Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious.

Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day remains more relevant than ever in light of the world’s ongoing inaction on climate change, the over-running of Congress by climate zombies, Obama’s multi-year fecklessness on this gravest of threats, and the amazing climate silence of the U.S. media.

In a 2009 interview, then Energy SecretarySteven Chu said:

I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. If every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column one more:

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Even as extreme weather worsens and the scientific evidence of human-caused climate change gets more alarming, it was hard to find any television outlets touching the subject this Earth Day.

However, there was one show that addressed climate change with a sense of urgency.

While CNN ran stories about “acts of green” and Fox News hilariously lamented that the earth “is not friendly to human beings,” former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm devoted a large portion of her show, The War Room, to the most pressing environmental story in history.

Granholm featured three segments on climate and energy issues, bringing in Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr., and Jeffrey Sachs to talk about the consequences of inaction. She also gave her own forceful monologue urging people to put politicians in office that “will allow your children to have a future on this planet.” As Granholm put it, “Your thinking small does not serve the world”:

“Across the political spectrum Democrats, Independents and Republicans now see that the climate is changing….

The climate is changing. But excuses for inaction have not. And nature doesn’t care about excuses.”

Watch it:

Al Gore appeared on the show, saying that he believes the small group of vocal climate deniers will eventually lose their voice: “We have got to win this. And we will win this. Because the reality is what it is.”

Watch it:

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Sarah Palin, John McCain’s “energy expert” in 2008, now appears to be setting the agenda for Mitt Romney. On Earth Day, Palin bashed the “holiest of days for EcoLiberals,” saying in a National Review blogpost that it should be celebrated with “drill, baby, drill.” On Monday, Romney followed Sarah Palin’s lead, telling an audience at a major coal company that he too opposes environmental regulations for drilling of coal, oil, and natural gas.

Romney even adopted Palin’s language in his speech at a Consol Energy research facility:

PALIN: “It’s time for the greatest nation on earth to tap into its full potential, and one surefire way to do so is to tap into what is beneath this earth.”

ROMNEY: “The course that I will put us on is to take advantage of what comes from above the ground as well as what comes from below the ground so that America can finally become energy-secure and independent of the oil cartel.”

“Romney’s energy and environmental platform calls for stripping EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions and expanding oil-and-gas leasing to include areas that are currently off limits, including the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, among other measures,” The Hill’s Ben Geman writes.

Romney denied that global warming is caused by burning fossil fuels at a Consol Energy facility last year. Consol has given $5000 to the Romney campaign and $150,000 to the Romney SuperPAC.

by Melanie Hart and Jeffrey Cavanagh

This Earth Day is a great opportunity to take stock of the progress we are making around the world on environmental protection. Here in the United States, much can be learned by comparing our environmental progress to China, where they are just now starting down a path we took back in 1970.

Taking stock of our environmental progress is particularly important in an election year, when some politicians and political hopefuls are pointing to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as an example of wasteful government spending and overregulation. The reality is that our regulatory system is what separates us from the citizens in China, where air pollution and lead poising are the norm and environmental problems corrode the quality of life in ways that we have not faced in decades.

We certainly hope China manages to address its environmental problems, not only for the sake of the Chinese people but also because China’s problems harm us as well. China is now the largest contributor to global carbon dioxide pollution, and jet streams are bringing some Chinese pollution to the United States. Mercury emissions from China’s coal-fired power plants are building up in U.S. watersheds, for example, and particulate pollution from China appears to be inhibiting rain and snow production and reducing water supplies in some California cities.

At the moment, however, our environmental protection regime is far superior to China’s, which gives us a competitive edge. Our children are growing up healthier and arguably smarter (since lead and mercury poisoning impairs brain development), and we will probably live longer and face lower cancer risks. Our environmental regulations give U.S. businesses more incentives to innovate and develop cleaner, more efficient production processes that will be fueling our economy long after China’s current high-polluting factories close their doors. We fought hard to build up the system that is now bringing these benefits, and it is not something we want to give up.

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by Jessica Goad

The United States is home to some of the most stunning and unique natural areas in the world, including 397 national parks, 101 national monuments, and 556 national wildlife refuges. But many more public lands—managed by the federal government and owned by all Americans—are worthy of protection for future generations. This Earth Day it’s worth thinking about the places that have strong local coalitions calling for protection that should be granted this year.

The road to protection could be a long one, though. Due to partisan gridlock Congress has not sent the president a single piece of land-designation legislation since March 30, 2009, when President Barack Obama signed into law a bill protecting 2 million acres of wilderness and 1,000 miles of Wild and Scenic Rivers from development. Both Republicans and Democrats have introduced more than 20 wilderness bills in the 112th Congress, but not only has a single one not passed, none has even come up for a vote.

President Obama has slowly begun building his conservation legacy by establishing a national monument at Fort Monroe and protecting the Grand Canyon from new uranium mines. But he has the authority to do much more.

Here are the top five places that have both local community and political support, and are therefore good candidates for protection during the remainder of this calendar year:

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by Abigail Ridley-Kerr, Jorge Madrid

When Earth Day celebrated its first year in 1970, the words “green” and “job” were disparate concepts. This weekend, however, on the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day, green jobs are remaking and transforming the economy to be less polluting, more efficient, and more equitable. In addition to helping the planet by reducing pollution and greenhouse gases, green jobs also provide economic opportunity for communities of color in urban centers that have felt the worst of the economic recession.

These jobs are on the rise. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Green Goods and Services—defined as jobs in businesses that produce goods and provide services that benefit the environment or conserve natural resources—accounted for 3.1 million U.S. jobs in 2010, or 2.4 percent of total employment that year. These jobs span a wide variety of sectors—including construction, manufacturing, professional services, and science- and research-related fields.

Nowhere has this growth been more striking than in America’s urban centers. According to a recent Brookings Institution report, green job growth outpaced traditional job growth at a rate of nearly 2-to-1 in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan centers from 2008 to 2010. Another study from the Apollo Alliance, the Initiative for a Competitive City, and Green for All found that inner-city green jobs grew at 10 times the rate of jobs overall in the last decade. It’s no surprise, then, that urban centers account for roughly two-thirds of green-job-sector employment.

The rapid expansion of green jobs is particularly significant in light of the country’s changing demographics. The top five urban regions of green job growth are also home to large concentrations of communities of color. According to data from the 2010 Census, people of color compose more than half the population in all five regions. (see table)

The burgeoning green jobs sector offers three economic advantages for urban communities of color:

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When “millions of environmental activists gathered on college campuses and in major cities 40 years ago for the first Earth Day, the rallies, teach-ins and organizing helped galvanize action on a historic scale — including passage of the Clean Air and Clean Water acts and creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.” Acid rain pollution, ozone-depleting chemicals, and neurological toxins are down because of these strong rules, as the chemical, auto and coal industries now like to trumpet. But the buildup of greenhouse gas pollution, which some climate physicists were worrying about forty years ago, has become a global existential crisis that has mobilized the world’s scientific community.

Center of American Progress Senior Fellow Joseph Romm, PhD, has just published a stiff drink of a book based on his work as the voice of the Climate Progress blog. In Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions, Romm distills his best work from the blog and honestly describes the catastrophic path humanity is on — and the clean energy solutions that offer hope for survival.

Here are just a few insights from this wide-ranging book, which clearly separates political and media delusions from physical reality:

— “If those who are counseling inaction and delay succeed, billions of humans will suffer unimaginable misery and chaos, while most other species will simply go extinct.”

“If the U.S. media refuse to make the connection between record-breaking wildfire, drought, and heat waves and human-caused global warming, why would anyone be surprised if the U.S. public doesn’t put it as a higher priority or make the connection itself?”

“America is the Saudi Arabia of energy waste.”

“The two key questions are, first, will we voluntarily give up fossil fuels in the next couple of decades, rather than being forced to do so helter-skelter after it is too late to stop the catastrophe? Second, when we do give them up, will the United States be a global leader in creating jobs and exports in clean technologies, or will we be importing them from Europe, Japan, and the likely clean energy leader in our absence, China?”

“If every day is Earth Day, then April 22 definitely needs a new name. . . . So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.”

What makes Straight Up work is what has made Romm such an effective blogger — these pithy quotes are backed up with sweeping policy knowledge and a mastery of the facts, from climate science to clean energy. Although I would have preferred a more deeply edited work that took the collected blog posts and refined their energy and intelligence, Straight Up is a unique resource. If you know anyone who’s ever wondered what “blogs” are all about or is confused why there are people who think global warming is such a big deal, it’s a safe bet this book will help set them straight.

Our guest blogger is Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org and the author of EAARTH: Making A Life in a Tough New World.

We have created a new planet. Not entirely new. It looks more or less like the one we were born into; the same physical laws operate it. But the changes that have already happened are large enough that if you were visiting our planet in a spaceship, this place would look really different from the outside than it did just decades ago — call it “Eaarth.”

I wrote the preface to my new book EAARTH on a gorgeous spring afternoon in 2009, perched on the bank of a brook high along the spine of the Green Mountains, a mile or so from my home in the Vermont mountain town of Ripton. The creek burbles along, the picture of a placid mountain stream, but a few feet away there’s a scene of real violence a deep gash through the woods where a flood in the summer of 2008 ripped away many cubic feet of tree and rock and soil and drove it downstream through the center of the village. Before the afternoon was out, the only paved road into town had been demolished by the rushing water, a string of bridges lay in ruins, and the governor was trying to reach the area by helicopter.

Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote the first book for a general audience about global warming, which in those days we called the “greenhouse effect.” That book, The End of Nature, was mainly a philosophical argument. It was too early to see the practical effects of climate change but not too early to feel them; in the most widely excerpted passage of the book, I described walking down a different river, near my then-home sixty miles away, in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. Merely knowing that we’d begun to alter the climate meant that the water flowing in that creek had a different, lesser meaning. “Instead of a world where rain had an independent and mysterious existence, the rain had become a subset of human activity,” I wrote. “The rain bore a brand; it was a steer, not a deer.”

Now, that sadness has turned into a sharper-edged fear. Walking along this river today, you don’t need to imagine a damned thing — the evidence of destruction is all too obvious. Much more quickly than we would have guessed in the late 1980s, global warming has dramatically altered, among many other things, hydrological cycles. One of the key facts of the twenty-first century turns out to be that warm air holds more water vapor than cold: in arid areas this means increased evaporation and hence drought. And once that water is in the atmosphere, it will come down, which in moist areas like Vermont means increased deluge and flood. Read more

Our guest blogger is Van Jones, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress focusing on green-collar jobs.

Forty years after the first Earth Day, we’re now embarking on Earth Day 2.0, with a different kind of environmentalism. Sleeves rolled up, hard hat, lunch bucket — that’s going to become the image of the environmentalist rather than just our beloved tree huggers.

We’re going to see a tug of war now between the interests that want to keep things in the old way and people that want to do things in a new way. Why is it important for ordinary voices to be heard? Because, frankly, if we had a clean energy economy, we would have more work, more wealth, and better health for regular people. That’s what’s not getting through. There are way more jobs putting up solar panels, building smart batteries, making wind turbines, putting them up, than we will ever have again in America in the coal lines. Period.

We need to be moving toward a technology-based job agenda rather than continuing to pull down on our natural resources that we are now beginning to see dwindle here in America. You’ll have more wealth. There are way more entrepreneurial opportunities for new businesses and new products and new services in the clean energy space. Not many people are going to go out and start an oil company tomorrow. But people can go start a solar company tomorrow.

So Earth Day 2.0 now just means straight-up common sense. There’s more wealth to be had for ordinary people in a new economy. And also from a health point of view, the green agenda is about cleaner air, cleaner water, healthier food. And so the stuff that ordinary people are dealing with—the questions around work, wealth, and health—we have much better answers, those of us who are champions for the green economy, than the people who are the champions of the dirty energy economy.

Listen to the podcast with Van Jones.

Our guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss and Kari Manlove, members of the Center for American Progress Energy Opportunity team.

President Obama has seized the clean energy opportunity by adopting many policies to boost investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy. He is also working with the Senate to pass legislation that would reduce foreign oil use, and limit carbon pollution and establishes a price on this waste. This price signal would drive even more investments toward clean energy technologies and services.

President Obama has rightly challenged Americans to take action together to protect our air, water and planet for future generations on the occasion the 40th Earth Day, April 22, 2010. He too can celebrate Earth Day and build on his record of success by taking additional executive actions to fight the threat of global warming pollution, reduce oil use, increase security, save the government money, provide incentives and assistance to manufacturers and other businesses who want to create clean energy jobs, and otherwise speed the transition to a clean energy economy. This would be a fitting way to honor the first Earth Day, and it would speed the clean energy transformation in time for the 50th observance.

Below are some of the 38 executive actions recommended by CAP:

— Reduce oil use and increase national security by establishing new fuel efficiency standards for 2017-2021 vehicles, and by accelerating the use of natural gas, hybrid and electric vehicles

– Reclaim and retrofit foreclosed homes for efficiency

– Increase the Defense Department’s deployment of efficiency, renewable energy, and clean alternative fuels such as natural gas

– Reward energy efficiency at U.S. manufacturing facilities

– Use government procurement to create jobs and increase clean energy

– Use cloud computers by the federal government to save energy and money

– Create a “virtual” Clean Energy Deployment Administration to identify and encourage investors in new clean energy technologies

– Invest in clean energy jobs in rural areas

– Create clean energy jobs through trade expansion of clean technologies

– Direct the Small Business Administration to provide loans to small businesses with energy efficiency projects

– Direct the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assist community efforts to increase their resilience to global warming impacts

– Establish a national goal for building efficiency retrofits

– Add a clean energy program to YouthBuild U.S.A.

– Set a national recycling target to create jobs and save energy

– Achieve international pollution reductions

Greenhouse gas pollution is altering weather patterns across the globe. NASA reports that the past decade was the hottest on record, beating out the 1990s, which were hotter than the 1980s. Glaciers are melting away in Glacier National Park, Montana, and New Moore Island in the Indian Ocean, fought over by India and Pakistan, is no longer in dispute because it is underwater due to sea level rise.

Download the full memo.