Californians, Vote No on Prop 23

Be sure to vote on Tuesday, November 2, Election Day, too much is at stake not to.  If you live in California, the results of races for Governor (vote for Jerry), the U.S. Senate (Boxer), and the U.S. House of Representatives, plus several state propositions, will have a collectively enormous impact on California’s environment, economy, quality of life, and future prospects.  

In California, it’s critically important that you vote No on Proposition 23.

Prop 23 is an attempt by Texas oil refinery companies Valero and Tesoro, as well as the extremist right-wing Koch brothers, to change the State of California's future by undoing our seminal Global Warming Solutions Act, better known as AB 32.  This legislation, approved in 2006 and signed into law by Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, will have a profoundly positive impact by significantly reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHG’s) and other air pollutants, creating new jobs and spurring innovation in clean technology, renewable energy, and energy efficiency, and improving residents’ quality of life through better air quality and more sensible transportation and housing policies.  Prop 23 would unravel these advances.

California’s AB 32 also is extremely important in the national debate over what to do about global climate change, especially given that reactionary conservatives to date have successfully stifled action on the climate change crisis primarily at the behest of oil, coal and electric utility companies.  AB 32 will help reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, reduce the nation’s irresponsible emissions of GHG’s, and provide invaluable impetus to the urgent economic and environmental necessity of shifting this nation’s energy dependence to clean technologies and renewable energy. 

Everywhere across the country, elected officials and numerous other stakeholders are looking to California and AB 32 as an indicator of where the nation is going.  Unless, of course, somehow AB 32 was made to go away.  Proposition 23 would effectively kill AB 32, although its dishonest purveyors claim that the proposition would merely “suspend” the global warming law.  Indeed, the language in the proposition does say “suspend,” but the conditions attached to this so-called suspension in reality would make it permanent.   

World Meteorological Organization Calls Current Decade another Record-Setter

The title of the December 8 press release from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is "2000-2009, The Warmest Decade."  Quoting from the text, "The decade of the 2000s (2000-2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990-1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980-1989)."  The WMO uses global combined sea surface and land surface air temperatures, a conclusively sound methodology.

The WMO announcement also pointed out that "This year above-normal temperatures were recorded in most parts of the continents.  Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average."  The anecdote regarding North America is important, as some U.S. climate change deniers use it out of context to try to confuse the public into believing that global warming isn't happening.

Earth's climbing surface temperatures are only part of the story.  The world's scientists, including but not limited to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are continuing to find one disturbing climate change-related development after another.  These include melting glaciers, drying rivers, sea level rise, oceanic acidification and an Arctic region in climate turmoil.

And yet more from the press release: "Climate extremes, including devastating floods, severe droughts, snowstorms, heat waves and cold waves, were recorded in many parts of the world," and "The Arctic sea ice extent during the melt season ranked the third lowest, after the lowest and second-lowest records set in 2007 and 2008, respectively."

The evidence is overwhelming -- humans are heating the planet to an alarming degree and so far there is no end in sight.

Al Gore Advocates for Electric Vehicles and Against Ethanol

Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore is on tour to promote his new book, Our Choice, which more or less begins where An Inconvenient Truth ended.  While touching on the latest science of global climate change, the book nonetheless focuses on U.S. energy policies, sources and uses and on policy solutions to the climate crisis (a term used not only by this author but also in a consistent manner by Gore).

Opening his November 9 remarks at San Rafael's Dominican University with his trademark self-deprecating humor -- "I'm Al Gore, I used to be the next president of the United States" -- the relaxed and good-humored Tennessean immediately had his audience laughing and applauding.  To be sure, for Gore, speaking to an ideologically compatible and politically sophisticated San Francisco Bay Area audience about global climate change, the only thing missing from the love would be flowers and kisses.

The Arctic in Crisis -- Global Warming Reverses Long-Term Cooling Trend

A recent study published in the September 4 issue of Science magazine is yet another indicator that the Arctic is in crisis.  A team of scientists found that temperatures in the Earth’s vast northernmost region – which includes the Arctic Ocean and parts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and the Scandinavian countries in Northern Europe – have reversed a long-term cooling trend and are now the warmest they’ve been in at least 2,000 years.

The study’s authors include the renowned Darrell S. Kaufman, of the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University, and David Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.

The Arctic cooling period had lasted for 2,000 years and was reversed during the 20th century, with four of the five warmest decades in the region occurring between 1950 and 2000.

Federal Agencies Roll Out Greenhouse Gas Regulations, Initiatives

The 1990s was a lost decade on the climate change issue in the U.S., mostly thanks to the hidebound U.S. Senate.  In 1993 it defeated President Clinton’s BTU tax proposal, in 1997 it repudiated the Kyoto Protocol (which at that time still technically was only a draft, not a final accord) with its 95-0 vote in favor of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, and in 1998 it defeated  “America’s Climate Security Act of 2007,” also known as the Lieberman-Warner bill. 

EPA Administrator Carol Browner, in choosing to be MIA, also served as an obstacle, albeit a quiet and passive one.  So President Clinton and Vice President Gore essentially limited the administration’s remaining climate change efforts to signing up corporate partners to its voluntary Climate Change Action Plan, supporting research, and launching an earnest but low-level public awareness effort that made a point to avoid the media, in which this writer participated.  Of course, the U.S. and the world community then lost another precious eight years under Dubyah and his administration, no need to elaborate. 

Today, 16 years after the U.S. Government should have started mobilizing the country to address global warming, we finally have a White House, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a Department of Energy (DOE) moving forward with meaningful measures to curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.