Posts

Showing posts from 2015

8 reasons why Obama is NOT a climate hero

I don't want to hear a single pip ever again from liberals about how Obama/the Democrats are committed to tackling climate change. 1. The USG has pledged to spend $750 million per year to a Green Climate Fund to pay for adaptation and mitigation costs to nations in the Global South. In comparison, the amount of damage caused by Hurricane Sandy was estimated around $67 billion. Obama’s speech may have conceded that the US must take responsibility for its disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis. But US negotiators have been pushing for developing countries to contribute to this fund, which is ridiculous. 2. Just now, it is being reported that at least 270 people are dead and 1.8 million displaced in South India as the result of the worst flooding there in over a century. A UN report recently announced that one person is displaced every SECOND due to climate change and more than 28 million have been displaced since 2008. Climate justice cannot be achieved without ope

6 things to keep in mind when looking at the Clean Power Plan and prospects of real leadership from the White House at COP21

1) There is, there has always been, and there will always be a huge gap between what the science requires and what the state can deliver when it comes to climate change. The climate isn’t going to wait for the US progressive movement to get its shit together. Yet so many greens in this country act like this is the case. As has been said before, Nature doesn’t do bailouts. 2) The 2007 IPCC report representing scientific consensus on climate change prescribed that emissions must peak in 2015 (this year) and decline dramatically thereafter in order to avoid catastrophic climate change (above around 2.4 degrees C, which is still a death sentence for many island nations). These estimates were conservative and more recent research has shown things are moving much more quickly than the IPCC had previously predicted. Nor have emissions peaked. They've increased. This is in spite of the 15% reduction in emissions from US power plants that has already happened, amounting to just under hal

Vanuatu

Half of the island of Vanuatu is now homeless in the wake of Cyclone Pam , with 90% of structures reported as damaged and many towns and villages without safe drinking water. You can't attribute a single weather event to climate change, but you can point out the quandary of having to rebuild a country (probably through loans from the Asian Development Bank and other international financial institutions, loans that will drive the country further into debt and make future development and resettlement difficult) that will almost certainly be underwater in a few decades. In 2012/3, the House and the Senate voted to allocate $60 billion in aid towards relief and redevelopment in areas affected by Hurricane Sandy. But at the end of last year, the House took major steps to block Obama's commitment of a paltry $3 billion to the UN climate fund.  All of the top 10 countries most at risk to climate change  impacts are in the Global South (Vanuatu and other small island states aren'