Not having the world's fastest connection, I use Sage for Firefox to keep up on news headlines. Click the feed, wait a second, and watch the headlines come up without all the extra ads and widgets and scripts. Beautiful. One of the feeds I check fairly regularly is Yahoo: Climate Change. I like being able to check news by issue, which is why I also subscribe to feeds created by Google News searches, as well.So I clicked on my climate change feed and I came across two headlines, one above the other. It's too early to start drinking, so I guess I'll write about them. First is a Bloomberg Story, "Obama to Act Quickly on Global Warming in 2009."
President-elect Barack Obama will act quickly on a campaign promise to address climate change upon taking office in January, his environment adviser said.
Obama will borrow from initiatives in place in Europe and some U.S. states to control heat-trapping emissions, Jason Grumet said today in Washington. While he avoided talk of new policies today, the adviser last month said Obama may continue international climate negotiations endorsed by his predecessor, George W. Bush, former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair and others.
We really should start calling this the "climate emergency" or "climate crisis," so it's good to see that we'll finally have a president who takes it seriously. This is something that needs to be addressed yesterday.
But there were two stories. The next was the one that made me consider drinking -- Associated Press's "Bingaman: Global warming on Congress' back burner."
Congress will not act until 2010 on a bill to limit the heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming despite President-elect Obama's declaration that he will move quickly to address climate change, the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee predicted Wednesday.
Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., said that while every effort should be made to cap greenhouse gases, the economic crisis, the transition to a new administration and the complexity of setting up a nationwide market for carbon pollution permits preclude acting in 2009.
"The reality is, it may take more than the first year to get it all done," Bingaman told a carbon markets conference here.
You know, in all the post-election celebrating, I forgot just how badly Democratic congressional leadership sucks. They were ready to roll over every time Bush wanted to do something stupid and now they feel the need to put the brakes on the necessary...
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