer? Does the community have access to fast emergency care, or is there a dearth of police, health, or other community services?

So, to break the cycle of heat waves causing a cascading and rising death toll in American cities over the next century, we need to address climate change, but we can do so in a way that builds green space, and clean and healthy communities. We also need to rebuild our social infrastructure so that the elderly, the poor, people of color, and other abandoned populations can survive the coming red-hot American summers.

Madeline Kovacs, a Fired Up Media correspondent, assisted with the research for this piece.