Dude knows how to promote his cause

Is this an admission that you have lived under a rock for the last year?

CLEARLY, what should be done about global warming is to require scientists at NASA to get national security clearences just to be able to SEE the data that might lead one to conclude that global warming may be happening!


http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070910/lindorff

NASA Scientists Challenge Security Rules
by DAVE LINDORFF

[posted online on August 30, 2007]

Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.

The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.

"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."

Nelson and 26 other JPL scientists and other employees have retained a Pasadena civil rights law firm to file suit in federal court in California to block the security program.

Attorney Dan Stormer a partner at Hadsell & Stormer, who with Virginia Keeney, is handling the case, says he will be requesting a preliminary injunction blocking implementation of the program. A hearing is set for September 24. (To date, Nelson says as many as 20 percent of JPL's 5,000 employees have refused to fill out the security forms, though those who haven't been investigated and received their badges risk being barred from the site after that deadline.)

"This campaign is an egregious invasion of privacy," says Stormer. "These are people who aren't in classified jobs and who don't handle classified information, yet if they don't submit to these investigations, they'll lose their jobs."

Stormer adds, "This is a classic Bush case of controlling information, and I'm sure the information JPL and Goddard are gathering about global warming has a lot to do with it. Do I have the evidence to prove that? No. But I think we'll find it in this lawsuit."

Others at JPL agree with Stormer's analysis of what lies behind the order. While the security crackdown at NASA is technically in compliance with Homeland Security Presidential Directive No. 12, that directive is actually fairly flexible, requiring each agency to establish the identity of each employee but leaving it up to each one to decide how to do it. Significantly, even the Department of Energy, at its Los Alamos facility, where much work is top-secret, has not resorted to the kind of blanket investigations NASA has ordered for JPL and Goddard.

"Griffin came to JPL in June and told us this security decision was 'a direct result of 9/11,'" says Dennis Byrnes, chief engineer for flight dynamics at JPL and a thirty-year veteran of the lab. "But that was a lie. Other federal research labs aren't being required to go through this. Besides, if they're worried about terrorists, they should be checking all the UPS trucks that drive in here, not the scientists who have worked here for decades!"

Interestingly too, the background checks are only required of permanent employees. People who come to work at JPL or Goddard for less than six months don't need them--a curious lapse if the concern is security.

"I haven't a doubt about the fact that the politics of global warming are behind this," says Byrnes. He notes that NASA already tried to silence James Hansen, a leading climatologist at Goddard who has warned about the grave dangers of global climate change. Griffin caused a firestorm earlier this year when, during a National Public Radio interview, he questioned the urgency of global warming.

Nelson, who with Byrnes and other scientists has been conducting weekly leafleting campaigns at the gates of the JPL facility in Pasadena, California, urging people not to submit to the security checks, says there are a number of ways NASA leaders like Griffin could interfere with research once a security program is in place. "They'll have personal information on all of us," he says, "so someone could say they know about a drug incident or a girlfriend but that it will stay quiet if you change some wording in a paper set for publication. Or they can just threaten to pull your badge."

Veronica McGregor, a spokeswoman for JPL, says JPL management had "nothing to do" with the security crackdown. "This all came from NASA," she says.

NASA spokesman David Mould claims that the requirement for all JPL and Goddard employees to submit to invasive security investigations was mandated by the presidential directive. "We're just following orders," he says. But in fact, the directive states that the standard for establishing employees' identities is to be established independently by each agency, and that agencies can use "graduated criteria, from least secure to most secure, to ensure flexibility in selecting the appropriate level of security for each application."

For unexplained reasons, Griffin chose an extreme standard for the space agency's two key research centers. "There is an implicit threat here that if you publish information that NASA or the government doesn't like, they'll pull your security clearance and you'll be out of your job," says attorney Stormer.

Maybe it has to do with a crazy astronaut driving across the US in Depends and a recent report that astronauts like to get hammered before stepping onto a rocket.

US states win right to set carbon target
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 14 September 2007

The US state of Vermont has won a landmark victory in the battle against global warming being waged at local level across America in defiance of the Bush Administration.

A federal judge has ruled against an alliance of US and European car companies seeking to kill off Vermont's tough new greenhouse gas standards for motor vehicles. The regulations are modelled on California's groundbreaking pollution standards for cars which were adopted in the teeth of opposition from President George Bush.

Earlier this year the US Supreme Court recognised for the first time the phenomenon of global warming and its potentially catastrophic effects upon the environment. Now, the courts have said that, as a result, individual states have the authority "to monitor and regulate emissions", in effect to adopt tougher rules than those at than federal level on carbon dioxide pollution from cars.

Irate car manufacturers hope to have the ruling overturned in a higher court. They had sued Vermont saying it was usurping federal authority by passing its own laws to limit the sale of polluting vehicles.

California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called the Vermont ruling an "important victory in the fight against global warming." The car industry should "stop wasting millions on legal fees and start paying their engineers to build these cars to be cleaner", said David Bookbinder, of the Sierra Club environmental organisation.

The ruling will quicken the pace of change to further reduce emissions. California has been leading the way in forcing polluting industries to reduce their emissions, despite the unwillingness of the Bush Administration to do so.

Congress has deemed that California alone – traditionally to the fore in fighting pollution – can draw up rules on pollution that are tougher than federal standards. Other states have the right to follow the tighter California standards, once approved.

Car companies, including Daimler-Chrysler complained bitterly that the cost of meeting these goals meant that few if any of US-made cars and trucks would be sold in Vermont by 2016. But Judge William Sessions rejected a variety of challenges from auto manufacturers, including their contention that the states were.

"It is improbable that an industry that prides itself on its modernity, flexibility and innovativeness will be unable to meet the requirements of the regulation, especially with the range of technological possibilities and alternatives currently before it," he wrote.

He was also dubious of claims that as many as 65,000 jobs would be lost across the country if California's pollution standards were taken up by other states.

In 2002, California became the first US state to force car companies to start reducing emissions of carbon dioxide. It has subsequently set some of the strictest standards in the world. Vermont adopted the same standards, as did other states, including Connecticut, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

The Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, which brought the lawsuit in Vermont, is planning an appeal.

"The court's opinion is a sweeping rejection of the auto industry's claim that California and other states" lack authority to regulate heat-trapping gases, Richard J Lazarus, a law professor at Georgetown University in Washington DC told The New York Times.

The world's leader... for pollution

Among the world's top economies, the US still stands out as the number one polluter. With just 5 per cent of the world's population, the US is the world's largest producer of greenhouse gases and responsible for almost a quarter of global emissions of carbon dioxide. Motor vehicle emissions are one of the leading causes of air pollution, with China, the US, Russia, Mexico and Japan the world leaders in emissions. However, squeaky clean Canada is the number two country, ranked per capita. The worst pollution sources include chemical plants, coal-fired power plants, oil refineries, nuclear waste disposal, incinerators, large livestock farms, plastic and metal production and other heavy industry.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/cl ... 961304.ece

i thought this was pretty genius/funny, i dont know how to embed it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71kckb8h ... age2%2Ephp

Greens leader slams Bush's climate change speech

Greens leader Senator Bob Brown says a renewed push by the United States Government for voluntary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will not help solve the problem.

George W Bush has told an international conference that while countries need to set a voluntary goal, they should decide for themselves how to do it.

He stressed new environmental technology and voluntary measures to tackle the issue.

"Our nations have an opportunity to leave the debates of the past behind and reach a consensus on the way forward and that's our purpose today," Mr Bush told an audience that included delegates from Europe, Japan and Australia as well as fast-growing developing countries such as China and India.

Senator Brown says making the announcement is actually worse than doing nothing at all.

"It's George Bush saying 'we'll do what we like' and dressing it up by saying 'oh, we're going to have targets, but we're not going to join the rest of the world, and along with John Howard we're going to pull the rug from under the UN-hosted talks, which are going to give us an agreement worldwide about massive cutbacks in greenhouse cutbacks which are required'," he said.

But his speech did little to dampen doubts from participants and environmentalists that the climate session at the State Department would help advance crucial UN talks in Bali, Indonesia, in December.

"It is striking that the (Bush) administration at the moment in the international conversation seems to be pretty isolated," said John Ashton, Britain's climate envoy.

"I think that the argument that we can do this through voluntary approaches is now pretty much discredited internationally."

Mr Bush's rejection of mandatory limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that warm the planet is at odds with the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and with many who attended on Friday.

"Our message to the US is this: what they placed on the table at this meeting is a first step, but is simply not enough," South African Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk said in a statement.

"We think that the US needs to go back to the drawing board.

"The meeting ended with serious disagreements on how to tackle the phenomenon.

European Union's director-general for the environment, Mogens Peter Carl, says even developing countries like India and China have shown a willingness to embrace binding goals.

"They are prepared to accept commitments under the future convention, under the successor to the Kyoto Protocol, that they do realise they have to contribute, that they are prepared to enter into binding and verifiable commitments," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007 ... 047031.htm

Want to Stop Global Warming? Stop Coal

SANTA FE, N.M. — Today, at the conclusion of Climate Week, Architecture 2030 delivered the 'silver bullet' for solving the global warming crisis in a full-page ad in The New York Times. According to Edward Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030, the only way to stop global warming is to stop coal.

* We must stop burning coal or we don't make it.
* Coal is the only fossil fuel that can push the planet to dangerous climate change, resulting in irreversible glacial melt and sea level rise.
* We can meet our energy needs without coal.
* The Department of Labor and Social Security Administration have paid out $42.3 billion for the Black Lung Program......................

http://www.enn.com/press_releases/2176

follow californias lead

I too enjoy rolling blackouts.

I can get behind this, so long as we replace it with nuclear energy.

why the heck would we do that when we could instead use renewables?

You honestly believe we can generate 100 percent of our energy with renewables? Its a nice goal and all, but it would appear that some stop gap production from nuclear or carbon sources would be necessary for a good long while. Don't them Frenchies have some nifty ways of reusing their nuclear fuel?

*waits for Bateman*

eventually, yes, we can. i'm not saying we should turn off all the coal plants tomorrow, these things take time. it's a gradual change, of not building any new coal plants, use gas as a transition fuel, build more wind farms, put solar panels on more buildings, invest in newer technologies such as geothermal, use biofuels... to use nuclear is to buy into a massive mess, and it's one we don't need. spent fuel has to be stored, end of story, and we can never guarantee that any storage method we use is failsafe over the kinds of time periods which are required- furthermore it's arrogant to the extreme that we could even consider it to be so.

You forgot increasing energy efficiency in buildings, which I think is absolutely key if you really want to cut down on the coal.

Of course, I'm an advocate of a combination of nuclear and clean energies, but we've had this debate before, I believe.

yes, and it is, but i was just talking about what we would replace the energy we do use with, rather than using less of that energy. energy efficiency is crucial and cheap, but it alone isn't enough.

Rarely is any one solution alone ever enough in life.

Indeed, and this is no exception. We need a suite of solutions. Energy Efficiency is the very first one we should be doing, because it's the cheapest- in general it will actually save us money- and requires no wait time on the scale of developing new power plants.

Well, I'm not sure how cheap/quick it would be. You have a ton of buildings that were not designed in such a way that would have to be retrofitted, and that's not easy. You could start quickly on the new buildings, though.