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Hours Four To Nine Of Climate Reality: Alaska And The Pacific | The Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality zooms across the Pacific Ocean with hours in the farthest reaches of the world, where some of the most vulnerable populations and environments to climate change are. The fourth hour starts in French Polynesia, followed by Kotzebue, Alaska, Hawaii, Tonga, Auckland, and the Solomon Islands. From the rapidly warming Arctic, to the disappearing islands of the South Pacific, the presenters will describe how places of indescribable beauty and culture are threatened with extinction, through no fault of their own — and how they are fighting to survive.

Highlights from French Polynesia:

By Brad Johnson on Sep 14, 2011 at 10:55 pm

NEWS FLASH

Hour Three Of Climate Reality: Victoria, British Columbia | After Mexico City and Boulder, the Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality continues in the capital of British Columbia, Victoria, Canada. On Vancouver Island, where Victoria is located, the average low winter temperature has increased about 1.5°C in just 13 years. In British Columbia’s interior, the mountain pine beetle has already damaged an area more than twice the size of New Brunswick. Meanwhile, Alberta’s tar sands deposits are poised to become the next man-made carbon bomb, if Canada’s conservative government and oil companies have their way. Presented by Peter Schiefke, co-founder of Youth Action Montreal.

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By Brad Johnson on Sep 14, 2011 at 9:55 pm

NEWS FLASH

Hour Two Of Climate Reality: Boulder, Colorado | The Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality continues in Boulder, CO, a hotbed of clean-energy innovation, climate research — and of climate change. Boulder is home to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Meanwhile, Colorado’s forests are under siege by pine bark beetles in a global warming infestation, and its water supply under threat by the combination of warming and overuse from the fossil fuel industry. Presented by John Zavalney, one of the top science teachers in the nation, and a graduate of Liberty University in West Virginia.

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By Brad Johnson on Sep 14, 2011 at 8:55 pm

NEWS FLASH

Hour One Of Climate Reality: Mexico City | The Climate Reality Project’s 24 Hours of Reality begins in Mexico City, one of the world’s largest megacities. The city of 20 million residents is facing a water crunch from two directions — increasing demand is drying out aquifers, causing rapid sinking of as much as a foot-and-a-half a year. Meanwhile, extreme precipitation fueled by greenhouse pollution is on the rise, causing killer floods that overwhelm the city’s sewer systems. The dangerous present and future for the largest and oldest city in North America is being presented in Spanish by Gerardo Pandal, the area manager for renewable energy at Guascor de México.

Highlights:

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By Brad Johnson on Sep 14, 2011 at 7:55 pm

Climate Progress

Al Gore’s 24 Hours of Reality Starts Tonight: “It’s Urgent to Rendezvous with Reality to Save the Future of Civilization”

By Joe Romm on Sep 14, 2011 at 7:33 pm

I’d love your comments on the telecast — and I’ll make sure Gore and his team see what you have to say.


Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

Former Vice President Gore launched The Climate Reality Project “to broadcast the reality of the climate crisis and mobilize citizens to help solve it.”

Tonight at 7 pm Central Time the “24 Hours of Reality” live video stream begins — 24 one-hour presentations from around the world ending with Gore himself in New York  delivering a new PowerPoint presentation.  You can watch it right here.

In an exclusive interview with CP from July, the Nobel laureate explained what you can expect to see if you tune in:

It will cover a 24-hour period. And I’m preparing a brand new 30 minute multimedia presentation.  A keynote slideshow with video and other features that will focus in part on the connection between the extreme weather events all around the world and the climate crisis.  And it will begin on September 14th, in prime time, central time zone from Mexico City, and then it will move West to the next time zone over, and continue through all 24 time zones, ending the following evening, in  prime time, in New York City where I will give the last of the 24 presentations.

Each site where a presentation originates will have basically the same 30 minute slide show, but with slides used in each time zone that illustrate particular impacts and particular efforts towards solutions at the venue representing  than that time zone.  And then the second thirty minutes of each hour will include a panel discussion focused on the climate crisis and the solutions to it from the perspective of leaders and scientists and others  in that particular location.  So it will be a 24-hour event.

I’ll host it from New York City, but really all 23 of the other presenters and I will host our respective presentations. And we have a lot of work underway.  There will be 13 languages involved, and we have a lot of work that’s bearing fruit for the events in each of the locations.  And this will be designed to present the full truth, scope, and impact of the climate crisis and discuss the solutions to it and again it will be the first of a series of large events that we will hold multiple times a year to mobilize the public around actions to solve the climate crisis.  Each global event will focus on a different facet of the crisis and its solutions.  And we’re pretty excited about it.

Gore also told me “it’s urgent to rendezvous with reality in order to take the appropriate steps to save the future of civilization as we know it.”

The denial will hit the fan — as one amusing new video from the Project makes clear:

Read more

Economy

GOP Rep Introduces ‘Jobs’ Bill That Would Completely Eliminate Corporate Taxes

By Alex Seitz-Wald on Sep 14, 2011 at 7:30 pm

Taking the GOP’s anti-tax ideology to its logical conclusion, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) introduced today his own “American Jobs Act” — giving his bill the same name as President Obama’s plan — which would completely eliminate corporate income taxes. Gohmert claims this will create jobs:

It is a very simple bill, which will eliminate the corporate tax which serves as a tariff that our American companies pay on goods they produce here in America. This bill will actually create jobs in America

The two-page bill changes the tax code to replace any mention of the current “35 percent” tax rate with “0 percent.” Corporations are already sitting on trillions in cash, so cutting their taxes would likely do very little to help the economy, but would balloon the deficit by depriving the government of about $300 billions in revenues annually. As the CBO found, cutting taxes on businesses “typically does not create an incentive for them to spend more on labor or to produce more, because production depends on the ability to sell output.”

But Gohmert’s plan is even more irksome considering that he’s spent the last few days attacking Obama’s jobs plan because it would prohibit employers from discriminating against people who have been unemployed. Gohmert appeared on various conservative media outlets to expose this “devilish detail,” saying on Sean Hannity’s radio show yesterday, via Political Correction:

GOHMERT: We have created in this bill a newly protected class, not on race, creed, color, sex — not even sexual orientation, this is a new one. It’s not religion, it’s a prohibition of discrimination in employment on the basis of an individual’s status as unemployed. By golly, if you apply for a job and you’re unemployed and you feel like you got discriminated against and not hired because you were unemployed, see a lawyer. You’ve got a claim under this bill.

So Gohmert wants to help unemployed Americans get jobs by eliminating taxes for corporations, but thinks helping those jobless directly is “devilish.” But at least his plan isn’t as half-baked as his colleagues’ plan to create jobs by curbing regulations on snakes.

Security

Romney Misrepresents Obama’s Iran Record, Calls For ‘Credible Military Threat’ That Already Exists

By Ali Gharib on Sep 14, 2011 at 6:41 pm

In an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney attacked President Obama’s foreign policy record. Obama’s “failures internationally will have perhaps even longer- lasting implications for America and the world than even his failures domestically,” said Romney. Pressed by O’Reilly to name specific failures, Romney brought up Iran’s nuclear program, which he called “probably the greatest threat to the security of the world.”

“[T]he president had an opportunity to really put pressure on Iran,” said Romney. “Had he gotten Russia to agree to impose tough, crippling sanctions on Iran, we could have put a lot more pressure on Iran.”

In June 2010, Russia voted for U.N. Security Council Resolution 1929, which imposed a fourth round of sanctions — the toughest yet — on Iran because of it’s failure to comply with earlier resolutions demanding an end to nuclear enrichment. In May, a U.N. experts panel on the sanctions concluded that the new measures “are constraining Iran’s procurement of items related to prohibited nuclear and ballistic missile activity and thus slowing development of these programs.”

Romney then discussed what he would do about Iran:

O’REILLY: What would you very specifically do?

ROMNEY: Well, several years ago I spoke at the Herzliya conference in Tel Aviv and laid out seven steps. I’ll try and be brief. But No. 1 was making sure that we put in place crippling sanctions.

No. 2 was communicating on the ground in Iran what the cost means to them of becoming a nuclear nation. They would be in a circle of suspects if either nuclear device were being tested or to be applied anywhere in the world. Number — I’ll get to the last one. No. 7 is you have to have a credible military threat. … You have to have credible options that Iran has to know that, if they pursue nuclear folly, that there is the potential that there will be an effort on the part of the United States to remove that threat. [...]

[Obama] hasn’t put together the kind of military credibility in terms of planning or communications that would suggest to them that it’s anything but a hollow threat.

Watch the whole exchange:

It’s true that Russia and China blocked more harsh economic sanctions in the Security Council, but the U.S. continued to impose strict economic and human rights sanctions on companies and individuals, which the administration continues to augment with a long string of executive orders. These sanctions are extraterritorial, meaning that international companies and individuals working with Iranian sanctioned companies and individuals can be punished by the U.S.

What’s more, as far as military “planning,” Obama has pledged to keep all options all the table. At his confirmation hearing before the Senate to be Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta said such planning was actually going on: “In line with the president’s statement that we should keep all options on the table, that would obviously require appropriate planning.”

And that doesn’t even begin to account for the covert actions taken by the U.S. to thwart the Iranian nuclear program. What we know — that the U.S. and Israel worked together to develop and deploy the Stuxnet computer virus that crippled Iran’s nuclear centrifuges — is likely only the tip of the iceberg.

The Obama administration, in other words, is doing exactly the things Romney says it is not. As for the public bluster about all of it, Iranian dissidents have praised Obama for setting that rhetoric aside, crediting the move with creating the political space that allowed for the rise of the Green opposition movement. One wonders what the Green Movement might think of Romney, whose foreign policy adviser has advocated for the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), a group considered terrorists by the U.S. and hated by the the Greens.

NEWS FLASH

Middle Class Receiving Nearly Its Smallest Share Of National Income Ever | The Center for American Progress Action Fund’s David Madland, Karla Walter, and Nick Bunker note that Census data released this week shows that “the middle class received close to the smallest share of the nation’s income it ever has [in 2010] since this data was first collected.” Last year, “the middle 60 percent of all Americans garnered only 46 percent of the nation’s income, down from highs of around 53 percent in 1968.” They point to falling unionization as one of the culprits for this decline, as “the percentage of unionized workers tracks very closely with the share of the nation’s income going to the middle class.”

NEWS FLASH

GOP Rep. David Camp Pledges Not To Fundraise While On Super Committee | Rep. David Camp (R-MI) is following the lead of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) and vowing to avoid fundraising while he sits on the congressional super commitee tasked with finding $1.5 trillion in deficit savings by November. Camp, one of six Republicans on the committee, said that while he will attend events that were already scheduled before he was appointed, “I am not going to add any new items in a fundraising capacity.” Because super committee members have such broad authority over important issues, including entitlement reform and defense spending, they have been a natural target for lobbyists. Committee members have already come under scrutiny for accepting money from lobbyists who have a clear stake in the committee’s decisions.

By Marie Diamond on Sep 14, 2011 at 6:35 pm

Yglesias

History Underexplains German Obsession With Hard Money

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 14, 2011 at 6:14 pm

Caitlin Kenney and Zoe Chace did a piece for All Things Considered tracing the German obsession with hard money policies back to the hyperinflation of the early 1920s. This is the conventional explanation, and surely it deserves some weight, but it’s worth noting that this bit of potted history substantially under-explains the actual results.

For example, note that hyperinflation was actually tamed by the mid-1920s, and by 1928, Weimar elections were dominated by mainstream democratic parties. Then came the Great Depression. At this point, it’s clear that memory of the hyperinflation in the recent past does a lot to explain why the Weimar monetary authorities were so leery of engaging in unorthodox policy to combat mass unemployment. But it’s clearly mass unemployment rather than inflation (which was non-existent at the time) which explains the parallel growing vote shares of the Nazi and Communist parties and the collapse of German liberalism and social democracy. Then when the Nazis took over, they undertook a successful program of monetary expansion. Then, obviously, came a war and German defeat.

So while Germany has experience with unduly inflationary monetary policy they also have experience with the harm of unduly tight money and experience with the ability of monetary stimulus. The question is why is this one particular episode so influential in German political consciousness rather than some other ones.

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