Home
Donate Sign up for e-network
CENTER for BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY Because life is good
ABOUT ACTION PROGRAMS SPECIES NEWSROOM PUBLICATIONS SUPPORT

Content on this page requires a newer version of Adobe Flash Player.

Get Adobe Flash player

MAKE SOME NOISE FOR A BETTER DEAL IN COPENHAGEN
Posted by Kassie Siegel
December 11, 2009, 11:06 a.m.

It’s an upside-down world these days . . . the president accepts the Nobel Peace Prize and talks about how to make war. Science shows impending global catastrophe if current greenhouse gas concentrations are not reduced, and the U.S. Congress talks about protecting the coal and oil industries.

 

Kassie Siegel interview
Frostpaw the polar bear and friends in Copenhagen need us to get to 350. Photo by Kassie Siegel.

Here’s a newsflash from Copenhagen for the president and Congress: It’s not the coal, oil, and nuclear industries that need protection. It’s life on Earth. We need to put a science-based proposal on the table here in Copenhagen. Scientists say we need to reduce carbon dioxide levels back to below 350 ppm, and that means cuts of 45 percent or more below 1990 levels by 2020. What the President has proposed (3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020) is essentially doing nothing. It’s far less than the 7 percent below 1990 by 2012 that the Clinton administration agreed to (but then failed to implement) in 1997.

This is not a “good start.” The Obama administration doesn’t just need “more time.” The president doesn’t need new legislation before he can act, as we show in our paper released here this week, Yes He Can. The President needs to hear from all of us that we demand the leadership and action that he promised on climate change.

We’ll be out on the streets here in Copenhagen this weekend, but we need to make some noise at home as well, so please make that call to the White House and join an event as soon as you can. The polar bears will thank you for it — and they’re just the tip of the melting iceberg.

Next entry – Kerry-Lieberman-Graham Bill: Not a Solution

Polar bears on Hudson Bay © Brendan Cummings