Climate Climate & Energy

What happens to a woman without a country?

By Amanda McKenzie, national coordinator of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition.

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Along with 10 other young Australians, I traveled to Bali to bring the voice of Australia's youth to the U.N. Climate Change Conference. We have been reminding world leaders that our future is threatened. However, my personal concerns about my future were eclipsed when a young woman named Claire from the small island nation of Kiribati stood up in front of 200 international youth and told her story. For Claire, climate change is more than a future concern. It is right here, right now.

Youth from all over the world, including Australia, had come together to share their stories and successes in raising awareness and taking action on climate change in their home countries. Every participant was humbled by Claire, who offered her heartfelt thanks to all of us for our efforts. Her home, only two meters above sea level, is rapidly being inundated by the rising ocean. Two islands that make up Kiribati have already been submerged. Claire's island, home, culture, and future are all under imminent threat from climate change. It is likely that her entire nation will have to be evacuated in the near future. Where do you go when your country simply vanishes?

Claire's voice, and the voices of the Pacific, are largely absent from the U.N. Climate Change Conference. These nations are small in terms of their size, population, wealth, and greenhouse-gas emissions. That's the irony: those who have contributed the least -- and benefited the least from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels -- will suffer first. Kiribati will be underwater before the bulk of the Australian population realizes that climate change is the most serious issue on the planet.

House report condemns “systematic” Bush admin climate-science manipulation

“The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming,” concludes a report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The report, written by the Democratic majority, is the product of a 16-month investigation into the Bush administration’s […]

It’s too late to stop climate change, argues Ross Gelbspan — so what do we do now?

As the pace of global warming kicks into overdrive, the hollow optimism of climate activists, along with the desperate responses of some of the world's most prominent climate scientists, is preventing us from focusing on the survival requirements of the human enterprise.

The environmental establishment continues to peddle the notion that we can solve the climate problem.

We can't.

We have failed to meet nature's deadline. In the next few years, this world will experience progressively more ominous and destabilizing changes. These will happen either incrementally -- or in sudden, abrupt jumps.

Under either scenario, it seems inevitable that we will soon be confronted by water shortages, crop failures, increasing damages from extreme weather events, collapsing infrastructures, and, potentially, breakdowns in the democratic process itself.

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Start with the climate activists, who are telling us only a partial truth.

A third of avian species on land could disappear this century as a result of climate change

In more depressing bird news, researchers at my alma mater estimate that up to 30 percent of all land-dwelling bird species could be extinct by 2100 as a result of global climate change. The study, published this week in the journal Conservation Biology ($ub. req'd), modeled bird population responses to changes in vegetation for over 8,000 species and 60 scenarios, and is one of the first analyses of extinction rates to incorporate information from the recent IPCC reports. I think I'm going to go cry now.

Innovator patents floating wind turbine

Traditional wind turbines have gotten a bad rap from NIMBY folk and bird advocates, but innovator Mac Brown thinks he can sway the haters. Meet the Magenn Air Rotor System (MARS), a 100-foot-wide, helium-filled turbine tethered to the earth by a copper cable. Hovering at 1,000 feet, MARS is capable of producing 10 kilowatts of […]

U.K. politician wants to power every British home with wind by 2020

Every home in the United Kingdom could be powered by offshore wind farms by 2020, says John Hutton, Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform. The long-titled Hutton said that investment in 7,000 turbines would admittedly change Britain’s coastline and raise energy costs in the short term, but would be “a major contribution […]

Belief in free lunches, tooth fairy still strong

Once in a while a pundit will say something quite revealing without intending to do so. You'd think a newspaper in a state that was recently looking down the barrel of a 72 percent electric rate hike might have beamed onto the fact that power doesn't come from wishes, and often requires difficult choices:

Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech

SPEECH BY AL GORE ON THE ACCEPTANCE OF THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
DECEMBER 10, 2007
OSLO, NORWAY

Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, Honorable members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Excellencies, Ladies and gentlemen.

I have a purpose here today. It is a purpose I have tried to serve for many years. I have prayed that God would show me a way to accomplish it.

Sometimes, without warning, the future knocks on our door with a precious and painful vision of what might be. One hundred and nineteen years ago, a wealthy inventor read his own obituary, mistakenly published years before his death. Wrongly believing the inventor had just died, a newspaper printed a harsh judgment of his life's work, unfairly labeling him "The Merchant of Death" because of his invention -- dynamite. Shaken by this condemnation, the inventor made a fateful choice to serve the cause of peace.

Seven years later, Alfred Nobel created this prize and the others that bear his name.

Seven years ago tomorrow, I read my own political obituary in a judgment that seemed to me harsh and mistaken -- if not premature. But that unwelcome verdict also brought a precious if painful gift: an opportunity to search for fresh new ways to serve my purpose.

Unexpectedly, that quest has brought me here. Even though I fear my words cannot match this moment, I pray what I am feeling in my heart will be communicated clearly enough that those who hear me will say, "We must act."

The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures -- a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: "Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live."

We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency -- a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst -- though not all -- of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

What gets measured gets fixed

The first thing you have to do if you decide to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by a certain date is … figure out 1990 levels. That is not an easy or uncontroversial undertaking, and as usual, California is showing the rest of us how to do it.

Al Gore and IPCC awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received their Nobel Peace Prizes this morning in Oslo, Norway. In his acceptance speech, Gore emphasized humanity’s role in the climate crisis, saying, “We are what is wrong, and we must make it right … We never intended to cause all this destruction, just as Alfred […]