Over the weekend, an excellent editorial on energy efficiency appeared in the Washington Post. And while Climate Progress has previously blogged on the Mckinsey report the piece discusses, any time the major media publishes one of their rare articles on energy efficiency, it deserves attention and praise.
The article’s full text is posted below:
The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is finally going to put a high priority on global warming and the policies to address it. Incoming chair Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is “aggressively” gearing up for a new direction in “substance and style,” as Congressional Quartely (subs. req’d.) put it.
Boxer and her allies, such as Joe Lieberman (D-Conn) and Thomas R. Carper (D-Del), are taking over a Senate that has rejected a bill to cap-and-trade greenhouse gas emissions–not once, but twice. Boxer says, “Nowhere is there a greater threat to future generations than the disastrous effects of global warming.”
In terms of climate change, Boxer is the nemesis of outgoing chairman Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla), who continues to call global warming a “hoax” and has actually published a booklet of how global warming Deniers can spin the media.
With the Supreme Court poised to make a crucial decision on greenhouse gas emissions, Boxer is exactly what Capitol Hill needs to propel legislative action forward.
A reference page for AOL has posted a slideshow that is well worth viewing. It features fifteen of the major impacts of global warming that are already visible and increasingly detrimental. Be warned, though, it’s not a pretty sight.
Kudos to AOL for slideshow and for putting together a good general overview of global warming science and solutions.
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) rejected an offering of 50,000 DVDs of Al Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, saying they did not want to give a “political endorsement of the film.” Yet NSTA has previously accepted and distributed the film “You Can’t Be Cool Without Fuel”, which promotes oil dependence, from the American Petroleum Institute.
Writing in the Washington Post, producer Laurie David notes that ExxonMobil has given NSTA $6 million. The American Petroleum Institute and Shell Oil have also made contributions.
Apparently NSTA did not want to “risk” the wrath of “certain targeted supporters” by accepting the gift. So It appears that even elementary-level science has been infiltrated and influenced by oil interests, similar to the Joe Camel campaign in the 1980s.
David’s conclusion:
Today’s students are, after all, the ones who are going to suffer most the harsh realities of climate change in the coming decades. How sad that special interest sponsorship can turn respected establishments into puppets of global warming deniers.
While it may be an”inconvenient truth” for some, the truth is that we can design policies to be cool without using so much fossil fuel.
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