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Steadfast stay the course policy making is often overblown.  As some have said about George W Bush, ‘you’ll know he’ll say the same thing Wednesday that he said Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday.’  The real world is not static, learning institutions and learning individuals will adapt to changing reality and changing understanding of reality … or suffer the consequences.  Thus, developing more nuanced understandings and being able to see multiple angles (positive and negative) of complex situations, complex evolving / changing situations, now that is generally a strength.

But, McFlipping and McFlopping to pander to different audiences, to seek to represent oneself via a truthiness that doesn’t seem to meet the real situation, to abandon seemingly core moral positions for momentary advantage, this is a far different thing.

When it comes to Global Warming and the Climate Crisis, John McCain is McFlip in favor of doing something and in favor of “green technology” and McFlop in failing to show up for 100% of the relevant votes in the Senate.

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Architecture2030, a fantastic organization, seeks to send a message come 19-22 April:  think about Nancy Reagan and Just Say No to the opiate of coal!  Send the message to all when you:

Wear BLUE for Earth Day 2008!

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Terra Daily reports on a Yale meta study looking at the economic impacts of a carbon-constrained economy.  The results:

“As Congress prepares to debate new legislation to address the threat of climate change, opponents claim that the costs of adopting the leading proposals would be ruinous to the U.S. economy. The world’s leading economists who have studied the issue say that’s wrong – and you can find out for yourself,” said Robert Repetto, professor in the practice of economics and sustainable development at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies …

Check out See For Yourself, an interactive website which enables users to examine studies, their assumptions, and results.

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Yesterday, Barack Obama gave a speech likely to become part of the pantheon of great American political speeches and moral speeches. A More Perfect Union is impressive, overwhelming even, on many levels. If you haven’t seen it, watch it. If you haven’t read it, read it.  Having listened to it twice and read it many more, each revisit sparks different ways of thinking about and reacting to it.  Yet, a gap remains and the sense of a gap even strengthens with each visit to it.

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Guest post from BruinKid.

They’re at it again.  Over at ICECAP, a site that claims to not be made up of global warming deniers, but turns out to host some of the biggest names in the global warming denial field that get serious $$$ from the oil companies, Joseph D’Aleo (a meteorologist, not climate scientist) put up their latest lie.  This graph is the brunt of their argument.

See??  There’s no correlation between temperatures and CO2 output!

Debunking after the fold.

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Some of the most interesting activities related to Greening America are happening on campuses (including high schools).  More than 500 university presidents have signed the American College & University Presidents Climate Commitment pledging serious action on their campuses to develop a greenhouse gas reduction plan for their campus, to take action (such as commiting to LEED construction on campus and Energy Star appliance purcahses) even while planning, begin executing the comprehensive plan within two years, and be transparent in processes throughout this plan.  In this process, they have allies and watchdogs in their students, like the thousands involved in the Youth Climate Movement.  And, those 500 schools are represented in March Madness where we will find out if the Greenest schools are the hottest basketball schools.  Some 24 of the 64 schools are “green”.  The East Region actually has a majority (9 of 16) that are “Green”.  

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The Wall Street Journal prides itself as America’s business newspaper of record when, in fact, the editorial board clearly seems to have an anti (sensible) business agenda. Amid the booming “green” business market, they went forward and held what sounds like it was a highly interesting conference last week:  Eco:nomics.  Amid all of the interesting panels, presentations, and discussions, there is an interesting backstory that the WSJ is unlikely to front page:  business leader after business leader rejected the idea that dealing with global warming will have devastating impacts on the economy. 

Eco:Nomics attendee David Roberts, of Grist, has done a quite insightful and downright witty post on Eco:Nomics: The decline and fall of the ideologues, subtitled “Delayers and doomsayers receive a chilly reception from pragmatic business leaders.”

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The environmental impact of warfare is real, a cost that is rarely understood or accounted for as this is submerged under the quite real costs in people’s lives and other resources (notably dollars).  How many ‘average’ people when consider the U-Boat campaigns of World War II consider the oil slicks and implications for wildlife? The long-term impacts of bomb craters on a jungle? The … Over 30 years ago, I read Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War which first sensitized me to this issue. Thus, warfare (whether Just or otherwise) has an impact on the environment, on that space in which we live, work, die.

Oil for Change just issued a report that seeks to raise awareness in this vein, highlighting yet another “cost” of the Iraq War:  A Climate of War: The war in Iraq and global warming (pdf).

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As reported today in the Washington Post, the cold winter has lead to more Artic ice than has been seen for several years, “maximum sea ice extent in March increased by 3.9 percent over that of the previous three years.”  Wow. Global Warming is done and we need to fear the ice?  Well, first off, “climate” is not measured in three years: “the total ice coverage was still 2.2 percent below the long-term average.”

Even more interestingly, is the look and consideration of long-duration ice coveage.  “The very old ice, which remains in the Arctic for at least six years, made up more than 20 percent of the Arctic in the mid- to late 1980s, but by this winter it had decreased to 6 percent.”  As one scientist noted,

It’s a facade, like a Hollywood set. There’s no building behind it.”

A Potemkin Village of ice coverage.

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The Financial Times published what might be called an Open Letter from John McCain to Europeans:  America Must Be a Good Role Model.   The first question through the gate, before reading anything other than the title: Does that mean that John McCain believes that American under George W Bush and Richard Cheney has not been a good role model?  That George Bush’s American does not live up to “our own high standards of morality and international responsibility”? This suggests so:

We cannot torture or treat inhumanely the suspected terrorists that we have captured. We must close the detention facility at Guantá­namo

Yet, if John McCain believes (or claims) this, is he willing to name names or just talk around the issue?

But why does this the Guantanamo detention facility matter at Energy Smart? Putting aside the wind turbines used to power it and the potential for solar power, the interest here is more the paragraphs related to Global Warming. And, the disingenuous and misleading claims that are part of John McCain’s Straight Talk Express directly to a dirty energy non-action machine.

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