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Energy Lobbyists Gather, Blame Obama and the Pope

January 27, 2016

USEACEOs
Last week, on the day after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2015 was by far the hottest year on record, the energy industry’s chief lobbyists gathered in a downtown Washington ballroom to tell each other that the real problem was not global warming, but rather efforts by the Obama Administration — and Pope Francis — to contain global warming.

The remarks of these lobbyists suggested that many of them live on a different planet, where climate change is not an urgent challenge but rather is the obsession of ideological malcontents.

The meeting, held annually, is sponsored by the United States Energy Association, whose chieftains are not the CEOs of America’s oil, coal, and gas companies. Rather, they are the heads of the Washington-based trade associations that lobby against regulation of greenhouse gases and toxic pollution. They mostly are former corporate lawyers or Capital Hill functionaries who worked their way up and now receive enormous-for-DC salaries to serve at the beck and call of actual energy executives.

I think most of us are grateful to the men and women of America’s energy companies for providing the power that fuels so much of our lives. The question is, now that the evidence of human-made global warming is overwhelming, what do these companies want to do about it? Will they continue to deny the dangers of climate change and vilify those who seek to slow it? Or can they instead change course and devote more of their skills and resources to innovations for cleaner energy, innovations that could make their companies, not to mention the Earth, more sustainable in the long term?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2015: the Year that Changed Everything?

January 1, 2016

2015: the Year that Changed Everything? 

 
Recent wildfires in California, photo from the Independent

There has been no lack of disasters taking place in 2015. Some can be classified as “natural” others as human caused. In all cases, anyway, they are an indication of the stress felt by the ecosystem and by the economic system at the same time. We are, finally, reaching our limits as we knew we had to, from the time when we were warned, in 1972, by the study titled “The Limits to Growth.”

But not everything was bad in 2015 and, in this post for the end of the year, let’s concentrate on the good things that happened. If we do that, we see that 2015 has been a very special year. Not that any of the big problems we face has been solved; but there is something new going on; something unexpected, but that may give a boost to a new direction that the world may take; a direction that may lead us to a better world. We may be learning something, after all.

So, let me list some of the good things that happened in 2015

– The Papal Encyclical on climate, the “Laudato si'”. This has really been something big. For one thing, it was clear from the way it affected the debate. Mostly, climate scientists, and scientists in general, are no-nonsense people, often atheists or agnostics, rarely churchgoers. So, the arrival of the Pope in the debate took them by surprise: “The Pope? What? Does he agree with us? Really? He said that God orders to us to safeguard the creation….. Eh….?” You can’t imagine how happy these solemn scientists were; like children receiving a Christmas gift in August! But the main effect of the Pope’s encyclical has been on the anti-science camp. They were, clearly, in difficulty.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

After the encyclical, lessons for climate activism?

July 21, 2015

After the encyclical, lessons for climate activism?

Note: This blog is based on and extends a short presentation at aLighter Footprints climate action group monthly meeting in Melbourne on 24 June.

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When I first heard early this year about the forthcoming papal encyclical on nature and climate change, my first reaction was that this could be one of the biggest moments so far in climate politics but, like many scientific “tipping points”, that can only be judged well after the fact. That Pope Francis will be addressing the UN General Assembly and the US Congress on consecutive days in September 2015, the drawing of his title from Francis of Assisi (patron saint of nature), and his training as a chemist all suggest that this issue is a core concern and his advocacy is far from over.

Laudato si, on the care of our common home was issued on 18 June and described by an editorial inThe Guardian as “the most astonishing and perhaps the most ambitious papal document of the past 100 years…[it] sets out a programme for change that is rooted in human needs but it makes the radical claim that these needs are not primarily greedy and selfish ones”.  Some key points:

  • It is addressed to everyone, to “every person living on this planet”, and not just to Catholics: “Whether believers or not, we are agreed today that the earth is essentially a shared inheritance, whose fruits are meant to benefit everyone.”
  • Nature is not separate from us: “When we speak of the ‘environment’, what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live. We are part of nature…”…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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