Vote Vets launches its toughest ad to date on behalf of bipartisan action on climate and clean energy:
For more videos — and a petition you can sign — go to BillionDollarsaDay.com.
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The link between energy resources and war is a real one. There are even countries that are ready to go as far as attacking other countries to steal their oil, killing in the process human beings.
Thank god we can stop talking about saving polar bars and floods and weather and talk about something practical.
Positive effect of not talking about cap and trade and start talkiing about taxing gasoline.
‘I will take our troops out of the war zone and put them into space’
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/03/i_will_take_our_troops_out_of.html
Arctic seabed methane stores destabilizing, venting
The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is leaking large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.
http://www.physorg.com/news186920485.html
Earth species might go extinct sooner as we thought.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun
My Advice
- Start space colonization/settlement NOW
- Build climate ark’s NOW
- Put all effords on removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere NOW
- STOP releasing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere NOW – make it a crime!
Contact me prokaryote1[@]hotmail.com
Interesting. It will probably be effective, but is also kind of awful in the way it promotes further divides and misunderstandins between the US and the middle-east.
+1 agree with westwood. The “us vs them” tribalism has no place in a truly global challenge such as global warming.
The analogy of a sinking ship applies here. We all drown together, and the sooner we acknowledge that, the greater the chance of avoiding that fate by cooperating. It’s the only way!
Love the ad. Joe, please blog on this:
http://www.physorg.com/news186920485.html
The most frightening story of the year (ever?). Looks like the beginning of the end.
C
Can someone put some perspective on the methane story for me? How much methane are we talking about compared to, say, what cows release when they, uhhhhhhh, emit methane? Is it more? Less? Is it a matter of where this methane is located (near the Arctic)?
The same powers that do NOT want action on climate and clean energy are staging (yet another) media frenzy trying to cause a war with Iran to get OUR oil that happens to be located under their geography.
For this reason, I assume any ad, otherwise laudable, using Iran as the focus could well be twisted toward the push for war. (I’m not so sure asserting that Iran is doing anything AGAINST us is totally accurate or laudable. At best, it’s inadvertently adding to the media frenzy.)
Of course, the impetus for said war is the new supply of OUR oil that, we will be assured, will decrease the price of oil. (Like Iraq’s oil was going to finance our invasion thereof! So far, there we’ve paid a $30/barrel surcharge for oil that we may never get to buy, at least anywhere near the price of oil before Mar 2003.)
If we attack Iran, presumably it will be after promising China that we (our corporate oil giants) will sell most of the oil to China. As obnoxious as that sounds it would be THE only way to avoid war with China if we insist on attacking Iran. They’ve completely bought into our hyper consumption insanity and there are 4 times as many of them as us.
Disclosure: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the proposed one in Iran, are immoral, illegal, criminal and suicidal.
Perhaps the ad is a little too tough: Given Iran’s net oil exports of 2.4 million barrels per day, the revenue impact of a $1 per barrel price increase is less than $900 million per year, not $1.5 billion.
Since $900 million could finance lots of mayhem, it is possible for the ad to make the intended point without inflating the numbers.
I realize that you (ClimateProgress) didn’t write the ad, but it does seem strange to me for you to approvingly cite it without even noting the mistake given that one of your main themes is getting the facts right.
I gotta say, the new methane story in the comments here is dominating my mind right now. Any reality check or calibration of how this measurement scales, compared to other things, is welcome. Pretty damn freaky.
#9, William Green, Can someone confirm the math. The ad just says “…goes up a dollar…” with out mention of barrel or gallon. Also if 2.4 million barrels is Irans net export, how much of that comes to the USA. If the unit is dollars/gallon the $1.5b could be correct.
+2 with westwood. I mean I’ve heard they’re part of the “axis of evil,” but what exactly is it that Iran does “against us” that makes it “the enemy,” specifically? Pretty sure racism/xenophobia (the perhaps unintended, but highly likely consequnce of ads like this one) are problems that will be even more devastating in the 21st-century than even the climate crisis. But then again, I suppose the target audience for this ad is already racist/xenophobic, so maybe it won’t actually spread those negative qualities.
You don’t want Iran to use that oil against us? Simple – just drill here, and the price of oil will go down. It may not be that much, but every barrel pulled out of ANWR and offshore drilling will be money that’s kept here instead of being sent overseas.
If this produces more CO2 and a warmer planet, it’s good. More CO2 = more plant growth, higher temperatures = less people freezing to death (deaths from cold greatly outnumber deaths from heat), rising sea levels and extreme weather events = more jobs for construction workers (wrecked cities need to be rebuilt elsewhere), melting sea ice = more efficient route for shippers (take the Northwest and Northeast passages), more endangered species = more jobs for zookeepers (put threatened animals in captivity to prevent them from going extinct), melting glaciers and permafrost = more useable land for people in Greenland and Siberia.
Great ad. To quibble about the exact relationship between oil price increases and the increase in revenues to Iran misses the point. The basic linkage and substance of the claim made in the ad is correct. The US has spends hundreds of billions of dollars through military expenditures to guard its access to oil. I can only image if the full cost of this i.e. military costs, expenses related to the VA, etc were shifted onto the consumers of oil in the US in the form of higher taxes I suspect we would see a radical change in oil consumption patterns.
@JoshL Post # 13 Very funny!