Progressive Opinion

thenation.com — The World Bank’s latest report on climate change, “Turn Down the Heat,” warns that the planet is on track for a four-degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100. Like many scientists, the bank fears that such an increase would be incompatible with civilization as we know it. “This report is a stark reminder that climate change affects everything,” World Bank President Jim Yong Kim writes in the forward to the report, which was authored by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “The solutions lie in ensuring all our work, all our thinking, is designed with the threat of a 4°C degree world in mind. The World Bank Group will step up to the challenge.” So far, so good. But how exactly will the World Bank “step up?” The answer, shockingly, is nowhere to be found in this report, and a review of the Bank’s history on climate issues raises many red flags.

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truthdig.com — Hurricane Sandy, if you are poor, is the Katrina of the North. It has exposed the nation’s fragile, dilapidated and shoddy infrastructure, one that crumbles under minimal stress. It has highlighted the inability of utility companies, as well as state and federal agencies, to cope with the looming environmental disasters that because of the climate crisis will soon come in wave after wave. But, most important, it illustrates the depraved mentality of an oligarchic and corporate elite that, as conditions worsen, retreats into self-contained gated communities, guts basic services and abandons the wider population.

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washingtonpost.com — You might not have noticed that another round of U.N. climate talks is under way, this time in Doha, Qatar. You also might not have noticed that we’re barreling toward a “world . . . of unprecedented heat waves, severe drought, and major floods in many regions.” Here in Washington, we’re too busy to pay attention to such trifles. We’re too busy arguing about who gets credit or blame for teeny-weeny changes in the tax code. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the legacy we pass along to future generations will be a parboiled planet.

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slate.com — Despite the lack of attention paid to the issue during this year’s presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s first term was a bit of a quiet revolution for climate change policy in America. It’s true that within his first two years in the Oval Office, the president had abandoned any efforts at passing a cap-and-trade bill, which went from the policy of choice for both major-party candidates in 2008 to political poison in 2010. But that failure belied a massive shift in energy and climate change policy that Obama was able to accomplish with relatively little fanfare in just his first few months in office. This profound change came in the form of the stimulus bill. More than 13 percent of the $700 billion American Recovery Act went to energy spending, most of it green. This was the biggest such investment in the history of history. It may even have finally heralded the arrival of a “Negawatt Revolution” that noted environmentalist and Rocky Mountain Institute founder Amory Lovins described 23 years ago.

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tomdispatch.com — Rarely does the release of a data-driven report on energy trends trigger front-page headlines around the world. That, however, is exactly what happened on November 12th when the prestigious Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) released this year’s edition of its World Energy Outlook. In the process, just about everyone missed its real news, which should have set off alarm bells across the planet. Claiming that advances in drilling technology were producing an upsurge in North American energy output, World Energy Outlook predicted that the United States would overtake Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the planet’s leading oil producer by 2020. “North America is at the forefront of a sweeping transformation in oil and gas production that will affect all regions of the world,” declared IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven in a widely quoted statement.

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grist.org — Last month, ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of state legislators who have sworn fealty to big business) began advocating for the “Electricity Freedom Act,” a bit of sample legislation aimed at crippling state renewable energy standards. The title of the bill is brazenly hypocritical — which by itself was probably enough to pique the interest of the right-wing, climate-change-denying Heartland Institute. And sure enough, it’s throwing in.

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dailykos.com — Coal is a disaster for the climate and, although it provides good-paying jobs in areas where there often are no others, it also is a disaster for coal communities and miners themselves. For those reasons, with his last election campaign a success, President Obama should push hard to get regulations in place that work to force an end to most coal mining—a ban on mountain-top removal, regulations that control CO2 emissions of existing plants, more funding for enforcing health and safety regulations while coal is still mined, installing every obstacle the executive branch can come up in the path of soaring U.S. coal exports and negotiating a no-exports pact with the world's other leading exporters. He should also find various innovative means to support and invest in the future of coal miners and other coal-company employees who will lose their livelihood as coal production is cut back.

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motherjones.com — It was halting, and hardly eloquent. He seemed rusty talking about the issue, even saying "carbons" at one point instead of "carbon." But nonetheless, in a White House press conference last Wednesday, President Obama went the farthest he has gone yet in laying out a climate change agenda for his second term. There were few specifics of the sort that climate watchers wanted to hear, however—and they were justly incensed the next day, when White House press secretary Jay Carney dismissed both the notion of a carbon tax, and tying global warming to Superstorm Sandy. Nonetheless, Obama's halting words reflect a stark political reality: Thanks to Sandy, we're only now taking baby steps back towards the political traction that we had obtained four years ago, when cap-and-trade legislation really seemed achievable—before the Category 5 intensification of Tea Party science denial. Before the climate silence.

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tomdispatch.com — There’s a war going on that you know nothing about between a coalition of great powers and a small insurgent movement.  It’s a secret war being waged in the shadows while you go about your everyday life. In the end, this conflict may matter more than those in Iraq and Afghanistan ever did.  And yet it’s taking place far from newspaper front pages and with hardly a notice on the nightly news.  Nor is it being fought in Yemen or Pakistan or Somalia, but in small hamlets in upstate New York.  There, a loose network of activists is waging a guerrilla campaign not with improvised explosive devices or rocket-propelled grenades, but with zoning ordinances and petitions.  The weaponry may be humdrum, but the stakes couldn’t be higher. Ultimately, the fate of the planet may hang in the balance.

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robertreich.org — Justice Department just entered into the largest criminal settlement in U.S. history with the giant oil company BP. BP plead guilty to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, and agreed to pay $4 billion over the next five years. This is loony. Mind you, I’m appalled by the carelessness and indifference of the BP executives responsible for the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that killed eleven people on April 20, 2010, and unleashed the worst oil spill in American history. But it defies logic to make BP itself the criminal. Corporations aren’t people. They can’t know right from wrong. They’re incapable of criminal intent. They have no brains. They’re legal fictions. Can we please get a grip? The only sentient beings in a corporation are the people who run them or work for them. When it comes to criminality, they’re the ones who should be punished.

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