The whole text is definitely worth a read, so be sure to read it. Here are some key quotes:

“The 99 per cent pay for wealth disparity with lost jobs, foreclosed homes, weakening pensions and slashed services, but Nature pays, too. In the world the one-percenters have created, the needs of whole ecosystems are as easy to disregard as, say, the need the young have for debt-free educations and meaningful jobs.

[…] Extreme disparity and deep inequality generate a double standard with profound consequences. If you are a CEO who skims millions of dollars off other people’s labour, it’s called a “bonus”. If you are a flood victim who breaks into a sporting goods store to grab a lifejacket, it’s called looting. If you lose your job and fall behind on your mortgage, you get evicted. If you are a banker-broker who designed flawed mortgages that caused a million people to lose their homes, you get a second-home vacation-mansion near a golf course.

If you drag heavy fishnets across the ocean floor and pulverise an entire ecosystem, ending thousands of years of dynamic evolution and depriving future generations of a healthy ocean, it’s called free enterprise. But if, like Tim DeChristopher, you disrupt an auction of public land to oil and gas companies, it’s called a crime and you get two years in jail.

[…] The same bottom-line quarterly-report fixation on profitability that accepts oil spills as inevitable also accepts unemployment as inevitable. Tearing apart wildlife habitat to make a profit and doing the same at a workplace are just considered the price of doing business. Clearcutting a forest and clearcutting a labor force are two sides of the same coin.

[…] The fundamental contradiction of our time is this: We have built an all-encompassing economic engine that requires unending growth. A contraction of even a per cent or two is a crisis, and yet we are embedded in ecosystems that are reaching or have reached their limits.

[…] Like so much else these days, the crash, as it happens, will not be suffered in equal measure by all of us. The one percenters will be atop the hill, while the 99 per cent will be in the flood lands below swimming for their lives, clinging to debris or drowning. The Great Recession has previewed just how that will work.
An unsustainable economy is inherently unfair and worse is to come. After all, the car is heading for the cliff’s edge, the grandkids are in the backseat, and all we’re arguing about is who can best put the pedal to the metal.

Another good read on the Occupy movement and the ecological crisis is this piece by Ian Angus and Simon Butler on Grist. They have a little different angle where they focus on our capitalistic system and overpopulation. “The capitalist system and the power of the 1%, not population size, are the root causes of today’s ecological crisis,” they write.

Key quote from the speech:

“The truth is the climate nightmare is real and happening now. We are destroying the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu and the snow caps. We are eroding our beaches, and our coastal cities will face managed retreat due to sea level rise. We are drying our food bowl, the Murray Darling, beyond repair, jeopardising rural communities and our food security.

Many of our Asia Pacific neighbours are struggling with rising seas and extreme weather which threatens a refugee crisis beyond anything we’ve ever seen.

The Himalayan glaciers, which feed all the major rivers of Asia  — the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yellow and Yangtze  — are melting away. Once they are gone, a third of the world’s people face a parched, hungry and, most likely, violent future.”

For what we have to do urgently – install renewables, return air CO2 to 300 ppm, return carbon as biochar to the soil, re-afforestation and cessation of carbon pollution and deforestation – see Climate Emergency Facts and Required Actions and 300.org – return atmosphere CO2 to 300 ppm.

“Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it’s over. The years in which more than 2C of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay. On current trajectories we’ll be lucky to get away with 4C. Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed; now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.”

Read this important piece on the Guardian!

Lord Nicholas Stern, British economist and academic who is most known for the Stern Review said, during an improvised speech at a Cape Town hotel in South Africa, that if we don’t act quickly and determinedly to address climate change the world will face billions of climate refugees and extended world wars in a near future:

“If the world’s nations act responsibly, Stern said, they will achieve “zero-carbon” electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 _ by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other “clean” energy.

Then warming could be contained to a 2-degree-Celsius (3.4-degree-Fahrenheit) rise this century, he said.

But if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be “disastrous.”

It would “transform where people can live,” Stern said. “People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases” _ 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, “because there’s no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place.”"

More quotes from Lord Nicholas Stern:
- “I underestimated the threat”
- Green Quote of the Week: Nicholas Stern

Also read:
- More than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century

Photo credit: World Development Movement

Top US climate scientist Dr James Hansen shares his thoughts about Coal River Mountain and Barack Obama’s coal policy in general in a letter titled: “Tell President Obama About Coal River Mountain“.

“Coal River Mountain is the site of an absurdity.

[...]The issue at Coal River Mountain is whether the top of the mountain will be blown up, so that coal can be dredged out of it, or whether the mountain will be allowed to stand. It has been shown that more energy can be obtained from a proposed wind farm, if Coal River Mountain continues to stand. More jobs would be created. More tax revenue would flow, locally and to the state, and the revenue flow would continue indefinitely. Clean water and the environment would be preserved. But if planned mountaintop removal proceeds, the mountain loses its potential to be a useful wind source.”

You can read and download the report that Hansen is talking about over at Coal River Mountain Watch.

Photo credit: World Resources Institute Staff

Al Gore talked about the failing auto industry in USA, “clean coal” and the environmental work being done in China in a recent interview with Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria.

In the interview Gore said that he thinks that the whole auto industry needs to be “transformed”, and that the auto makers in USA “should make a transition as quickly as possible toward plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.”

ZAKARIA: Would you bail out the carmakers?
GORE: Whatever assistance might be forthcoming should be focused on speeding the changes that are absolutely essential to ensure that our companies are competitive in the global marketplace. When I was vice president, I initiated a program called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles. The federal government invested over a billion dollars in partnership with the Big Three to focus on the accelerated development of advanced high-efficiency vehicles. But as soon as they felt they were off the hook at the end of 2000, they pulled the plug and walked away.

Gore also mentioned that he is in favour of raising the gasoline tax, saying: “I don’t think that’s likely to happen, but that’s my preferred alternative”. If you are a regular Green Blog reader you probably know by now that I am a big supporter of high gasoline taxes. I think it’s a great and easy way to encourage more people to use carpools, take public transportations or bike to work etc. Of course the taxes generated should help pay for something else in return for a higher gasoline tax. This way people and families don’t end up loosing any money and there won’ be so much criticism about rising fuel costs.

Gore also, somewhat, defended developing nations such as China and India:

“China and India and other developing countries all have exactly the same excuse for not moving on the climate crisis. They say, the United States hasn’t done anything. When the U.S. acts it will be by far the most effective way to improve the odds that China and India and other smaller developing economies will also act. They know that it’s in their own interest to tackle this problem.”

Gore especially defended China saying the country “is now actively preparing a version of cap-and-trade legislation” and that “their top leaders appear to get it”. Other things Gore mentioned in the interview were that China has “the largest tree-planting program in the world. They are actively building solar and wind and exploring carbon capture and sequestration”.

But according to Gore these countries “are not doing enough by a long shot [but] the way to encourage them to do more is … for the United States to take the lead”.

Gore also continued to criticize the “clean coal” lie that the fossil companies are foolishly trying to sell to the public and politicians. Gore said in the interview that “clean coal” uses “technology that does not yet exist”, and that “we cannot allow an illusion to be the basis of a strategy for human survival”.

You can read the whole interview here.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum

During a meeting, with focus on development and transfer of technology that can help tackle climate change, in Beijing with 76 nations attending the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said that “developed countries have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to global climate change by altering their unsustainable way of life”.

“The developed countries have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to global climate change by altering their unsustainable way of life,” Wen was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

Developed countries should also help developing countries respond to climate change, Wen said, according to the agency.

A senior Chinese climate policy official also warned that “a lack of firm funding commitments could derail efforts to cut emissions in developing countries, especially during times of economic turmoil”.

Photo credit: patrick dentler

Newsweek has a good quote from Barack Obama when he was preparing for one of the debates:

The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that's green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

The quote pretty much speaks for itself. We need strong government actions now. It will be interesting to see what Obama can and will do during the climate talks in Poland, one month from now, and in Denmark, next year in December.

photo credit: Nrbelex

George Monbiot says that the motor industry has long sabotaged eco-innovations and that they are now demanding billions to cut its carbon emissions. The green subsidy for car makers, Monbiot says, is just a disguised corporate bail-out.

“Their sabotage of green technology has been both subtle and comprehensive. The film Who Killed The Electric Car? shows how the manufacturers, working with oil companies and corrupt officials, sank California’s attempt to change vehicle technologies. Having bumped off battery power, they persuaded the federal government to pour money instead into hydrogen vehicles, aware that the technological hurdles are so high that a cheap, mass-produced model might never be possible. Electric cars, by contrast, have been ready for the mass market for almost a century. The $1.2bn that the US government is spending on research and development for hydrogen cars – like the €2bn pledged to the same quest by the European Union – is a subsidy for avoiding technological change.”

Continue to read over at the Guardian.

“Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. The evidence is clear, the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last.”

Read more: Met Office says climate change deniers deluded