OUR CHOICE to provide blueprint for solving the climate crisis

EMMAUS, PA, and NEW YORK, NY, March 24, 2009—Today Vice President Gore announced that his next book, Our Choice, will be published by Rodale in the US and by other publishers internationally on November 3, 2009.

Picking up where An Inconvenient Truth left off, Our Choice utilizes Mr. Gore’s forty years of experience as a student, policymaker, author, filmmaker, entrepreneur and activist to comprehensively describe the real solutions to global warming. A co-recipient of the Nobel Peace prize in 2007 for his environmental work, Mr. Gore continues to make sense of the pressing issues we face and Our Choice will unquestionably inspire and rally those ready to fight for solutions that were deemed impossible only a short time ago. (more…)

Reprinted with permission by Peter Montague

Global food prices have risen 83% in the last 3 years. This spring, as prices rose steeply, food riots broke out in Haiti, Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy, among other places. Because U.S. energy policy subsidizes farmers to grow corn to make ethanol (alcohol that can supplement gasoline), the U.S. is being accused of feeding its sport utility vehicles (SUVs) instead of feeding people. There is some truth to this charge, but it’s more complicated than that.[1]

The global food crisis has been created by a combination of things (MW: also see Foto Galery by Time Magazine from which the foto above is reproduced), among them: (more…)

Climate change is a global crisis which demands cooperation at a scale never encountered before - cooperation on all levels of the global human society to reduce our carbon emissions:

1. Within families and at the workplace we need to help each other to find ways to minimize our energy consumption, considering each other’s needs and being willing to compromise.
2. Within larger units - such as universities, towns, and cities - different departments, businesses, industries and organizations need to cooperate and act for the greater good not for their own self-interest.
3. Nations will need to cooperate and transfer technologies so that all countries in the world can acquire the standards needed to deal with the tasks ahead.

If we cannot be successful on every single one of these levels, then fast and effective changes will be hard to reach. Why is such close cooperation so hard to achieve? (more…)

Reprinted with permission by Dr. James Hansen from his website at Columbia University

This article is part of the new version of the biannual “State of The Wild: 2008-2009, published by the Wildlife Conservation Society. “State of the Wild is a collection of evocative essays featuring emerging issues in the conservation of wildlife and wild places. The book brings together international conservation experts and writers to analyze our time’s most pressing environmental topics. Seeking to broaden awareness of major trends that are affecting the state of the wild across all continents, it also includes a catalog of the year’s research, rulings, and events.”

“Animals are on the run. Plants are migrating too.”1 I wrote those words in 2006 to draw attention to the fact that climate change was already under way. People do not notice climate change because it is masked by day-to-day weather fluctuations, and we reside in comfortable homes. Animals and plants, on the other hand, can survive only within certain climatic conditions, which are now changing. (more…)

Below is a part of a letter by US environmentalist, author, and educator Bill McKibben, slightly adjusted to a non-American audience.

Under McKibben’s initiative, the Step It Up! team is soon starting a new campaign: 350. Whereas Step It Up! was focused on the US, 350 will be a global campaign to push for effective global climate action. For background in German on the reasons why we need to decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere from 385 ppm to 350 ppm, please see my earlier contribution here.

“Meanwhile, the science around climate change has continued to darken. (more…)

Reposted with permission; by Jim Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

When I was young, Yankee Stadium had ~70,000 seats. It seldom sold out, and almost any kid could afford the cheap seats. Capacity was reduced to ~57,000 when the stadium was remodeled in the 1970s. Most games sell out now, and prices have gone up.

The new stadium, opening next year, will reduce seating further, to ~51,800. This intentional contraction is aimed at guaranteeing sellouts, increasing demand, allowing the owners, in pretty short order, to hike prices to double, triple, and more. The owners know that scarcity will fatten their wallets, even though it reduces the number of sales. This is more than a bit distasteful, as it discriminates against the lower middle class. Nevertheless, it should be a great stadium and as long as the owner is footing the bill without public subsidies for the stadium itself, we may have little grounds for complaint.

The reason that I draw your attention to this practice is that fossil fuel moguls are intent on hoodwinking the entire planet with an analogous scheme. (more…)

Reprint from James Hansen; dieser Artikel wird noch ins Deutsche übersetzt.

Recent analyses indicate that the amount of atmospheric CO2 required to cause dangerous climate change is at most 450 ppm, and likely less than that. Reductions of non-CO2 climate forcings can provide only moderate, albeit important, adjustments to the CO2 limit. Realization of how close the planet is to ‘tipping points’ with unacceptable consequences, especially ice sheet disintegration with sea level rise out of humanity’s control, has a bright (more…)