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It
was a busy week in the Senate. Senators debated the egregious Energy
Bill that came out of the House at the end of April, which never saw an
expensive subsidy to the oil, gas, coal and nuclear industries it
didn’t like. In the Senate they furiously debated, adding and rejecting
amendments that would 1) put the U.S. on record as declaring global
warming a reality and starting, timidly, to curb carbon emissions (as I
detailed in my last post) and 2) creating a national renewables
portfolio standard, which would be a real achievement in my view.
I’m
not going to waste your energy rehashing what you can just as easily
read in the press. So if you want to follow the Bill (which could come
to the Senate floor Friday), go to the two or three newspaper pieces of
the last few days, including Carl Hule’s June 17 piece in the New York Times and Ann McFeeter’s Sunday piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. For kicks, you can also look at the AP story
from Friday, which relates how Senate Energy Committee Chairman Pete
Domenici (R-New Mexico) scurried to meet with Dick Cheney before
deciding on whether to back fellow New Mexicano, but Dem, Jeff
Bingaman’s amendment on carbon emissions, and announced afterward that
he might co-sponsor the Bingaman amendment, which calls for a mild
reduction of GHG emissions, but only if it didn’t endanger the rest of
the energy bill, which calls for $34.5 billion in subsidies to what
Gore Vidal calls the oil and gas junta.
In other words,
Domenici will fess up to the reality of global warming, but only if we
mandate that it continue. Now how often do you see that kind of courage
in a lawman?
In any case, what I wanted to post here was the
not-quite-fresh news, spiked from the mainstream American media, that
while Bush was telling Blair that his administration is still in deep
denial about climate change, the National Academy of Sciences of the
U.S. joined 10 other scientific academies worldwide in June 7 in
issuing a statement ahead of the G-8 summit in July that global warming
is real and must be addressed now. The academies’ statement
begins: “There will always be uncertainty in understanding a system as
complex as the world’s climate. However, there is now strong evidence
that significant global warming is occurring. The evidence comes from
direct measurements or rising surface air temperatures and subsurface
oceans temperatures and from phenomena such as the increase in average
global sea levels, retreating glaciers, and changes to many physical
and biological systems. It is likely that most of the warming in recent
decades can be attributed to human activities. This warming has already
led to changes in the Earth’s climate.” The joint statement goes on to
call on nations to take prompt action to reduce the buildup of GHGs in
the atmosphere to lessen the magnitude and and rate of climate change.
Can
we get any more definitive than that? The National Academy of the
United States is our highest scientific body. And so are the national
academies of Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy,
Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom in their respective countries, all
of which signed the joint statement.
Isn’t this news?
Then
why, I wonder, was this all but totally ignored by the print and
broadcast media? Oh, I forgot: it didn’t have anything to do with God
or Michael Jackson. Just the future of the planet.
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