McClatchy has an interesting article by Charles Mead and Annie Snider on why the CIA is spying on climate change effects globally:
For the analyst, who heads the CIA's year-old Center on Climate Change and National Security, the worst natural disaster in Pakistan's history was a warning.
"It has the exact same symptoms you would see for future climate change events, and we're expecting to see more of them," he said later, agreeing to talk only if his name were not revealed, for security reasons. "We wanted to know: What are the conditions that lead to a situation like the Pakistan flooding? What are the important things for water flows, food security ... radicalization, disease" and displaced people?
As intelligence officials assess key components of state stability, they are realizing that the norms they had been operating with - such as predictable river flows and crop yields - are shifting.
Yet the U.S. government is ill-prepared to act on climate changes that are coming faster than anticipated and threaten to bring instability to places of U.S. national interest, interviews with several dozen current and former officials and outside experts and a review of two decades' worth of government reports indicate.
Someone reminded us the other day of Clem's 2010 challenge to lessen our carbon impact. I increased my recycling probably 10-fold, cut my miles driven by roughly 25 percent, and took no airplane trips last year. I've also been working on cutting my water usage too though I didn't actually track it since I never go over the amount for the minimum bill.
So there is a lot we can do as individuals. At the same time, I saw a bumper sticker today saying "Going green is the new communism" and we have two U.S. senators who don't want the Environmental Protection Agency to be able to protect the environment. So I think it's a comforting myth to some that we can do things as individuals that make a difference if we also don't have national leaders recognizing the reality of the future we face and enact changes on a larger scale. It's going to take all of us acting locally and acting globally to save the only planet we've got.
It'd be great if there were sensible Republicans and coal-state Democrats who could be convinced of the economic benefits that are there from moving to environmentally friendly energy sources.
However the last sensible Republicans are keeping quiet to avoid being primaried out of the party and the coal-state Democrats can't hear us and the alarm-bells sounding for the planet because they're too busy listening to the coal industry lobbyists.
Update
Ken Ward Jr. at Coal Tattoo:
As the Republicans take control this week in the U.S. House of Representatives, even some Democrats - like West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockfeller - are joining the bandwagon to attack Obama administration efforts to deal with some of the problems caused by our reliance on the coal industry.
Sen. Rockefeller told Politico that he's raring to go in his controversial bid to handcuff the Environmental Protection Agency's climate regulations for two year. At the same time, former Democratic House member Rick Boucher of Virginia reminds us that the climate change bill that passed the House had plenty of stuff in it to help the coal industry try to survive and control its greenhouse gas emissions |
