I think I see a potential policy here for Obama. He introduces some form of one off super tax on the wealthy, or a new top rate of tax for multi-millionaires. But as with everything in America we need to market it properly. I suggest the name Providing Appropriate Tax Requirements In Our Time or Patriot Tax for short. This would put the cat among the pigeons. Those right wingers who love to drape themselves in the US flag would suddenly face the accusation of being unpatriotic by dodging tax (either through legal loopholes or by using more illicit techniques). “Why does Bachmann hate America so much?” or “why are the Koch brothers so un-patriotic?” would be comments the left wingers could say and still keep a straight face. Fox News won’t know what to do!

More importantly it would combat what to me is a serious problem with many of the world’s super-rich who seem to think that its okay to cheat on you’re taxes if you’re rich enough or you’re crazy right wing politics disagree with said taxes (even in situations where you’re job or business is dependant on high levels of government spending). This policy would hammer home the point that there is never any excuse for such behaviour.

Take my example. I oppose council tax. For those not from UK shores this is a tax that is calculated based on the value of the house you live in (whether renting or the owner). The bands are very wide and thus someone living in a 1 bedroom apartment in Camden Town can wind up paying the same tax as his super rich neighbour in a 5 bed penthouse in Notting Hill. Meanwhile, Billionaire Phil “Tax-less” Green pays no council tax (nor income tax), as he flies in every week from Monty Carlo and stays in a plush London hotel. Or how about if you bought a house many years ago in a working class suburb and retired? Now just because you’re neighbours are all yuppies and the house price has gone up since then you’re living on cat food just to pay off the council tax. It’s basically a horribly unfair tax, the tax equivalent of driving down the street randomly shooting up the place with a scatter gun. A local income tax to me would seem much fairer as this would link ones ability to pay to the amount one pays in tax. But do I pay council tax, despite my objections to it? Yes, I do, reluctantly, so reluctantly in fact that I just realised forgot to pay it yesterday so will have to run down to the post office! Either way, objecting to a tax is no excuse for not paying it (unless you genuinely can’t afford to pay it or they’ve overcharged you, which is a common occurrence with the council tax!) as you merely shift the tax burden onto your fellow citizens. If you disagree with a tax, vote for parties who pledge to change it…of course I did that, they got into power and are still squabbling, go figure! And of course the rich frequently do this, buying up politicians get them to repeal taxes but not the services of the state that it supplies to them.

Of course as I pointed out in a prior post, we cannot simply tax the rich and that will solve everything. But certainly it will go along way to solving the financial problems of several states. An increase in general taxation in many countries (the US particularly) is inevitable as are some spending cuts. In the US the military budget and excessive farm subsidies plus the various corporate welfare and other elements of political pork would be my first targets for the axe.

But certainly the rich need to realise that the gravy train they are rolling along in is about to reach the end of the line, and they are going to have to pay their own way from now on. And the rich have every incentive to support these policies. As I also pointed out in a prior post the rich have the most to loose if major trading nations start filing for bankruptcy. Some of those debts that will be defaulted on are owed to them, or owed to the bank or hedge fund which all their money/gold/shares are tied up in. So supporting higher taxes, as Buffett and Bettencourt propose, isn’t entirely an altruistic move. Also, by agreeing to a modest tax hike now they are heading off the possiblity of a much more severe one in the future.

Either way we all need to accept, that none of us like paying taxes, but it’s a necessity, as its sort of nice to have police, firemen, emergency services (like those all important hurricane warnings going out now stateside), roads, libraries, schools, parks, sports grounds, art galleries, hospitals and public transport – amongst many other things! We have to pay for those services some way, and if we don’t pay for them via taxes then we pay for private companies to supply the same service. And the experience here in Britain is that those private services usually cost more and supply a poorer quality of service (see my comments on British Railway privatisation).

There are but two certainties in life – Death and Taxes. And scientists are working on the first of these!

In an interview with a Polish newspaper Lewandowsk said that:

“We already have overambitious agreements on CO2 emission reduction. There is a notion that the thesis that coal energy is the main cause of global warming is highly questionable. Moreover, more and more often there is a question mark put over the whole [issue of] global warming as such.”

He also expressed doubts about EU’s future climate goal saying the CO2 reduction targets “are too ambitious for the Polish economy” and that “a quick jump away from coal” would for Poland “be a disaster”. And this was no misquote from the Polish newspaper. A spokesman for Lewandowski even confirmed the accuracy of the statements later to the EU observer:

“His overall line is that it would be impossible for Poland to shift away from coal overnight. But he also expressed his doubts over climate change, in a personal capacity,” Patrizio Fiorilli told this website.

Environmental organizations and political groups are afraid that Lewandowsk’s science and climate skepticism will affect the drafting of the €130 budget that will form EU’s political course of action and structure between 2014 and 2020. But the Polish climate skepticism comes as no surprise. Poland helped block strong European leadership on climate during the Cop14 climate summit in 2008. And it’s an even less surprise considering the fact that Poland relies heavily on coal, around of 90%, for its electricity generation.

Ruth Davis, chief policy adviser at Greenpeace UK, said: “It’s terrifying that the man in charge of Europe’s budget is someone you might expect to see in Sarah Palin’s Republican party.

“He has a huge influence over all of our economic futures and yet not only does he deny the overwhelming evidence of climate change, but he’s also opposing measures that leading businesses say would drive green growth and create millions of new jobs in Europe’s clean industries.”

The environmental organization WWF also expressed their worry about the climate change denying budget chief:

“It comes as a shock, especially following the commission president’s recent statements. So much for collegiality,” said Tony Long, director of the WWF’s Brussels office. “That degree of climate change scepticism is now rare in Europe, and even rarer among politician’s of Lewandowski’s seniority.”

“One can’t have much faith in the commission’s budget proposals if one of the chief architects admits in a private capacity that he has doubts over global warming.”

European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso shows no sign of worry though. Saying that “the effects of climate change are – quite literally – all around us” and that the EU will stay it’s course on climate change. But one can only imagine how embarrassed Barroso must be from Lewandowsk’s anti-science statements.

“But I think we need to up the ante for those pursuing business as usual, the relentless expansion of oil and gas infrastructure that is causing these problems and guaranteeing that they will be worse in the future. Actions that lead to mass deaths and displacements, either directly due to a weather event or indirectly from impacts on land and livelihoods, beg for some accountability. I’m no international law-talking guy, but I believe that these things can only be called crimes against humanity.

Let’s say that again. Efforts to expand the oil and gas industry, like the Keystone XL and Enbridge pipelines, are crimes against humanity. Expanding the coal industry, like the proposal to export megatonnes of Washington state coal, is not just bad environmental policy, but a crime against humanity.”

“[...] I may be willing to give a grace period for actions take before 2000 or so, on the grounds that we did not know better (though we actually did). Nor would I punish regular folks (including me) who burn fossil fuels because of the structure of the world we live in and the lack of alternatives. This is about the dealers not the addicts; about the need for urgent change in response to the unfolding crisis.
It matters not whether such actions today are “legal” (almost all genocides were legal at the time) but they are deeply immoral and wrong. Major shareholders and senior executives in big fossil fuel industries – and the politicians that dote on them – need to understand that their profiteering off of destabilizing the climate will pay a price. That’s a little thing we call justice.”

You can read his whole article here. Related posts: UN official says biofuels are a “crime against humanity” and Dr James Hansen says we should prosecute climate change liars.

Ever had a digital camera suddenly stop working after several thousand shots for no obvious reason? Again planned obsolescence.

Why is it that every version of Windows seems to take up more disk space than the last version and require a higher spec PC? – possibly because MS have a cosy little deal going with the PC makers to up the spec for windows so that they can sell new PC’s….least you wonder why so many leading PC makers are so resistant to the use of Linux and other open-source software (which comes in a range of different flavours for machines of different operating requirements, one of my decade old laptops at home runs on X-ubuntu quite happily).

Had a DVD or CD in your collection recently fail to play…ever heard of disk rot?

This whole concept dates back to the days of the Phoebus light bulb cartel ( the aforementioned light bulb conspiracy of the title) which conspired to not only fix the price of light bulbs but make them with deliberately shorter working life’s so that the companies involved could sell more of them. This of course explains how a pre-cartel light bulb in Livermore Firehouse, California, is still working after a good century of near continuous use.

Should anyone think I’m some deranged conspiracy theorist (and that next I’m going to start going on about Roswell, the Grassy knoll or Black helicopters), no I’m not – but yes everything they said in this film is more or less true. I once worked in the electronics industry, for indeed a leading manufacturer of printers and I know that they are designed with a limited service life in mind. I would point out thought, that this is in part motivated by H&S and quality control reasons. So not so much a dark machiavellian conspiracy, more “that which we do not speak of”.

When you start considering issues such as fatigue, and age related deterioration (and creep) in plastics you need to come up with a round number of the final end life of your product so that you can be sure that all the critical parts will work safely within said lifetime “envelope”. This inevitably means picking a number; say 30,000 pages of printing and/or 5 years of service, and designing the printer to do just that. Also beyond a certain point there is the risk of the printer failing catastrophically, leaking ink all over your table and carpet (good luck trying to wash that out!), or even catching fire (a rare but potential risk in the event of a serious paper jam and an overheated defective printer head). While such failures are unlikely for an individual printer, when you’re making them by the tens of millions and shipping them worldwide, you have consider such issues. So obviously to get the legal department off our backs the printer is designed to bring itself to an end long before there is any danger of failure.

But equally yes, part of the motivation behind planned obsolescence is to get the public to buy more printers…and inkjet cartridges (most printers are sold at a loss these days, the real money is made selling the cartridges).

In another job, I worked for a leading European steel maker. At one point the Suits upstairs got spooked by all this talk of aluminium cars, particularly in high end vehicles (i.e. luxury car models). At the time car makers were our biggest customers, so any switch by them to aluminium would have been catastrophic. So an extensive R&D program began to redesign our stainless steel products to be better at resisting corrosion, which would give a longer service life (we were prepared to offer a money back guarantee on no significant rust for twenty-five years!). Ways of making cars out of thinner sections of material were also investigated, as this would reduce the vehicle’s weight, producing better power to weight ratio’s, less fuel consumption and of course lower material costs for the manufacturer.

While some of these ideas were indeed taken on board by the car industry, by and large much of it was ignored, especially by the high end car makers. It took awhile but the penny soon dropped, the car companies didn’t want cars that lasted longer, and they certainly didn’t want car bodies that lasted 25 years without a speck of rust! If we built cars to last like that then the public would buy less cars! We also soon learnt (from marketing) that the diversion into aluminium bodied cars for certain high end vehicles were more driven by the “gimmick” factor than any technical reasons. The “…overpaid more-money-than-sense…” types who bought such vehicles (read here about SUV drivers) just liked to be able to brag about how they’re car was made out of aluminium….even though most would probably struggle to tell the difference between the two types of metal even if you wacked them over the head with a aluminium pole!

At around the same time I had a colleague who was working on a academic design project that was looked at using new materials, in particular titanium alloys and ceramics to produce an ultra-durable next generation IC car engines (the petrol heads were apparently getting worried about fuel cells putting them in the poor house in future). Aided by a computerised engine management system (years before the Prius came along, this would come with automatic engine idling reduction as standard), such an engine would have an endurance of the order of several hundred thousand miles (without any serious failures), lower maintenance costs, and best of all much lower fuel consumption. I’ve not heard anything about this project since. I’m assuming it came to an abrupt end after they went and give their presentation to a major car maker and were promptly burnt as witches by the head of marketing and sales.

Now you might say, well so what, this policy is bringing in lots of jobs, and it means people get to upgrade and change their stuff regularly. But you have to consider the environmental costs of such policies. We are seeing literally mountains of E-waste building up in many poorer parts of the world, leaving an awful toxic legacy behind. You also have to consider the embodied energy contained within products, which can often represent half (or more) of the overall lifetime carbon footprint of any product (such as a car). So improving the service life of products would do alot in terms of reducing carbon emissions, as well as reducing the need for new raw material (thus less mining, etc. read about coltan mining here) and less stuff going into landfills. It would also free up factory capacity worldwide to make other stuff, like solar ovens, wind turbines, energy storage systems, etc.

So yes I’m saying it’s possible for us to build cars or electronic goods that last 2 to 4 times longer than the currently do. Thought I would note that such products would also cost more to produce. Certainly not twice as much or four times more, probably more like 30% more or 50% more.  But the cost of such products would inevitably rise and I’m talking here in terms of materials and embodied energy, not just money.

However, this presents a problem, most of us as consumers go for the cheapest product available, and we rarely factor in service life as a deciding issue when buying stuff. Indeed this is the usual excuse you’ll hear from manufacturers when you enquire why they don’t make products with a longer service life. Too many of us buy cheap “crap” like pans and pots or battery’s from cheap discount stores that inevitably break within a few weeks (or hours). So we can hardly blame the corporations for giving us what we want.

For example, you would think the rechargeable battery would be a no-brainer. You buy a pack of them plus a charger for say £15 and it lasts as long as 100 sets of non-rechargeable ones. But unfortunately, the majority of people still plump for the Alkalines – or go and buy the cheapest TV with the widest screen – or the cheap fridge regardless of its energy rating (forgetting how they’ll be paying several times over for one with poorer efficiency once you realise how much electricity a fridge uses over its lifetime). The consumer is often as much at fault here as the manufacturer’s.

One solution to this problem would be legislation. We could mandate a fixed life-time guarantee on all products sold, with this life time limit set by governments, not manufacturers. Or we could fiddle with the VAT rate. Products with a long life time warranty would pay less VAT than items that came with a shorter one (or none!). We could also extend this to include the energy efficiency rating of products, with VAT charged at a rate based on a products energy efficiency rating also.

Of course let’s not kid ourselves, getting such legislation passed would be difficult, especially in our globalised economy. Needless to say, the manufacturing industry would be highly resistant to such polices. They will no doubt argue that less products coming out of factories means less people working in manufacturing, and thus massive layoffs. Those on lower incomes won’t be able to afford such goods anymore. Obviously this would not be to the liking of manufacturing nations such as China or India, who would kick up a right old stink at the WTO if any government tried to implement such a policy. And there’s also the general public. Many of us, like i said earlier, want products which are cheap and have short operating lives. The current resistance to the phase out of incandescent bulbs should show you what you’re up against (see here and here)….although I would note that some of this might be motivated by the fact that some people (see Bachmann here) will oppose anything “environmental” regardless of whether such opposition makes any logically sense or not. The Yes men (see here) once succeeded in getting a load of republicans to sign a petition calling on George Bush to bring about more global warming and more pollution….scary!

I would correct the point made about job losses thought. Obviously products with a longer service life need to be more carefully designed, this means more engineering applied upstream and thus more engineering jobs. Also, the days when thousands of people toiled in the factory and made things with their bare hands are thankfully rare, at least for the sorts of high end products we’re talking about such electronics, electrical goods or cars (its still an issue for products like clothes thought). Even in China, most of these products would be made by robots, not people, so we’re mostly talking about robots being made redundant not people (poor R2-D2). Yes, there would be some layoffs, but it certainly won’t be a case of half the global work force going or anything like that.

And on that point, I would also note a slightly “anti-capitalist” streak you often see in captains of industry when ideas like this come up, or for example suggesting increasing environmental standards or increased regulations on the financial services industry. The “capitalists” will always trot out the argument that business leaders, rather than try and adapt to these changes will be so incensed by such a move that they’ll fire half the work force and then go off in a huff and have a good sulk. That doesn’t sound very “capitalistic” type of behaviour to me. If I were head of, say a TV manufacturer, and I heard that new government reg’s were going to effectively halve TV sales in future, I’d either A) make sure it was my rivals who bore the brunt of such sale reductions (by making sure my product stayed ahead of the curve and outsold everyone else) or  B) I’d decide that if half my factory wasn’t going to be making TV’s any more it might be time to re-tool and commence production of a new product that there was higher demand for, such as solar panels for example.

Another interesting film on a similar theme to the above is the man in the white suit, and 1950’s classic, staring Alex Guinness, it seems to be available on-line here. Worth a watch! The synopsis is that a stereotypical “mad” scientist (Guinness) invents a new type of fiber that never wears out and even repels dirt. Great news….until the textile industry bosses and worker’s Unions both realise the implications of this discovery! An interesting parable that shows the conflict that often occurs when well meaning scientists come up against the realities of politics, economics and vested interests.

This whole issue should also show you how advocating policies such as renewable over fossil fuels (or nuclear) means you coming up against a mass of opposition from vested interest with everything (as they see it) to lose.  This “lightbulb conspiracy” also demonstrates just how wasteful a society we are and how much room for improvement there is.

But I’ll have to leave you now…..I think I hear black helicopters approaching!

The U.N. chief warned that humanity is “running out of time.”

He told the gathering of heads of State, international economists, business leaders and representatives of civil society that to avoid national and global “disaster” will require balanced development that will lift millions out of poverty and, at the same time, protect the planet and ecosystems that support economic growth. He said, “It is good business – good politics – and good for society.”

“China is going to leave all of us in the dust,” Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change declared the previous day, the Associated Press reported.

The diplomat leading the U.N. Climate talks said that China is surpassing the U.S. and Europe in developing clean and low-carbon energy as a way to spur its economy.

“China is committed to winning the green economy race,” she said. “And honestly they are not doing it just because they want to save the planet. They are doing it because it’s good for the economy.”

Last year China increased spending on low-carbon energy by 30 percent to $51.1 billion, “by far the largest figure for any country,” according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The accounting firm Ernst & Young reported in September that China for the first time surpassed the U.S. in its quarterly index of the most appealing countries for renewable energy projects.

“You can leapfrog – you don’t have to follow the model of the north,” Figueres declared. “China is showing this.” China’s chief climate negotiator Su Wei has said his country will boost energy efficiency in its next five-year plan being worked out this year.

European Union Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard called on U.S. business to take greater initiative in embracing a more energy-efficient economic model.

Governments can provide the conditions for green growth by setting “a price on carbon,” Hedegaard said. “If it costs a lot to pollute a lot, then business has an incentive to pollute less.”

This article was first published in People’s World on February 4th, 2011.
Author: Juan Lopez.

“The Baltic nation of Latvia is blessed with some of the most beautiful forests in the world, millions of square kilometres of pristine woodland that support a complex biodiversity of rare species of animals and plants. [...] As the UK aims to become one of the greenest countries in Europe, we expose its role in the deforestation of Latvia.”

The clear cutting, which is a total loss not only for biological diversity but also for social and economic reasons, is the result of the current economic crisis in Latvia. It is being fueled by the demand from overseas markets, particularly the UK which has been Latvia’s main export market for over 300 years. Al Jazeera shows how corporations and the Latvian government ignores EU habitat directives, laws and nature reserves to be able to satisfy the market demand for timber. They also question the validation of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certificate which is said to only label timber that is sustainable produced.

“Many of the products of the trade from furniture to wood pulp and paper are sold in the UK under a labelling scheme run by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international NGO that certifies timber is being sustainably produced. Is that really true?”

This episode shows not just the world’s ecological unequal exchange but also how unattainable sustainability is in today’s capitalistic system which is based on a never-ending growth rate.

Sachs introduces with “the four directions” which are his logical answers to scarcity. Then his talk is divided in nine points; some skipped, others expanded. Focussing on growth, the efficiency paradox, green investments, sufficiency and commons here are a selection of quotes and notes.

Introduction: The four directions

“Let us speak about the success of Copenhagen [laughter from the crowd] everybody who is right in his mind, in the world, knows that we are entering a new historic age. Everybody who is clear in his mind knows that, let’s call it universal encompassing environmental scarcity is to be with us for the 21st century.”

“There are four possible reactions. [...] the first logical answer is, well, keep out people who might add to the aspirations; so it is a logical answer to go for exclusion. [...] Second logical answer when scarcity is looming [...] expansion is a logical response [nuclear power, genetic technology, capture and storage of CO2, geoengineering]. Third, [...] get better in the way we use things; so efficiency is another logical answer. [...] Fourth, [...] revise the aspirations.”

Growth

(11-17 minutes)

“Growth [...] it is a very young phenomenon. Of course for many thousand, two thousand years certainly, humanity has lived without steady economic growth. More so, classical economists – Adam Smith, Malthus, [?] – still do not really have the idea about steady accelerating growth. Yes, there was the idea around that you might increase prospect [...] at some point it will kind of level out, it’s not going to be, if you want, a human condition.”

“The idea of permanent economic growth is an offspring of the fossil age.”

Before second world war governments did not see economic growth as their main objective. Growth philosophy a product of the post-war effort to curb unemployment, thus only 40-50 years old.

Efficiency paradox

(22-28 minutes)

Efficiency paradox: Efficiency leads to consumption.

“The direct rebound effect is that once you can do something more efficiently you do more of the same thing. […] The indirect rebound effect is even more important: […] Where does the money go? […] Whereever you look it is very likely that there will be new energy and material demand associated with it.”

For example, I bought a bike about a week ago. I use it to transport myself to and from work so it already did about 100 kilometers. That’s a couple of kilos of CO2 saved right there. However, it is the stated policy of the Danish government to sell unused carbon quotas. The money they use on tax cuts for the rich and for companies. Thus, my green investment and biking effort is funding luxury yachts, stock market speculation and I don’t know what else.

“The precautionary principle [...] requires we begin research, debate, social experiments about how to live well with less or no economic growth.”

Green investments

(33-37 minutes)

“Investments today shape the economy of tomorrow.”

“There is a common ground [...] between green economy and degrowth. We need green investments because we need a different infrastructure. [Even if it comes with short term growth.] In the mid to long term a real green new deal has to incorporate a perspective of degrowth.”

Sufficiency and the commons

(37-51 minutes)

“Cars are built for intermediate performance levels.”

Effort is wasted in designing for top speed etc.

“The more unequal a society is the less happy people are.”

Unhappiness has environmental consequences as well as growth incentives, therefore promoting equitability creates sustainability.

“If we’d had to pay for Wikipedia, we wouldn’t have it.”

The graphs comes from New Scientist who recently did a special report on how our economy is killing the earth. In the report several “key thinkers from politics, economics and philosophy” gave their opinions about why they disagree with the current growth dogma. They write:

“Most of us accept the need for a more sustainable way to live, by reducing carbon emissions, developing renewable technology and increasing energy efficiency.

But are these efforts to save the planet doomed? A growing band of experts are looking at figures like these and arguing that personal carbon virtue and collective environmentalism are futile as long as our economic system is built on the assumption of growth. The science tells us that if we are serious about saving Earth, we must reshape our economy.”

Unfortunately you need to be a New Scientist subscriber to be able to read the actual articles.

Photo credit: azrainman

When discussing climate change, the old saying needs to be amended to “What do you want first, the somewhat good news, or the astoundingly awful bad news?”

The bad news is piling up fast:

* The ice sheets in the Artic, Antarctic and Greenland are melting twice as fast as earlier projections from just a year or two ago, which will lead to the sea level rising about a foot every 20 or 25 years – meaning a 3-foot rise by the end of the century, enough to wipe out some island nations, flood much of Bangladesh and other low-lying coastal countries, threaten many coastal cities around the world, and increase erosion on coasts.

* Glaciers are melting faster as well – meaning that before the end of this century, glaciers in the Himalayas may disappear, and these glaciers provide water for over a billion people, an environmental, agricultural and human catastrophe. This extra melting will first cause more floods in India and China, and then cause extreme water stress for humans and for agriculture.

* Previous estimates of the massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane locked up in the permafrost were too small, increasing the likelihood of an unstoppable tipping point if too much of the permafrost melts and releases these greenhouse gases, potentially overwhelming any human efforts to slow and control carbon emissions.

* While it is not possible to link any one weather event to global warming, extreme weather events are increasing in intensity and frequency, such as the droughts in Australia and the U.S. Southeast and Southwest which heavily impact on agricultural production of essential foodstuffs like wheat.

* Scientific projections are now that even with all the planned emission cuts, the world’s average temperature will rise 6 degrees by the end of the century, with disastrous consequences for extreme weather events, droughts, disruption of agriculture, species extinction, water stress, population dislocation, spread of tropical diseases, ocean acidification, and many other aspects of life. This will be the hottest world in the last 11,000 years or more, the entire period of human agricultural development.

Are you scared now? There is some good news:

* The Waxman/Markey energy bill has passed the House of Representatives and has some serious support in the Senate (the companion Senate bill was introduced on Sept. 29, sponsored by John Kerry and Barbara Boxer), though whether or not this can overcome the fierce lobbying by energy companies, right-wing climate change deniers, and coal-producing states is still to be determined, in part by our activism.

* In a cloud/silver lining way, the global economic crisis has resulted in a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the last year, with decreases in travel and shipping, and the shelving or delay of some proposed coal-fired plants.

* China has made significant strides in increasing its energy efficiency, and it projects a four-fold increase in energy efficiency in the coming decades, which means its economy can still continue to expand, lifting millions out of poverty, without increasing the threats to the atmosphere. China is also making other important strides in improving its environmental efforts, though it still opposes mandatory caps on the emissions of developing countries.

* Diplomatic efforts and meetings to prepare for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change conference are intensifying, and include important proposals such as the U.S. proposal to cut energy subsidies; a fund to compensate countries such as Brazil and Indonesia for ending or at least slowing rampant deforestation; and various proposals to share technology and costs for the poorest countries, which have contributed least to the problem yet face the earliest and sharpest impacts of climate change, and to mitigate and adapt to rising sea levels and set limits on carbon emissions.

* The production of alternative energy is increasing; the efficiency of alternative energy processes is increasing – making them more economically competitive with fossil fuels; subsidies for alternative energy are increasing – such as $60 billion in the U.S. stimulus package; and alternative energy sector jobs are increasing.

* Economic projections of the costs of carbon emissions caps and other environmental measures have decreased, making these efforts more economically and politically feasible.

There is much public posturing leading up to the Copenhagen conference, which has the goal of negotiating the international treaty that will replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

Passage of a climate change bill by the full Congress and completion of a treaty in Copenhagen complete with mandatory emission reductions for at least all the industrially developed countries are the minimum steps needed, before the bad news gets much worse.

Author: Marc Brodine, People’s World

“This is not what I voted for,” Bill Maher said on his HBO show Friday night, arguing that Barack Obama has maintained his personal popularity but failed to make real progress on climate change, the economy and health care in USA.

And of course Maher has a good point. China is investing $12.6 million every hour to green their economy and they will impose stricter gas mileage rules than those Obama have proposed. And while China triples their wind power capacity and outpaces the USA you just have to wonder what Obama is doing.

Well it seems Obama’s solution to man-made climate change is to stick with the Bush climate ruling and paint our cars and roofs white. Although painting our roofs white to reflect the sunlight is a cheap way to fight global warming (some claim white roofs is the equivalent to taking the world’s approximately 600 million cars off the road for 18 years) reversing his pro-coal stance somehow seems like a better and more direct solution to the climate crisis.

And just like Maher said, “this isn’t what I voted for”, or why we endorsed you.