U.N Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon Calls for Immediate Action on Climate Change

Two weeks ago, I visited the Arctic. I saw the remains of a glacier that just a few years ago was a majestic mass of ice. It had collapsed. Not slowly melted “” collapsed. I traveled nine hours by ship from the world’s northernmost settlement to reach the polar ice rim. In just a few years, the same ship may be able to sail unimpeded all the way to the North Pole. The Arctic could be virtually ice-free by 2030.

Scientists told me their sobering findings. The Arctic is our canary in the coal mine for climate impacts that will affect us all.

I was alarmed by the rapid pace of change there. Worse still, changes in the Arctic are now accelerating global warming. Thawing permafrost is releasing methane, a greenhouse gas 20 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. Melting ice in Greenland threatens to raise sea levels.

Meanwhile, global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.

I am therefore all the more convinced we must act “” now.

To that end, on Sept. 22 I am convening a special summit on climate change at the United Nations for some 100 world leaders “” history’s largest-ever such gathering of heads of state and government. Their collective challenge: transform the climate crisis into an opportunity for safer, cleaner, sustainable green growth for all.

The key is Copenhagen, where governments will gather to negotiate a new global climate agreement in December.

I will have a simple message to convey to leaders: The world needs you to actively push for a fair, effective and ambitious deal in Copenhagen. Fail to act, and we will count the cost for generations to come.

Climate change is the preeminent geopolitical issue of our time. It rewrites the global equation for development, peace and prosperity. It threatens markets, economies and development gains. It can deplete food and water supplies, provoke conflict and migration, destabilize fragile societies and even topple governments.

What is needed is political will at the highest levels “” presidents and prime ministers “” that translates into rapid progress in the negotiating room. It requires more trust among nations, more imagination, ambition and cooperation.

I expect leaders to roll up their sleeves and speak with “” not past “” each other. I expect them to intensify efforts to resolve the key political issues that have so far slowed global negotiations to a glacial pace. Ironically, that expression “” until recently “” connoted slowness. But the glaciers I saw a few weeks ago in the Arctic are melting faster than human progress to preserve them.

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Written by Brad Johnson and Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and the Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Last night, Glenn Beck accused President Obama of “outright lies,” engaging in a “coverup” of the cost of his green economic agenda. Beck claimed that “buried” Treasury documents from March show that the cost of a cap-and-trade carbon market to regulate global warming pollution is $1,761 per household per year, despite the president’s assurance to the American public in June that “the price to the average American will be about the same as a postage stamp per day“:

I have a question. Did the President of the United States tell the people in Congress about this? Facts are stubborn. Don’t they suck? It is always the coverup that gets you. March 9. June 25. Mr. President, did you tell Congress about prior estimates? That, you know, that you knew about? Or did you just kind of keep it secret and hide it away from them and those pesky American people? I want to show you something that I said a few weeks ago. I was talking directly to the Democrats. I was telling them wake up. “Democrats in Congress, wake up! You are being played and you’re being bypassed.”

Watch it:

In reality, Beck’s figure of $1,761 per household for the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) is not actually based on secret Treasury documents, but on the confabulation of a right-wing blogger at CBSNews.com. Although the Treasury Department has called this story “flat out wrong,” conservatives and the oil industry have heavily promoted this inflated number, much in the same way they wildly overestimated the number of Tea Party activists who attended the Glenn Beck rally in Washington, D.C. last weekend.

On June 19th, the Congressional Budget Office analyzed the ACES Act — legislation crafted by Congress, not by “czars” in the White House — and determined “that the net annual economywide cost of the cap-and-trade program in 2020 would be $22 billion—or about $175 per household.” Yesterday, the CBO — a Congressional research arm independent of the “spooky” executive branch — released an updated analysis that lowered its previous cost projection to “$160 per household.” In other words:

The average household would spend 44 cents per day – the price of a postage stamp.

The revised analysis also determined that the least well off Americans would receive a greater net benefit than its previous projections. “CBO estimates that households in the lowest income quintile in 2020 would see an average gain… [of] about $125” per household. By 2050, this net gain would increase to “$355 measured at 2010 income levels.”

A clean energy economy would enjoy massive growth, according the the CBO:

CBO projects that real (inflation-adjusted) GDP [Gross Domestic Product] will be roughly two and a half times as large in 2050 as it is today.

Investing in efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change, the CBO concluded, would reduce this GDP by as little as one cent per dollar. CBO concluded that the impact of the ACES Act on the overall economy would be “modest.” However, the CBO did not analyze elements of the legislation that would increase our energy independence and household savings further:

The analysis does not include the effects of other aspects of the bill, such as federal efforts to speed the development of new technologies and to increase energy efficiency by specifying standards or subsidizing energy-saving investments.

Glenn Beck is spinning a paranoid fantasy in which Democratic members of Congress are either puppets of — or conspirators with — an out-of-control, “racist” and “spooky” President. In the real world, the Congressional Budget Office has repeatedly found that a clean energy future can be ours for less than a (real) postage stamp a day.

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When we last left CBS’s Declan McCullagh, he was promoting another fossil-fuel-funded, falsehood-filled CEI attack on clean energy reform.  I’ve been at Elizabethtown College talking to their terrific faculty and students, so I haven’t been able to respond in detail to all of the nonsense he has been peddling, but Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has another great post that I will reprint here.

Yesterday, libertarian blogger Declan McCullagh, a senior correspondent for CBSNews.com, made the incendiary claim that the Obama administration was suppressing Treasury Department documents detailing the true cost of limiting greenhouse gases. After CBS published the story, “Obama Admin: Cap And Trade Could Cost Families $1,761 A Year,” Republicans claimed this was a startling admission, since it has officially estimated an average household cost in 2020 of $80 to $175. It turns out, however, that the $1,761 figure was constructed by McCullagh himself, not the administration, using a new form of economic analysis, Twitternomics:

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) insisted today that he hopes to move a comprehensive climate bill “as quickly as we can” but stopped short of endorsing action over the next three months before a major international global warming summit in Copenhagen.

Reid earlier this week fueled speculation that the climate bill would be punted until 2010 because of a cramped legislative calendar that also includes health care and Wall Street regulations. His comments left many foreign diplomats nervous ahead of this December’s U.N. climate negotiations, where the Obama administration will be relying in large part on the fate of legislation on Capitol Hill.

So E&E News (subs. req’d) reports this morning.  After Reid’s initial statement, of course, his aide immediately walked back the statement.

Even more important, I’m told, the climate science realists in the Cabinet had a come-to-jeepers* meeting this week with the political team, and the word went out from the White House that the climate bill is still a top priority of the administration, with a strong desire to see the Senate act this year.  That said, I thought the White House’s commitment to the issue was fairly obvious from the big recent news:  Obama to speak at U.N. special session on global warming; Todd Stern testifies “Nothing the U.S. can do is more important for the international negotiation process than passing robust, comprehensive clean energy legislation as soon as possible”¦. President Obama and the Secretary of State, along with our entire Administration, are committed to action on this issue.”

Here’s more from Reid himself on the timing — and some relatively positive words for a surprising Senate source:

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