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A Call for Global Attention: Nepal to hold Cabinet Meeting on Mount Everest
Later this month, the government of Nepal will hold a cabinet meeting at the base of Mount Everest at an altitude of 17,585 feet to draw global attention to the effects of climate change in the Himalayas (India Times). This landmark revolutionary meeting is expected to predate the UN Climate Change Conference, which will be held from December 7th through December 18th, 2009 in Copenhagen. With this call for urgency, responsibility and environmental vigor, the ministers hope to incite the international world to rise from its slumber.
The Himalayan glaciers feed some of the region's most widely utilized and well-known rivers, including the Ganges, the Yamuna and the Brahmaputra. Fulfilling their divine purpose to service mankind and the environment, the glaciers irrigate agriculture in Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and India. However, rising temperatures are having an enormous impact on the region. Many of the largest glaciers, including the Siachen glacier separating India and Pakista...
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The End of the Tour But the Beginning of the Fight
On Oct 12, military veterans of OperationFree boarded two large biodiesel buses in two different states to begin a historic journey crisscrossing the country to talk to citizens, political leaders and fellow veterans about the national security implications of climate change and the need for Congress to enact comprehensive new clean energy legislation.The brilliant blue coach buses were wrapped with the names of more than 70 cities and towns in 21 states that the buses visited over a two-week period. Veterans of wars from all services participated in the tour, some jumping on board for a few days while a few others stayed on board for the entire period.
I served as communications staff aboard the "southern" bus, blogging at various points along the way for the Operation Free and the NRDC Greenlight websites. We started our trek in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and then headed north through Missouri and Nebraska until we veered east and rolled through Iowa, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia...
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The Arctic Circle: Science at the End of the Earth
Oct. 18th, Ny Ålesund, Arctic Science Village
In Ny Ålesund, a former mining village that is now an international center for climate research, most of the two hundred researchers and technicians have left for the season. But at the Alfred Wegener Polar Institute, a German engineer still remains, for a whole year in this inaccessible outpost, to repeat the same experiments every day. In one he releases a large white weather balloon, each day at 1pm, which rises and drifts into the stratosphere before exploding when it gets too high, but not before transmitting essential data from its disposable radio which will never be found. Then at night he shoots a high energy laser beam straight up into the clouds, of such power that even a tiny fraction of its bright beam is diffused back through the cloud cover and can be registered by the naked eye. The beam bounces through the building inside a complex and irregular rectilinear box, down to the floor off a large telescope mirror, then s...
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Road to Copenhagen: Fears Arise Outside Closed Doors
From all I can gather, the actual on-paper negotiations are moving this week, progressing in some way towards some kind of agreement. (We'll get to what kind of agreement soon.) But we wouldn't have much way of knowing, since proceedings largely disappeared behind closed doors this week. I've been told by plenty of folks--including two former US negotiators--that I shouldn't complain about the lack of access, because it's the closed-door meetings where things really get done. Still, it's frustrating that an institution that prides itself on openness seems to operate best through closed meetings. The American delegation does seem more confident at this stage that there's an agreement out there to be achieved.
Whether that agreement will be anything close to what the science tells us is necessary is another question (hint: it won't be). And what form that agreement will take has become the story of the week. Will it be a "legally-binding" treaty that is enforceable by international la...
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Join the Campaign to “Kill the Drill” and Keep NYC’s Drinking Water Free of Toxic Chemicals
Last month, Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon vowed that his company will not drill for natural gas in New York City's upstate watershed. This may seem like a victory for the "Kill the Drill" campaign, but it's only a partial one: In five years' time, Chesapeake's leases in the watershed will expire, and even before then there is no guarantee that McClendon will remain the head of the company. That's why I am calling on the State Department of Environmental Conservation to implement a complete and permanent ban on hydrofracture drilling in the Catskill / Delaware watershed.
As McClendon himself stated, "How could any one well be so profitable that it would be worth damaging the New York City water system?" Now the State environmental agency finds itself in the uncomfortable position of lagging behind the industry it regulates in protecting the City's drinking water.
For those who may be unfamiliar with the drilling technique known as "hydraulic fracturing," it is already being u...
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The Arctic Circle: The Graves of Failed Dreams
Oct. 17th, Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden
In 1910 Ernest Mansfield was convinced that this was going to be the site of the greatest marble quarry in the world, so he set up the Northern Exploration Company to cut all the stone out. He named the spot New London. Some of his machines remain right on the rails, having never even been used. The whole project fell apart, there was nothing worth taking.
The more we experience this distance the place, the less it seems it's a wilderness. Spitsbergen is the warmest place in the Arctic, because it's the end of the gulf stream, so much of the sea surrounding remains ice-free most of the year. Already by 1700 the Dutch had killed all the whales here, and after that came trappers, hunters, miners, still trying to extract something useful out of the landscape. What might remain most useful today is strategy-a few years ago a cable was laid all the way from Norway under the sea, bringing fast communication to the outside world. There a...
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The Arctic Circle: The Cruel Beauty of Nature
October 14th, Sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E
The bell rings on deck, that means there's something to see. "Ayeaah," says the captain, usually a man of few words, "seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North."
Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don't seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it's probably been there for months.
"Ooohhh..." someone says, "it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film." "Hey," someone else has a bright idea, "let's put those binoculars over a camera lens, see what kind of effect comes out."
We watch the bears eating and playing for hours. It's impossible to pull our eyes away. The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed. A couple of us remember Werner Herzog's line in Grizzly Man, where the ...
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Road to Copenhagen: No Senate Bill Before Copenhagen, What's Next?
Well that's settled. There won't be a Senate bill before Copenhagen. Which means a lot of things: the US won't have concrete numbers on mitigation targets and finance commitments before COP15 convenes; the difficult job of the American negotiators just got even harder; the international community has even more cause to accuse the US of coming up short; the chances of a fair, ambitious and binding deal coming out of Copenhagen have taken a serious blow; and finally, any hope for the talks to succeed depends on a dramatic shift in how the State Department approaches the negotiations.
A new (and very controversial) way forward?
Up until now, the thinking was that the best course towards any sort of deal in Copenhagen was through a good bill passing on Capitol Hill. Now this changes-we know that a Senate bill isn't coming. The conventional wisdom has long held that the US needs to bring numbers from our domestic policies to the UNFCCC, and not vice versa. Doi...
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Nuclear Power: A Problem or a Solution?
A recent news release issued by the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) has raised the idea of developing nuclear power as a primary energy source as an adaptation plan to combat climate change. Nuclear power represents the second largest source of U.S. electricity generation, producing approximately 20% of U.S. electricity. If the demand for electricity would increase by 50 percent, as suggested by prediction models between 2004 and 2030 more sources of energy will need to be utilized or developed to keep up with such trends. In conjunction with rising energy costs, this becomes a serious concern for Americans. Nuclear energy, however, represents an affordable and reliable source for energy.
The possibility of nuclear power as a significant energy source brings provides and environmentally clean energy source (it produces no gases that contribute to global warming or those associated with causing smog and acid rain). In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, nuclear power pl...
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Road to Copenhagen: This Week's Tripping Points
With the US still holding out on a couple crucial bits of information (mitigation targets and finance numbers) that make real progress on the Long-term Cooperative Agreement (LCA) track just about impossible, the UN talks this week in Barcelona are circling around a couple other troubling tripping points.
First, there’s the question of what’s to become of the Kyoto Protocol. Many developing countries are accusing industrialized nations of sabotaging the agreement, which isn’t–as many believe–supposed to end in 2012, but requires new commitments to be agreed upon for a second phase that runs through 2020. Brendan Demille’s got a solid account of the fireworks the erupted Monday over this when 50 African nations “suspended” any further Kyoto Protocol talks until developed countries start taking them more seriously and deliver some numbers that are long overdue.
Second, there’s quite of bit of unease in the air over the flood of recent comments–from everyone from th...
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Mowing the Lawn