Here's a clip from my post on today's CD article about Greenpeace:

The posturing and glacially slow action to address human-caused climate disruption remains frustrating to witness.

The frustrating thing is that at the most basic level, the science was clear forty years ago - the atmosphere retains heat with a measurable rate of efficiency, and adding carbon to the atmosphere increases the efficiency of heat retention. Yes there has always been some uncertainty about exactly how climate change will play out as we change the atmosphere, what role is played by feedback loops in the complex climate system, how much amelioration or amplification of effects might occur. But as many many scientists have pointed out, uncertainty is reason to be careful, not reason to charge forward with increasingly disruptive action.

Almost thirty-five years ago, the USA under Jimmy Carter began taking steps to reduce our carbon output. But almost thirty years ago under Ronald Reagan these steps were reversed, and we have charged forward with increasingly disruptive action.

So here we are, the wheels falling off our ecology, glaciers melting, extinctions spiking, sea level rising, droughts and hurricanes on the rise, etc etc etc.

Obama needs to announce a massive worldwide investment in conservation / reduction in use of fossil fuels and transition to renewables. There is more to it than that - clean water, food sovereignty, climate justice, climate reparations, etc - but giant steps need to be taken NOW. Worldwide carbon output in 2010 needs to drop from 2009, and every year into the future, and the USA is in the position of greatest responsibility and greatest opportunity to act.

The frustration is, it ain't gonna happen. What needs to happen goes beyond investing trillions in conservation, efficiency and renewables. We need dethroning corporations from power, and reforming the money system, and transforming agriculture, and the entrenched power of these systems is resisting fundamental change. And Obama is effectively the global spokesperson and front man for these systems of entrenched power that resist change.

All very very true! Good post webwalk. As Naomi Klein talked...what I heard at the end, even tho she believes we need to act now...she still has faith in Barack Obama...that his great "rhetoric" can convince people in the U.S. that climate change is real and needs action now. This "hope" is what we all have been waiting for.....will it happen? We will have to see.

I'm on a land-line modem so I can't watch the video but I did read Klein's Rolling Stone article also here as the lede headline at CD which offers no opportunity for comment, so here goes...

Klein writes:

"... The developing world has always had plenty of reasons to be pissed off with their northern neighbors, with our tendency to overthrow their governments, invade their countries and pillage their natural resources. But never before has there been an issue so politically inflammatory as the refusal of people living in the rich world to make even small sacrifices to avert a potential climate catastrophe. ..."

She wants the "rich world" to pay a climate "debt." But who within the rich world does she think would pay that debt, the rich? Hell no, and she never addresses that inequity.

My family were poor midwestern dirt farmers without electricity or tractors until well into the 1930s. They might as well have been Third World; for all practical purposes they were. What debt do they owe? Or, for that matter, how about the poverty-stricken coal miners of West Virginia and Eastern Kentucky who pulled all that coal out of the earth so rich people could get richer and then died of black lung? What debt do they owe?

My father devoted most of his life as a cancer researcher, using high-tech energy-taxing scintillation counters without sufficient radiation shielding and he died a painful cancer death at age 61. What's his debt?

The problem with Klein's article is that it artificially divides rich countries and poor countries without taking into account the vast carbon-consumption disparities WITHIN those countries. By far the largest carbon footprint within ALL countries is that of the filthy rich. And if this carbon "debt" thing is ever implemented it will be via Naomi Klein's very idea of Disaster Capitalism. The rich won't pay. The already poor will pay whether we live in a "rich nation" or not. That is far more the dilemma. The elitism subtext within her thesis really reeks. Tax the goddam rich! Everywhere! And stop their resource wars (talk about a large carbon footprint!), now.

-30-

Naomi looks and sounds too happy to me.
I clicked out at 30 seconds.
She's bright and right, I read the book, but
she doesn't seem to be feeling it.

Webwalk states the problem and solution correctly. WE cannot wait for Obama or anyone else. We cannot wait for the perfect solution. WE MUST ACT NOW.In our actions the way to proceed will become clear. BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY

my dearest naomi ... i belive there is extensive documentation from the bilderbergs and club of rome that the global elite have created the environmental movement and hence global warming and climate change as the number one vehicle of oppression for the new world order. if you read the documents from the elite you will see that they intend to wreck the economy and control freak everyone to death via 'carbon tax'. we are carbon life forms. this is a total joke on the peeps and life on earth. the entire climate tax is a joke and a tool of death for the global elite. they intend to make the useless eaters die by any means necessary and will use a global tax on carbon to help do this. i very much wish you would read the textbooks and foundation directives which spell this out. there are many and the main stream media, including you naomi are very confused about what is about to unravel via this illusion that has benn fronted to us again by global banksters who intend to kill 80% of the planet by any means necessary.