I’m ready for a moratorium on all polar bear imagery.*

Far more humans have been rendered homeless by global warming than polar bears: the Inuit in Shishmaref, Alaska, whose homes are being destroyed by melting ice, the people of the Marshall Islands, which is drowning in the South Pacific, hurricane victims in New Orleans, Sub-Saharan Africans fleeing drought, and many more to come, especially in India.

This kind of ad is designed for the priviledged, whose experience of global warming is limited to panicky or tear-jerking reports from the media and in small talk with their neighbors (“I can’t believe how warm it is today! Climate change, you know.”)  They’re not the people who have suffered and will continue to suffer at the expense of a carbon-fueled global economy.

This approach alienates millions of Americans who are too worried about their own livelihoods to worry about polar bears.  We’re at the point now that our focus needs to be on the economy, security, and people, particularly the disadvantaged in the U.S. and around the world, who are the most vulnerable to the climate crisis and have the least resources to protect themselves.

* I admit, I’ve been guilty.  What can I say?  They’re cute.

via whatonearth, kari-shma, intrsystm.

The Emaar Malls Group is building a 12.1-million-square-foot shopping and entertainment center in Dubai. (Via Sara Zucker.)

A massive air-conditioned indoor mall, amusement park, parking lot, temperature-controlled aquarium, and ice-skating rink in one of the hottest places on Earth that is accessible to most people exclusively by greenhouse-gas spewing airplanes?

Now that the indoor ski slope is up and running, I think this is exactly what the world needs.

Clearly, this sort of diabolical urban planning could only be dreamed up by an oil-rich monarchy with zero compassion for future generations and a vested interest in using all the oil it can’t horde or sell for an exorbitant price.

Sarah Palin in a rally in North Carolina, via Laura McGann.

… and nuke baby nuke, burn baby burn, and watch our grandkids drown baby drown?

Andrew Ang, Professor of Finance, Columbia Business School, on “This American Life.”

Cheerful thought of the day: in a few decades, I think it’s going to be deja vu all over again — except we’ll be talking about a climate gone haywire, wars over resources, and just how little we did to stop it.  We’re in debt to our ears, and not just financially.

RENEWABLE “PORK”

On Monday, the House rejected the financial rescue package by 228 to 205 votes.  On Friday, it passed it, by 263 to 171. What changed? The Dow had its largest single-day drop. Popular opinion reversed. And the bill itself changed. It had picked up $150 billion in what some critics labeled “pork.”

Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense said of the tacked-on portfolio: “Many of these provisions are tax provisions that benefit narrow interests that have been waiting to hop on a legislative train that was leaving Washington.”

True, the bill includes a bizarre tax credit for wooden arrows, worth $200,000, and a very un-eco-friendly seven-year tax rebate for owners of motocross race tracks, worth $100 million, among other less-than-noble and certainly unnecessary provisions.

But there are a few that are crucial to our efforts to mitigate the effects of climate change, certainly not a “narrow” interest:

One-year extension of tax credits for the production of power from wind, solar, and refined coal facilities, and other renewable sources, as well as tax credits for a new category, “marine renewable.” The “Environment News Service” reports that “the extensions will be partly paid for by a change in the tax code for the oil and gas industry.” This portion of the bill includes $800 million for clean energy bonds for renewable energy generating facilities.

On his cellphone from outside the House chamber yesterday afternoon, Peter Mandelstam, the founder and president of BlueWater Wind and a long-time advocate for wind power, said, “We shouldn’t have to be back before Congress every two to three years asking for these extensions. Those of us in the business are committing capital for projects that will be completed in 2012, when the legislation is only through 2009.”

Not surprisingly, King Coal is given precedence.  $1.4 billion will go to refined coal facilities over 10 years, with priority given to those with smaller carbon footprints.  These facilities produce what its proponents, like Evergreen Energy’s President and CEO Kevin R. Collins, call “cleaner coal.”  Faithful readers know how I feel about that.  But I’m willing to accept the lesser evil, and $800 million is appeasement enough, although the 2009 expiration date for some of the provisions is frustrating.

$10 million to allow employers to provide benefits to employees who commute to work on their bicycles (similar to the benefits some employers provide to those who commute in their cars or on public transportation). This will include provisions for the “purchase and repair of a bicycle, bicycle improvements, and bicycle storage.”

Referring to the provisions for tax credits for renewable energy facilities, the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, said:

This was a part of our energy bill last year; it did not survive the Senate. It now has become a part of this legislation. And it is paid for. We fought hard to include these critical tax cuts … because they are central to job creation.

It’s a shame it took this crisis and this bill to get them through Congress, and a shame that people like Mandelstam will have to be back in DC next year, lobbying Congress, instead of building wind farms.

In the vice presidential debate, Senator Biden said he and Obama support building so-called “clean” coal plants.  Governor Palin, in perhaps her only factual statement of the evening, pointed out that he had said the opposite in a rope line at a rally.  And indeed he did, a few weeks ago.

C’mon, Joe, I liked you better when you recognized that coal is coal and it’s dirty. “Clean coal,” a textbook example of an oxymoron, is another example of chasing one last fix (or three) before we check into rehab.

That said, just win this thing for us.

Video shot by a 1Sky campaigner, via Silbatron.

For more info on where the candidates stand, check out “The ‘Clean Coal’ Myth.”

The Colbert Report’s spot-on parody of all those commercials from Big Oil companies that boast about how much they care about the environment:

One day, we’ll live in harmony with nature and all our energy needs will be renewable, as long as we all work together.  But we’re not there yet.  So keep buying gas, and get off our case. Prescott Oil: Leave us alone. We’re on it.