September 22, 2009 11:28 PM UTC

The one good Eco thing about China...

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• by: wade norris

Today President Hu Jintao of China announced their plan for curbing emissions at the United Nations.

From huffington post

China laid down a significant plan for curbing greenhouse gases on Tuesday, outlining ambitious goals of planting enough forest to cover an area the size of Norway and generating 15 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources within a decade.

“At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world,” Hu said. “Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change.”

…and the United States does what?

The goals Hu outlined also were held in contrast to the United States, where the Senate has yet to take up climate legislation and likely will not have produced a new law by the time world leaders gather this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto pact.

Even though President Obama today said the United States was

as McJoan pointed out in her diary, “the Problem of the Small State Senator”

the majority of the population of the Country is being held hostage to the whims of several small state Senators like Mike Enzi of Wyoming who said:

U.S. Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., said the bill is “the biggest hidden tax in America.”

“It’s a Ponzi scheme because we’re just going to print certificates for CO2 and not take care of any CO2,” Enzi said. “It’s just another way to make money.”

while at the same time he is the Number one recepient of industry PAC money. (hattip Nate Silver)

They are able to hold up legislation when it threatens their re-election funding. This way of government is the opposite of the kind of action we need to be taking right now.

At a recent Environmental Law conference where I presented on Environmental Refugees, I got to listen to the National Policy Director of the World Wildlife Fund, (who also was with Obama for America) and got a chance to speak with him later at length.

What I took from his conversation was this:

If the United States does not come through with some kind of bill by Copenhagen, many other countries would be less likely to commit to decisive action, since the US is the biggest polluter on the planet.

Well, i responded, we could get it through the Senate next year, and then…

and then he interrupted me to stress that the global political alignments combined with the United States having a Democratic President and a double majority may not occur again any time soon.

Remember Kyoto was over 10 years ago – and we did not do our part then.

Will it take another 10 years? And will we have the luxury of a double majority and a Democratic president?

More importantly, as was shown in the Global Wake Up Call premiere filming of “Age of Stupid” the scientific evidence from the International Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment completed in 2007, pretty much lays it out there, that we must reach the maximum emissions globally by 2015 and begin decreasing there to stop temperatures from rising above 2 degrees by 2100.

That is the scenario in which we will survive Climate Change, that’s all, survive it and prevent it from a runaway temperature spike which will end the civilizations we have on the planet.

And that modest proposal which Waxman-Markey aligns with, does not go nearly far enough to help some of the people I have been talking to, who will be losing their homeland of an island paradise in the next 5 to 10 years.

here is a quote from Lou Leonard of WWF:

“Our political system in America is a bit like an ocean liner…neither is good at sudden changes in direction. But there are moments in time when we must act quickly and decisively. If we are to stop the climate crisis, that time is now.”

The one strength Waxman-Markey does have is that it has an ongoing provision which states that every 2 years its goals must be re-assessed

to ensure that we are making the necessary steps to comply with the 2 degree goal – that gives it the ability to adapt, if our Climate Change scenarios are too conservative.

One example of this – Climatologists were predicting an ice free arctic summer by 2100 a decade ago, now have revised that date to 2013.

I know Healthcare is a big priority now, but I wish President Obama would take a page out of President Hu’s book, or for that matter out of George Bush’s book, when he got the Patriot Act, the Iraq War, and Guantanamo, all rammed through both houses of Congress sometimes without a majority, and never with 60 Senate seats.

I don’t want the outcome I saw in that movie last night to be our legacy…

Age of Stupid Trailer

Pete Postlethwaite as the Archivist from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Once we get Healthcare – we must immediately switch to pressuring the Senate on Climate Change or perhaps we will have to do both, but Obama said we could do more than one problem at a time, so let’s tackle this.