Maldive's Underwater Cabinet Meeting

Three days ago, a country known as Maldives (a low lying atoll nation off the coast of India) held a cabinet meeting in an effort to draw global attention to climate change and the crisis that it'll bring if left uncontrolled.

According to predictions, Maldives will be completely submerged and uninhabitable if global warming continues to cause slight rises in sea level. In lieu to that projection, they donned skuba gear and held a meeting underwater to sign a resolution printed on a whiteboard and signed in water-proof marker to urge controlling global emissions.

They said that "Maldives is a front-line nation, what happens to us today may happen to others tomorrow". But we shouldn't have to wait to see a whole country submerged and then take action to save our sorry keisters.

These guys in my opinion have the right idea. People need to pay attention to everyone else and stop being so considerate of only their own endeavors. I passed by this article while surfing the internet and felt the need to share. It's witty and has impact, I couldn't pass up blogging it.

Click here for the original article!

Climate Change, What's That?

So guess what!? There's a new bill in town -- you guessed it, it's a climate bill, and it's now introduced into Congress! It might take a bit of time for it to go through, what with all this healthcare business flying around (did you hear they pretty much killed public option? SHAME ON YOU SEN. BAUCUS!), but we at MASSPIRG are pushing for the Clean Energy Jobs And American Power Act.

You may say to yourself, "oh boy, that's flippin sweet... but what's in the bill?" Well we're here to direct your attention to some of the important compenents of the bill!

Coal
The bill will invest $10 Billion over a period of 10 years into not-so-clean coal. It will provide incentives to those first switching over to not-so-clean coal and improves standards for current coal powerplants, up to date with modern technology. The bill relies heavily on coal, which is hilarious, because coal is part of the problem! The power elite in Washington is pretty firm on their support for coal technology, and this bill appears like a great transition for Big Coal, so that their profits won't be harmed at all! I cannot stress enough how terrible of an idea this is! Clean coal has been proven not to work... it's an absurd idea, and we have better technology that has no ill environmental effects (solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc).

Natural Gas
Provide incentives for moving to this more-efficient fossil fuel. Not much else is said about it in the bill. As you may have read in an earlier blog, natural gas isn't winning! This isn't terrible, I'm not crying over it, but the sad part is that not-so-clean coal is being embraced!! Oh no!

Nuclear
Our politicians love this stuff. It's clean and efficient. It creates almost no waste... except for a small amount of poisionous waste that will kill you with minimal exposure. Oh, and that green glowing stuff doesn't go away for like, 10,000 years at least? Actually they don't know the exact date, but estimates are in the 100,000's of years! If we could figure out what to do with this stuff, nuclear would be a great option. But it has me worried, that's for sure. Also consider things like 3 Mile Island and Chernobyl. Wind turbines don't do that.

Renewables
Probably the biggest part of the bill, on par with coal, is this! That is excellent! Funding into new technologies, funding into using existing technologies. If you're reading this, you probably get the gist of it!

This bill will create millions of Green Jobs. It has a section for helping workers achieve more training for these high demand, high pay jobs! It includes ways to protect consumers from predatory energy companies seeking to exlpoit us as we move to a new, clean energy economy, as well.

Pollution reduction is part of the bill, also. It targets a reduction
of 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 from 2005 levels, the minimum scientists judge
necessary to avert a climate disaster. This is good, and I am hoping that as this goes into commitee, the Republicans do not completely destroy this section. It is probably the most vital of all to avoid disaster.

I encourage you all to be involved in this, write to your Senators and Reps, tell them you want this and the nation needs. And if you're a BCC, you ought to make sure to do our photo petition that we are sending to the bills champion, Sen. John Kerry!

Find out more about this here: http://kerry.senate.gov/cleanenergyjobsandamericanpower/intro.cfm

- Cam Mancini