"Senate's Duty on Climate Change": Ny Times:

[amborin]

"The news that world leaders have abandoned hope for a comprehensive, legally binding climate change treaty in Copenhagen next month inspired no end of finger-pointing.

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Our own candidate for criticism is the United States Senate.

But the indecisiveness of the Senate’s Democratic leaders is worrisome, as is the Republicans’ reflexive and virtually unanimous hostility to anything that challenges the way this country produces and uses energy.

There are exceptions. The Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Jeff Bingaman have produced bills that could form the basis of a broad measure curbing emissions and ushering in alternative energy sources. But Harry Reid, the majority leader, seems at times like a man who wishes the climate change issue would go away. Last week, he suggested that he could not bring a bill forward until “sometime in the spring,” and that even then it would be sold as an economic stimulus bill.

With very few exceptions, the Republicans have behaved terribly. They refused en masse to show up when Ms. Boxer tried to get a committee vote on a bill, claiming they had been denied an analysis of the bill’s impact on the economy. When Ms. Boxer summoned officials to provide such an analysis, they boycotted again.

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the House bill, which calls for a 17 percent reduction in United States emissions by 2020.

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But how credible can even this modest goal be if the Senate is largely indifferent?

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<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/22/opinion/22sun2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion>


from the Guardian:

"Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world's chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the government has said.

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the department for environment and rural affairs, said a decade of inaction on climate change meant it was now virtually impossible to limit global temperature rise to 2C. He said the delay meant the world would now do well to stabilise warming between 3C and 4C.

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The decision of former US president George W Bush to walk away from the Kyoto protocol, the existing global treaty on carbon emissions, sent a message to other countries not to act, he said. "The last decade was a lost opportunity. Elements within the fossil fuel industry clearly had major implications for the Bush administration."

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European officials fear the agreement could eventually do no better than return emissions in 2020 to 1990 levels; scientists say they must fall by 25-40% to have a good chance of staying within the 2C limit.

Watson, a former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: "I think we will do well to stabilise between 3 and 4C. Even that is going to take strong political action to decarbonise the energy system and to require us peaking greenhouse gas emissions in the next 10 or more years," he said. "We have to make sure we understand what it would mean to see 3-4C. How would we adapt our agriculture, our water resources, coastal protection and human health systems."

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<http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/22/climate-change-emissions-scientist-watson>

hope everyone emails and/or calls their senator on this

[G_j]

1. K&R