Peoples' Climate March NYC

Not all business groups are calling President Obama’s climate plan a bottom-line buster.

The environmental advocacy group Ceres released a letter of support to the White House with backing from 173 investors and companies including giants such as Unilever, VF Corporation  and  Mars.

The investors, who manage a combined $800 billion in assets, said they were looking for long-term policies that would protect their portfolios.

Clean Energy Portfolios Needed
“Analysts are predicting that climate change (and related policy uncertainty) could add as much as 10 percent to portfolio-wide risk in the next two decades, putting trillions of dollars of institutional investors’ assets at risk. In order to manage this risk, we, as investors, are seeking long-term policies that provide businesses the certainty needed to transition to a clean energy economy.”  Here is the link: they wrote.

Former VP Al Gore, Obama Critic, Speaks to the Plan

As recently as a year ago, former Vice President Al Gore was publicly criticizing President Obama’s environmental record, characterizing his efforts as all talk and no action, despite Mr. Obama’s push to cut emissions from cars.

But Mr. Gore, who was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his advocacy of urgent measures to combat man-made climate change, praised the administration’s latest plan.

“Today’s announcement by the Obama administration to reduce our nation’s global warming pollution from power plants is the most important step taken to combat the climate crisis in the country’s history,” he said in statement.

Climate-Change Deniers Called Out
“As with the connection between tobacco and lung cancer, special interests have vehemently denied the linkage between carbon emissions and the climate crisis,” he said.

“These special interests now recognize that change is inevitable, but continue to trot out misleading and false claims to spread confusion and delay action for as long as they can,” he added. “However, it is now clear that further inaction would be extremely dangerous and destructive for America and the rest of the world.”

Bipartisan Report Tallies High Toll on Economy

The National Climate Assessment summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. A team of more than 300 experts guided by a 60-member Federal Advisory Committee produced the report, which was extensively reviewed by the public and experts, including federal agencies and a panel of the National Academy of Sciences.

Clive Hamilton is professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He is the author of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (Yale University Press, 2013) -

Holocene and Anthropocene
The early-Anthropocene hypothesis effectively dissolves the distinction between the Holocene, which started some 11,700 years ago and encompasses the beginning of agriculture, and the Anthropocene, enabling ecopragmatists to argue that there is nothing inherently preferable about a Holocene Earth—a moral claim that permits the conscious creation of a different kind of planet. Hence their attraction to geoengineering schemes aimed at regulating solar radiation or changing the chemical composition of the oceans. In the words of the most vocal eco-pragmatist, the environmental scientist Erle Ellis, “We will be proud of the planet we create.” Ellis speaks of “the good Anthropocene,” a golden era in which we relinquish nostalgic attachments to a nature untouched by humans and embrace the new epoch as “ripe with human-directed opportunity.”

Earth - System Thinking
But the idea of a good Anthropocene is based on a fundamental misreading of science. It arises from a failure to make the cognitive leap from ecological thinking—the science of the relationship between organisms and their local environments—to Earth system thinking, the science of the whole Earth as a complex system beyond the sum of its parts. The early Anthropocene hypothesis goes against strong evidence, provided by Crutzen, Will Steffen and other researchers, that only with the beginning of the industrial revolution can we detect a human influence on the functioning of the Earth system as a whole.

Human a "Force of Nature"
The revolutionary meaning of Earth-system science is lost on the ecopragmatists. In reality, the arrival of the new epoch represents not merely the further spread of human influence across the globe but a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and the Earth system—one in which human activity now accelerates, decelerates and distorts the great cycles that make the planet a dynamic entity. The radical distinctiveness of the Anthropocene lies in the fact that humans have become a novel “force of nature”, one that is shaping the geological evolution of the planet. So far-reaching is the impact of modern humans that esteemed palaeoclimatologist Wally Broecker has suggested that we have not entered a new geological epoch, a relatively minor event on the geologic time scale, but a new era—the Anthropozoic—on a par in Earth history with the development of multicellular life.

Dangerous Wishful Thinking
Some climate science deniers believe only God can change the climate; ecopragmatists, by contrast, see humans as “the god species.” Here is what the god species and this kind of thinking are certain to give us: an atmosphere with 500 ppm of CO2 (probably closer to 700 ppm) and a climate that is hot, sticky and chaotic. It will indeed take omnipotence to fix the problem without calamity. For those who prefer orthodox climate science, such unbounded optimism is dangerous, wishful thinking.