The weather in South Africa is beautiful -- warm during the day, cool and breezy at night. This is a unique and fitting place to stage the United Nations Climate Change Conference, as South Africa prepares for the impacts of climate change.
The costs of adapting to climate change are not limited to South Africa or other countries that the UNFCCC framework considers "developing." The cost is something that we in the United States deal with on a daily basis, even if there are still powerful "climate deniers" in Congress who aren't willing to admit it. From the costs of increasingly severe weather events to the rising cost of food from climate-related droughts, Americans pay for global warming every day.
But the biggest cost that we pay is in lost opportunity. As it stands, the U.S. is failing to take advantage of the opportunities to create good jobs by addressing climate change. This makes less and less sense as our economy struggles to regain its footing, and as millions of Americans continue to search for work.
The BlueGreen Alliance is in Durban this week advocating for a framework to address climate change that spurs economic growth and job creation in the United States. The 15 partners of the BlueGreen Alliance -- 11 of America's largest labor unions and four of its most influential environmental organizations -- released a statement this week, "Fighting Climate Change, Creating Jobs," which advocates international climate action grounded in science-based greenhouse gas reduction targets, urging the U.S. to pursue emissions reductions as aggressively as possible by taking all feasible steps to meet current near term targets. This can be achieved through investments and policies that will build a strong clean energy economy, create new jobs for American workers and improve U.S. competitiveness in the global economy.
We can accomplish these goals through smart policies and strategic investments in building a truly 21st century American economy. Growing the production of clean energy in the United States while making our transportation systems, industries, building stock, transmission and communications systems more efficient will both create jobs and ensure that America is competitive in an increasingly efficient global economy.
On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the American economy had gained about 120,000 jobs in November. A positive number is a good number. But we have to face facts: we aren't going to put eight million people back to work with a piecemeal approach to our economy. It's no longer acceptable to sit on the sidelines and hope that jobs will be created and that our economy will recover by returning to an unsustainable pre-2008 economic model. It's no longer an option to deny the impact of climate change on our economy. We need action to build the industries that will drive our future economy in the United States, and we need it now.
In Durban this week, thousands of people from around the world are gathering to advocate for an agreement that will avert the worst impacts of climate change and help impacted nations adapt. Whether in South Africa or in the United States, the cost of climate change is deep and far reaching. It's costing us money. It's costing us economic growth. And it's costing us jobs.
Follow David Foster on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bgalliance
Chris Deary: Solving Climate Change the Steve Jobs Way
Protagonists and antagonists of the AGW debate really ought to switch efforts to pursuading Governments to clean up pollution and atmospheric particulates from the burning of fossil fuel for energy. We don't need to parade our erudition on 'proving' or 'disproving' conjecture, when we have - Facts: (1) Two million premature deaths per annum result from burning fossil fuels. (2) We have passed or will very soon reach Peak Oil - we need to stop burning hydrocarbons for energy and save them for the manufacture of essential products.
I'm doing my bit to get Chris Huhne to switch to clean energy. See the heading to this Blog to get an instant perspective on the environmental impact of energy from - Coal - Uranium - Thorium: http://lftrsuk.blogspot.com/
I will openly state that there is no such thing as man made "climate change."
If we could prove there was indeed man made climate change, we certainly couldn't prove there would be anything we could do about it now....
I find it absurd that you could think we could save our economy by simply putting people to work with government "green" jobs...
How much do these jobs cost?
Who pays for these jobs?
Will these green jobs work?
I know you have none of those answers...
Please wake up and smell the water vapor....
This is obvious...
You have been duped...
And you will pay dearly for it....
Maybe Al Gore will share his climate controlled mansion with you....
And, hmmmm, the US will be a net exporter of energy in 2011, first time in over 40 years.
Wow. We're in really big trouble!
Time to stamp on all the poor folk with higher energy prices so some academics can spread their theories to the marketplace!
"Proven technologies?"
Like what?
Solar power at this point is inefficient and expensive....
Our government should lower everyones taxes and stop giving money to billionaires!
I'm totally against government subsidies on any level.....
YOU seem to love the right kind of government subsidies as long as it goes to whatever YOU decide is cool....
THINK AGAIN.
We are paying for their inability to see themselves as "energy" companies, and to lead the way to the new tech, as the "invisible hand" theory assures us they will.
David Foster seems focused on "smart policies and strategic investments" and not the sheer numbers of people who make them.
Time to stop subsidizing the fossil fuel industry.
Here in Australia local smart green jobs are being consumed by other countries doing the same thing but using cheaper labour. And Germany has acknowledged that moving to more expensie energy supplies actually causes a net loss in jobs - hardly surprising with even the least bit of unbiased thinking.
Green jobs usually require subsidies or tariffs to compete against cheaper energy sources (and I acknowledge that some of the costs of those other energy sources are externalised). There are numerous studies from the European experiments which show that not everyone can have green jobs, Europe has outsourced much of it's carbon intensive processes to other parts of the world. Their carbon consumption has kept climbing while emissions have dropped.
The only way there can be more jobs overall is that somehow overall living standards must be lowered to allow labour currently not being used, to compete in a sustainable way against the option of using less but more expensive labour on more effective capital investment.
1000 Execs making 400 times the average workers pay is 400,000 potential jobs alone.
Maybe a gain of 1,000,000 jobs woudl result.
Even if only half that money is used for job creation that would still be 500,000 jobs. Maybe the remainder could be put into R&D by the businesses for the long-term.
That may be wishful thinking on my part.
The Stockholders need to wakeup and take action against the over-paid frauds that are running their Ccompanies.
Won't fix the problem of poverty.
And does nothing for global warming hysteria and its consequences.
But the fact that execs and politicians for that matter make off with inordinate riches is obscene.
This world is a mess.
Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes
"Here we show that human-induced increases in greenhouse gases have contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events found over approximately two-thirds of data-covered parts of Northern Hemisphere land areas". (Min et al, 2011.)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v470/n7334/abs/nature09763.html
Human-caused climate change a major factor in more frequent Mediterranean droughts
“The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone”. (Hoerling et al, 2011)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00296.1
Increase of Extreme Events in a Warming World
"[…] the majority of monthly records like the Moscow heat wave must be considered due to the warming trend. In highly aggregated data with small variability compared to the trend, like the global-mean temperature, almost all recent records are due to climate warming." (Rahmstorf and Coumou, 2011)
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/10/18/1101766108.abstract
The Role of Human Activity in the Recent Warming of Extremely Warm Daytime Temperatures
“Anthropogenic forcings alter the regional distributions, indicating that extremely warm days have become hotter.” (Christidis et al, 2011)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2011JCLI4150.1
The reason Anglia cooked the books is because the data does not support the hypothesis.
And you quote from sources that use that corrupted data as proof?
Lemmings! Sigh!
'When the beetles hatch in the summer, huge swarms attack a forest all at once. Cool year-round temperatures and freezing winters once kept this beetle confined to low-elevation forests, where native lodgepole pines evolved natural defenses against beetles. Global warming, however, has allowed the mountain pine beetle to expand its range into high-elevation forests, where the whitebark pine is virtually defenseless against this newcomer and its explosive attacks.'
http://www.nrdc.org/wildlife/whitebark/
The statement in Durban is well-made. It puts an end to the misconception that fossil fuels exploitation brings jobs. And it highlights the fact that build a strong clean energy economy can improve US competitiveness in global economy. A green economy will strengthen our economy and not weaken it.
So we need real policies investments and don't wait for big oil proposals about jobs.
Jobs21 initiative by BlueGreen Alliance is a good one.
Like this?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1350811/In-China-true-cost-Britains-clean-green-wind-power-experiment-Pollution-disastrous-scale.html
Don't read it, it might make you change your mind!
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2059603,00.html
and also this one:
http://www.physics.isu.edu/radinf/np-risk.htm
What a great green energy it is.
Real scientists welcome sceptics.
Cue the usual BS supporting their close minded justification of using sceptic as a perjorative in 3...2..1...
Have you been paying attention?
Anyone who is sceptical of a 98% probability of an event occurring with a margin of error of 3% or less is not a skeptic but most certainly is a completely foolish and senseless person and CANNOT be taken seriously!