That’s Bill McKibben’s concern about the Straight Up author. From the Washington Monthly:

Romm’s hyper-realism may ignore more important political possibilities. He’s paid less attention to the emerging popular movement on climate change than to the machinations of the Senate, but if we’re actually going to get change on the scale we need, it’s quite possible it won’t happen without an aggressive, large, and noisy movement demanding that change. And Romm, who would have a good deal of useful things to say to such a movement, hasn’t been very interested. He’s deeply Washington centric. And in that he’s not alone—most of the D.C. green movement has pretty much written off organizing out in the hinterlands in favor of lobbying in the offices of senators and congressmen. The problem with that strategy, though, is that effective lobbying depends on senators and congressmen actually perceiving that there’s some pain involved in doing the easy thing and stalling action. (Pain beyond wrecking the planet—I’m talking real pain, like losing an election.)

On Grist, Jay Inslee vents about the “birthers” and climate-change deniers:

Both birthers and the climate-change deniers work on a similar premise—that concrete facts can be subjugated to the power of fear. Both movements fear change and contemplate that they can create enough smoke and confusion to fertilize the ascendency of fear.  They both enjoy big megaphones and are capable of big noise, but are both fundamentally rotten at the factual core.

In a dramatic break with recent policy, the Environmental Protection Agency has just formally announced plans to regulate climate changing pollution under the Clean Air Act, declaring clear evidence that greenhouse gases “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people.” President Obama has pledged to attend the second week of the COP15 climate change talks in Copenhagen; which is widely viewed as a positive indication of an international agreement to take significant steps in curbing greenhouse gasses.

The EPA has indicated a willingness to let Congress take the reins, but with Congressional Republicans and business interests having already said they will fight any new legislation, this latest ruling from the EPA illustrates the federal government’s intention to take the steps necessary to move forward. In The Climate Solutions Consensus, David Blockstein and Leo Weigman present an agenda for the United States. It incorporates specific recommendations by the nation’s leading scientists, offering solutions that don’t need to wait for new laws. From changing our eating and consumption habits to land use and education, the book addresses controversial topics head-on and provides a clear-cut path to reversing the driving factors behind climate change.

Some industries are getting ahead of the game. People on the front lines of the energy revolution are ready to create the world’s most powerful solar energy systems and most sophisticated hybrid cars to save the planet. Apollo’s Fire: Igniting America’s Clean Energy Economy, written by Representative Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks, not only introduces the pioneers behind these innovations but it also presents a pathway towards energy independence and a cleaner future.

A clean energy future doesn’t have to break the bank. Climate 2030, published by The Union of Concerned Scientists, shows that meeting strict emissions cap regulations is not only feasible, it can be done cost-effectively. Within a timeframe of 2030, the book’s authors visualize a set of smart environmental policies that save consumers and businesses money on their energy bills, while also keeping the economy moving forward.

These are important first steps, and ones that Island Press authors have been advocating for decades. We urge you to learn more about the climate change debate and follow our updates on the COP15 conference.

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Peter Gleick describes the history of the Water Conflict Chronology and the bottom line for water resources:

International security is not a sterile or static field of study and analysis. It is constantly evolving as international and regional politics evolves and as new threats to security become increasingly important in the affairs of humanity. In all this, however, one factor remains constant: the importance of water to life means that providing for water needs will never be free of politics. My hope is that it can someday be free of violence.

Marc Ambinder has a point-by-point rebuttal of Sarah Palin’s latest column in the Washington Post:

Remember, the “revelation” was born from an potentially illegal e-mail hack. “So-called” — untrue. These are experts. Their science has been validated, independently. Their “actions” here consist of insulting climate change skeptics, immature name-calling, and, at worst, devising a strategy to keep the climate change deniers out of debates and peer-reviewed journals. The “concerns” that Palin speaks of are the result of years of accumulated science denialism that now, conveniently, has been seemingly “validated” by the fog of a grand conspiracy, suddenly revealed.

Read the rest here.

This story about the Dalai Lama, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, and a presidential gym rat may sound like the set up of a pedestrian joke, but it represents a troika of forces that are on the cusp of the greatest industrial revolution yet. The Dalai Lama represents the morality of the necessity of change, the physicist represents the economic and scientific necessity of change, and the presidential gym rat represents the political possibility of a clean energy revolution. Together those three men I met last week are the embodiment of hope.

Read the full article at Grist.

At a recent three-day workshop here in Vermont, I joined a visionary set of leaders, including Mary Evelyn Tucker, David Orr, and Larry Susskind, to help launch Solutions.  The brainchild of Bob Costanza and his Gund Institute colleagues, it’s a great idea: an academic journal dedicated to analyzing and sharing solutions, in real time.  Stay tuned: the Solutions website will soon be alive with practical ideas for building a more sustainable and more desirable future.

I have made the case to Bob’s team that Solutions has the potential to thrive on campuses worldwide.  The reason?  Today’s remarkable college students are truly the Solutions Generation.  Like their older sisters and brothers – the Millennial Generation – the current batch of  late-19 and early-20 somethings were born into a warming world in which poverty has stubbornly persisted and human rights have been denied to too many for too long.  But even more than the millennials, “the solutions” (I like that… ) believe in action.  They don’t see college as a time to prepare to lead; it’s a time to lead.  And while they don’t shy away from academic theories or even ideologies, they are not burdened by them.

Here’s an example.  In late January, Lois Parshley and Ben Wessel, Middlebury sophomores, approached me with a modest proposal: to get academic credit for researching and writing a detailed guide to The American Clean Energy and Security Act, or ACES. Their reasoning? Everyone in the youth movement was talking about ACES; few had studied its contents.

While I saw the merit of their proposal – akin to outstanding work for 1Sky that three other Middlebury students led a year ago –  I wasn’t sure that they would succeed.  For one, Lois was planning to spend 10 days in Antarctica during the semester (following Ben’s footsteps – he was there last summer!)  But based on their irrepressible enthusiasm, I signed off and held my breath.

The result, The Citizens Guide to Climate Policy, speaks for itself.  Forty-four detailed pages on ACES: the research is thorough, the analysis is rigorous, and the presentation is clean and clear.  (And yes, they both got an A!)

I detail this example to make a case: those of us in higher education should be playing to the strengths of this generation, in part through online, open-source resources like Solutions.  What shapes their pragmatic worldview? For one, these young leaders are products of their time.  As Nicholas Kristof has been documenting for several years, citizens of all kinds are using the networking and information-sharing power of the internet to effect real change,  Here’s just his latest example, on Charity Water.  As many of my co-authors document in Ignition, the web-powered civil-society movement may well be a transformative tsunami

There’s even more going on with today’s college students.  Their babyboomer parents have not only offered caring and opportunity; they have passed along an ethic of commitment to social change.  So their kids have inherited the best ideals of the 60s and early 70s – without tangled ideologies and the raw sense of a nation falling apart, forces that left too many of the hopes of that age unfulfilled.  Now, young leaders don’t have to try to effect change in the street (though their good at that too – see the latest from Mt. Rushmore); they organize online, big time.  For example, take a look at what Sierra Murdoch, another Middlebury student, has done to accelerate the fight against coal.

So I am hopeful about the journal Solutions, in large part because, if done well, it will complement the pragmatic leadership of the Solutions Generation.  In fact, I look forward to a special edition of Solutions, edited by leaders like Lois, Ben and Sierra.  I know I’ll learn a lot from them.

The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) sounds like a contradiction in terms–conferences are business-like and dull while parties are, well, fun! But COP 15 is actually the formal name of the annual gathering of nations that participate in the UN’s effort to curb climate change and the “party” is about half a year from now in Denmark. Will the US arrive with little more than a tourist map of Copenhagen and some well-worn stories about China being the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs)?

In my view, the US will surprise everyone and arrive with the suitcase full of robust climate policies, but if the UN insists on sticking to its formula for a new global climate deal, based on the Kyoto Protocol, the Americans won’t be the only ones departing empty handed. The divisions between developed and developing nations, especially the US and China, are too old and too real to solve with a broad one-size-fits-all agreement. Instead, we may need a series of mini-deals, each tackling specific sources of GHGs (by geography and industrial sector), which taken together creates a mosaic that completes a more detailed, practical picture.

The good news is that these various agreements are already being drafted, signed, and implemented. For example, at last year’s Governors’ Global Climate Summit in California, US states reached agreements with states in Brazil and Indonesia that will preserve rainforests, thereby cutting GHGs instead of trees.

In another example, US states and Canadian provinces have invited China to help design a massive international cap-and-trade system to use markets to reduce GHGS and ensure that projects are sustainable and verifiable.
Other sub-national governments–usually with US climate leadership states in the mix–are signing agreements to reduce GHGs with measures like energy efficiency R&D and other policy initiatives that pave the way for their respective national governments to get deals done when they convene in meetings like the COP15.

People forget that the US signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1992–but never ratified it. That’s because when policy makers looked inward, they had no idea how to achieve what had just agreed to and, as a result, there was no political support for ratification. Today the opposite is true–33 states have “climate action plans” that put them on a par with Kyoto signatories, showing the feds how we can slash GHGs–and the politics that usually undermine well-meaning aspirations and agreements.

So let’s prepare to party hearty in Denmark in December. The US will bring a lot of its own policies and programs that are already effectively reducing GHGs, albeit at the state and regional level–in many cases, with international partners already lined up. If the UN builds on this foundation, along with the great work that many Kyoto signatories have done in their countries so far, there will be more than funny hats and confetti on the floor when this party’s over.

Ever since President Obama took office in January, he’s kept his eye on the grand prize of making political discourse more civil. He’s held up the ideal that Democrats and Republicans can find common ground and move beyond shrill partisan warring that has characterized politics for the last twenty-five years.

In looking for places to boost this unifying project, the sunny patch of common ground on the White House lawn holds great promise.

When First Lady Michelle Obama and her daughters together with Washington school children recently turned soil to start the new White House vegetable garden, they tapped into a deep well of America’s heritage–the agrarian ideal and the related notion of self-sufficiency–but also into modern dreams of a more healthful food system not just for elites but for everyone.

These ideals and dreams capture the imagination of people everywhere on the political spectrum.

In the past year, as I’ve given talks about my book Kitchen Literacy: how we’ve lost knowledge of where food comes from and why we need to get it back, I’ve found myself talking with people from far right to far left, some from traditional farm backgrounds, some from city centers, some Christian fundamentalists, some Buddhists, some young, some old. I have been inspired to find people of all sorts excited by the hope of rebuilding local, regional food systems that can revive rural economies and provide better, more wholesome foods to more people.

Like no other issue, the aim of rebuilding local agriculture has the potential to unite people in communities all across the nation– to get us talking again about what is important and what is possible.

And strategies from both political camps are clearly needed.

With so many recent food recalls and food-borne illness problems, reforming government oversight of our food system is crucial. The USDA has a long history of sympathizing with producers, not consumers, creating an undeniable conflict of interest when it comes to food safety. Both FDA and the USDA have long been governed by leaders who rotate through revolving doors from big food and agri-business to government–drawing the credibility of the agencies into serious question. Another key area for reform is reducing farm subsidies that favor only the largest commodity crop producers.

But we also need a bottom up approach to rebuild our food systems on a regional and community levels. Already citizens are working at the grassroots to identify barriers to thriving regional agriculture and to figure out new solutions. Small farmers are seeing themselves not only as producers in a large corporate-governed commodity system, but also as entrepreneurs who can tap niche and local markets. And even consumers are figuring out how to parley the power of their pocketbooks by taking personal responsibility for their shopping, by supporting local farms at farmers markets and by starting backyard vegetable gardens.

On a practical level, the new White House vegetable garden will certainly grow great tasting lettuce for the first family and may even inspire local school kids to eat their veggies. On a more symbolic level, the garden can nurture a mix of personal responsibility and government reform that has the potential to re-unify America.

As new seeds poke their heads through soil this spring, we can be hopeful.

When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed me to serve as the Secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency in 2003, my first challenge came not from the smoggy skies of Los Angeles or the pesticide-laden drainage from irrigated fields near Fresno, but from a small town in Missouri. Well, actually it came from the tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions made to Missouri Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond by Briggs & Stratton in exchange for the lives of about 1200 Americans.

My CalEPA air quality team had concluded that small, highly-polluting engines should be required to reduce emissions, using off-the-shelf technology, the same as your car or a refinery’s smoke stack is required to do. Doing so, the science showed, would reduce asthma and save lives. Briggs and Stratton had an engine assembly plant in Missouri, so they turned to the Senator, whose election campaigns they had generously supported, and cooked up a scheme to sneak a provision into a bill before Congress that would prevent any state from regulating these potent polluters.

After much wrangling, Governor Schwarzenegger and Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) protected California’s unique rights under the federal Clean Air Act to regulate these small engines, but Bond managed to force the other 49 states to wait for the USEPA to take action if they were going to do likewise. Bond, and the USEPA at the time, said there was a greater threat to the economy than our lungs from such regulation, because it might hurt the factory in Missouri.

Last week, after stalling for nearly five years, the USEPA finally agreed with California and imposed regulations on small engine pollution. Californians are already protected from these smog-makers, but the federal rules for the other 49 states won’t take effect for three more years, despite the fact that the USEPA now admits that “…the total estimated public health benefits range between $1.6 and $4.4 billion by 2030. These benefits outweigh estimated costs by at least eight to one, while preventing over 300 premature deaths, 1,700 hospitalizations, and 23,000 lost workdays annually.”

The additional delays in regulating this significant source of pollution nationally means that about 1200 Americans will die prematurely for absolutely no reason – - other than politics. Meanwhile, Briggs and Stratton lost the business anyway, because the rest of the world wanted cleaner engines too and started buying the ones produced by Briggs’ competitors, like Coleman and Honda, who were smart enough to produce cleaner versions of the same thing at competitive prices.

Yes, politics kills people, jobs, and even the economy it pretends to protect. I hope this small battle in the long war for clean air will serve as a teachable moment for our Presidential candidates and the voters who will make their choices later this year. If so, then perhaps those 1200 will not die in vain.

What do you think? Leave us a comment.

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Terry Tamminen is author of Lives Per Gallon: The True Cost of Our Oil Addiction. You can visit him at www.terrytamminen.com.