environment Politics: 350 Nancy Sutley White House Council on Environmental Quality
by Warren
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Month 3, Day 19: Inside the White House?
Looking around for someone new to badger, I located Nancy Sutley, the Chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She posted on her organization’s website (buried in the White House site) about President Obama’s proposed Greenhouse emission reductions for the US Government. I liked that, although the target numbers as mentioned don’t go nearly far enough.
So she gets a letter. She’ll get a fax, too, if I can figure out what the number is.
Dear Ms. Sutley,
I was delighted to learn of President Obama’s commitment to reduce the U.S. Government’s carbon emissions. A 28 percent reduction is indeed substantial. With a target date just ten years in the future, this will require swift and decisive action on retrofitting buildings, changing energy use strategies, and rewarding conservation initiatives within bureaucratic systems.
President Obama’s proposed reduction is commendable, and an excellent step in the right direction. But it’s not enough.
America needs to lead the world in achieving genuine and total “energy independence.” That phrase is often used to mean “energy we don’t have to buy from OPEC,” or “non-oil energy.” What it should mean is “independence from fossil fuels.” Whether it’s oil or coal, it’s the same thing in the end: taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere. And that, quite simply, is no longer sustainable.
The scientific evidence is clear and unambiguous: we need to bring atmospheric CO2 down to 350 ppm or below if we are to prevent a climate catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. It is time for the Administration to address this issue clearly and unambiguously; there is little time left if our actions are to have any effect.
A 28 percent reduction in GHG emissions is a laudable but inadequate target. I hope that in the months to come, you and the White House Council on Environmental Quality will be advocating forcefully for much stronger policies on sustainability, and towards the ultimate elimination of fossil fuels from our government’s energy diet.
Thank you,
Warren Senders
environment: Ban ki-Moon Boston Globe United Nations
by Warren
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Month 3, Day 18: The United Nations Is On The Case?
It’s relatively difficult to take an AP report about internecine disagreements within the U.N. Climate team and turn it into a letter. In the event, I used the article as a hook for a relatively standard polemic, which went to the Boston Globe.
It’s reassuring that the member states of the United Nations continue to keep climate change on the table, despite the failure of the Copenhagen conference and the inability of the U.S. Government to do anything substantial towards reducing America’s grossly disproportionate contribution to the climate crisis. The 1997 Kyoto agreement would have been a good first step to addressing the problem — if it had been ratified in the 1970s. Climatologists agreed years ago that Kyoto’s proposed 5 percent reduction on carbon emissions is a pathetically tiny band-aid on a gaping wound. The nations of the world need to do more than “expand” Kyoto — we need to recognize that an extraordinary situation demands an extraordinary response.
Global climate change is a crisis of environment, because human activity is on the verge of making our relatively benign biosphere a lot less welcoming. It is also a crisis of perception, because for the first time human beings must abandon “local thinking” in both time and space, and take responsibility for one another everywhere on the planet, and across the centuries to come. Are we up to the challenge? Ban ki-Moon thinks so. I hope he is right.
Warren Senders