Running out of time in 2009
Before we put this decade in the rear-view mirror, we have a few stories that have been stockpiling up the last few weeks - stories that just won't cut it in 2010. Not because they won't be relevant, it's just that they have that certain, end-of-year type of feel to them. So before you cue Auld Lang Syne - enjoy these.
Our favorite local writer Tim Connor took on partisan politics in wake of the Copenhagen climate talks, and whether he meant to or not, he ended up writing a brilliant piece on attitudes towards climate change. "Either Republicans have supernatural powers of scientific criticism or we are arguably witnessing the most important and destructive exercise of delusional thinking in human history," Connor wrote in his piece titled, When the Penguins Vote Republican. And while this particular piece is a gold-mine of intelligent perspectives on partisan politics and the scary result that we've seen from that this year, this excerpt was our favorite part:
What’s missing is not necessarily the urgency to address global warming. As exemplified by Bill McKibben and the worldwide 350 campaign, there is a planetary public uprising underway to push the world’s governments into making the changes necessary to reduce carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. What is missing is any sanity in the character and machinery of U.S. governance. I don’t mean to excuse China and India, whose willingness to develop their economies without a reliance on fossil fuels is vital. But, really, this is about us. The American Century was built upon a fossil fuel binge Not that the odds of a solution are great even with American leadership, but without it the science indicates that global warming is swiftly headed toward a tipping point that would end the natural world as we’ve known it.
Read the entire article HERE.
We'll take an incomplete... it's better than failing. The San Franciso Chronicle did a nice year-in-review look at the United States' energy policy and came to the solution that the only grade to give would be incomplete based on the fact that the climate bill didn't get pushed through this year. "Everything in the long term depends on getting a climate bill through," said Daniel Kammen, a professor in the Energy and Resources Group at UC Berkeley. "Until then, the best grade you can give is incomplete. There's been more progress than a lot of people expected." Read more HERE.
The Christian Science Monitor offers a wealth of stats on Americans' attitudes toward the environment, and how those aren't reflected in action. More than 6 in 10 people said they thought car pooling or taking mass transit would help the environment.
Yet only 3 in 10 said they were very likely to do it, and 4 in 10 said
they were not at all likely to car pool or take mass transit. However, nearly eight of 10 people who were concerned about
environmental protection said that they believe their actions are
helping to protect the environment.
Yeah, sure, numbers are ripe for debating - but this is also the year that we saw nearly half of Americans say they are only slightly or not at all concerned about climate change - a jump of ten percent from 2007. Maybe David Simon is on to something when he says global warming is a problem that maybe is too big for the human imagination.
