Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Well, the Al Gore Global Warming Road Show stormed through the halls of Congress yesterday, and great theater it was. I know I particularly enjoyed the scene played out in the Senate as Sen. Barbara Boxer, noted for her green credentials, sat next to the former chair of the energy and environment committee, the notorious global warming skeptic, Sen. James Inhofe, whom Boxer gloriously replaced when the Democrats re-took the Senate.

Inhofe would not allow Gore to answer his own questions and became quite testy about it. Boxer looked at him with annoyance and disbelief, then reminded him that he wasn’t making the rules anymore, holding up the gavel in emphasis. Yo, girl, women rule!

Gore was pretty unambiguous, as is his style these days — global warming poses “the most dangerous crisis in American history.” And nothing short of an immediate freeze on carbon emissions will save us from disaster.

It’s refreshing to hear someone say these things without nuance. It helps a lot to stir up the people, wake us from our complacence, get constituents demanding action from their lawmakers.

But I have to say that I found a lot of the media coverage down right snarky, giving way too much time to the opposition to the science, an opposition that is bogus at best, since there is virtually no credible science in opposition to the reality of global warming and its human causes.

Fox news [sic], of course, gave ample time and preference to Christopher Horner, a well-funded professional global warming denier who is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a group that has received big bucks from Exxon Mobil. This guy is so bad that even Exxon Mobil stopped funding him. They and other science deniers were obviously working off talking points, as all day the right wing hammered away at Gore’s credibility because of the high energy usage at his Tennessee mansion. Now I have problems with anyone who lives lavishly while others are impoverished, and it is true that everyone is called to lower their ecological footprint, and not just in terms of carbon emissions. But we all know this was just another ’swift boat’-style effort to attack the messenger when the message makes us squirm.

Anyway, it’s one thing to provide balanced coverage of pro and con positions on vital issues; but the pro and con here is no longer about the science, only about the best way to address the crisis.

I appreciate several points Gore raised. One is that unless the US takes leadership in curbing carbon emissions, international efforts are likely to be meek at best, and we don’t have time for meekness. This is especially important as the international community wrestles with a new approach after the largely ineffective Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012.

It’s funny to hear rightist politicians like Rep. Joe Barton of Texas tell Gore, “You’re not just off a little, you’re totally wrong.” I mean, really, after the thousands of scientist involved in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and people like James Hansen of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, we have to listen to oil and gas industry-funded Texas politicians tell Gore that he’s wrong?

So, Gore called for taxes on carbon emissions, a ban on new coal-fired power plants that are not able to capture and sequester carbon emissions, a ban on incandescent light bulbs (if California can do it…), mandatory gas mileage standards, a national mortgage program to help homeowners pay for energy-efficient technology, like solar panels and energy efficient appliances, and a restructuring of the tax code to lower income taxes but raise them steeply on carbon emissions.

Indeed, those who emit carbons should have to pay the real cost of those emissions, which means assigning costs to the destruction of the atmosphere, and the ecological destruction all along the path of production and delivery. Now that would bring emissions down pretty quickly.

Meanwhile, another Texas politician, Rep. Ralph Hall, said that cutting emissions of greenhouse gases amounted to “an all-out assault on all forms of fossil fuels.”
We can only hope.

Hall said, of course, that this would do grievous harm to the economy. They love this argument. But just think of the new jobs and the energy savings that would come from developing carbon-free alternative sources of energy — not to mention saving us from the grievous collapse of our economy as we reach peak production of oil and natural gas in the next few decades and grapple with the growing disasters caused by climate change.

So it was great theater. One can only hope the theatrics and hysterical arguments of the oil and gas devotees helped raise some national consciousness about what Gore loves to call our planet’s rising ‘fever.’

[tags] Al Gore, global warming, climate change, planetary emergency, carbon emissions, greenhouse gases[/tags]