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University of Montana professor Steve Running came away with one distinct impression from his time at the International Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, earlier this month: The United States continues to take small steps to acknowledge the threat of global warming, but binding commitments never come.
"You never see any hard implementation agenda, like the U.S. commits to closing 50 coal-fired power plants in the next decade, or something like that," says Running, who claims a slice of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for work he's done combating climate change. "Do you ever see that? No, never."
That same point couldn't have been better highlighted than when, just days after Copenhagen ended, Running watched aghast as policymakers in his home state gave the thumbs up to lease more than 570 million tons of state-owned coal in the Otter Creek Valley east of Hardin.
For Running, the Otter Creek decision and the token commitments made in Copenhagen are inextricably linked. At the summit, he says all eyes were on the U.S.—the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases—to step up and show it was set to implement hard limits on emissions. It never happened. Instead, as soon as the conference ended, Montana officials showed exactly how quickly leaders forget about climate change when making big decisions.
"Every one of them was waiting for [the U.S.] to show that we were serious," he says of the summit attendees. "And the very next day the Montana state government votes to lease another billion tons of coal, my God. All those countries saw how willing we are to lead. It's pretty pathetic. As long as the political leaders keep making decisions like that, all of these targeted emissions reductions are a total joke."
Montana Land Board members who voted in favor of the Otter Creek deal point to the financial benefits of mining the sprawling expanse near the Tongue River. A sizeable slice of the proceeds are slated for Montana schools.
- Photo by Sarah Daisy Lindmark
- UM climate scientist Steve Running, pictured here at left with NASA’s James Hansen, returned from the International Climate Change Summit just in time to hear the Montana Land Board vote in favor of leasing more than 570 million tons of coal in the Otter Creek Valley.
"We have a fiduciary responsibility to get a return on those assets for the education trust," says Gov. Brian Schweitzer, who voted for the leases along with Secretary of State Linda McCulloch, Attorney General Steve Bullock and State Auditor Monica Lindeen. "If a company moves forward leasing the Otter Creek tracks, they'll move forward after writing a $140 million check to the state of Montana."
Schweitzer says it's easy to point fingers, but the economic realities of sitting atop tons of coal are unavoidable. Fifty percent of the country's electricity still comes from coal, he says. If power companies don't load up on coal in Montana, they'll go somewhere else.
"Wyoming will continue to mine it, or Kentucky," he says. "Or it will be mined in China."
Despite backlash against the Land Board's vote, Schweitzer defends his environmental track record. He points to his 20 x 10 Energy Initiative, which will have curbed energy use in state agencies by 20 percent from 2007 levels by the end of this coming year, while cutting fuel consumption in state vehicles. His administration has also been an aggressive proponent of wind energy, laying a platform for the renewable resource to be an up-and-coming state industry.
"I can sleep very well at night because there's no governor in America, not a single governor in America, who has made greater steps toward energy conservation," Schweitzer says.
But Running says the planet is rapidly changing, and policymakers must look to the broader picture in order to shape a sustainable environment. The Otter Creek decision shows that's not happening.
"The trajectory of emissions is nothing but up," he says. "It has been for decades. And it's been accelerating in the last decade. And if while we argue we continue business as usual emissions, the point will come, yeah, we lost the argument, just by delay, rather than by specific decision."
Running and other Copenhagen attendees struggle to find glimmers of hope from the recent developments. Keegan Eisenstadt of Missoula's ClearSky Climate Solutions, which works locally and internationally to curb greenhouse gas emissions, says the summit overall was a disappointment, but that political momentum continues to build.
"I used to feel like I was a member of this weird little cult—the climate change cult," Eisenstadt says. "Copenhagen was the first time that it felt like the whole world was watching...That, I think, is a significant change."
Another small victory came as the U.S., China, Brazil, India and South Africa signed off on "The Copenhagen Accord." Though not legally binding, the last-minute deal aims to limit global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times, with the U.S. joining other developed nations in providing $100 billion annually by 2020 to help developing nations reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But Running says that's not enough. Climate change is already becoming visible in Montana as mountain pine beetles thrive in warming temperatures and consume forests across the state.
"It is something to contemplate—hillsides full of dead trees and streams that are running out of water," he says. "And you realize that, even here, impacts already are quite clear. I can't imagine anybody can argue that they like millions of acres of dead trees."
The responsibility to change belongs to citizens and policymakers alike, Running says, and urgency is mounting.
"We may have already hit a tipping point," he says.
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Please join the community discussion: "City Club Missoula -Cap And Trade: Is This The Answer To Decreasing Carbon Emissions?, 1/11, Missoula"
http://matr.net/article-37298.html
For how many election cycles have we been told how important it is to elect Democrats to these statewide offices which make up the Land Board? And how important it was to get rid of Burns, and elect a Democrat President? Well, we've done all those things. What is their excuse, now?
Schweitzer has always been the "clean coal", corporate agri-biz guy. He certainly didn't run under any false pretenses, nor did Obama say anything different than that he was going to send more troops to Afghanistan, and that he is "from a coal state, too."
People vote for Democrats because they're supposed to be concerned about the environment, and a little bit smarter about issues like global warming than the Republicans. I'll give Denise Juneau credit for being a Native American, and a Harvard grad. She's obviously nothing like the other Democrats who voted to sell Montana's birthright and sacrifice Mother Earth for a little bit of cash up-front.
Maybe people will finally realize that the Democrats have no interest in change, reform, or any kind of progress. All they care about is their jobs and getting re-elected. We need 100 or 1000 new members for the Green Party. Join at www.mtgreens.org.
Interesting that this article never mentioned the Climategate scandal, in which evidence that the data had been cooked by global warming "scientists" was released.
http://www.theweeklystandard.com/Content/P…
...Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going
out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few
years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. ...
In mid-November a large cache of emails and technical documents from the
Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain were
made available on a number of Internet file-servers for download by the
public--either the work of a hacker or a leak from a whistleblower on the
inside. The emails--more than 1,000 of them--reveal a small cabal of
scientists who, in the words of MIT's Michael Schrage, engaged in "malice,
mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings." ......
Also:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdel…
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/A…
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&…
The disappointment runs deep but it is nothing new. It seems we need to be looking at developing citizen initiative to make changes in ourselves and our communities from the ground up.
A group of us local people started working over five years ago of responding to the concepts of development we were seeing in Western Montana. We decided to throw together our collective resources and middle class wealth and learn to live differently. We chose the ecovillage movements model and bought 40 acres of forested land with a south facing ridge. We are in the beginning stages of the concept but we have worked hard at putting together a vision and mission and have started implementing the plan. Our long term goal is to build a "village" of super efficient but simple homes using local materials such as the beetle killed logs from the land and straw bale construction to build passive solar homes. We intend to catch all the water running off the roofs and reuse the gray water. We have built a greenhouse and started raised bed gardens with plans for much more.
We have done a pretty good job of defining the problems. We are now trying to find solutions. It is clear that it will be we the people, on the ground, looking for ways of living in harmony with each other and the changes we are seeing before it becomes a matter of survival.
We call our community Sundog Ecovillage.
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