As gas prices spiral out of control again, threatening our economic recovery, President Barack Obama laid out a bold plan to address the threats of our dependence on oil. Only by making our transportation system oil-free will Americans be free from skyrocketing gas prices, free from oil disasters, free from hostile governments that control foreign oil supplies. The great campaign to free America from the toxic influence of oil has been stalled for decades. Obama’s State of the Union address laid out a vision for restarting the United States, built upon a simple idea: less oil, more clean energy:

With more research and incentives, we can break our dependence on oil with biofuels, and become the first country to have a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. We need to get behind this innovation. And to help pay for it, I’m asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to oil companies. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but they’re doing just fine on their own.

“Within 25 years,” Obama added, “our goal is to give 80 percent of Americans access to high-speed rail.”

We need to build now to pay less for oil. Gas prices are going up, but more importantly, the costs of using gas are rising even faster. The pollution, the destruction of our climate, the national security risks, the crushing influence on the national debt of over a billion dollars a day flowing overseas to pay for oil — all of these mean Americans can’t keep jobs and can’t feed their families.

It’s time to “charge, baby, charge.” If this Congress wants to take on the pain at the pump, it will support legislation to build a national infrastructure of electric charging stations for electric vehicles, deploy 21st-century high-speed rail, and curb oil profiteering by Wall Street. This transformation should be paid for by eliminating the billions of dollars of subsidies for the oil and gas industry, and by instituting a slowly graduated gas tax that keeps the money of American drivers inside the United States, instead of going to speculators and foreign dictatorships.

The 3.5°F warming of Fram Strait water over the past century is “not just the latest in a series of natural multidecadal oscillations.”

Study after study finds recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.  The anti-science crowd keeps trying to debunk one or two old Hockey Sticks, but new ones crop up faster than a speeding puck.

Science just published a new one, “Enhanced Modern Heat Transfer to the Arctic by Warm Atlantic Water” (subs. req’d), news release here, “Warming North Atlantic water tied to heating Arctic, according to new study.”

I have pulled out the key graph — and it is one heck of a Hockey Stick.  It is derived from “planktic foraminifers in a sediment core”:

Temperature reconstructions of upper Atlantic Water in the eastern Fram Strait over the past ~2100 years

Thin lines are raw data, bold lines are three-point running means….  (C) Summer temperatures at 50-m water depth (red)….  Gray bars mark averages until 1835 CE and 1890 to 2007 CE. Blue line is the normalized Atlantic Water core temperature (AWCT) record … from the Arctic Ocean (1895 to 2002; 6-year averages)….  (D) Summer temperatures (purple) [calculated with a different method]

This astonishing warming in the past century is clearly not, as the anti-science crowd likes to say, some sort of recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age (see “A detailed look at the Little Ice Age“), which, in any case, is barely noticeable in this data.   The lead author, Robert Spielhagen of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said, “Such a warming of the Atlantic water in the Fram Strait is significantly different from all climate variations in the last 2,000 years.”  The fact is, over 90% of human-caused warming is going into the oceans — and it is melting ice whereever it goes (see “Deep ocean heat is rapidly melting Antarctic ice“).

Air temperatures in Greenland have risen roughly 7 degrees F in the past several decades, thought to be due primarily to an increase in Earth’s greenhouse gases, according to CU-Boulder scientists.

“We must assume that the accelerated decrease of the Arctic sea ice cover and the warming of the ocean and atmosphere of the Arctic measured in recent decades are in part related to an increased heat transfer from the Atlantic,” said Spielhagen.

Here are the abstract and conclusion:

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Urgent need for a new lens and lexicon for conveying climate collapse

Climate change is not one among many issues, it is THE crisis, the greatest threat on Earth.

If you have kids, you know Raffi.  But Raffi is much more than a singer, songwriter, and performer.  He is a children’s champion and ecology advocate, founder and chair of the Centre for Child Honouring, the name of his powerful, integrated philosophy.

This essay, by Raffi, is reposted in full by permission followed by his song on global warming.

Are we tweeting while Earth burns? Is climate collapse our new collective Titanic? How do we best describe the survival struggle of 7 billion in a way that connects with the public and with decision makers?

The science on global warming is clear and compelling. Earth is in serious climate crisis. That’s why many writers have recently upgraded climate change to climate collapse, climate catastrophe, the long emergency. To convey the climate threat fully, we need a new Story.

In a well known Greek myth, the very rich King Midas who loves gold above all else, is granted his singular wish that everything he touches turn into gold. The gift becomes a curse when his golden touch kills plants, food, and even his daughter, who is turned into a statue. Bereft and repentant, forsaking greed, the king begs for deliverance. His curse is lifted by a wash in the river. All he holds truly precious is restored.

The modern version of the story is about a gold rush called globalization, a monetized world order that commodifies everything and poisons all that it touches: air, water, soil, whales, indigenous cultures, mothers’ milk, and babies, now born with a body burden of toxic chemicals. Money as symbolic reward for goods and services, when elevated above all else, becomes a curse. The symbol turns tyrant and casts a plague on the living. We’re currently in the atonement chapter of the tragedy, praying we have time to write a happier ending.

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The Department of Energy estimates that wind power from tribal lands could satisfy 14% of total U.S. electricity demand. Van Jones, Bracken Hendricks, and Jorge Madrid explain how to capture that potential, in a CAP cross-post.

In his remarks at this week’s State of the Union, President Obama called for another “Sputnik moment,” in which the country would unleash a wave of innovation that creates new industries and millions of new jobs. The plan the president laid out led boldly with the deployment of smart new infrastructure and clean technology that will break our dependence on imported oil while creating jobs and building businesses in our hardest hit American communities.
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It’s the head-exploding headline of the month from down under.  Bloomberg reports:

Australia to Cut, Delay $500 Million of Clean-Energy Funding After Floods

In this country, ABC News explained “Raging Waters In Australia and Brazil Product of Global Warming.”

The Australian government’s own Bureau of Meteorology released data showing that the warmest sea surface temperatures on record were fueling floods called ‘biblical’ — floods covering an area “the size of France and Germany combined.”

But in the most counterproductive decision imaginable, “to help pay for reconstruction after the nation’s worst floods,” the government is cutting funding for clean energy programs including solar energy and green cars:

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Steven Chu outlines energy spending plan

A day after President Obama pitched a clean energy agenda in his State of the Union speech, Energy Secretary Steven Chu outlined the administration’s strategy for producing 80 percent of the nation’s electricity from clean sources by 2035 “” and how much it might cost.

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For a few months there was a brief flirtation with what some called “post-partisan power” — see Brookings embraces American Enterprise Institute’s climate head fake along with right-wing energy myths.  But the object of the flirtation flatlined unexpectedly this month.

The flirtation was strange because post-partisan power was based on a several conclusions that were painfully obvious myths, including:

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“New Mexico’s Supreme Court ordered the state records administrator yesterday to publish a rule establishing a statewide cap on emissions,” as E&E News (subs. req’d) reported today.  That should be good news in a state that faces a grim future “” brutal heat waves, massive wildfires, permanent Dust Bowls “” in a world of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions (see “U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought like that of 12th century “” only hotter “” this century” and below).  Indeed, the state’s own Sandia National Laboratory analyzed projected rainfall patterns from climate change and found “over the next 40 years, New Mexico’s economic contribution to the U.S. economy could drop by $26 billion.”

But newly elected NM Gov. Susana Martinez (R) is dead set against the emissions cap.  Worse, as noted earlier this month, she picked climate denier Harrison Schmitt to run “the state’s Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, which oversees all environmental matters” in the state.  Schmitt believes mainstream climate science is a conspiracy “to increase government control.”

Now it turns out former astronaut Schmitt is even more of a climate crackpot than first thought.  As ThinkProgress reports (with a jaw-dropping audio):

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