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Our Climatic Moment: We Didn't Find Nemo - We Made Him

Our Climatic Moment: We Didn't Find Nemo - We Made Him
Wed, 2/13/2013 - by Carl Gibson

If you’re trying hard to lose weight that you’ve gained exponentially in the previous year, would it make more sense to eat fried chicken for breakfast as well as lunch and dinner, or to eliminate fried foods from your diet altogether?

Dennis Trainor, Jr. compared last fall's climate conference of the world’s leading fossil fuel consumers in Qatar to Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy sitting alone in a room deciding how they should be punished for their crimes.

The world’s industrialized nations, particularly the U.S., have only been increasing their use of fossil fuels even as climate change wreaks havoc on hundreds of millions of people all over the world. The longer we hold out on enacting real solutions to these real problems, things will only get worse.

The fires that dealt a huge blow to Russia’s grain export economy in 2010; the floods that destroyed Pakistan that same year; the droughts that are plaguing the American Midwest, and the winter storm that’s just recently crippled New England all have the same root cause: an atmosphere crowded with an overabundance of CO2 and methane gas, which is meanwhile dislodging ice sheets, acidifying oceans and causing sea levels to rise at a rapid level.

Those rising sea levels put more moisture in the air, meaning that precipitation that would normally fall in Russia got carried over and dumped into Pakistan, creating the dry conditions that led to Russia’s fires and turning Pakistan’s monsoon season into floods that left millions of people without homes, not to mention numerous children without parents.

The new moisture in the air also warmed temperatures in a normally cold New England fall, making conditions ripe for an October hurricane that flooded Manhattan and all but swept away parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island. That same change in the climate warmed the air just enough during what would normally be a frigid New England winter, bringing us milder temperatures at or just below freezing. So instead of Boston having a 2-degree low, Boston got 2 feet of snow.

While it remains to be seen what the total cost of damage will be from Winter Storm Nemo, Hurricane Sandy cost businesses in the New York area at least $50 billion. Russia's halting of grain exports in 2010 likely led to the skyrocketing of food prices that helped spark the Arab Spring protests across the Middle East. Climate change isn’t just endangering people’s lives and communities, but entire economies as well.

In a Buzzfeed interview, GOP Senator Marco Rubio didn’t deny climate change is happening, but said there was some "debate" as to the causes. However, a climate change study funded by the right-wing billionaire polluter Koch Brothers, who finance the campaigns of politicians that vow to gut environmental regulations and deny climate change is man-made, found these latest alarming changes in the climate are indeed man-made.

There really isn’t a “debate” anymore, and there hasn’t been for awhile, since the only debate that existed was between scientists who study the climate and paid lackeys of oil barons who profit from sustaining the conditions that are worsening climate change.

As the world’s largest economy and largest emitter of CO2, the United States has the obligation to be a leader in addressing climate change and mitigating its effects. Other countries have set examples we can live up to—Denmark went from total fossil fuel dependency to an economy run 30% on wind power in one generation. Uruguay has a plan to generate 25% of its electricity with wind power by 2015. Germany is already producing 40% of its power from the sun.

We could achieve similar results with a cap-and-trade system that would fund future investments in building clean energy infrastructure across America. But instead of trying these tried-and-true tactics from other countries, we’re running in the opposite direction.

The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, if built, would take the world's dirtiest oil from the Alberta tar sands, in Canada, and pipe it 2,000 miles south through the Great Plains to Houston, where it would be refined and exported to Europe, South America and elsewhere. The scientific consensus is that burning this vast supply of toxic sludge will drastically, and unequivocally, raise global temperatures further.

The project is about to receive a final yes or no decision from President Obama very soon, according to Secretary of State John Kerry. While Obama rejected the original route that pipeline builder Transcanada proposed, he has been ambiguous about whether he’ll give the green light for a new route that activists and landowners have been busy for a half year getting arrested to block.

Now, on Sunday, February 17, tens of thousands of activists will descend on Washington, DC to demand that the president keeps his promise to move "Forward on Climate" and say no, once and for all, to Keystone XL.

If the doctor gave you only six more months to live based on your current diet, a reasonable person would switch to fruits and vegetables instead of gobbling down more fried chicken. The climate diagnosis is in. We must stop our nation’s, and our planet's, fatal addiction to fossil fuels before climate change wipes us all out.

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Like Hitler, Trump has a unique command of propaganda, a captivating public presence, and he knows how to drive home narratives beneficial to him and harmful to his enemies.

Trump’s brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries like India,Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Argentina, among others.

The Florida governor’s humiliating loss has a dark undertone: Most Republicans, and many independents, apparently have a craving for the unchecked lawless vengeance that Trump has promised if he wins a second term.

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

Posted 3 weeks 3 days ago

Trump’s brand of hyper-nationalism combined with the intense consolidation of executive power follows the same playbook as fascistic leaders in other countries like India,Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Egypt, Italy and Argentina, among others.

Posted 1 month 3 weeks ago
Donald Trump, Hitler

Like Hitler, Trump has a unique command of propaganda, a captivating public presence, and he knows how to drive home narratives beneficial to him and harmful to his enemies.

Posted 1 month 1 week ago

What remains unknown is whether post-truth Republicans will succeed in 2024 as the Nazis did in 1933.

Posted 1 week 2 days ago

Based on details that have emerged about Trump’s presidential agenda, the far-right Heritage Foundation plans for the next GOP president to have all the tools necessary to demolish multicultural democracy and establish a white, Christian ethnostate that imposes a gender apartheid not unlike the Taliban’s Afghanistan.