The Battle To Limit Climate Change

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/peter-g-cohen/53421/the-battle-to-limit-climate-change

The Battle To Limit Climate Change
by Peter G. Cohen | December 31, 2013 - 10:43am

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You petitions and other protest gestures on behalf of limiting climate change are falling on oil-deaf ears. There’s so much money to be made from the extraction of the Earth’s old carbon sinks that the Congress and many of the federal agencies just ignore the real dangers to our climate and nation.

The situation is dire. In his “Instant Planetary Emergency” in The Nation, Dahr Jamall says, “It is possible that, on top of the vast quantities of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels that continue to enter the atmosphere in record amounts yearly, an increased release of methane could signal the beginning of the sort of process that led to the Great Dying. Some scientists fear that the situation is already so serious and so many self-reinforcing feedback loops are already in play that we are in the process of causing our own extinction. Worse yet, some are convinced that it could happen far more quickly than generally believed possible -- even in the course of just the next few decades.”

The very people who have corrupted some scientists and funded front groups to deny global warming for decades are now buying, threatening, or otherwise persuading our legislators to obstruct climate change legislation.

“A two-year study by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, released today. illustrates what might be one of the reasons why he (the President) had to take this circuitous route. Charles and David Koch have, through Americans for Prosperity, a conservative group they back, succeeded in persuading many members of Congress to sign a little-known pledge in which they have promised to vote against legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts. Since most solutions to the problem of greenhouse-gas emissions require costs to the polluters and the public, the pledge essentially commits those who sign it to vote against nearly any meaningful bill regarding global warming, and acts as yet another roadblock to action.” --The New Yorker, July 1, 2013.