OBAMA: It is critical that we understand this is not just a challenge, it’s an opportunity, because if we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs, easily. It can be an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine for economic growth over the last couple of decades. We can do it, but we’re going to have to make an investment. The same way the computer was originally invented by a bunch of government scientists who were trying to figure out, for defense purposes, how to communicate, we’ve got to understand that this is a national security issue, as well.
McCAIN: We can move forward, and clean up our climate, and develop green technologies, and alternative energies for battery-powered cars, so that we can clean up our environment and at the same time get our economy going by creating millions of jobs.
27 January 2009
Obama Makes Climate Change a National Priority
U.S. technical agencies prepare to help regions understand local effects
This is the first article in a series about steps to address the effects of climate change at regional and local levels.
Washington — Climate change is a planetary process, but its effects — sea level rise, shrinking glaciers, changes in plant and animal distribution, early-blooming trees, permafrost thaws — are regional and local.
Some of the effects are already occurring, and the newly installed Obama administration, in power for just more than a week, is moving fast to put the United States in a leadership position to work with nations of the world and meet the challenges of climate change and energy security.
On January 26, President Obama signed two related presidential memorandums. In what he called “a down payment on a broader and sustained effort to reduce our dependence on foreign oil,” Obama directed the Department of Transportation to establish higher fuel efficiency standards for carmakers’ 2011 model year.
The second memo directed the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a petition by California to set more stringent limits for greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles than those set by the federal government. (See “Obama Sets Bold New Principles for U.S. Energy, Climate Policies.”)
SPECIAL ENVOY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
On the same day, at the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton introduced Todd Stern as the nation’s new special envoy for climate change.
“With the appointment today of a special envoy,” Clinton said, “we are sending an unequivocal message that the United States will be energetic, focused, strategic and serious about addressing global climate change and the corollary issue of clean energy.”
Stern will serve as a principal adviser on international climate policy and strategy and as the administration’s chief climate negotiator. He will lead U.S. efforts in U.N. negotiations and will be a lead participant in developing climate and clean energy policy.
“Containing climate change will require nothing less than transforming the global economy from a high-carbon [dioxide] to a low-carbon energy base,” said Stern, who in the 1990s coordinated the Clinton administration’s climate change efforts and was senior White House representative at U.N. climate negotiations in Kyoto, Japan, and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
“President Obama and Secretary Clinton have left no doubt,” he said, “that a new day is dawning in the U.S. approach to climate change and clean energy.”
SCALING DOWN TO THE LOCAL LEVEL
Climate change often is described as an event that will bring catastrophe to Earth’s inhabitants in the distant future.
But every nation’s farmers, coastal dwellers, emergency planners and government officials already have experienced the bleeding edge of changing climate — rising air and sea-surface temperatures, shrinking arctic ice, lower crop yields, dwindling forests, intense hurricanes and unrelenting droughts.
There is no shortage of evidence that the planet faces a climate crisis, but there is a severe shortage of one thing that will help villages, towns, cities and regions protect themselves and their ecosystems against the long-term effects of a climate in flux: information.
“Our understanding [of climate change] has primarily been at the global level,” William Brennan, former administrator of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), told America.gov. “That’s where we can see the signal.”
Much more work needs to be done, he said, “to scale that down to the regional and ultimately to the local level. That’s where we need the facilities of something like a National Climate Service, not only to provide information, but to receive data and turn it into information.”
NATIONAL CLIMATE SERVICE
Weather is the day-to-day state of the atmosphere and its short-term (minutes to weeks) variation, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center. Climate is statistical weather information that describes weather variation at a given place averaged over a longer period, usually 30 years.
NOAA’s National Weather Service provides weather, hydrologic and climate forecasts and warnings for the United States, its territories and ocean areas. Weather Service data and products form a national information database and infrastructure that is available to other governmental agencies, the private sector, the public and the global community.
NOAA also has an operational mandate to monitor and predict climate, Chet Koblinsky, director of NOAA’s Climate Program Office, told America.gov.
With NOAA in the lead, a proposed climate service partnership would include federal agencies like NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Forest Service and many others.
NOAA also would collaborate with academic and private organizations.
“We don’t have all the capability,” Koblinsky said. “The best climate service will be one that draws on the full capabilities of the nation.”
NOAA and its partners are discussing the potential capabilities and products of such a new service.
Read more: http://www.america.gov/st/energy-english/2009/January/20090127161856lcnirellep9.743899e-02.html#ixzz0Qq2k5iHP
Democratic Nominee Obama Vows to Defeat Climate Change
DENVER, Colorado, August 29, 2008 (ENS) - Climate change has made Senator Barack Obama's list of "threats of the 21st century" alongside terrorism and nuclear proliferation, poverty, genocide, and disease.Accepting the Democratic nomination for president Thursday night before 75,000 supporters at Denver's Invesco Field, Obama said he would "build new partnerships" to defeat these threats.
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Senator Barack Obama of Illinois is the Democratic nominee for president of the United States.(Photo courtesy DNCC) |
"Washington's been talking about our oil addiction for the last 30 years, and John McCain has been there for 26 of them," said the senator from Illinois of his Republican opponent.
"In that time, he's said no to higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars, no to investments in renewable energy, no to renewable fuels. And today, we import triple the amount of oil as the day that Senator McCain took office."
"Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close," said Obama.
"As president," he promised, "I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power.
"I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America," he said. "I'll make it easier for the American people to afford these new cars."
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Obama accepts the nomination with a smile.(Photo by Pat Kight) |
"And I'll invest 150 billion dollars over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy - wind power and solar power and the next generation of biofuels; an investment that will lead to new industries and five million new jobs that pay well and can't ever be outsourced."
Obama has won the support of many environmentalists for his climate and energy plans.
In a scorecard comparing Obama's energy policies with those of his Republican opponent, Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Sierra Club last week came out clearly in favor of Obama.
"Both candidates are talking about energy, high prices and global warming, so it's important to look past the rhetoric and see what is at the heart of their plans," said Cathy Duvall, Sierra Club political director.
"As this scorecard illustrates, the contrast in this election could not be starker," she said. "Barack Obama wants to give tax relief and $1,000 energy rebates to working families, while John McCain wants billions more in tax breaks for oil companies making more than $1,000 a second in profits."
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Some 75,000 Democrats packed Invesco Field for the nomination ceremony. |
Speaking tonight in support of the newly selected Democratic presidential nominee, former Vice President Al Gore described the choice facing American voters as one that will determine the fate of the planet.
He spoke from experience, having run for the presidency in 2000 and won the popular vote only to watch as the U.S. Supreme Court stopped the vote counting in Florida, in effect handing the White House to his opponent, George W. Bush.
"That's why I came here tonight: to tell you why I feel so strongly that we must seize this opportunity to elect Barack Obama president of the United States of America," said Gore.
"Take it from me, if it had ended differently," Gore told the crowd, "we would not be denying the climate crisis; we'd be solving it."
But today, Gore said, "We are facing a planetary emergency, which, if not solved, would exceed anything we've ever experienced in the history of humankind."
"We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the future of human civilization," said Gore. "Every bit of that has to change."
Gore, who shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for doing his utmost to warn the world about global warming, delivered a searing picture of potential climate disaster tonight.
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Former Vice President Al Gore addresses fellow Democrats in Denver. August 28, 2008 |
"Many scientists predict - shockingly - that the entire North Polar ice cap may be completely gone during summer months during the first term of the next president," he said.
"Sea levels are rising; fires are raging; storms are stronger. Military experts warn us our national security is threatened by massive waves of climate refugees destabilizing countries around the world, and scientists tell us the very web of life is endangered by unprecedented extinctions," Gore warned.
The former vice president, who served in the Senate with McCain as president pro tem during the Clinton administration and before that as a senator from Tennessee, told the crowd tonight, "In spite of John McCain's past record of open-mindedness and leadership on the climate crisis, he has now apparently allowed his party to browbeat him into abandoning his support of mandatory caps on global warming pollution."
Gore said Obama will be a president who inspires America to believe we can use the sun, the wind, geothermal power, conservation and efficiency to solve the climate crisis.
By contrast, he said "the carbon fuels industry - big oil and coal - have a 50-year lease on the Republican Party, and they are drilling it for everything it's worth."
At the White House today, presidential spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters that President Bush believes the Obama nomination shows "that America is the best country on Earth and a place where everybody, if they work hard, can achieve great things."
Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved
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