- Encouraging news from Canada that includes a practical carbon tax. The choice is between carbon trading and carbon tax- carbon trading involves huge and complicated overhead expenses and so far, poor results. A simple carbon tax makes sense. British Columbia is putting a tax in place BUT making it revenue-neutral so not increasing taxes but merely shifting to taxing what we don’t want. So logical! Want to move to Canada? - Editor
Climate Change Plan Takes BC 73 per cent Towards 2020 Target
British Columbia’s Climate Action Plan outlines comprehensive strategies and initiatives that will take B.C. approximately 73 per cent towards meeting the goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 33 per cent by 2020, Premier Gordon Campbell said today. “The plan outlines a roadmap to a new, prosperous, green economy for British Columbia, with a wide range of specific actions which will make the province more efficient, competitive and productive while reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” said Premier Campbell. “In addition to laying out actions announced since 2007, the plan outlines how the province’s Climate Action Team will recommend strategies to bridge the remaining gap to reach the province’s emissions reduction target by 2020.”
British Columbia’s Climate Action Plan is available at: www.gov.bc.ca
http://www.theenergynews.com/news/article.php?storyid=3180&newstype=gov
and
British Columbia’s Carbon Tax Is Revenue-Neutral
 
B.C.’s revenue-neutral carbon tax puts a price on each tonne of greenhouse gases emitted, while at the same time returning every dollar collected back to taxpayers through reductions to income tax, small business tax, and corporate tax, the climate dividend, and low-income climate action credits.  It rewards green choices, and encourages consumers to reduce their fuel consumption, increase fuel efficiency, use cleaner fuels, and adopt new technology. Even after paying the carbon tax, most British Columbians will have more money in their pockets because of the tax reductions made possible by the carbon tax.
http://www.livesmartbc.ca/carbon/index.html

- What a clever deception campaign to call one of the most dangerous toxins known to man “Clean.” How clean is something if it gives you cancer or deforms your baby? Or if it pollutes the ground for tens of thousands of years? Twice as much money for nukes as for renewables is frightening. If you were putting up a loan guarantee, would you feel safer with a payback from wind or solar, or from nuclear, where one mistake can create tremendous liability? - Editor
US DOE Solicits $30.5 Billion in Clean Energy Loan Guarantees (Nukes get twice as much as renewables)
The U.S. Department of Energy on Monday solicited $ 30.5 billion for clean energy loan guarantees. The guarantees will boost the nuclear power and renewable energy industries as part of the Bush administration’s effort to encourage projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The DOE is soliciting $18.5 billion for nuclear power projects, $10 billion in renewable energy and advanced transmission and distribution projects, and $2 billion for advanced nuclear power projects, which refers to the next generation of nuclear power.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200806301340
DOWJONESDJONLINE000451_FORTUNE5.htm

- A desert is full of life, so it is important to consider how to minimize the ecological damage. Selecting the more efficient systems that require a smaller footprint is key, plus measures can be taken to not eliminate the wildlife. If we wait an additional two years as decided previously, however, far more ecosystems would be destroyed from climate change and from never-ending digging for oil, gas, and coal. - Editor
U.S. lifts freeze on solar applications in West
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday said it reversed an earlier decision freezing solar project applications in six Western states and would accept new applications. “We heard the concerns expressed…about waiting to consider new applications and we are taking action,” BLM director James Caswell said. The government agency announced a freeze a month ago, and the decision was criticized by many in the solar industry.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/7626126

Indifference
International cartoon contest 2ed place- by Igor Kondenko, Ukraine
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/no-words-.htmlssary-the-cartoonists-tackle-climate-change-859017.html?action=Popup&ino=2

- Some amazing and powerful cartoons really hit home- it’s worth considering how these could get wider distribution. - Editor
No words necessary: The cartoonists tackle climate change
A picture may paint a thousand words, but a cartoon provokes, protests and entertains – all at once. It is this that makes cartoonists so valuable and influential in times of crisis. Today, that crisis is climate change, and clever imagery can give new impetus to our struggle to combat global warming. The organisers of Earthworks 2008, a global cartoon competition, believe that art and humour are simple ways to get the environmental message across.  The 50 or so countries from which the 600 competition entries were sent are all suffering the effects of global warming, some more dramatically than others.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/no-words-.htmlssary-the-cartoonists-tackle-climate-change-859017.html

QUOTE
“In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint,
‘Your money or your life,’
that’s not supposed to be a hard question.”
Barbara Kingsolver, noted author during commencement address

- For decades now, heavy polluters have created fake organizations with names that make it seem as if they are for the environment, gaining huge publicity advantages by such techniques as writing reports claimed to be objective, yet obfuscate the truth. Millions of people have been fooled. One fake environmental organization sponsored by the coal industry, for example, was “Greening Earth Society,” which argued that global warming was a good thing because all that extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would make the world greener. Now folks trying to protect our climate have turned the tides during a major coal conference. We can fight coal polluters by protesting outside their meetings or joining the powers inside. They went inside to “speak truth to power.” Of course what we really need is open, moderated genuine dialogue between sides. We all need to care about tomorrow, and tomorrow is at risk for all of us. - Editor

The environmental group Greenpeace posed as a pro-coal organization to become a sponsor of the 2008 McCloskey Coal USA conference and deliver an anti-coal message at the gathering, officials said. Greenpeace spokesman Carroll Muffett was allowed to speak twice. He blasted coal as a polluting fuel and accused coal executives of failing to protect the public. The team manned a booth offering information and anti-coal paraphernalia. In the conference brochure, an ad for the fake Institute seems pro-coal, but readers that go to the www.tomorrowsenergytoday.org  Web site are redirected to www.coal-is-dirty.com. The Greenpeace team handed out business cards that read: “The Institute for Energy Solutions is a joke. So is clean coal.” The cards were signed Greenpeace.
Muffett said the environmental action group merely copied a tactic used by several industries, creating a benign-sounding but phony front to promote their position. Greenpeace had three children handing out asthma inhalers and masks. That offended some attendees. “I think that using kids … was inappropriate,” Gerard McCloskey, chairman of the consulting and publishing company, said. Muffett demurred, saying one of the 12-year-old boys has asthma and the youngsters wanted to be there. “What to me is unconscionable is to sell a product when you know it gives children asthma.”
If you go to www.tomorrowsenergytoday.org/news, you will be directed to http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/ which has the story of this action and a lot of useful information for understanding why “clean” isn’t.
Useful information on the problems of “clean coal” at http://www.coal-is-dirty.com/coal-destroys-mountains
http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN27462956

- Such a powerful commencement speech, this excerpt does not do it justice- it’s really worth reading in its entirety. Kingsolver took the challenge of facing our climate crisis head-on instead of pretending these new graduates weren’t going to have to face a very different world. A real challenge. Now let’s get the current decision-makers to face the issue, as well. - Editor 
 

“How to be Hopeful” Commencement Address
How can we get from here to there, without burning up our ship? That will be central question of your adult life: to escape the wild rumpus of carbon-fuel dependency, in the nick of time. You’ll make rules that were previously unthinkable, imposing limits on what we can use and possess. You will radically reconsider the power relationship between humans and our habitat. In the words of my esteemed colleague and friend, Wendell Berry, the new Emancipation Proclamation will not be for a specific race or species, but for life itself. Imagine it. Nations have already joined together to rein in global consumption. Faith communities have found a new point of agreement with student activists, organizing around the conviction that caring for our planet is a moral obligation. Before the last UN Climate Conference in Bali, thousands of U.S. citizens contacted the State Department to press for binding limits on carbon emissions. We’re the five percent of humans who have made 50 percent of all the greenhouse gases up there. But our government is reluctant to address it, for one reason: it might hurt our economy.
For a lot of history, many nations said exactly the same thing about abolishing slavery. We can’t grant humanity to all people, it would hurt our cotton plantations, our sugar crop, our balance of trade. Until the daughters and sons of a new wisdom declared: We don’t care. You have to find another way. Enough of this shame.
Have we lost that kind of courage? Have we let economic growth become our undisputed master again? As we track the unfolding disruption of natural and global stabilities, you will be told to buy into business as usual: You need a job. Trade your future for an entry level position. Do what we did, preserve a profitable climate for manufacture and consumption, at any cost. Even at the cost of the other climate – the one that was hospitable to life as we knew it. Is anyone thinking this through?  In the awful moment when someone demands at gunpoint, “Your money or your life,” that’s not supposed to be a hard question.
A lot of people, in fact, are rethinking the money answer. Looking behind the cash-price of everything, to see what it cost us elsewhere: to mine and manufacture, to transport, to burn, to bury. What did it harm on its way here? Could I get it closer to home? Previous generations rarely asked about the hidden costs. We put them on layaway. You don’t get to do that. The bill has come due. Some European countries already are calculating the “climate cost” on consumer goods and adding it to the price. The future is here. We’re examining the moralities of possession, inventing renewable technologies, recovering sustainable food systems. We’re even warming up to the idea that the wealthy nations will have to help the poorer ones, for the sake of a reconstructed world. We’ve done it before. That was the Marshall Plan. Generosity is not out of the question. It will grind some gears in the machine of Efficiency. But we can retool.
http://news.duke.edu/2008/05/kingsolver.html

A judge in Georgia has thrown out an air pollution permit for a new coal-fired power plant because the permit did not set limits on carbon dioxide emissions. Both opponents of coal use and the company that wants to build the plant said it was the first time a court decision had linked carbon dioxide to an air pollution permit. The decision’s broader legal impact was not clear, either for the plant or for others outside Georgia, but it signaled that builders of coal plants would face continued difficulties in the court system as well as with elected officials in many states.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/business/01coal.html?ref=business

 QUOTE
“Politicians have been throwing around all kinds of ideas in response to the skyrocketing energy prices, from the rethinking of nuclear power to pushing biofuels and more renewables and ending the ban on offshore drilling. But anyone who tells you this would bring down gas prices any time soon is blowing smoke.”
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, criticizing McCain at the Florida conference on climate conference http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-arnold27-2008jun27,0,858804.story

- The implications of this decision are quite profound. We fail to recognize how much land and sea, and the life therein, have been destroyed because of oil, gas, and coal, and now our nation wants to continue to expand devastation of ecosystems with cancerous growths of tar sands, mountain-top removal, off-shore drilling - on and on. But the answers to such havoc such as solar must now be halted here for years. Humm, perhaps the oil, gas, and coal folks had a say in this? - Editor
US halts solar energy projects
The US government is putting a hold on new solar energy projects on public land for two years so it can study the environmental impact of sun-driven plants. The Bureau of Land Management says the moratorium on solar proposals is needed to determine how a new generation of large-scale projects could affect plants and wildlife on the land it manages. The move has angered some solar energy proponents who argue it could hold up the industry at a vital juncture, given the pressing need to secure alternative energy sources at a time of soaring oil prices. Brad Collins, executive director of the American Solar Energy Society, argued the analysis could halt recent momentum in the domestic solar industry that has seen “a large number of international, large-scale players move their operations and headquarters” to the US and impact the growing field of “green collar jobs”.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/27/easolar127.xml