Obama renews climate change push (via AFP)
President Barack Obama renewed his campaign to curb carbon emissions Saturday, saying the debate over climate change is over. Obama, who made the battle against climate change a core promise of his 2008 election campaign, has been stymied at the federal…
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Republicans used to pride themselves on being pragmatists who took scientists seriously. Nowadays, they are more likely to be proud of their verbal gymnastics. A legislator in Michigan (and also a member of ALEC) wants the pet coke that is left behind when tar sands are turned into oil to be counted as “alternative energy.” And of course the stuff will be as dirty as burning coal.
link to thinkprogress.org
One thing to keep in mind about the tar sands is that it provides oil at a high cost. It is not only equivalent to converting coal into oil (a bad sign for any economy), but it still leaves millions of tons of pet coke climbing higher and higher in piles several stories high in various places around the country.
The Koch brothers own tons of the pet coke. And they would like to make millions more by burning it in the United States, though it is now illegal. It’s dirty stuff but advocates of burning pet coke want their word games taken seriously.
Obama may be on to something. More and more Americans are getting tired of the word games. We have issues that need to be dealt with and very high on that list, if not number one, is global warming. But even if global warming were not real, which we now know it is, resorting to dirtier and dirtier fossil fuels that are more and more expensive (three times more expensive than it was in 2003) is not good economic policy, particularly when real alternative energy is getting cheaper and cheaper while being far more clean.
President Obama is right on. Any politician not paying attention to what the environment is doing or what the experts are
saying is playing a risky game.’
$100s of millions of dollars were spent by the Kochs and friends
on the anti-climate science doubt machine. What do they get for their $$$? They get a hundred thousand comments by a flying monkey army of paid suicidal morons – in attack mode.
Polls show there are very few true deniers in the general public. Most Americans want solutions to an obvious and fatal global warming: such as a carbon tax with all fees returned to citizens, renewable energy, greater efficiency…. They are not that dumb…
These Americans will vote smart and get out the vote. It’s a matter of life and death.