Inconvenient Countdown: Today!!!

The opening of An Inconvenient Truth is here in Seattle (along with 73 additional screens nationwide), and I thought I'd just refresh what's at stake here (thanks to this handy summary over at AlterNet--check it out for a wealth of supporting links):

Nineteen of the 20 hottest years on record have occurred since 1980, with 2005 marking the warmest yet. But proof of global warming goes beyond higher temperatures. In the far north, Inuit hunters have fallen through ice, and villages have lost ground to swelling seas. In the tropics, deluged islanders are making plans for permanent evacuation. Seas worldwide have risen four to eight inches in the last century; Massachusetts alone has lost 65 acres a year. Malaria has spread to higher altitudes in places such as the Colombia Andes, which is 7,000 feet above sea level.

Scientists are considering creating an official Category 6 for hurricanes "as evidence mounts that hurricanes around the world have sharply worsened over the past 30 years -- and all but a handful of hurricane experts now agree this worsening bears the fingerprints of man-made global warming."

A study published in Science Magazine analyzed 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003. Not a single one challenged the scientific consensus that the earth's temperature is rising due to human activity. In 2005, a top group of scientists convened by British Prime Minster Tony Blair met and examined the catastrophic impacts of global average temperature increases. The U.S. Climate Change Science Program, an intergovernmental agency, also concluded that humans are driving the warming trend through greenhouse gas emissions, noting "the observed patterns of change over the past 50 years cannot be explained by natural processes alone, nor by the effects of short-lived atmospheric constituents such as aerosols and tropospheric ozone alone."

[...]

President Bush will be ignoring "An Inconvenient Truth" when the movie opens in the nation's capital, just as he has ignored the inconvenient truth of global warming throughout his administration. In 2000, candidate Bush pledged to "establish mandatory reduction targets for emissions of four main pollutants: sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury and carbon dioxide." That promise was short-lived. One year later, Bush backed away from his campaign promise and in 2003, his administration ruled that carbon dioxide, the chief cause of global warming, was not a pollutant and did not need to be regulated.

The President still thinks that there is a "fundamental debate" over whether climate change is "manmade or natural," ignoring the consensus of the scientific community and the opinion of his own Environmental Protection Agency, which in 2002 stated that global warming "is real and has been particularly strong within the past 20 years...due mostly to human activities."

The BushCo Gang might be doing their best to ignore global warming/climate change, but that doesn't mean that business is. Check out this NYTimes business section article on the efforts of Timberland to reduce its carbon emissions:

When Timberland, the outdoor clothing company, studied ways to reduce its carbon emissions four years ago, it weighed several options: building a wind farm in the Dominican Republic, buying power generated by renewable resources and setting up a vast bank of solar panels at one of its distribution centers in Ontario, Calif.

It chose to do all those things, but that was the easy part. When Jeffrey B. Swartz, Timberland's president and chief executive, considered how much carbon dioxide was produced in making leather for the company's famous boots, the answer came as a surprise.

[...]

Americans are increasingly recognizing that the effects of carbon emissions on global warming are a serious problem, but there are no rules in the United States regulating heat-trapping gases comparable to those that most other developed countries have adopted under the Kyoto Protocol. Some United States businesses, though, are responding for a variety of reasons anyway: to satisfy customers or shareholders who worry about the environment, to improve their public image or to drive down their energy costs. In addition, some states and local authorities have stepped in to try to curb their contributions to global warming.

So business is on its own--even more so according to this Christian Science Monitor article:

A few years ago a little-known US Energy Department program helped produce a design technology for lightweight cars and trucks that in 2004 alone saved the nation 122 million barrels of oil, or about $9 billion.
Even without that breakthrough, the tiny Industrial Technologies Program routinely saves the United States $7 worth of energy for each dollar it spends, proponents say.

So, with energy prices spiking and President Bush pushing for more energy research, the ITP would seem a natural candidate for more funding. In fact, its budget is set to get chopped by a third from its 2005 level. It's one of more than a dozen energy-efficiency efforts that the Energy Department plans to trim or eliminate in a $115 million cost-saving move.

[...]

If Congress accepts the Energy Department's proposed 2007 budget, it will cut $152 million - some 16 percent - from this year's budget for energy-efficiency programs. Adjusting for inflation, it would mean the US government would spend 30 percent less on energy efficiency next year than it did in 2002, the ACEEE says.

I'll be seeing the film tonight with some of my FotF homies, and I'll do a post about it when time permits this weekend.