How to Stop the Planet From Burning (South End Press, via AlterNet)

[marmar]

How to Stop the Planet From Burning
By George Monbiot, South End Press. Posted May 2, 2007.

We know that climate change is happening. But can it be stopped? George Monbiot's book "Heat" shows how it can.

The following is an excerpt from George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (South End Press, 2007).

All over Washington, you can hear the giant scraping sound of officials and legislators frantically back-tracking. After years of obfuscation, denial, and lies about climate change, all but the most hardened recidivists are rebranding themselves as friends of the earth.

In February, two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press "that the President's concern about climate change is new. In fact," they reported, "climate change has been a top priority since the President's first year in office." To prove it, they had found 37 words Bush said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002; and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007 he had even managed to say "climate change." This demonstrated, they claimed, that he has shown "continued leadership on the issue."

Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are falling over themselves to show how they have sought to save the world. The Senate's vote in 1997-95 to zero-to sink the Kyoto Protocol before it was signed has been forgotten. Joe Barton's congressional Inquisition, in which scientists who refused to alter their results to suit the oil companies were questioned as if they were members of Al Qaeda, never happened. Even Larry Craig, once one of the Senate's most outspoken climate change deniers, now claims that he has been helping to lead the world "toward cleaner technologies." Only Senator James Inhofe, last of the dinosaurs, still maintains that efforts to prevent climate change amount to nothing more than "profiteering" and "chicanery." After the war, almost everyone becomes a member of the Resistance. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/51006/