Climate Action Heroes
It's Getting Hot in Herre

Salon and Rolling Stone just published a list of their choice of 28 "climate warriors and heroes -- scientists, politicians, activists, celebrities and inventors -- who are fighting to stave off planetwide catastrophe." Here's the link, and even if you don't have a Salon subscription, you should still be able to view the story after watching a short flash ad (just go pour yourself another cup of coffee while it runs). (If you're not a Salon subscriber, think about it--it's one of the best online news magazines and offers consistently good and lefty content.) Here are a couple of the more interesting and personal favorites of the choices:

THE HAWK -- Jim Woolsey
and officious, Jim Woolsey comes across like the hard-core hawk he is -- a former director of the CIA with access to high-level officials in the White House and the Pentagon. But going against the grain of old-school conservatism, he has become the loudest voice in a growing chorus of "cheap hawks" who want to wage the war on terror with plug-in cars and fuel made from manure. A member of the Defense Policy Board, Woolsey wants to defeat terrorism by freeing America from its dependency on foreign oil, rather than routing the enemy in costly wars. "America's energy demand is financing terror," Woolsey says. "We don't need pie-in-the-sky hydrogen scenarios that are 20 years out. We don't have that kind of time."

Among the techno-fixes Woolsey promotes: producing ethanol from prairie grass and corncobs, harvesting biodiesel from farm waste, and adding a battery to existing hybrid cars. "Plug-in hybrids could get up to 150 miles per gallon," he says. "And since electricity is comparatively cheap, you would get the functional equivalent of 50-cent-a-gallon gasoline."

Woolsey's primary goal is to bolster America's national security. But his energy-independence strategy would also curb global warming, create a market for clean-energy providers, strengthen the dollar, cut the deficit, and generate international goodwill. "It's not just win-win," he says. "It's win-win-win-win-win."
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An avid kayaker who lives in a solar-powered house off Chesapeake Bay, he also confesses to being "a tree hugger" -- but he isn't worried about sharing an agenda with environmentalists. "It doesn't matter what the principal motivation is," he says. "It's just two different sets of reasons for wanting the same thing."

THE VISIONARY -- Amory Lovins
Nobody has a more varied and eccentric set of credentials as a climate crusader than Amory Lovins. A respected physicist and economist who co-founded the Rocky Mountain Institute in 1982, Lovins has published 29 books on energy and the environment, helped the semiconductor industry devise hyper-efficient factories, and advised 18 heads of state, including Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. His top priority, however, is transforming the automobile. Thanks to America's love affair with the Hummer, average fuel efficiency is actually worse today than it was in 1980.

"Transportation accounts for 70 percent of America's oil demands and generates a third of all carbon emissions," says Lovins, 57. "It is the most intractable part of the climate problem."

To prod Detroit to think cleaner, Lovins has designed a new kind of SUV: the Revolution. His concept car goes from zero to 60 in 8.3 seconds and gets 114 miles per gallon. Crafted from superstrength plastics, the Revolution weighs only 1,850 pounds -- less than half as much as a conventional car -- yet has more than five times the crash resistance. That makes it light enough to be driven by hydrogen fuel cells, which lack the oomph to power heavier cars with gas engines.
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"Using energy more efficiently doesn't just address the climate crisis -- it offers an economic bonanza," Lovins says. "Why? Because saving fossil fuel is a lot cheaper than buying it."

THE PIED PIPER -- Greg Nickels
Earlier this year, as the rest of the industrialized world prepared to implement the Kyoto Protocol to reduce global warming, Greg Nickels was frustrated to see the United States sitting on the sidelines. So the Seattle mayor decided that if "the White House isn't going to make it happen from the top down, America's cities can and will make it happen from the ground up."

In February, Nickels introduced the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, calling on municipalities to meet Kyoto's targets -- reducing greenhouse gases to below 1990 levels. So far, 187 mayors from major cities in 38 states have signed the agreement, and Nickels hopes to double the number next year. "He's making global warming the focus of the next great grass-roots revolution," says New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson. "Let's face it -- if we wait around for the feds to act on global warming, nothing is going to happen."
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When it comes to global warming, cities are both the problem and the solution. They account for 78 percent of all climate-warming emissions -- but they may possess enough purchasing power to actually alter the weather. "We buy car fleets, buses, construction equipment, computer systems, light bulbs," says Nickels, whose city's economy is larger than Ireland's. "If we invest in efficient technologies, that can have huge implications for climate change."