Obama’s green team: He really meant it
Source: The Hill
Obama’s green team: He really meant it
By Ben Geman - 01/22/13 12:08 AM ET
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President Obama’s green energy team all said, in essence, that Obama really, really meant it when he vowed to make climate a major focus in Monday’s inaugural speech.
“We need to make sure that we tackle climate change in these next four years and this president is going to do it,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, wearing his traditional ten-gallon hat and bolo tie, told the crowd Monday night.
“We are going to lift our game in the interlocking challenges of climate change and energy,” said John Holdren, who is Obama’s top science adviser.
“Energy and climate policy are going to be a top priority,” added Heather Zichal, the top White House energy and climate aide.
Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/278429-obamas-green-team-he-really-meant-it
= new reply since forum marked as read
We won't see shock and awe. We will see the following, for decades, until the will to live is sapped from our dry, famine starved bones:
We have 100 years of that in the pipe with climate change on top. Our crops will die within decades as the soil turns to dust.
Northward migration will eventually be halted by a lazer-armed double wall, patrolled by drones (for everyone except those with Koch and Bush for last names):
Is not viable, unless we genetically engineer wheat capable of growing in granite outcroppings, which about half the blue-shaded section is.
Besides, I'm planning on being part of the new wave of Minnesota banana farmers by then 
Don't worry about me; I'm all too familiar with what sorts of catastrophies my 2-yr old daughter will get to see as she grows up 
"We shouldn't do anything because the rest of the world isn't doing anything."
Well ... So much for American Exceptionalism and being that Beacon in the Night. 
I am so Happy, that Our President, is addressing this issue. It will be good to give something back, to our Mother Earth, instead of sucking it dry!
Thank You, Mr President!
what is happening in rust belt cities like Detroit? Natural wonders, community gardens, popping up everywhere!
And it happens naturally people powered, as we are by nature gardening species, without top-down orders from government.
Watch for tower gardens in our future.....there's been a lot of discussion about that in recent years, and might be a hell of a boon for urban residents, particularly if worst-case Plains drought scenarios come close to playing out as some fear they could. 
But, TBH, 17% isn't all that bad(though I think we can also do much better).....I'll take it.
And it scares them when they compare what is happening now to what has happened in the past.
by Robert Kunzig
Photograph by Ira Block
Earth has been through this before.
Not the same planetary fever exactly; it was a different world the last time, around 56 million years ago. The Atlantic Ocean had not fully opened, and animals, including perhaps our primate ancestors, could walk from Asia through Europe and across Greenland to North America. They wouldn't have encountered a speck of ice; even before the events we're talking about, Earth was already much warmer than it is today. But as the Paleocene epoch gave way to the Eocene, it was about to get much warmer still—rapidly, radically warmer.
The cause was a massive and geologically sudden release of carbon. Just how much carbon was injected into the atmosphere during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, as scientists now call the fever period, is uncertain. But they estimate it was roughly the amount that would be injected today if human beings burned through all the Earth's reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas. The PETM lasted more than 150,000 years, until the excess carbon was reabsorbed. It brought on drought, floods, insect plagues, and a few extinctions. Life on Earth survived—indeed, it prospered—but it was drastically different. Today the evolutionary consequences of that distant carbon spike are all around us; in fact they include us. Now we ourselves are repeating the experiment.
Photograph by Jason Hawkes
The source of the carbon surge 56 million years ago is uncertain, but it was natural. Today’s surge, which may prove much faster, is human made. Oceans and forests absorb atmospheric CO2 but can’t keep up with emissions from stacks like this one (at center) at a coal-fired power plant in England—the country where the industrial revolution began.
The PETM "is a model for what we're staring at—a model for what we're doing by playing with the atmosphere," says Philip Gingerich, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Michigan. "It's the idea of triggering something that runs away from you and takes a hundred thousand years to reequilibrate."
More: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/10/hothouse-earth/kunzig-text
Very good article about the PETM and how it could be a forecast of what the world faces in the next few hundreds or thousands of years.
Now, hopefully, we can start making real major progress again, like in the '90s.....
