David Sassoon's Climate Chronicles

On December 24th we carried a report about Tim DeChristopher's heroic act of civil disobedience: he went to an auction of public lands and outbid oil and gas companies for 22,500 acres of land -- in order to protect it from fossil fuel development. The price? A whopping $1.8 million the University of Utah student doesn't have.

The downpayment is due on January 9th, a mere $45,000, and on the advice of the legal team working to protect him and keep him out of jail, DeChristopher is trying to raise the money. So far, he's got $18,000 in hand, and a campaign that's gaining steam.

Below is DeChristopher's appeal letter, and the link for making a contribution is here.

Here's a video shot by Sandra Diaz, the national field coordinator for Appalachian Voices, of her investigation of the Christmas-time coal-ash spill in Tennessee, the biggest in US history.

From her accompanying post on Huffington:

This mighty nation is enslaved by the collective imperative to shop or perish and as a result is dragging the whole globe to perdition. That's why the news this past week about the economic troubles of the nation's retailers has been, well, sorry to say so, good news overall.

Story after story about how retailers are slashing prices and taking losses to move inventory after a dismal holiday shopping season. I couldn't help but be glad when I heard a report on National Public Radio on how empty the stores are now. I didn't imagine that everyone was home sulking, but suddenly free to do something more fulfilling.

The NY Times summed it up this way:

Retailers have no choice but to find creative ways to clear their store shelves, because they have to make room for spring merchandise.

After 9/11, President Bush famously told America: go shopping! In anticipation of a coming snowstorm the week before Christmas, Mayor Bloomberg promised efficient snow removal and told New Yorkers: go shopping! Soon after his inauguration, President Obama will likely sign an economic stimulus bill into law that will authorize the government to print close to $1 trillion of new currency. Why? So that America can once again go shopping! as before.

Good grief.

Our $13 trillion economy is based essentially on shopping -- for cars and houses, clothes and televisions, gadgets and gifts -- a treadmill of consumption with no "off" switch. The Chinese economy, a juggernaut of production, and the American economy, its all-consuming counterpart, together account for half the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Despite the global financial crisis and the global climate crisis, they are working in lock step to bring spring merchandise to a store near you. The retailers are making room on their shelves for it, the marketers are preparing the enticing come-ons, and we are all expected to show up and buy things we really don't need so that the economy can recover and grow without limit.

Coal ash deposits in the USA are now under renewed scrutiny after a giant spill just before Christmas released 5.4 million cubic yards of toxic sludge into Tennessee waterways. Water tests near the spill from the Kingston Fossil Plant showed elevated levels of lead and thallium, which can cause birth defects and nervous and reproductive system disorders. The spill muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

So now a big question mark hangs over the hundreds of coal plants all across the country which store their fly ash in unlined embankments and ponds -- like the one that failed last week. Most are situated near rivers that supply water needed by the coal plants to operate.

The NY Times reported that in the US, coal plants produce 129 million tons of postcombustion byproducts a year. It's the second-largest waste stream in the country, after municipal solid waste, and its storage and handling is unregulated. Who knew?

It is yet another measure of the high price of addiction to fossil fuels, which is not only polluting the air and warming the earth, but fouling the nation's terrestrial and aquatic environment as well. The Tennessee coal spill is a wake up call not only for the coal industry, but the oil industry as well, and not only for America but for Canada, too.

Both nations, still in pursuit of endless supplies of fossil energy, are collaborating on the exploitation of Alberta's tar sands -- one of whose byproducts will be toxic spills like the one in Tennessee, only on a massively larger scale.

I wish President-elect Obama would assign the nation a bit of holiday homework: to watch this mini-lecture on global warming that was delivered by John Holdren, his science advisor-to-be.

Lord knows this country is in need of remedial education on the subject, and who better to provide it than an eminent professor from Harvard, one of the best in the field?

Follow this link and you can watch the lecture and read his powerpoint slides simultaneously.
This particular talk was delivered in June 2008 at the Wild Center at Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks. It was the opening presentation for a conference called The American Response to Climate Change. Holdren's job was to describe and frame the problem so that conference attendees could spend most of the rest of the time working on solutions.

The lecture gives a window into what Holdren will be telling President Obama and the nation, and it begins with a sobering point: "global warming" is a poor name for what is happening. A more accurate term would be "global climactic disruption," and it is almost entirely harmful. Holdren calls the climate the "envelope" within which everything on Earth happens, and he demonstrates how everything important to us will be disrupted unless we take action soon.

A small mountain of toxic coal sludge stored in a pond near a TVA power plant in Kingston, Tennessee broke through a dike on Monday at 1 am. The sudden flow covered dozens of homes, caused a train wreck and covered more than 400 acres so far.

THE EPA has estimated the spill of the slurry to be 2.6 million cubic yards, which has muddied the waters in the Emory river and is flowing into tributaries of the Tennessee River - the water supply for Chattanooga TN and millions of people living downstream in Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky.

It's 90-seconds of animated messaging featuring a new cartoon hero, Captain (Cap'n) Dividend. He explains how the "cap-and-dividend" form of cap-and-trade works.

In a nutshell:

Cap the carbon supply. Sell permits. Pay dividends.

It's win-win for the earth -- and American families.

Click here to view the cartoon.

Brought to you by Peter Barnes and the folks at CapandDividend.org, a project of On The Commons, a network of thinkers and activists that promotes public understanding of our common wealth.

The Reality Coalition has just released a new ad that's laugh out loud funny.

Click here to view it.

There is a wave of elation now pulsing through the climate policy world with the announcement that President-elect Obama will appoint John Holdren to be his science adviser. 

Holdren will run the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and he brings an impressive set of credentials. He's Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Harvard University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences; simultaneously a Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government; and President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. And believe it or not, lots more.

For example, from 1987 to 1997 he served as chair of the executive committee of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and in 1995 he delivered the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Pugwash organization. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Joe Romm comments:

He probably has more combined expertise on both climate science and clean energy technology than any other person who could plausibly have been named science adviser.

Holdren's appointment also brings another big plus. He has no patience for the climate denial machine that has so befouled national discourse, and under his watch as science advisor, we can expect the dishonest naysayers will have a harder go of fooling the public. Here's what Holdren had to say about them in a summary he shared with attendees of a recent conference:

SELECTED INDIVIDUAL POWERPOINTS, VIDEO, AUDIO (reverse chronological order)

"Global Climate Change" Interview on the Late Show with David Letterman, 17 April 2008, video, http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/video_player/index/php/953125.phtm...

“Global Climate Disruption: What Do We Know? What Should We Do?” Lecture in the Kennedy School Forum, 6 November 2007, PowerPoint, video http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/ksgnews/Features/news/110607_holdren.htm

“Meeting the Intertwined Challenges of Energy and Environment”, Robert C. Barnard Environmental Lecture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 18 October 2007, PowerPoint, audio, video, http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2007/1029barnard.shtml

"Recent Findings from Climate Science and Their Implications for Policy", Keynote Presentation at the Informal Thematic Debate of the General Assembly, “Climatic Change as a Global Challenge”, United Nations, New York, 31 July 2007, PowerPoint

http://www.un.org/ga/president/61/follow-up/climatechange/programme.shtm...

“Ahead of the Curve: Business Responds to Climate Change”, Documentary film produced by Sea Studies Foundation, Monterey, CA, March 2007, http://www.seastudios.org/ahead

“Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being”, John P. Holdren, Presidential Keynote Address at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, San Francisco, 16 February 2007 (PowerPoint and video),

http://www.aaas.org/meetings/Annual_Meeting/2007_San_Fran/02_PE/pe_01_le...