Zitat des Tages von Jeff Goodell:
Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.
President Obama is in no danger of being judged by history as an eco-radical.
Some studies have shown that natural gas could, in fact, be worse for the climate than coal.
But Big Oil and Big Coal have always been as skilled at propaganda as they are at mining and drilling. Like the tobacco industry before them, their success depends on keeping Americans stupid.
From the industry's point of view, the problem is not that coal companies blast the top off mountains, turning the area into a moonscape and polluting the air and releasing toxic chemical into what's left of the local streams and aquifers. It's that the people who live near the mines are too cozy with their cousins.
Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.
With so much at risk, you might expect Australia to be at the forefront of the clean-energy revolution and the international effort to cut carbon pollution. After all, the continent's vast, empty deserts were practically designed for solar-power installations.
The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.
To understand how quickly we're cooking the planet, we need good data. To have good data, we need good satellites.
But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.
If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for "dangerous" climate change.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who also happens to be the 10th richest person in America, with a personal fortune of some $18 billion, likes to pick a fight - especially fights where the line between good and evil is particularly stark.
When it comes to energy, cost isn't everything - but it's a lot. Everybody wants cheap power.
Subsidies are hugely important; they represent America's de facto energy policy.
In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.
Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper.
Nowhere has the political power of coal been more obvious than in presidential campaigns.
Mark Ruffalo, aka the Incredible Hulk, is the natural gas industry's worst nightmare: a serious, committed activist who is determined to use his star power as a superhero in the hottest movie of the moment to draw attention the environmental and public health risks of fracking.
In the Arctic, things are already getting freaky. Temperatures have warmed three times faster than the global average.
Obama's record on climate issues is not all bad.
Without electrons, there is no Google. And without clean electrons, there will be no Google customers, since we'll all be too busy fleeing from rising seas, droughts, and disease.
Today, we're very dependent on cheap energy. We just take it for granted - all the things you have in the house, the way industry works.
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.
It's not all Obama's fault: His plans to rebuild America's energy infrastructure have been hampered by the recession, and his efforts on global warming have been stymied by Tea Party wackos and weak-kneed Democrats in Congress.
The first sign of whether Obama is serious about confronting the climate crisis will be revealed by how he organizes the White House.
The oil industry fought hard to keep Keystone alive, making wildly exaggerated claims that the pipeline - the country's largest infrastructure project - would create tens of thousands of jobs and decrease America's reliance on oil from the Middle East.
Climate scientists have long pointed to the Southwest as one of the places in the U.S. that is most vulnerable to global warming impacts, especially drought. And if there's one thing that even climate denialists don't dispute, dry things burn.
Compared to coal, which generates almost half the electricity in the United States, natural gas is indeed a cleaner, less polluting fuel. But compared to, say, solar, it's filthy. And of course there is nothing renewable about natural gas.
So if you want to know how Exxon Mobil can make $10 billion profit in 90 days, just look around. The whole world was built for them.
Is it in our national interest to overheat the planet? That's the question Obama faces in deciding whether to approve Keystone XL, a 2,000-mile-long pipeline that will bring 500,000 barrels of tar-sand oil from Canada to oil refineries on the Gulf of Mexico.
In any crass political calculation, drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class, we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.
The coal industry is an even larger part of the Australian economy than it is of the American, and it has an enormous amount of political power.
Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.
Australia has suffered a decade of drought, epic floods, a Category 5 cyclone, and a plague of locusts. But just because Aussies have the biggest carbon footprint in the world, it doesn't mean they're stupid.
Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 - twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners.
Obama wants to be thought of as the president who freed us from foreign oil. But if he doesn't show some political courage, he may well be remembered as the president who cooked the planet.
