I wrote a piece in December about the anniversary of the Clean Air Act for the Progressive Media Project, a column that ran in numerous newspapers around the country.
Tag: climate change
Grassroots: States taking responsibility
My Progressive Populist column is on the efforts by the states to address global warming in the absence of presidential leadership.
Green fight goes to court
New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine is tired of waiting for the federal government to approve California’s emission restrictions — a delay that has similar New Jersey rules on hold. So the governor is adding the state to a lawsuit filed by California and several states (New York, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington) that seeks to force the issue.
As The Record points out today,
If the permission is granted, New Jersey will require dealers to sell 168,000 hybrids and other low-emissions vehicles in 2009, and more in the future. The cleaner cars are part of a plan to reduce the pollution caused by carbon dioxide emissions 20 percent over the next 10 years. In as heavily trafficked a state as this one, that would have a lot of people breathing more easily — as well as reducing the greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. Vehicles account for about half the annual greenhouse gas emissions in New Jersey.
This is only a drop in the greenhouse bucket, of course, but it is a start and could encourage other states to move ahead with their own tighter regulations. That, in turn, could get the federal government moving — which would make it a lot easier to convince nations in the developing world to pay attention to climate change.
In the end, global warming can only be addressed by a worldwide commitment led by the world’s biggets polluter — the United States.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
The air is thick with climate change
Another piece of the puzzle, another bit of evidence to support the truth. The Earth is not only getting warmer, but more humid — and the global warming thesis just gets stronger and stronger.
Climate scientists have now seen the man-made fingerprint of global warming on 10 different aspects of Earth’s environment: surface temperatures, humidity, water vapor over the oceans, barometric pressure, total precipitation, wildfires, change in species of plants in animals, water run-off, temperatures in the upper atmosphere, and heat content in the world’s oceans.
“This story does now fit together; there are now no loose ends,” said Ben Santer, a scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and author of the September study on moisture above the oceans. “The message is pretty compelling that natural causes alone just can’t cut it.”
Man is changing the climate and choking us all.
I know. Not a pretty picture, but that’s just the way it is.
South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick
E-mail me by clicking here.
Hank Kalet 