Gustav: More Extreme Weather for a Nation in Denial

Hurricane Gustav is just the latest example of extreme weather in a nation that’s seen its share this summer. Indeed, the Iowa floods and Southeastern drought and western wildfires all fit the patterns scientists say we should expect with global warming. As we watch the spectacle of two million American refugees evacuating the Gulf coast, it’s important to remember that not so long ago category 3 and 4 hurricanes were a true rarity in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. Now they seem almost routine. Indeed, of the ten strongest hurricanes ever recorded in terms of low barometric pressure, six have occurred in just the past ten years.

Learn more in my 2006 book The Ravaging Tide: The Race to Save America’s Coastal Cities. As for climate-induced sea level rise and it’s affect on the levees in New Orleans, see my recent piece below in Grist magazine.

Mike Tidwell

cell 240-460-5838, mikewtidwell@gmail.com

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Fear on their Faces; Hope in their Eyes. VA Citizens Demand Real Solutions for Climate Change

I saw fear yesterday on the faces of the men and women directly affected by the proposed Wise County coal plant who had just driven 8 hours to testify before the Governors Climate Commission. They knew that their land, their health, and their beautiful landscapes were the ones being sacrificed for our runaway energy demands. That fear and concern was most eloquently expressed by Bill McCabe who challenged the commission to actually think and care about the people most affected by dirty energy. To try and relate to the 91 year old woman who could sit on her porch her whole life and enjoy the mountains, worship God with the mountains, and live in a healthy environment with land she has always known. Now the same woman comes outside to her porch to see her familiar mountains flattened and toxic waste left behind.

The nearly 200 citizens that flooded the Governor’s Commission on Climate Change yesterday were concerned about our addiction to dirty energy no matter what part of Virginia they came from. There were the school teachers from NOVA who did not want to use power at the expense of their neighbor’s rights and the college students who could not understand why Virginia’s leaders would blatantly ignore climate scientists about the consequences of building new coal plants. The overwhelming consensus at this hearing was that the commission has to recognize that global warming is real and deal with it aggressively. Residents insisted that VA would be perfect for leading the country in renewable energy and emphasized that its skilled labor force could be at the forefront of the burgeoning green jobs movement to replace dirty industries. Continue reading

Hands in the Middle for Maryland

by Ethan Nuss

Oh yea, Power Vote‘n in MD, baby! This past weekend members of the Maryland Student Climate Coalition (MSCC) gathered to launch Power Vote in style, and set a stellar state goal of 40,000 total pledges! (Two Maryland High School students gathered 400 pledges in the 5 days after returning from the Mega Camp training in MN. Booyah!) The MSCC is also planning multiple coordinated Green Jobs Day of Action events across the state and looking to garnish some high profile media like the Washington Post. But wait it doesn’t stop there…. the MD students heard that the Governor and several of their US congresspeople will be doing a campus speaking tour the first week of September. Expect to see Maryland students there in Power Vote T-shirts, green hard hats, and waving signs, because I smell some sweet bird-dogging.

But before we get ahead of ourselves with the excitement of the Sunday gathering (see silly video). Let’s rewind to Friday when they got their first campaign victory. Maryland students and community members went to an in district meeting with Rep. Elijah Cummings. What was the result of that meeting, you ask? They got Rep. Cummings to become the second member of congress to sign onto the 1Sky platform and commit to Green Jobs, Science based carbon reductions, and a moratorium on new coal plants. Yay! Look out Maryland elected officials because the MSCC is here to Kick this country into action!

CCAN's Hiring Interns! Clean Energy Internships

Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN) is accepting applications for Clean Energy fall internships.

The Chesapeake Climate Action Network is the first grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated exclusively to fighting global warming in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. Our mission is to educate and mobilize citizens of this region in a way that fosters a rapid societal switch to clean energy and energy-efficient products, thus joining similar efforts worldwide to slow and perhaps halt the dangerous trend of global warming.

We are in need of 3-4 qualified and dedicated individuals to work with us in several different capacities. We are looking for interns to support our:

  • Communications/media support for our clean energy and global warming campaigns/trainings.
  • Campus Climate Challenge campaign and other campus activities
  • Federal and state policy campaigns in Virginia and Maryland, with focus on grassroots activism
  • Web Development/Online campaigns

In your cover letter, please indicate whether you would be most interested in working on the national, campus or state campaigns.

The position requires a commitment of at least 15 hours/week during Fall ’08 (September – December). Location of the internship is flexible. Dependent focus

Want to See Climate Change? Look Out Your Front Door. It's here.

Has anyone noticed that our local weather in the D.C. region has turned truly screwy? We go from one bizarre weather condition to the next with almost no pause in between for “normal” conditions. It’s too wet, too dry, too cold, too warm, too windy – nearly all the time. Hmmm? And scientists and average people all over the world, from Japan to Argentina, report similar strangeness. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recently wrote from Kenya that the Serengeti’s April rains, so critical to that famous ecosystem, haven’t shown up this spring. And they didn’t come last year. There’s just no normal weather anymore. Anywhere.

In the D.C. region nothing illustrates this better than the annual Martin Luther King parade. Last year, tired of the cold and grayness of January, the organizers decided to move the annual parade to early April. The result? This year on January 16th (the official King holiday) it was 70 degrees in D.C. Remember all that freakish winter warmth? Outdoor barbeques broke out all over the city on backyard decks still festooned with Christmas decorations. And on Saturday, April 7th, the date of the “warmer” and more hospitable MLK parade? There was actually snow on the ground. The parade majorettes and tuba players woke up to 34 degrees and a blanket of snow on the ground, the most April snow in DC since 1924.

And yes, I know: There’s always been weird weather that occasionally defies the seasonal norms, sometimes dramatically. It’s part of the natural unpredictability of weather. And if you listen to the dismissive climate rants of the Rush Limbaugh crowd, you’ll yield to that inner voice that wants to reassuringly say: Don’t worry. It’s all normal. Everything’s okay. Continue reading

An Analysis of "Barack Obama: New Energy for America"

On August 4th the Obama campaign released a comprehensive program for reform of the U.S. energy system. This article is a critical analysis of that program.

Following an introduction, there are seven separate sections.

The Introduction

Obama frames his program as primarily a response to “our dependence on oil.” He calls this dependence “a threat to our national security, our planet and our economy.”

Comment: It is striking that in this introduction, and nowhere else in the 8-page, single-spaced document, does Obama identify our fossil fuel addiction, or the carbon pollution from the burning of oil, coal and natural gas, as the, or even a, problem.

He does say in the concluding paragraph of the introduction that “the nation (needs) to face one of the great challenges of our time: confronting our dependence on foreign oil, addressing the moral, economic and environmental challenge of global climate change, and building a clean energy future that benefits all Americans.”

He lists in a prominent box six things his program will do:

  1. Provide short-term relief to American families facing pain at the pump

  2. Help create five million new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion over the next ten years to catalyze private efforts to build a clean energy future

  3. Within 10 years save more oil than we currently import from the Middle East and Venezuela combined

  4. Put 1 million Plug-In Hybrid cars Continue reading

Governor Kaine Announces Air Board Appointments

State Air Pollution Control Board


Randolph Gordon M.D. of Mechanicsville, specialist leader at Deloitte Consulting. Gordon holds a master’s degree in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University, a medical degree from the Medical College of Virginia, and fulfills the statutory recommendation that the Air Pollution Control Board have public health representation. He served as the State Health Commissioner from 1995-1998 and is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the Rice Center for Environmental Life Sciences at Virginia Commonwealth University, an environmental center focused on education and policy development regarding rivers.

Bernadette W. Reese of Chesapeake, senior environmental engineer and facilities manager at BASF Corporation. As senior environmental engineer, Reese has developed compliance strategies to meet federal, state and local air, water, solid and hazardous waste regulations. Reese holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Virginia.

Sterling E. Rives III of the City of Richmond, county attorney for Hanover County. Rives has served as Hanover’s county attorney since 1987. He is a graduate of the T.C. Williams School of Law at the University of Richmond. He served from 1999-2008 on the board of directors for Campaign Virginia, an environmental advocacy group focused on environmentally sound waste management policies.