WOW! climate conference in Germany

http://www.grist.org/comments/dispatches/2006/10/03/levitin/index.html?source=daily


Beyond Kyoto
A dispatch from a forward-looking climate conference in Germany


Imagine a trans-European "super grid" of renewable energy connecting solar parks in northern Africa to wind farms in Scandinavia. Consider the millions in savings -- in miles, in dollars, in tons of CO2 injected into the atmosphere -- if once a week, one out of every 10 Americans telecommuted to work using state-of-the-art conference screens at home.

Or how about picturing the alternative: a world in which our continued burning of fossil fuels forces global temperatures over the 2 degree Celsius threshold (we're currently 0.7 degrees C above pre-Industrial levels) believed to be the tipping point that will lead to long-term, devastating atmospheric changes.

-snip-

" is about making sharp cuts. It's about restructuring our lives, re-steering investment, shifting our modes of transportation and production," Renate Künast, a Green Party politician and former agriculture minister, told the 600-strong crowd packed into the glass, solar-powered Energy Forum building located on the Spree River, just yards from the longest standing stretch of the Berlin Wall. Young, charismatic, and a shrewd politician, Künast is the kind of firebrand leader the environmental movement needs, here and elsewhere. Damning the EU's failed cap-and-trade system within the Kyoto Protocol, whose loopholes allowed industrial carbon emissions to keep soaring, she called on her country to much more aggressively lead the way in Europe. "Germany must be a pioneer. We need a green market economy where only sustainable use is an acceptable use. Count on technological change," Künast warned, "because by the middle of the century, we'll need an economy that runs carbon-free."

-snip-

"At the end of the day, climate is about energy technology, and in the U.S. it's the states who are taking the lead on energy policies," Lewis Milford, president of the Vermont-based Clean Energy Group, said at a panel he chaired with California Energy Commissioner John Geesman, Massachusetts Rep. Jim Marzilli (D), and other clean-fuel advocates from the U.S., who shared some surprising results of their regional energy plans. In Connecticut, for example, an NGO called SmartPower is marketing clean energy through competitive community programs; in Oregon, energy efficiency saves the state 1 million megawatt hours per year; in the Northeast, nine states have signed on to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, agreeing to cut CO2 emissions by 10 percent. And in California, according to Geesman, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's aim to increase renewable-electricity generation to 20 percent of the state's total by 2010 -- and, even more ambitious, to possibly 33 percent by 2020 -- backs up a recent poll that found 85 percent of Californians want the state to double its reliance on clean energy over the next decade.

-snip-


"The people of America want to see an answer to climate change. The people of America want to see a reduction in CO2," he said, his voice bellowing through the bright, sunlit conference hall. "I challenge you: help us save the planet. It is not a question of should we. We must."
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wish this was the news on all the TV stations. wish this was the 3 hr. Wash. Journal show. wish talk radio was talking about this. front page of the newspapers and news magazines.

get the child abusers out of D.C. so actual work can be done to save our planet.

I doubt it will be the elite.

nt

worth a grain of sand if this world becomes inhabitable.

Especially after reading this morning that 2/3 of the planet will be desert in 2100 if nothing changes. And yes indeed this should be all of the news.