Fuuuuuck. The man’s got a point. Well played, asshole.

He blamed Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe, and called for “drastic solutions” to global warming, and “not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change.”

Rohit Aggarwala, Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability, explains how proposed legislation will reduce energy consumption in buildings and significantly curtail the city’s carbon footprint, while creating jobs and maintaining economic competitiveness. He spoke on these matters at a conference I helped organize last week.

Consider it a much-needed antidote to that OTHER op-ed (which I refuse to link to directly.)

Mr. Obama will tell the delegates to the climate conference that the United States intends to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions “in the range of” 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, officials said.

Yeah, we’re fucked. Awesome gesture but not enough. And this is contingent on Congress making strict news laws against carbon pollution … not likely.

Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that some how, some way, the White House and Congress cobble together a civilized public health care system. Within a decade, Americans are healthier than they’ve been in a generation. Preventative care available to everyone has led to fewer ER visits and fewer instances of chronic, avoidable diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. We have more money in our pockets because we’re not paying for inefficient, privately-controlled health care. More and more of us are spending it on healthier, fresh food, and the obesity epidemic is finally turning a corner.

Guess what? We’re still fucked. Because the Senate decided one crisis is enough.

Bloomberg reports:

The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.

“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”

The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama’s effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.

“Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation,” said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. “In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done.”

This legislation might be our last hope of tackling climate change before it’s too late.

It looks like that hope is lost.

From The Reality-Based Community:

[Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry] Waxman appears to have sold out the indirect land use issue in a deal with [Agriculture Chairman Collin] Petersonon the climate change bill.

Waxman also consented to block EPA from calculating “indirect” greenhouse gas emissions from land-use changes when implementing the federal biofuels mandate. The Democrats will impose a five-year moratorium to allow further study of the issue, with consultation from Congress, EPA, the Energy Department and USDA instrumental in restarting the measurements in the biofuels rules.

It’s not easy to exaggerate just how bad this is. Waxman-Markey has been savaged on the implicit principle that climate stabilization is good, but only if no-one important has to actually do anything different to accomplish it. Among the people who get a pass are anyone who burns coal, and anyone who grows corn or makes fuel out of it; I was worried months ago that a president from a coal state and a corn state might be a problem, but then he promised flatly that in his administration, science was not going to be yoked to a political ox. Boy, is the bloom off this rose: DADT, climate and energy, transparency… “Better than Bush in some ways” is a mighty big comedown from the PR of a few months ago.

In Copenhagen this December, the Indians and the Chinese will be within their rights, and maybe even well-advised, to say “you spent the last eight years burning as much oil and coal as you could, and denying climate change was a problem. Now you enact legislation that forces use of corn ethanol that’s more global warming intensive than gasoline, muzzles your scientists, and requires your regulatory agencies to lie to the public about greenhouse gas releases, all to put money in the pocket of your farmers and reelect a few rural legislators. You’ve made sure no-one who uses electricity from coal will have any reason to use any less of it. You expect us to do your climate stabilization for you, and even more to make up for the antics of these yokels, and to help you pretend you’re being green when you’re not? You trashed Kyoto and now you’re here to trash Copenhagen: get a grip. We’re out of here.”

1,200 pages of … what?

250 pages were stuffed into the already behemoth climate energy bill (which focuses on cap-and-trade legislation) and members of the House’s Energy and Commerce committee have just 24 hours to absorb and make changes.

And that’s how Washington sausage gets made.

(Via jake_brewer.)

Sounds like a fantasy, but Santa Fe-based architect Edward Mazria has done the math, and his “14x” plan, which he calculates will generate $14 in private spending for every stimulus buck spent, is creating major buzz in city halls and statehouses across the country.

Mazria was in Washington, D.C., last week pitching his plan to senators, administration officials, and perhaps more importantly, to a luncheon crowd of about 250 mayors, council members, and county commissioners at a national climate change summit hosted by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI).

… The politicians were riveted by Mazria’s talk, says Michelle Wyman, ICLEI’s executive director. They even stopped eating to pay closer attention, and when Mazria finished his spiel, they gave him standing ovation. “You could almost see in the audience light bulbs going on as he put flesh on the skeleton of his concept,” says Mayor Patrick Hays of North Little Rock, Ark. “It was like a preacher giving a sermon and by the end we were singing out of the same hymn book and there were ten or twelve of us lining up to be baptized.”

mattlehrer writes:

This is real. The idea is that instead of using municipal stimulus money for a one-off project, it’s used to pay points on a mortgage refinancing for a private borrower getting them a lower interest rate as long as that borrower makes energy efficiency investments in the property. Click through for more detail. Brilliant.

Financing energy-efficient retrofits is the greatest barrier to a more sustainable urban environment. (In fact, I’m on a team presenting a conference on the subject this Friday.) The Clinton Climate Initiative’s raison d’tere is “simply” arranging financing — and it’s not clear how much success its had.

This could be a game-changer.