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Three presidential candidates just got on board with the Step It Up campaign.

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Which Presidential Candidates Are Stepping It Up to Halt Climate Change?

By Bill McKibben, Grist.org. Posted October 23, 2007.


Three presidential candidates just got on board with the Step It Up campaign.

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You can advance many great arguments against making Iowa and New Hampshire the bellwethers of our political life: they are pale, unrepresentative, rural, and obsessed with a few issues (the price of corn has doubled in the last year due to the ethanol boom, which in turn is due to the Iowa caucus).

But one argument that their backers always make rings true as well: in an America so oversized that politics takes on an entirely abstract feeling, in these two states the presidential candidates actually engage with citizens. The New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucus offer the only punctures in the airless sphere that is high-level American political life -- the only chance for regular people to get inside for a moment.

What do I mean? Here's what I mean:

At noon last Saturday, a few of us were sitting around the Step It Up 2 offices along Elm St. in Manchester, N.H., eating a lunch we'd carried in from a nearby diner. We looked out the window, and there was Dennis Kucinich peering in at our signs and banners.

Lindsay Franklin grabbed the Flip camera and ran out on the sidewalk where she asked him if he'd come to one of the Step It Up events on Nov. 3 and give a talk. Sure, he said -- and with that we had our first commitment from a presidential candidate.

The second came 10 or 15 seconds later, when someone's cell phone buzzed. Ian Hough and Zo Tobi were two blocks down the street, listening to John McCain speak at a forum organized by Clean Air-Cool Planet.

When question time came, they stepped up to the mike and asked the senator if he'd come to a Step It Up rally, and he said yes, if he got an invitation. We didn't bother telling him he'd already received several hundred through the invite tool on our website -- ace organizer Roger Shamel simply got up from the audience and handed him a hard-copy invitation.

Not only that, but McCain said he might support a moratorium on new coal-fired power as long as we could show him possible alternatives.

Before the day was out, we'd also heard from John Edwards, who promised to join our big New Orleans rally, complete with brass band, second-line march, and a front-row view of the big trouble that can be caused by global warming and bad government.

In other words, we've got real momentum starting to pick up.

And the reason it's happening is that our invite tool lets everyone, as it were, live in New Hampshire for a little while. It offers a direct and powerful way to actually connect with presidential campaigns. We know from their schedulers that presidential candidates and members of Congress are sensing the groundswell for global-warming action thanks to all the messages showing up in their inboxes.

Now's the time to turn up the heat. We've got three weeks to make our point, and not long after that American politics will regrow its hard shell of commercials and stage-managed events. The 2008 election won't be decided till next November -- but our best chance to affect it comes this fall.

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Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

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View:
IF YOU WANT YOUR VOTE TO COUNT FOR YOU,VOTE JOHN EDWARDS
Posted by: SALLY EVANS on Oct 23, 2007 7:17 PM   
Current rating: 4    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
JOHN EDWARDS IS THE MAN THAT HAS DONE HIS HOMEWORK. THE UNIONS ARE FAVORING EDWARDS BECAUSE THEY KNOW JOHN WILL BE WORKING HARD FOR THEM. WITHOUT QUESTION, EDWARDS IS A MAN OF HIGH MORAL CHARACTER AND WANTS ONLY THE BEST FOR EACH AND EVERY CITIZEN AND KNOWS HOW TO GET IT. VOTE FOR YOURSELF; VOTE JOHN EDWARDS

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

Bill McKibben, you didn't answer your own question.
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 23, 2007 8:19 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Dennis Kucinich seems green, but he is against nuclear power, which means that,
if elected, he will be overpowered because people still need electricity. NOVA
on PBS this evening was a repeat of their solar electricity show. According to
NOVA, solar power is good for cutting your electric bill because you get solar
power when the peak of electricity usage and the most expensive electricity
happens. Also according to NOVA, solar power is too expensive, etc. to replace
the grid or to get off the grid. You can sell electricity to the grid during the day
when electricity is expensive, but you buy electricity back at night. Various
interviewees on NOVA had various ideas about how much solar power would be
in use when, but the most enthusiastic answer was 30% of our electricity needs.
NASA spent millions of dollars for the solar cells on the 2 rovers on Mars. Each
rover gets something like a few hundred watts, if memory serves.

"McCain said he might support a moratorium on new coal-fired power as long as
we could SHOW HIM POSSIBLE ALTERNATIVES." If you tell him the
alternatives are wind and solar, McCain is not going to support a moratorium on
new coal-fired power. Remember, he said POSSIBLE. He meant: Technology
we actually have now, not science fiction, not wishful thinking, not untested ideas
and not future research. If you tell him the alternatives are wind, solar and
nuclear, and there will be no protests of new nuclear plants, McCain will support
a moratorium on new coal-fired power. If you tell him the alternatives are wind,
solar and nuclear, and there will be enthusiastic public support of new nuclear
plants, McCain will support converting coal fired plants to nuclear.

So the question is which do YOU want?:
Resist nuclear power and we humans go extinct in 200 years when ocean
warming leads to H2S gas killing everybody
or
Encourage nuclear and put an end to global warming.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» Solar too expensive? NOT! Posted by: ScottP
» best point so far Posted by: KaptainSpiffy
» RE: Solar too expensive? NOT! Posted by: AsteroidMiner
» RE: math help Posted by: ScottP
Coal is radioactive
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 23, 2007 8:43 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Did you know that enough URANIUM goes up the
smokestack or into the cinders of a coal-fired power plant
to Fully fuel a nuclear power plant with the same output?
See:
http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-
34/text/coalmain.html
If breeding of thorium into uranium and using plutonium as
fuel are allowed, enough uranium and thorium go up the
smokestack of one coal-fired power plant to fully fuel 500
nuclear power plants of the same size. That isn't all that
goes up the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants.
Arsenic and lead are also among the 73 elements in coal
smoke, and the quantities are worthy of commercial
production. Did you know that you get 100 times as much
radiation from a coal-fired power plant as from a nuclear
power plant?
Have you ever heard of background radiation? The natural
background radiation that has been there since the
beginning of time is 1000 times what you get from a
nuclear power plant or 10 times what you get from a coal-
fired power plant. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation
or http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/publications/2000_1.html
If the safety level of nuclear power plants were
LOWERED to the same level as coal-fired power plants,
the resulting [nuclear] electricity would be very cheap
indeed and nuclear power would be very efficient.
I have NO connection with the nuclear power industry.
It is just that I would rather not go extinct because of global
warming. The Existential Risk that is virtually certain to
happen is the same as the End Permian mass extinction:
Hydrogen Sulfide. It is possible to avoid it, but the power
of wealth must be overcome. Coal is a $100 Billion [US]
industry in the US alone.
download from:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00037A5D-
A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000&sc=I100322
from the October 2006 issue of Scientific American
Article: "Impact from the Deep"
"Strangling heat and gases emanating from the earth and
sea, not asteroids, most likely caused several ancient mass
extinctions. Could the same killer-greenhouse conditions
build once again? "
By Peter D. Ward
The last paragraph of the article says:
"The so-called thermal extinction at the end of the
Paleocene began when atmospheric CO2 was just under
1,000 parts per million (ppm). At the end of the Triassic,
CO2 was just above 1,000 ppm. Today with CO2 around
385 ppm, it seems we are still safe. But with atmospheric
carbon climbing at an annual rate of 2 ppm and expected to
accelerate to 3 ppm, levels could approach 900 ppm by the
end of the next century, and conditions that bring about the
beginnings of ocean anoxia may be in place. How soon
after that could there be a new greenhouse extinction? That
is something our society should never find out."
The hydrogen sulfide will finally put an end to the mining of
coal. Nuclear power is the safest available.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: Coal is radioactive Posted by: AMERICAN VETERAN
for your information
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 23, 2007 8:48 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Background radiation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Background_radiation

Background radiation is the ionizing radiation from several natural radiation
sources: sources in the Earth and from those sources that are incorporated in our
food and water, which are incorporated in our body, and in building materials and
other products that incorporate those radioactive sources; radiation sources from
space (in the form of cosmic rays); and sources in the atmosphere which primarily
come from both the radon gas that is released from the earth's surface and
subsequently decays to radioactive atoms that become attached to airborne dust
and particulates, and the production of radioactive atoms from the bombardment
of atoms in the upper atmosphere by high-energy cosmic rays. Since 1945 it also
comes from low levels of global radioactive contamination due to nuclear testing.

............shortened.............

Natural background radiation

Natural background radiation comes from three primary sources: cosmic radiation,
terrestrial sources, and radon. The worldwide average background dose for a
human being is about 2.4 mSv per year. This exposure is mostly from cosmic
radiation and natural isotopes in the Earth.

Cosmic radiation

The Earth, and all living things on it, are constantly bombarded by radiation from
outside our solar system of positively charged ions from protons to iron nuclei.
This radiation interacts in the atmosphere to create secondary radiation that rains
down, including X-rays, muons, protons, alpha particles, pions, electrons, and
neutrons. The dose from cosmic radiation is largely from muons, neutrons, and
electrons.

The dose rate from cosmic radiation varies in different parts of the world based
largely on the geomagnetic field and altitude.

Terrestrial sources

Radioactive material is found throughout nature. It occurs naturally in the soil,
rocks, water, air, and vegetation. The major radionuclides of concern for terrestrial
radiation are potassium, uranium and thorium. Each of these sources has been
decreasing in activity since the birth of the Earth so that our present dose from
potassium-40 is about 1⁄2 what it would have been at the dawn of life on Earth.
Some of the elements that make up the human body have radioactive isotopes,
such as potassium-40, so there is also a very small amount of internal radiation.

Radon

Radon gas seeps out of uranium-containing soils found across most of the world
and may concentrate in well-sealed homes. It is often the single largest contributor
to an individual's background radiation dose and is certainly the most variable in
the United States. Many areas of the world, including Cornwall and Aberdeenshire
in the United Kingdom have high enough natural radiation levels that nuclear
licensed sites cannot be built there—the sites would already exceed legal radiation
limits before they opened, and the natural topsoil and rock would all have to be
disposed of as low-level nuclear waste.

............shortened.............

The exposure for an average person is about 360 millirems/year, 80 percent of
which comes from natural sources of radiation. The remaining 20 percent results
from exposure to artificial radiation sources, such as medical X-rays and a small
fraction from nuclear weapons tests.

............shortened.............

Reference:
http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/publications/2000_1.html

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

RealClimate
Posted by: AsteroidMiner on Oct 23, 2007 9:44 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Tell the candidates to see:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=488

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Shut up already!
Posted by: scott balogh on Oct 24, 2007 7:52 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
What is this incessant yammering on all forms of media concerning presidential candidates? It has gone on for months. Also, there is the the raising of campaign funds. What everyone should be working on is how to get rid of the malignant cancers that threaten the body that is the USA, if not the world. I am talking about the plutocracy that is calling the shots. The likes of Bush and his vicious gang, the lobbyists and the ruling elite must go NOW. No more of the Bush, Clinton, Reagan and others who are, admit it, run by big business. Greed runs government. Nobody will get "elected" unless they are tied to corporate greedy, murderous, conniving business. We need to stop this cycle. We need government financed campaigns without advertising. What the heck is wrong with people that cannot recognize that we mean nothing more to them than being good consumers? Stop the bleeding and suffering and starving and dieing then talk about what to do next. Nothing will change until we take matters in our own hands and start executing the power class.

[« Reply to this comment] [Post a new comment »] [Rate this comment: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5]

» RE: Shut up already! Posted by: AsteroidMiner
» wonderful post Posted by: KaptainSpiffy
I Wouldn't Mind
Posted by: Joe on Oct 29, 2007 12:04 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
I wouldn't mind articles on alternet on technologies that people could use to generate their own electricity and get off the power grid. Or articles on companies people can invest in with those goals. As usual though, every thing here is no-solution, people-weakening, government based.

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