Here Comes The Sun
2017 World - Bonn – Fiji Island – Climate Summit COP 23
Salutes Angela Merkel
As broadcast on KOPN 89.5 FM and online at KOPN.org in Columbia, Missouri:
Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, reporting from the U.N. climate summit in Bonn, Germany, on protests underway against oil, coal, gas and nuclear power -
"Indian activists are demonstrating against India’s largest nuclear power station, activists had a special welcome ready for German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday before her address to the conference.
Marshall Islands
COP23 stands for Conference of Parties 23rd year, the first “Islands COP,” with Fiji presiding over the climate summit. The event itself is in Bonn, Germany, because Fiji is in the middle of the South Pacific cyclone season.
Fiji
Here in the main plenary area of the U.N. climate summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is about to address the United Nations. Climate activists have just rolled out a special welcome for her—a red carpet that says on it, “Keep it in the ground.”
Activists from the Pacific Islands such as Tonga, Samoa, Tuvalu, and the Marshall Islands explained how in addition to the rising waters gaining ground on their lands, climate change is destroying their food and fresh water supplies. Low-lying atoll countries are being flooded.
“We urgently need to keep coal in the ground, and transition away from fossil fuels.. because once king tides come in, our villages will be flooded with saltwater because of the rising sea levels.”
Tuvalu
Citizens' Climate Lobby Meetings with Congress
To Pass Climate Legislation
Also in the same week of November 6-10, 2017, Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), a bipartisan, nonprofit volunteer organization with more than 87,000 supporters worldwide, lobbied Congress to enact carbon fee and dividend legislation.
Following a summer filled with wildfires and hurricanes made worse by a warming world, Dr. Michael Russell, along with hundreds of citizens arrived in Washington to ask Congress to enact policies that reduce the future risks of climate change. Calling for a price on carbon at its source and returning the net proceeds to American households. CCL legislation, if passed by Congress, will sharply lower CO2 emissions and speed our transition to a green economy.
“Our nation had a major wake-up call with this year’s wildfires as well asHurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria,” said Terry Beggs, co-leader of the Yolo County chapter of the Climate Lobby. “These storms were bigger and more powerful because of climate change. Scientists tell us we can expect worse in the future if we do not reduce the amount of heat-trapping gases we spew into our atmosphere.”
All those concerned about increasing droughts, wildfires, escalating temperatures, health impacts, and the rising costs we must bear to rebuild after extreme weather events are invited to join CCL (https://citizensclimatelobby.org/) and become part of the climate change solution!
Maldives
Read more: Highlights from CCL 2017 Trip To Congress in Washington DC at https://citizensclimatelobby.org/highlights-2017-congressional-education-day/
Missouri Solar Energy Industries Association Conference
At Missouri State University in Springfield, MO
The same week as the World Climate Action Summit leaders were meeting Bonn, and Citizens’ Climate Lobby activists were meeting with members of Congress in Washington DC, the national Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) was addressing the Missouri Chapter of SEIA at the 2017 Annual MOSEIA Conference at Missouri State University in Springfield, MO.
SEIA spokesman Sean Gallagher addressed the gathering, outlining the two solar power legislative actions that the U.S. solar manufacturing industry is seeking from Congress for the coming year: Raise tariffs on solar panels from China.
Portland-based manufacturer Solar World has one further last request from the gasping industry, that Congress hold the line on their scheduled phase out of the solar and wind renewable income tax credits (ITCs) to renewable energy projects, rather than speed up the schedule. No more support from the federal government for renewable power will be provided. Moreover, none from the government is requested.
This strongly suggests that organizations like SEIA, MOSEIA, and Citizens Climate Lobby should be joining forces in Washington to add at least one further measure to restore much needed funding to the renewable industry. People love solar! As soon as carbon renewable energy and energy efficiency funds are in their pockets, they will be shopping and investing wisely to lower their energy bills.
China Is Investing Hundreds of Billions of Dollars in the Solar Industry
While it may sound reasonable to fair-minded tax paying citizens to cut subsidies for renewables, hundreds of billions of dollars in tax breaks and other subsidies have been and still are handed out to the coal, oil, gas, and nuclear industries over the years.
In contrast to U.S. solar policy, hundreds of billions are going to boost China’s wind and solar industries. This is leading to an increasingly robust, thriving, and exponentially growing renewable industry in China, that are being subsidized with hundreds of billions of dollars.
DOE Chart Comparison Between U.S. and China Subsidies for Solar
The U.S. Trump administration’s focus at the Bonn climate talks is coal and nuclear power, in a sign of the fossil fuel industries’ goals at the talks.
Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, noted that “promoting coal at a climate summit is like promoting tobacco at a cancer summit.” https://twitter.com/MikeBloomberg/status/930121983492280320
Also like turkeys loading themselves and their offspring up onto Tyson's moving conveyor belts for the slaughter.
With the benefit of foresight, China’s energy policy makes perfect sense, building and fueling the initial phase of their industrial technology boom with fossil fuel combustion, which has met with outstanding success. Now China is able to be swiftly making the massive shift to renewables while they can still breathe.
India is largely following China’s business model of launching their economy with coal, in order to finance and transition to renewables as fast as possible before they are overcome by their toxic air, termed a “gas chamber” in the headlines last week.
India asked for US financial assistance to sidestep part or all of this unnecessary carbon emissions, the only other recourse they have open to them. Their discussion with former Vice President Al Gore was filmed in An Inconvenient Sequel – Truth To Power.
Puerto Rico’s American U.S. citizens are also requesting federal assistance to rebuild, but what chance do they have when we won’t even help our continental American U.S. children and grandchildren, even as we are bringing them into this world, with all our loving hopes for their bright futures! Forget the Maldives, Fiji, and all the other island nations or the millions living in American coastline cities across the U.S.
Puerto Rico - Then & Now
We have access to a powerful triad of plans to accomplish and the means and resources in the Stanford Solutions Plan, The Climate Mobilization’s Victory Plan, and Bernie Sanders’ Our Revolution Plan, and informed by DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory report that Rooftop Solar Can Produce 40 Percent of U.S. Electricity.
Stanford Solutions Plan
The analysis appears in "Rooftop Solar Photovoltaic Technical Potential in the United States: A Detailed Assessment." The report quantifies the technical potential for rooftop PV in the United States, which is an estimate of how much energy could be generated if PV systems were installed on all suitable roof areas.
Many more studies and reports provide a vast wealth of guidance for a comprehensive and smooth transition to 100 percent renewables as expeditiously as possible. Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) Carbon Fee and Dividend legislation would provide much of the funding.
The U.S. wrote off its solar manufacturing sector several years ago as a concession to the climate change denial in Congress. Throwing the lions’ share of the manufacturing industry under the bus, ceding it to the Chinese. The few remaining long established solar manufacturers proudly featuring Made In the USA include Solar World. Now the solar installer industry is following suit:
SEIA: Missouri Solar Installations 2010 - 2021
Not in every state, however. Many state governors and city mayors, environmental and even Fortune 600 companies are putting on a brave face, squaring their chins and pronouncing in no uncertain terms they oppose the Congress and Trumpian lunatic refusal to sign on to the World’s Climate accord. Needless to say we’ve taken abstinence too far.
The United States of America is the only country in the world to abstain from making this vital, if largely symbolic gesture. The Copenhagen-Paris-Rio-Fiji-Bonn targets falling far short of what is needed in order to prevent runaway climate change leaving our children and unlivable world. As anyone at the climate talks can now tell you, including Al Gore, Climate Reality, James Hansen, Bill McKibben, 350.org, NRDC, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund, Rocky Mountain Institute, Tesla, the entire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but lacking the necessary stridency, urgency, the true clarity that is increasingly essential to turning this Titanic earthship before it crashes head on into the proverbial iceberg it is steaming straight toward and is blown, burning, stricken with droughts, massive flooding, down with all our children and future generations on board.
One cannot help but wonder, what part of 350 PPM does Bill McKibben, does everyone not understand? Well, while the world was racing past 400 PPM like a runaway train, someone was deftly replacing the definitively clear 350 ppm red line in the sand, extending the safe limit with the indistinctly far removed 2 degrees C? F? K? as the obfuscating new target limit red line in the sand - as if that gave the planet or anyone anywhere anymore time.
A small, but thankfully growing contingent led by Democracy Now, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, The Climate Mobilization (TCM), Institute for Energy & Environmental Research (IEER) Professor Kevin Anderson at the Tyson Research Center for Climate Change, Michael Moore, and Stanford Solutions Group are finally capturing the attention of the mainstream media.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson took a swing at climate change deniers during his Daily Show interview when host Trevor Noah asked the astrophysicist about his recent tweet, "Odd. No one is in denial of America's Aug 21 total solar eclipse. Like Climate Change, methods & tools of science predict it." The famed scientist has spoken out against powerful U.S. politicians who reject the science of climate change.
"When you have an established scientific emergent truth it is true, whether or not you believe in it, The sooner you understand that, the faster we can get on with the political discussions about how to solve the problems that face us while there may still be time." All are beginning to realize and are welcome to join today.
What is needed is subsidies comparable in size and scope to China’s -and India’s business model – as documented in An Inconvenient Sequel, so aptly represented by an hourglass. With the last few remaining years, months, or weeks we may have to pass CCL legislation, and to synthesize, organize, and carry out a plan to save the planet!
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