Dissent Mag

By Al Gore, AlterNet. Posted July 22, 2008.

I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.

Editor’s note: MoveOn sent this appeal to its members after Al Gore’s recent energy speech calling for a massive program to switch America to clean energy (below this is the text of Gore’s speech): “Al Gore took a big risk when he called on us to get 100% of our electricity from cheap, clean sources within 10 years.

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By Yifat Susskind

23/07/08 ” ” –Real Women, Real Voices - -Last week, leaders of the world’s richest countries, the Group of Eight (G8), met to chart the course of the global economy at the luxurious Windsor Hotel Toya Resort and Spa in Toyako, Japan. While President Bush and his colleagues discussed world hunger over a six-course lunch, women in Haiti were preparing cakes of dirt for their children’s dinner.

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By NICOLE COLSON

At first glance, it seems like common sense.

Unless you’re delusional or in the pay of the energy industry, you know that the burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and destructive climate change that is already wreaking havoc around the globe. Not to mention that fossil fuels are a limited resource, costly to extract and refine, and increasingly sought-after by competing nations.

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By Janet Redman, Institute for Policy Studies. Posted July 11, 2008.

The World Bank’s new Climate Investment Funds will do nothing to help the climate; they’ll just give the bank more clout.

President Bush and other leaders of the industrialized world managed to produce a masterfully vague, loophole-ridden statement on climate change at a Group of 8 summit held at a secluded resort on the banks of Lake Toyako in Japan this week.

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The Superstitious Right Fights Good Science on Global Warming

By David Michael Green, AlterNet. Posted July 7, 2008.

In a society devoted like no other to the politics of fear, we have somehow managed to forget the one thing we should probably fear most.

We live in the most astonishing of times, politically speaking.

And I don’t mean that as a compliment.

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Posted: 2008/06/30
From: Mathaba

Gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, wind and solar energy cannot make up the shortage of oil. The world population will have to do with less energy.

by Rudo de Ruijter, Independent researcher
(Court Fool)

After more than 150 years of increasing availability of energy and explosive growth of the world population, we are now entering an era of ever decreasing energy availability. The world population will shrink. For this new era, novel economic principles are needed to maintain prosperity. Part of this is a bank-reform that members of Parliament can adopt if they want to.

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by George Monbiot

Oil-dependent countries are focused on growth at all costs, and the pale green political consensus looks unlikely to hold

Almost everyone seems to agree: governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy. As recession looms, the political pressure to abandon green policies intensifies. A report published yesterday by Ernst & Young suggests that the EU’s puny carbon target will raise energy bills by 20% over the next 12 years. Last week the prime minister’s advisers admitted to the Guardian that his renewable energy plans were “on the margins” of what people will tolerate.

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26 June 2008

By Shannon Jones

In testimony before the US Congress on Monday, James Hansen, a leading climatologist, called heads of major energy companies criminals who should be prosecuted for deliberately spreading false and misleading information about the threat posed by global warming.

Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming to mark the 20th anniversary of his initial appearance before Congress in 1988. He generated the first significant public awareness of the issue of global warming by telling the Senate at that time that manmade greenhouse gasses were raising global temperatures.

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