Did yall see the Presidential debate last night? What about that question about Green Jobs and Climate? I don’t know if you were as dissapointed with the candidates’ lukewarm answers as I was, but one thing is for sure – there’s one issue neither McCain nor Obama will argue about: their support for (and astronomical campaign contribution support by) so called “clean coal.” Wanna see a real debate? Yesterday Mike Brune, director of Rainforest Action Network debated Joe Lucas of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity on Democracy Now!
check it out:
Mike also has a new book out, called Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal
We’ve all read plenty of books and articles about the high costs and impacts of our addiction to fossil fuels. This book is different. It’s optimistic but it’s also a clear-eyed and realistic book about solutions. More importantly, it suggests specific, tangible things that people can do collectively to create the deep change we need to create a clean energy economy.
Bill McKibben describes Coming Clean as, “the resource we have long needed,”
Van Jones writes, “At last! A road map to a clean energy future.”
Ross Gelbspan calls it, “A gem of a book.”
Jeff Goodell, author of Big Coal, says its, “a smart, heartfelt guide to building a better world.”
The book can be found at local bookstores now or on Amazon here
Our aim is to use the book as an opportunity to bring diverse activists together, to promote real solutions to our energy crisis, and to put some heat on local politicos and corporate targets. If you have students who would want to host an event, its an easy way to help keep up a buzz about solutions and a clean energy future and can help keep momentum up around Power Vote and other organizing happening locally. If you’re interested, email Jen Angel at jen@aidandabet.org
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Delay is the new Deny.
Quoting from James Hansen’s email “Tell Barack Obama the Truth, The Whole Truth” which I received Nov 21 2008 regarding climate change: “The only solution is to target a (large) portion of the fossil fuel reserves to be left in the ground or used in a way such that the CO2 can be captured and safely sequestered.”
It isn’t just Hansen who calls for carbon capture. Some of the organizations in favour of the rapid deployment of carbon capture and storage are: the IPCC (IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage), MIT (The Future of Coal), the UNDP (Avoiding dangerous climate change: strategies for mitigation), and the IAC (the InterAcademy Council, set up to represent every science academy in the world, who published “Lighting the Way”. Incidentally the study panel that wrote this was co-chaired by Stephen Chu, Obama’s DOE appointee).
I mean, Brune is confusing the issue. Climate change requires limiting CO2 emissions. Brune is campaigning against a technology that Big coal has been delaying because it will cost money. Rather than campaign to force Big Coal to put in the technology to drastically reduce emissions, Brune would rather tilt at windmills by declaring that the only goal should be to eliminate the entire industry. Never mind that China and India are basing their dream of a higher living standard on coal.
Brune doesn’t want the US to force its coal industry to rapidly develop a technology that could be transferred to the developing world to allow them to use their coal more safely.
His problem seems to be that he believes that one dime spent on carbon capture is a dime not spent on renewable energy. $40 billion is spent in the US on pets each year. $20 billion in the US and EU is spent on cosmetic surgery. But not one dime of that money was taken from renewable energy development, no. The problem is carbon capture technology, and not one dime should be spent on that.