Hill Heat

Stories about the influence of carbon pollution on the history-making Frankenstorm Sandy have had a remarkable pattern:

• Albert Sabate, ABC News/Univision: Hurricane Sandy: What’s Climate Change Got To Do With It?
• Kevin Spak, Newser: Is Sandy the Face of Climate Change?
• Mark Fischetti, Scientific American: Did Climate Change Cause Hurricane Sandy?
• Chris Mooney, Climate Desk: Was Hurricane Sandy supersized by climate change?
• Elizabeth Kolbert, New Yorker: Is Climate Change Responsible For Hurricane Sandy?
• Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience.com: Weather or Climate: What Caused Hurricane Sandy?
• Lloyd Alter, Treehugger: Hurricane Sandy, AKA the Frankenstorm and Climate Change: Is There A Connection?
• Maggie Koerth-Baker, Boing Boing: Did climate change cause Hurricane Sandy? The answer depends on why you’re asking
• Will Bunch, Attytood: Too soon to talk Sandy and climate change?
• Andrew Restuccia, Politico: Hurricane Sandy: The next climate wake-up call?
• Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian.com: Can We Link Hurricane Sandy to Climate Change?
• Ed Kilgore, Political Animal: Should Climate Change Activists Sandy-gogue?
• Lawrence Karol, Take Part: Frankenstorm Sandy: Has Climate Change Bred a Monster?
• AccuWeather.com: Climate Extremes: Sandy a Result of Climate Change?
• Robin Young, Here & Now: Was Hurricane Sandy Caused By Climate Change?
• Stephen Lacey and Joe Romm, Climate Progress: Did Climate Change Help Create ‘Frankenstorm’?

Equivocation in the face of calamity will neither spur action nor better inform the public.

Today, after the history-making silence on global warming during the national debates, MTV’s Sway Williams challenged President Barack Obama to address his climate silence. The president acknowledged to the young voters watching the Friday afternoon interview that the climate crisis is a “critical issue,” but said he was “surprised it didn’t come up in one of the debates.”

The answer is number one, we’re not moving as fast as we need to. And this is an issue that future generations, MTV viewers, are going to have to be dealing with even more than the older generation. So this is a critical issue. And there is a huge contrast in this campaign between myself and Governor Romney. I am surprised it didn’t come up in one of the debates.

Watch it:

The President of the United States shouldn’t pretend to befuddled why he promoted deadly coal, gas, and oil production during the debates instead of addressing the urgent threat of carbon pollution.

President Obama was right to finally tout in this interview the steps his administration has taken to cut carbon pollution and the commitments he made to the world in Copenhagen, but he was even more right to acknowledge that “we’re not moving as fast as we need to.”

The president unfortunately continued to portray global warming as a threat to “future generations” that is “going to have a severe effect.” But global warming is not a someday problem, it is now. The freakish Hurricane Sandy, barreling down on millions of Americans and powered by superheated seas, is likely to be the latest in the growing barrage of long-predicted billion-dollar climate disasters fueled by carbon pollution.

The network of Jersey Shore should be applauded for doing the job that PBS’s Jim Lehrer, CNN’s Candy Crowley, and CBS’s Bob Schieffer failed to do in breaking the candidates’ climate silence. Gov. Mitt Romney has been asked by MTV to also appear, but has given no response. This writing off of young voters is only fitting, as Romney’s aggressively pro-carbon agenda would write off any hope for their future.

There is now a little more than a week left for the presidential candidates to present a serious plan to eliminate carbon pollution before Election Day.

Transcript:

For the first time in two years, President Barack Obama has spoken out about how climate change is now causing extreme weather disasters in the United States. In a campaign speech in Iowa following the “climate silence” town hall debate, Obama called out the “droughts we’ve seen” as caused by “the carbon pollution that’s also heating the planet.” In the same speech, Obama claimed that “we all agree we got to increase oil production” and “we got to increase natural gas production.”

At Iowa Campaign Stop, Obama Links Carbon Pollution To ‘The Droughts We’ve Seen.’ “My plan will keep these investments, and we’ll keep reducing the carbon pollution that’s also heating the planet – because climate change isn’t a hoax. The droughts we’ve seen, the floods, the wildfires – those aren’t a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And we can do something about it. That’s part of what’s at stake in this election.” [Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Mt. Vernon, IA, 10/17/12]

At Iowa Campaign Stop, Obama Says ‘We All Agree We Got To Increase Oil Production, We All Agree We Got To Increase Natural Gas Production,’ But Also ‘We’ve Got To Develop New Sources Of Energy.’ “Look, we all agree we got to increase oil production. We all agree we got to increase natural gas production. But the question is whether we build on the progress for the new energy sources of the future.” [Remarks by the President at a Campaign Event in Mt. Vernon, IA, 10/17/12]

Since 2010, the president has spoken only of climate change’s impacts on extreme weather disasters as a “threat to our children’s future,” if he mentioned climate change at all. When Obama addressed the nation about the Colorado wildfires, Irene’s floods, the national drought, and others of the billion-dollar climate disasters of 2011 and 2012, he did not attribute their destructiveness to influence of greenhouse pollution.

At his campaign stop that afternoon in Ohio, Obama promoted “clean coal” and mocked Romney for claiming to be “champion of coal” because the Republican candidate said in 2003 that coal plants kill people. In the Ohio speech, as in the town hall debate, Obama didn’t discuss carbon pollution at all.

Already under fire for his organization’s denial of climate change, Heartland Institute Joe Bast renewed his allegiance to his tobacco sponsors, Altria and Reynolds American International. “The public health community’s campaign to demonize smokers and all forms of tobacco is based on junk science,” Bast writes. His new attacks are raising the pressure on health industry companies such as Pfizer to join the exodus from the Heartland Institute.

Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) lost the Republican primary in his bid for re-election to Indiana state treasurer and Tea Party favorite Richard Mourdock, a climate conspiracy theorist. In April, Mourdock attacked Lugar for his association with the Alliance to Save Energy and the Brookings Institution’s Energy Security Initiative:

Clearly, Lugar is out of touch with Hoosier conservatives if he thinks that serving on the board of groups that advocate ‘cap and trade’ carbon tax schemes and the junk science associated with global climate change alarmism is prudent when he represents a state that meets the majority of its electrical needs with coal-fired generators.

Following his defeat, Lugar bemoaned the extremism of the Republican Party. “Republicans cannot admit to any nuance in policy on climate change,” Lugar said.

Lugar did not actually have a record of supporting climate legislation. In 2008, he joined the filibuster of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

The Heartland Institute has been quietly dropped from two significant coalitions with top environmental organizations. Under pressure from Forecast the Facts and Greenpeace, insurers who funded Heartland’s Washington DC vice president, Eli Lehrer, ceased their support and helped to convince Lehrer to leave the organization. With Lehrer’s departure, the Heartland Institute has been excised from the websites of two green coalitions:

The Smarter Safer Coalition, an effort to reform the National Flood Insurance Program by top insurers, environmental organizations including American Rivers, the Sierra Club, National Wildlife Federation, Environmental Defense Fund, Defenders of Wildlife, Ceres, and the Nature Conservancy, alongside conservative groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Conservative Union, and Americans for Tax Reform

The Green Scissors Campaign, an initiative to reduce anti-environmental government spending with Friends of the Earth and Taxpayers for Common Sense.

According to leaked documents, Lehrer brought about $700,000 a year into the Heartland Institute for his Center on Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate, including the majority of Heartland’s corporate funding. The insurers who announced their departure from Heartland include the Association of Bermuda Insurers and Reinsurers, XL Group, Renaissance Re, Allied World Assurance, and State Farm Insurance.

Corporate sponsors of the Heartland Institute who have resisted calls to end their financial support include Microsoft, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Comcast, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Heartland’s seventh climate-denier conference will take place in Chicago in two weeks.

Tim DeChristopher, the climate activist jailed by the Obama administration for disrupting a last-minute Bush administration oil auction, finds his strength by accepting the terrible reality of climate change.

In an interview recorded in May 2011 before his two-year jail term began in July of that year, DeChristopher told environmental activist and author Terry Tempest Williams that he was willing to be Bidder 70 at the Bureau of Land Management auction in Utah – willing to dedicate his life to fighting global warming through nonviolent direct action – the moment he learned that the window had already closed for humanity to avoid all of the terrible catastrophes of climate pollution:

TIM: I think part of what empowered me to take that leap and have that insecurity was that I already felt that insecurity. I didn’t know what my future was going to be. My future was already lost.

TERRY: Coming out of college?

TIM: No. Realizing how fucked we are in our future.

TERRY: In terms of climate change.

TIM: Yeah. I met Terry Root, one of the lead authors of the IPCC report, at the Stegner Symposium at the University of Utah. She presented all the IPCC data, and I went up to her afterwards and said, “That graph that you showed, with the possible emission scenarios in the twenty-first century? It looked like the best case was that carbon peaked around 2030 and started coming back down.” She said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said, “But didn’t the report that you guys just put out say that if we didn’t peak by 2015 and then start coming back down that we were pretty much all screwed, and we wouldn’t even recognize the planet?” And she said, “Yeah, that’s right.” And I said: “So, what am I missing? It seems like you guys are saying there’s no way we can make it.” And she said, “You’re not missing anything. There are things we could have done in the ’80s, there are some things we could have done in the ’90s—but it’s probably too late to avoid any of the worst-case scenarios that we’re talking about.” And she literally put her hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry my generation failed yours.” That was shattering to me.

TERRY: When was this?

TIM: This was in March of 2008. And I said, “You just gave a speech to four hundred people and you didn’t say anything like that. Why aren’t you telling people this?” And she said, “Oh, I don’t want to scare people into paralysis. I feel like if I told people the truth, people would just give up.” And I talked to her a couple years later, and she’s still not telling people the truth. But with me, it did the exact opposite. Once I realized that there was no hope in any sort of normal future, there’s no hope for me to have anything my parents or grandparents would have considered a normal future—of a career and a retirement and all that stuff—I realized that I have absolutely nothing to lose by fighting back. Because it was all going to be lost anyway.

DeChristopher also discussed a 2008 speech by Naomi Klein that noted that Barack Obama’s goals for climate change were centrist, that “even his pie-in-the-sky campaign promises were not enough.” “And so if the center is not good enough for our survival,” Klein argued, “and if Obama is a centrist, and will always be a centrist, then our job is to move the center.” So DeChristopher realized that “you have to go to the edge and push” :

I mean, with climate change, the center is this balancing point between the climate scientists on one side saying, “This is what needs to be done,” and ExxonMobil on the other. And so the center is always going to be less than what’s required for our survival.

24 Hours of Reality will be broadcast live online from September 14 to 15, over 24 hours, representing 24 time zones and 13 languages.

The event begins in Mexico City at 7 pm local (8 pm EDT).

7 PM local, Saturday

• Mexico City, Mexico
• Boulder, CO, USA
• Victoria, BC, Canada
• French Polynesia
• Kotzebue, AK, USA
• Hawaii, USA

INTERNATIONAL DATE LINE

7 PM local, Sunday

• Tonga
• Auckland, New Zealand
• Solomon Islands
• Canberra, Australia
• Seoul, South Korea
• Beijing, China
• Jakarta, Indonesia
• New Delhi, India
• Islamabad, Pakistan
• Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Istanbul, Turkey
• Durban, South Africa
• London, United Kingdom
• Husavik, Iceland
• Cape Verde
• Ilulissat, Greenland
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• New York City, NY, USA

Please join Protect Our Winters for a special evening with Olympian Gretchen Bleiler, pro snowboarder Jeremy Jones, skier Chris Davenport and Aspen Skiing Company’s Auden Schendler.

They’ll discuss climate change, winter sports, and why athletes are an important part of the solution.

Honorary co-hosts Rep. Jared Polis (CO), Sen. Mark Udall (CO), and Sen. Michael Bennet (CO).

The League of Women Voters has launched a major, nationwide campaign in defense of the EPA’s work to give Americans clean air. The People Not Polluters campaign asks Americans and their elected officials to join the Clean Air Promise:

I promise to protect America’s children and families from dangerous air pollution. Because toxics and pollutants such as mercury, smog, carbon, and soot, cause thousands of hospital visits, asthma attacks, and even deaths, I will support clean air policies and other protections that scientists and public health experts have recommended to the EPA to safeguard our air quality.

Watch the campaign spot:

LWV is mobilizing its members to tell personal stories of the cost of asthma for children and families, including outreach to vulnerable populations like seniors, Latinos, and African Americans.