Climate Change Denier by Nancy OhanianHeads of state have flooded into New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly meetings. One topic of supreme concern is Climate Change-- supreme concern more to some leaders, though, than to others. An AP report emphasized that "Saying humanity is waging war with the planet, the head of the United Nations isn’t planning to let just any world leader speak about climate change at Monday’s special 'action summit.' Only those with new, specific and bold plans can command the podium and the ever-warming world’s attention, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said. So sit down, Brazil. Sit down, Saudi Arabia. Sit down, Poland. 'People can only speak if they come with positive steps. That is kind of a ticket,' Guterres said. 'For bad news don’t come.'" Where does that leave Señor Trumpanzee? (The White House has told the media that Señor T is skipping the Climate Crisis session so that he can speak about the persecution of Christians.)
As if to underscore the seriousness of the problem, the U.N.’s World Meteorological Organization released a science report Sunday showing that in the last several years, warming, sea level rise and carbon pollution have all accelerated.Brazil’s, Poland’s and Saudi Arabia’s proposals for dealing with climate change fell short, so they’re not on Monday’s summit schedule. The United States didn’t even bother, according to a U.N. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.The bar isn’t that high: Leaders from 64 nations, the European Union, more than a dozen companies and banks, a few cities and a state will present plans at the secretary-general’s Climate Action Summit.Guterres wants nations to be carbon-neutral by 2050-- in other words, they will not add more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the air than are removed by plants and perhaps technology each year. On Sunday, 87 countries around the world pledged to decarbonize in a way consistent with one of the international community’s tightest temperature goals.There is a sense of urgency, Guterres said, because “climate change is the defining issue of our time.”“For the first time, there is a serious conflict between people and nature, between people and the planet,” Guterres said.He wants countries to commit to no new coal power plants after 2020 and reduce carbon pollution by 45% in the next century. The purpose of the summit is to come up with new green proposals a year earlier than the 2020 deadline that is in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.World leaders agreed in 2009 to try to keep warming to just 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times. Then in 2015 they added a secondary, tougher goal, at the urging of small islands, to keep warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).The new weather agency report showed that the world has warmed already by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit). So that means the goals are to limit further warming to 0.9 degrees Celsius (1.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from now or even 0.4 degrees Celsius (0.72 degrees Fahrenheit) from now.Efforts to reduce carbon pollution need to be tripled to keep from hitting the 2-degree Celsius mark and must increase fivefold to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, the World Meteorological Organization report said.As bad as that sounds, it’s wrong and overly optimistic to use the mid-1880s as the benchmark, said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann. Mann said that many studies, including the WMO’s, are overlooking that the world warmed 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) from human causes between the mid-1700s and the 1880s.The weather agency said the last five years were the warmest five on record and even 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) hotter than the first half of the decade, a significant jump in just a few years.“There is a growing recognition that climate impacts are hitting harder and sooner than climate assessments indicated even a decade ago,” the 28-page report said.If the world keeps temperatures to the 1.5-degree Celsius goal instead of the 2-degree one, 420 million fewer people will be exposed to heat waves and 10 million fewer will be vulnerable to sea level rise, NASA climate scientist Cynthia Rosenzweig said Sunday at a U.N. session.A larger, more international report looking at climate change and oceans and ice will be released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Wednesday.“This new WMO report highlights the importance of making more progress on reducing emissions of carbon dioxide,” Cornell University climate scientist Natalie Mahowald said. “Hopefully this latest U.N. Climate Summit will motivate more action.”
White House Emissions Standards by Nancy OhanianRebecca Parson is an all-in progressive candidate running for the northwest Washington state seat currently occupied by New Dem chief Derek Kilmer. She's for the Green New Deal; his career is financed by those denying there even is Climate Change. "Every time a new report comes out," she told me today, "the situation seems to be more dire than before. And it's poor, working class communities and communities of color that will be hit the hardest. In Washington's 6th Congressional District, the village of Taholah, which has been at its current coastal site for at least as long as the Quinault Nation can remember, has to relocate. In Aberdeen, poor communities have to deal with sewage on their sidewalks when the river floods. They need action now-- not when the lobbyists and oil companies grant their permission."She's in a similar situation to the one Marie Newman is in-- running for Congress on values and ideals... and against a corrupt, crooked conservative pretending to be part of the party of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In Marie's case, that faker is Dan Lipinski who, like Kilmer, also opposes the Green New Deal. "For me," said Marie, "the mere fact that the UN Secretary-General is only allowing countries who have actual 'bold plans' in place to combat climate change to speak at the Action Summit is telling. Secretary-General Gutteres has made it clear that leaders of those countries who are regressing and are stagnant in their climate policies (unfortunately the U.S. is part of that group), will not be asked to speak. The U.S. in another time, would always be asked to share our policies. Once we left the Paris Accords, we lost that leadership title. Falling behind on combatting climate change it not only troubling for our collective health and welfare, but also for the economy. Members of Congress who do not support the Green New Deal and its clarion call for action, such as my opponent, Dan Lipinski are short-sighted at best and more importantly, clearly handcuffed to fossil fuel companies. This lack of urgency is going to have long-tentacled repercussions."Milwaukie, Oregon mayor Mark Gamba is running for a congressional seat held by conservative Blue Dog, Kurt Schrader. One way to look at the race-- as many younger Oregonians do-- is that Gamba very vigorously supports the Green New Deal, while Schrader supports the polluters and poisoners who have underwritten his dreadful political career. "Climate change," explained Gamba, "is more than the defining issue of our time; it is the defining issue for all time. Continual failure to act with strength, audacity and focus will result in massive displacement and political unrest as sea levels rise, temperatures increase, and our food supply is threatened. That is literally what hangs in the balance and yet we continue to treat it as a political football. The Paris Climate Agreement is a powerful step forward for the world and Trump’s abdication of responsibility is abhorrent. I believe that cities are capable of powerful action that will begin to address the issue without the Federal Government. I am proud to be the Mayor of a city that is setting a bold and survivable vision for our future. However, with only 11 years left to make dramatic changes in everything from how we create and use energy to the way we farm and manage our forests-- Federal action and federal leadership is critical. As a congressman, I will be an unrelenting and unapologetic advocate for decisive and immediate action to keep us below 1.5 degrees Celsius."Rachel Ventura (IL-11) decided to run because of the Climate Crisis. Her conservative opponent, New Dem multimillionaire Bill Foster likes to bill himself a "scientist"-- he isn't-- but if he were, he'd be one of the Republicans' favorite kind of scientists-- one who laughs about Climate Change, doesn't acknowledge there's a crisis and can be easily bought off when it comes to acting responsibility in regard to it. Ventura noted that "Trump doesn’t appear ready to do anything positive to address the climate crisis and corporate Democratic members of Congress, after decades of inaction, are at least trying to appear like they care about human existence with photo ops." But its too late for appearances.Ventura co-hosted an event for the September 2019 global climate strike in Naperville, Illinois. She told us this morning that "It was a successful event with hundreds of people. One of the primary reasons I am running for this seat is because my current congressman has failed to take meaningful steps to combat the climate crisis even though he reminds us he is a scientist. In fact, he still refers to the emergency as "climate change." To become a co-sponsor of the event I worked through the Sunrise Movement and went through their multi-step screening process. Sunrise wanted to make sure that it would be an event promoting a call to action on the Green New Deal and not be a generic call to action to “do something.” The day of the event, Sunrise co-founder Varshini Prakash, fully expected half-measure Democrats to try to co-opt strike events and pretend to support climate legislation even though they have not signed onto the Green New Deal. In an interview with Huffington Post he said, 'they're going to glom onto whatever they can, but we don't want compliments. We want action.' Varshini was correct. Both my opponent, Bill Foster, and Rep. Sean Casten, 'glommed on' by attending the climate strike, shot some photos and left. Foster quickly took a Facebook ad out promoting his attendance at the event because he knows that being a scientist is no longer good enough to be considered the 'climate candidate.' We are going to have to work harder to make sure voters continue to see his 10-years of inaction instead of the photo op with Greta Thunberg and his photo bombing of the Green New Deal Naperville Climate Strike."Dana Balter, a progressive congressional candidate in Syracuse, New York, is running against Trump-enabler John Katko, a Climate Crisis denier who has worked actively against solutions. Moments ago, Dana told us that "some of the boldest leaders we have on the climate crisis are our young people; they've pushed their elected leaders, changed public opinion, and brought big solutions to the forefront. But their movement continues to face roadblocks because the people with the power to make a difference refuse to listen. We simply cannot make progress on addressing this problem while we have folks in Congress, like John Katko, who take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry and then vote to allow their financial backers to pollute our planet. It's time that we replace the folks who are holding us back with climate champions; I will be one of those champions." The Columbus Dispatch covered the Climate Strike in central Ohio last week. The paper noted that Columbus students "joined in solidarity by hundreds of thousands more around the world as part of a 'global climate strike,' the contingent held up signs with messages such as 'There is no planet B' and 'It’s time to cut carbon.'... Morgan Harper, a Democrat who is running for Ohio’s 3rd Congressional District, gave a speech-- the only one by someone in the political arena-- and signed two pledges, promising to advocate for the Green New Deal and refusing to accept campaign contributions from the oil, gas, and coal industries. 'We have students that are in classrooms that are already under-resourced, don’t have air conditioning, and [they] have no ability to learn in extreme heat conditions,' she said. 'We have people that are already in unstable housing that are going to increasingly feel the effects of climate change... But there’s something we can do about it, and it’s not complicated. All it’s going to take is us coming together to fight for what’s right.'" She followed up this morning with an e-mail to her supporters: "In Congress I am going to advocate for the Green New Deal and be an absolute champion of climate change policies. [I will] not accept any money from the fossil fuels industry."Let's close this out with a message-- text and video-- from Mike Siegel, who is building his movement around the Green New Deal in central Texas. "The climate movement is growing here in Texas," he told us this afternoon. "On Friday I marched in Austin with 2,000 high school and college students, and I joined their inspiring leaders in speaking out on the steps of the capitol. Meanwhile, many hundreds more students marched in Houston, despite suffering the fifth 500-year flood event in five years. And on Saturday hundreds joined my campaign for a town hall on the Green New Deal, featuring national experts like Raj Patel and Andres Bernal, and local youth and labor leaders. We are disproving the conventional wisdom, that you can’t talk about cutting fossil fuels in Texas, and instead showing how the people are hungry for a bold vision and courageous leadership. These conversations may not be easy, but they are essential to our future."
