In his first interview since the election Barack Obama talked with 60 Minutes about the economy, energy and about the failing auto industry in USA.

In the interview Obama said that “the challenges that we’re confronting are enormous” and many, and that he sometimes asks himself “where do I start?” Obama also said that the American people are looking for “action” instead of “a lot of speeches”.

I would just like to add that the whole world is looking for action, not just the American people. Watch the interview below:

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Photo credit: bunnicula

Al Gore writes that the next President of USA “must take immediate steps to deal with” climate change:

In one week Americans will go to the polls and elect our next President. Whoever wins, (and I certainly hope and believe it will be Barack Obama) must take immediate steps to deal with the climate crisis.

[…]

The challenges we face are immense – a global economy in crisis, and two ongoing wars. However, the solution to the climate crisis will also help us solve the economic crisis by putting people to work in green jobs and stimulating the economy with the large investment necessary to convert our energy infrastructure to renewable energy.

Read why Barack Obama should be the next President of the United States of America.

Yvo de Boer, who heads the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, is a bit more optimistic about the current financial crisis than George Monbiot is. Yvo de Boer says that the current financial crisis could “hasten” countries efforts to create a greener and more sustainable economy.

“The credit crisis can be used to make progress in a new direction, an opportunity for global green economic growth,” Yvo de Boer told a news conference.

“The credit crunch I believe is an opportunity to rebuild the financial system that would underpin sustainable growth,” and that “governments now have an opportunity to create and enforce policy which stimulates private competition to fund clean industry”, Yvo de Boer said.

Yvo de Boer said that to be able to “create new markets, investment opportunities and job creation” the climate meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December 2009 must be successful.

Read the whole interview over at wbcsd.org

There have been a lot of discussions about the high gas prices in USA the past months and what exactly should be done to curb this trend. Some politicians, like McCain, Bush, and Gingrich, are taking advantage of the situation and tries to push for the ending of a 27-year moratorium on offshore drilling along the coastlines of USA.

But offshore drilling is not a “quick fix” and it won’t help to lower the gas prices. The only ones that will profit from this are Bush and McCain’s friends in the oil industry. While people are suffering from the high gas prices the oil companies are reporting record profits after record profits.

Greenpeace has listed a bunch of reasons why offshore drilling is not the answer to high gas prices at the pump:

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31% of men believe climate change “is a myth invented by the hippies.” At least that is the case if you take a look at the results from the 2008 great male survey from AskMen.com, one of the most comprehensive opinion polls of men ever conducted on the web.

31% might seem like a high number in the light of overwhelming scientific evidence and consensus in favour of man-made climate change. Luckily the majority are no climate change deniers as 69% the men asked are worried about the effects of global warming.

Besides all the ordinary sport, movie, celebrity and TV questions the men who participated in the survey were actually asked a couple of serious questions.

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George Monbiot talks about oil-dependent countries focusing all their powers on “growth at all costs” while the world slides into recession, over at the Guardian.

“If the world is sliding into recession, it’s partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. The price of oil is so high and it hurts so much because there has been no serious effort to reduce our dependency. Yesterday in the Guardian, Rajendra Pachauri suggested that an impending recession could force us to confront the flaws in the global economy. Sadly it seems so far to have had the opposite effect: a recent Ipsos Mori poll suggests that people are losing interest in climate change. Opportunities for energy populism abound: it cannot be long before one of the major parties abandons the pale green consensus and starts invoking an oil cornucopia it cannot possibly deliver.”

Monbiot also explains why he no longer believes in contraction and convergence. Instead he puts his hopes on a global limit for carbon pollution that Oliver Tickell proposes in his book Kyoto2.

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Do you remember, when Al Gore said he would do everything in his powers to influence the American people and politicians to value the climate issue much higher, placing it among the other top issues that would be heatedly discussed among the president candidates and the, hmm, two(!), political parties?

Well, I am no US political expert. Heck, I am not even an US citizen. But from what I’ve heard and seen so far the discussions and talks about the climate threat have gone pretty much un-noticed.

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