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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: SiouxPal who wrote (79892)	9/22/2006 7:14:35 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 361250

And They're Off! Bush's climate plan will kick-start a new era of bargaining over the planet's future By Bill McKibben 21 Sep 2006 After almost two decades of inaction, at long last America seems ready to start considering some kind of action to address global warming. With states setting conflicting standards, with the scientists announcing weekly updates on the speed and size of the approaching cataclysm, with shareholder activism starting to push business, and with green stirrings even from the evangelical wing of American Christianity, the time when the fossil-fuel lobby could get away with total obstruction may be passing. Not too quickly, mind you -- yesterday's announcement from the White House that their new climate plan consists of a few billion dollars in odds and ends, mostly to help build a few reactors, was about as tiny a sop as one could imagine. Pressed for a moon-shot-style program to lift us toward renewable energy, the president offered a cherry bomb in a tin can. His announcement was apparently designed to undercut Bill Clinton's call for international action on global warming this week. And it came a few days after Al Gore's truly landmark speech -- the missing reel from the end of An Inconvenient Truth -- in which he became the first major American politician to call explicitly for stringent carbon taxes. His plan to replace the payroll tax with a levy on fossil fuel might even make political sense. But for the moment, it serves as a kind of starter pistol for the congressional battle. If the Democrats manage to pick up one or both houses of Congress in November's election, there will be a real chance to actually pass a law. That's an opportunity. And that's also an enormous danger, because if we lock into the wrong plan now, it may be years before we revisit the issue again. And years are what we don't have. The temptation will be to simply pass something -- most likely some version of the McCain-Lieberman bill introduced years ago. But that bill was pretty feeble when it arrived (appreciated, but feeble), and the passage of time has made it clear that you might just as well pass a law mandating anti-global warming bumper stickers. Compared with what we've learned in the last three years about the speed of melting ice caps and glaciers, about the surge in monster storms, about the release of methane from the permafrost -- compared with all that, McCain-Lieberman isn't even lipstick on a pig. It's like nail polish on Godzilla. Clear nail polish. By contrast, the legislation introduced by Henry Waxman in the House and Jim Jeffords in the Senate at least has targets with the right number of digits. It talks about 80 percent carbon reductions from 1990 levels by 2050, and about 20 percent renewables by 2020. It's not enough to meet the real-world minimum set out by NASA's Jim Hansen (that we reverse carbon increases worldwide in a decade), but its numbers might shock the system enough to give us a fighting chance. Corporate interests, of course, will favor something like McCain-Lieberman (they'll favor something south of it, actually, but bargain in its direction). The great danger is that the weak members of the environmental movement will meet them there, ready to declare bipartisan victory (and a great fundraising opportunity). With Hansen's challenge ringing in their ears, the great hope is that the leaders of the big enviro groups -- the Green Group --will steel themselves for a real fight, demanding something like Waxman-Jeffords. Or, as some are starting to call it, "The Real Climate Act." They will waver, imagining that such cuts are politically impossible. But in fact we don't know -- there's never been a real movement about climate change in this country because there's never been anything to rally around. When we tested the Waxman-Jeffords bill in Vermont a few weeks ago with our march, we assembled the biggest rally against global warming yet in this country -- and convinced even our conservative Republican candidates for U.S. Senate and House to sign on. The student climate movement -- representing the people who will get to live on our heated planet for another six or seven decades -- is already pressing the Washington honchos to find some spine, to make this the defining stand for environmentalism in our time. It may be politically difficult, but it won't be as hard as convincing the glaciers not to melt or the sea not to rise. - - - - - - - - - - Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and the forthcoming Deep Economy. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, and he serves on Grist's board of directors. grist.org

To: SiouxPal who wrote (79892)	9/22/2006 7:26:25 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 361250

Where's Tim? Physicist Takes Energy Efficiency From Theory to Practice By Lonny Shavelson Berkeley, California 18 September 2006 Particle physicist Arthur Rosenfeld shows off a compact fluorescent light Eighty-year-old particle physicist Arthur Rosenfeld began his career slamming atomic nuclei together at the University of California at Berkeley. Then he moved to a new job: working with refrigerators and light bulbs. That second job, he says, has really paid off to the tune of $800 billion in energy savings from inventions and innovations in his lab. They did that by making refrigerators more efficient. He explains that the appliances used to consume 2000 kilowatt hours of energy a year. "At today's prices," he says, "[that] would cost about $250 a year. [Now we're down] to 450 [kilowatt hours a year]." You can even hear the difference. Refrigerators from 30 years ago are very noisy. "The 1973 refrigerator was actually a remarkably light and cheap piece of junk," Rosenfeld observes. "And the motors were incredibly inefficient." So Rosenfeld got to work, and the sound of his refrigerator, and all American refrigerators today, is quiet. Rosenfeld notes, "The motors have risen from 30% efficiency to probably 90% efficiency; we have better insulation, and the electricity use has fallen to one quarter what it would have been in 1973." His shiny new refrigerator, bigger than the 1973 version, with crushed ice, cubed ice, door alarms and water filters, uses one fourth of the energy compared to that small, old thing that just kept food cold. That's a saving of $200 a year for every refrigerator. That's pretty amazing, but it's not yet $800 billion of energy. Arthur Rosenfeld displays 'low emissivity' windows in his house Art Rosenfeld also does windows. In his very cozy breakfast nook just off the kitchen, with the hot light of the mid-day California sun streaming through the glass, he explains, "We worked very hard on the thin film of a semi-conductor, which is perfectly transparent to visible light, but which is a perfect reflector to heat." The sun-baked glass feels cool to the touch. The light's coming in, but the heat is staying outside. The air-conditioning is off, and the room this mid-summer day, is quite cool. In the winter, this same window glass will keep the heat inside the house. "You can put windows on a new house, which cuts the heating bill by 30%," Rosenfeld says, adding, "[you] are indeed saving more oil every year than comes out of Prudhoe Bay." The fields at Prudhoe Bay Alaska are America's major domestic source of oil. So the energy savings are really adding up now. Dr. Rosenfeld's compact fluorescent lamps And Dr. Rosenfeld's lab has done even more. He ticks them off: "Compact fluorescent lamps are saving another $5 billion a year. Better programs for designing buildings are saving like $10 billion a year. Each one of those have now pretty much saturated building standards around the world. The savings even in the United States are simply astounding." But forget about money for a moment. It's the energy savings, the lack of pollution, the decreased -- but still very real -- dependence on foreign oil, that count. And Rosenfeld says those gains will need to keep pace with the growing number of energy users in the world. "We've done well, but we're only one half or one quarter of potential savings if we really took it seriously." This summer, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded its most prestigious prize, the Enrico Fermi Award, to Art Rosenfeld. The prize was $375,000. But the physicist says the recognition and gratitude from the community was his real reward. voanews.com