Hill Heat

In an impassioned floor speech on Tuesday, freshman U.S. Senator Angus King (I-Maine) compared Churchill’s unheeded warnings about the threat of Hitler to America’s inaction on the global threat of climate change pollution. Sen. King also described how carbon dioxide has been rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, how sea level rise threatens America’s coastal cities, and how Maine’s lobsters are threatened with extinction by global warming.

“I rise today, Madam President, because we are entering a period of consequences,” Sen. King said. “It’s 1936. It’s August of 2001, when we had warnings Al Qaeda determined to strike in the United States.”

Sen. King concluded, “The generation that finally woke up to World War II, and fought it, and preserved this country and the western civilization for us has often been referred to as the Greatest Generation. The reason they were the Greatest Generation is that they were willing to face a problem and make enormous sacrifices in order to deal with it, to protect us and our children and grandchildren and our ability to function in this new world. They were the Greatest Generation. I have to say, Madam President, if somebody was going to characterize us, we’d be characterized as the Oblivious Generation – the generation that saw the data, saw the facts, saw the freight train headed for us and said, ‘That’s okay, it’s business as usual. Don’t bother me, I don’t want to be inconvenienced.’”

Sen. King was governor of Maine from 1995 to 2003.

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From the Wonk Room.

“Wind turbines accounted for 42 percent of all new generating capacity in the U.S.,” growing into “a key part of the energy infrastructure in Minnesota and Iowa,” which can now generate more wind power than California.

On Tuesday, Maine lawmakers “will take up one of the most far-reaching anti-global-warming bills to go before any state Legislature in the country” “to reduce dependence on fossil fuels and cut carbon dioxide emissions” but “Maine’s business community wants the Legislature to kill the proposal.”

U.S. Department of Energy officials and top commercial real estate executives kicked off the Commercial Real Estate Energy Alliance, a public-private partnership aiming to produce widespread net-zero-energy commercial buildings by the year 2025.