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STOP THE WARS, STOP THE WARMING!

 

Humanity is at a crossroads. Either we watch in a stupor as climate change accelerates, nuclear weapons are "improved", and wars spiral out of control—tempting the use of nuclear weapons, OR, "We the People of the World" take action to change things. These growing threats to a healthy planet and to human well-being urge us to mobilize and take action.

 

Friday, Saturday, September 19-20: Climate Convergence Conference, New York City, hundreds of activists from different movements participating to build unity

Sunday, September 21: Join us in New York City!  Reserve Bus Tickets Now: bit.ly/pcm-bus. People’s Climate March: Peace Hub • Sign Up! peoplesclimate.org/peace  

(To see the full call to the peace movement to participate in the September 21 Peoples Climate March go to http://peoplesclimate.org/peace/appeal/.) People’s Climate March: Peace Hub • Sign Up! peoplesclimate.org/peace  

 

CHANGE IN A TIME OF CLIMATE CHANGE: What to Do When You're Running Out of Time

But responding to these current cataclysmic changes means taking on people who believe, or at least assert, that those of us who want to react and act are gratuitously disrupting a stable system that’s working fine. It isn’t stable. It is working fine -- in the short term and the most limited sense -- for oil companies and the people who profit from them and for some of us in the particularly cushy parts of the world who haven’t been impacted yet by weather events like, say, the recent torrential floods in Japan or southern Nevada and Arizona, or the monsoon versions of the same that have devastated parts of India and Pakistan, or the drought that has mummified my beloved California, or the wildfires of Australia.

The problem, of course, is that the people who most benefit from the current arrangements have effectively purchased a lot of politicians, and that a great many of the rest of them are either hopelessly dim or amazingly timid.  More

 

The Self-Interest in Climate ‘Denial’

But climate change deniers persist in telling us it just ain’t so, like the tobacco industry claiming for decade after decade that nicotine wasn’t addictive or that cigarettes couldn’t kill you. It’s been more than a decade since Oklahoma Republican James Inhofe, once chair of the U.S. Senate’s committee on the environment and public works, told us that “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” …So intense is the political and corporate opposition to the concept of manmade climate change — despite a majority of Americans who accept it as reality — that some of the more rational officeholders and local governments quietly are trying to work around the resistance, preparing for the worst without mentioning the dreaded words climate change or global warming.   More

 

KRUGMAN: Could Fighting Global Warming Be Cheap and Free?

It has long been clear that a well-thought-out strategy of emissions control, in particular one that puts a price on carbon via either an emissions tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, would cost much less than the usual suspects want you to think. But the economics of climate protection look even better now than they did a few years ago… On the other side, it turns out that putting a price on carbon would have large “co-benefits” — positive effects over and above the reduction in climate risks — and that these benefits would come fairly quickly. The most important of these co-benefits, according to the I.M.F. paper, would involve public health: burning coal causes many respiratory ailments, which drive up medical costs and reduce productivity… The idea that economic growth and climate action are incompatible may sound hardheaded and realistic, but it’s actually a fuzzy-minded misconception. If we ever get past the special interests and ideology that have blocked action to save the planet, we’ll find that it’s cheaper and easier than almost anyone imagines.  More