Julia Bovey's Blog: Solving Global Warming

Dont Look Back, A New Day is Breakin'

2007-11-02T21:34:53Z

I just noticed that I’ve been singing the song "Don’t Look Back" in my head all day and I had no idea why. Just because I’m from Boston does not mean that I am a devotee of the band Boston, and although I’ve been known to belt out "More Than a Feeling" when it comes on the car radio (who doesn’t?) Boston (the band) isn't really my style. Too much synthesizer, not enough bass.

So how, I wondered, did "Don’t Look Back" get lodged in my head, given that as far as I know it was not featured in any ads during the American league Championship Series or the World Series (this being all the mass media I’ve been exposed to in the last month)?

I just figured it out. Yesterday I had the very interesting opportunity to be on the phone with the very-close-to-almost 44th President of the United States, Massachusetts’ junior Senator John Kerry. He wanted to get down in the trenches and dish about global warming with some bloggers. Lots of us have been feeling much stress and angst lately about what the Lieberman-Warner bill – officially known as the Climate Security Act – and what it will look like when it actually comes to a vote. Two things are for sure: America needs a limit on global warming pollution, and if that limit comes in the form of a cap and trade system based on companies getting pollution "credits," then the majority of those credits should be auctioned or sold, and not given away for free to polluters. Another point: the limit on pollution should decline over time.

So here in Washington DC, there are a great number of people, some of them extremely bright, who are losing a good deal of sleep over two questions: what percentage of the credits should be auctioned and how fast should the cap decline? What if what we know about global warming changes and, as we’re starting to see, we need to reduce more pollution faster in order to save the planet from the worst consequences of global warming? What if we pass a bill based on today’s science and then tomorrow’s science – based on newer information – tells us something else?

You gotta love the 2007 John Kerry. Unstressed by trying to win national election, he is free to be the person that got him into public service in the first place. He is serious, he is smart, he’s into the details, and his incapability of turning this off in the presidential race, a detriment then, is an asset to him now.

He reiterated a detail about the Lieberman-Warner bill that should not be overlooked: LOOK BACKS. And, yes, gentle readers, this is why the Boston song "Don’t Look Back" has been stuck in my head all day."Look backs" in the Lieberman-Warner bill give it the ability – if passed – to be adjusted based on the latest science and pressing need to cut pollution faster than originally thought necessary. Kerry and pal Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) are making sure these look backs will allow the bill to respond to changes and keep current.

To me this is crucial because there are still some folks out there who think that we should wait and pass a climate bill under a different administration with a more sympathetic congress. Then there are realists like John Kerry that have been around before when you thought a friendlier administration – like your own administration – was almost in hand only to see it slip through your fingers.

The time for climate change legislation is now. Waiting for a friendlier congress could leave us kicking ourselves for thinking we would ever have a friendlier congress than this one. A friendlier administration? Did you know there are candidates who don’t even believe in climate change?

In the immortal words of Boston:

Dont look back

A new day is breakin'

Its been too long since I felt this way

I dont mind where I get taken

The road is callin'

Today is the day

Global Warming... Will Eat You for Lunch?

2007-08-16T22:05:53Z

This just in from the good folks at Science Daily: Flesh-eating Disease Is On The Rise Due To Global Warming, Experts Warn. (Gross photograph not for the weak of stomach.)

Wow — that would really be the cherry on the top my summer.

Seems like all the other good things that we get a break from when it's cold -- poison ivy, disease-spreading mosquitoes, invasive weeds -- flesh-eating bacteria loves that global warming. Really kind of eats a hole in the whole "adaptation" argument. Sure you can turn up the A/C all you want, but once those limbs are eaten off, it's a little hard to get up and turn the thermostat down.

How can you be clear when you’re basically schizophrenic?

2007-06-22T23:27:47Z

The Senate Energy Bill passed without the provisions that would have made biofuels cleaner while also making sure growing crops to make them doesn't mean bulldozing Redwoods to grow corn. That stinks.

The excuse/reason is that Senate leadership wanted a vote lickedy split so that they could pass the bill before some numbskull could offer an amendment to ruin the fabulous, historic, bold, courageous vote on CAFE standards (see every previous post). So they voted, and the Senate Energy Bill passed.

Now, we turn our attention to the House, where if we play our cards not only right but hard and relentlessly we could get the good stuff -- the global warming and land and water protections we desperately need -- into the House version That's one of the things that's agonizing about this work. What we really want to be doing today is jumping up and down and hugging and drinking over the CAFE win. Is it HUGE. But instead we're wringing our hands about how the bill lacks other things that are very important to us.

Many people -- including the grumpy but excellent Wall Street Journal energy reporter John Fialka -- say that the problem with us environmentalists is that we "make the perfect the enemy of the good." Not only that, but it seems that wins and losses happen to us simultaneously, so that we're forced to be thrilled about one thing at the same moment that we'e bitterly disappointed about something else. We want to have a clear message. But how can you be clear when you're basically schizophrenic?