We write this alert with a sad and heavy heart, in the aftermath of the spectacle of ONLY Dennis Kucinich casting the vote of true conscience and courage last night, the only one who spoke the truth about a CORPORATE takeover of national health care, that in fact CUTS the existing Medicare program and throws a woman's right to choose completely over the side for bad measure. And we will have much more to say about this in the next alert, when we will debut the first in a series of "I'm A Democrat, and I'm A Republican" issue action videos which we have produced. So please stay tuned for that.
In the meantime, other critical issues are pressing and must be addressed by those who are willing to take a stand for good policy in the true public interest.
It seems that every day there is a new story about the shocking and dramatic evidence of acceleration of global warming, which extrapolated out means utter planetary climate catastrophe within decades. But even the moderate measures proposed by the Boxer bill are being stymied by the refusal of Republicans to even take their committee seats. In the meantime the best chance to achieve worldwide consensus on real carbon emissions cuts, the Copenhagen summit, is a mere weeks away.
Even worse, in yet another attempt to turn a reform bill into something that actually does more harm than good, we are being told that to get a climate bill passed we must endorse more offshore oil drilling and MORE coal fired power plants. The sheer lunacy of pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, when that is the primary CAUSE of the problem, is the stuff of farce. And Congress needs to hear that from you, now. Please submit the action page below and tell Congress we must burn LESS fossil fuel and find truly green solutions instead.
Stop Fossil Fuel Expansion Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1019.php
We were frankly shocked by some of the responses to our first alert supporting the climate change bill, so this time please take a moment to allow us to preemptively address some of the concerns we have heard from you.
First there were some of you who condemned any effort to achieve international cooperation on addressing climate change as some kind of sinister "New World Order". Roughly in that same crowd are those who assert national sovereignty and the rest of the planet be damned. And damned it most surely will be unless we find a way to cooperate globally in the interest of the survival of our civilization. And what means national sovereignty when the carbon dioxide pollution we create, and spread to the rest of the world, causes our OWN climate to change in disastrous ways? Indeed, fair international cooperation is the only hope we've got, and we'd better get used to it.
Many years ago in a high school biology lab we remember some fruit fly experiments. And we had tubes of nutrient gel, and if you put a couple fruit flies in there they would just breed and breed until the tube was like some kind of fruit fly hell out of Malthus. Was there a fruit fly in there to talk about cooperating to conserve finite resources? Apparently not. So now will the human species rise above the intellectual level of a fruit fly? That remains to be seen.
Next we heard from those who condemned any kind of cap and trade bill as a sell out to polluting industries. And in all candor we AGREE with you there. Except for one thing. The most valiant world leaders on stopping climate change argue that cap and trade bills in Europe HAVE reduced carbon dioxide emissions already, and that such a bill in the U.S. Congress, as long as it were not completely debased by further endorsement of coal and oil drilling (the point of this alert), would bring the United States to the world bargaining table and set the stage for a real global consensus and further progress.
So this is not a case where a reasonable cap and trade bill would be a step in the WRONG direction. This is not a case, like the health care bill just passed by the House, where we have so far gotten NOTHING we want. But again, this is based on standing up to say no to trading off a little cap and trade gains for an outrageous increase in fossil fuel burning, in which case of course the bill must be opposed in its entirely.
And finally, the next person that writes to us arguing that carbon dioxide is a "life giving gas" that the plants love earns an instant ticket to the permanent removal file. Sure, and water is life giving too, unless you're under 20 feet of it and it's a flood.
And sure plants love carbon dioxide, except when we are clear cutting forests from one end of the planet to the other. There is PLENTY enough in the atmosphere already for as many plants as we allow to grow, and indeed aggressive reforestation is the perhaps the most powerful cure we can apply to achieve real REDUCTIONS in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. But perverse ignorance of what we are doing to our own environment is the inevitable road to environmental catastrophe, as even the average fruit fly can now tell you.
By the way, we have a new "350 ppm" cap to promote the maximum level of carbon dioxide that the top REAL scientists believe we can sustain without putting our future in jeopardy. We are currently at 387. And fifty years from now, assuming we do nothing and when coastal cities are under water, you will remember we told you so, if you are around.
350 PPM Caps:
http://www.peaceteam.net/all_gifts.php
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=carbon+dioxide
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=drilling
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=coal+fired+power+plant
