Friends of the Earth Goes it Alone: Urges 'No' on Climate Bill
by Stacy Morford
Jun 24th, 2009
From the page: "The House climate bill took another hit this week as Rep. Henry Waxman made further concessions, this time to farm-state Democrats, to ensure the bill's safe passage on Friday. Even weakened, though, the bill continued to draw support from most of the big environmental organizations.
Except for Friends of the Earth. The organization is going it alone with an ad campaign and request to its members to demand better legislation from Congress. FOE President Brent Blackwelder is publicly urging Congress to either substantially strengthen the bill or vote no.
"Corporate polluters including Shell and Duke Energy helped write this bill, and the result is that we're left with legislation that fails to come anywhere close to solving the climate crisis," Blackwelder wrote.
"Worse, the bill eliminates preexisting EPA authority to address global warming -- that means it's actually a step backward.
"This exercise in politics as usual is a wholly unacceptable response to one of the greatest challenges of our time, and it endangers the welfare of current and future generations... If the 'political reality' at present cannot accommodate stronger legislation, their first task must be to expand what is politically possible -- not to pass a counterproductive bill."
That position hasn't been easy hasn't been easy to take. Some of the largest environmental groups, including NRDC and EDF, were involved with Shell and Duke in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a consortium that wrote the industry-environment compromise that the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) bill is based on. Groups that have questioned the legislation have been pressured to back off."
Betraying the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 28, 2009
From the page: "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."
44 Democrats Broke With Obama on Climate Bill
Sunday, June 28, 2009
From the page: " The majority of the 52 House members who broke party ranks on Friday's cap-and-trade climate change vote came from congressional districts that backed the presidential nominee of the opposite party in last year's election.
Nearly all of these members will face competitive races in 2010, according to Congressional Quarterly, and many will likely brandish this ostensibly independent vote as evidence of their political independence.
Here's the list of the 44 Democratic "no" votes that chose to go against their party leader, President Barack Obama. There were also 8 Republican "yes" votes."
I'm Starting With The Man In
The Mirror
I'm Asking Him To Change
His Ways
And No Message Could Have
Been Any Clearer
If You Wanna Make The World
A Better Place
(If You Wanna Make The
World A Better Place)
Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change
(Take A Look At Yourself, And
Then Make A Change)
The Climate Bill in Climate Context
By Andrew C. Revkin
June 26, 2009, 2:23 pm
From the page: "Any flow of money for deploying less-polluting energy technology in developing countries is likely to be constrained in any final climate bill by the Senate, which has expressed big concerns about the United States subsidizing the technological advancement of emerging competitors.
The bottom line remains, as the International Energy Agency warned in its 2008 World Energy Outlook, that 97 percent of projected growth in emissions of carbon dioxide from energy use through 2030 (without aggressive action) will come in developing countries, with three-fourths of that growth in China, India and the Middle East.
The pace of emissions and long-term warming largely will be determined by how the Obama administration and other leaders of industrialized powers handle that reality. "
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