Earth Equity News

As the World Burns. Commentary by Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone, January 6, 2010. "Our collective response to the emerging catastrophe verges on suicidal. World leaders have been talking about tackling climate change for nearly 20 years now -- yet carbon emissions keep going up and up. 'We are in a race against time,' says Rep. Jay Inslee, a Democrat from Washington who has fought for sharp reductions in planet-warming pollution. 'Mother Nature isn't sitting around waiting for us to get our political act together.' In fact, our failure to confront global warming is more than simply political incompetence. Over the past year, the corporations and special interests most responsible for climate change waged an all-out war to prevent Congress from cracking down on carbon pollution in time for Copenhagen. The oil and coal industries deployed an unprecedented army of lobbyists, spent millions on misleading studies and engaged in outright deception to derail climate legislation. 'It was the most aggressive and corrupt lobbying campaign I've ever seen,' says Paul Begala, a veteran Democratic consultant...

"But the most disturbing achievement of the energy industry in the battle over global warming is its success in lowering our expectations. Climate activists like to talk about mobilizing all of America's resources, as we did during World War II, to fight global warming. But as the failure to pass the climate bill reveals, it may be easier to defeat a dictator like Hitler than to overcome internal threats to our future as powerful as Big Coal and Big Oil. Despite the near-certainty of a climate catastrophe, there are no crowds marching in the streets to demand action, no prime-time speech from President Obama. Even the most aggressive climate legislation the Senate might pass -- something on par with the House bill -- will still fall tragically short of what climate scientists tell us needs to be done to avoid the looming chaos and destruction. In that sense -- the only one that ultimately matters -- the battle over global warming may already be over."