Representative John Barrow, a Democrat representing Georgia's 12th Congressional district, has created a 2-question survey on his web page to find out how people think we should be dealing with high gas prices.

Click here to tell Rep. Barrow the obvious: Renewable energy is the future!

Now that's more like it:

WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Al Gore said on Thursday that Americans must abandon electricity generated by fossil fuels within a decade and rely on the sun, the winds and other environmentally friendly sources of power, or risk losing their national security as well as their creature comforts.

“The survival of the United States of America as we know it is at risk,” Mr. Gore said in a speech to an energy conference here. “The future of human civilization is at stake.”

Mr. Gore called for the kind of concerted national effort that enabled Americans to walk on the moon 39 years ago this month, just eight years after President John F. Kennedy famously embraced that goal. He said the goal of producing all of the nation’s electricity from “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” within 10 years is not some farfetched vision, although he said it would require fundamental changes in political thinking and personal expectations.

“This goal is achievable, affordable and transformative,” Mr. Gore said in his remarks at the conference. “It represents a challenge to all Americans, in every walk of life — to our political leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, engineers, and to every citizen.”

This Alternet article delivers the goods:
As Facts Emerge, the False Promise of Offshore Drilling Becomes Clear

From a Bush Admin spokesperson admitting offshore drilling won’t make a short-term impact on energy prices to an informed citizen challenging McCain’s shortsighted new policy proposal at a campaign stop, it’s all there.

The article also exposes the inadequacies of the last refuge of offshore drilling proponents. As the facts of this terrible proposal become common knowledge, Bush, McCain, and Gingrich have been ducking for cover behind a recent Rasmussen poll that found that “two-thirds of Americans want to see the offshore ban rescinded.” Problem is that the poll is completely bogus:

But the Rasmussen poll asked (emphasis added) "In order to reduce the price of gas, should drilling be allowed in offshore oil wells off the coasts of California, Florida, and other states?"

After being misinformed that drilling would lower the price of gas, it's not surprising that voters would express support.

But what do you think the results would be if an accurate question was offered, such as: should drilling be allowed off the coasts of California, Florida and other states, even though it would NOT lower the price of gas in the next several years?

The mistake that politicians in support of the gas tax holiday made was taking comfort in polls that did not factor in what would happen after all the facts were laid out.

The facts on coastal drilling are coming out. Poll-driven politicians, beware.

President Bush gave a highly-partisan speech today in which he announced that he was lifting the presidential moratorium on drilling the outer continental shelf for oil. There are a whole slew of reasons why this is a terrible idea that would not work whatsoever. Maybe that's why the speech is more about taking pot-shots at the Democratic Congress than any real, substantive explanation of why he thinks this is the right solution to high gas prices. Put simply, it's not a solution to rising energy costs, period. It's a way for Bush to throw his pals in the oil industry one last giant bone before he leaves office -- or I guess I should say another bone, in addition to his decision not to deal with global warming.

The Natural Resources Defense Council put together a video on Omnisio that details all of the distortions and mistruths contained in Bush's speech. Check it out: The Truth about drilling, gas prices and OCS.

Please oh PLEASE let the Democratic Congress have the guts and the savvy to effectively neutralize this ridiculously partisan election year stunt. Bush has been screwing up this great country of ours for almost 8 years, we can't let him continue to lie to and manipulate the public so that his chosen successor can extend his policies. Bush's disastrous tenure must end at precisely 12:00 noon, January 20th, 2009.

A day after President Bush flippantly excused himself from a G8 summit that failed miserably to establish new policies for addressing global warming by saying "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter," this should surprise no one:

EPA Won't Act on Emissions This Year
Instead of New Rules, More Comment Sought

The Bush administration has decided not to take any new steps to regulate greenhouse gas emissions before the president leaves office, despite pressure from the Supreme Court and broad accord among senior federal officials that new regulation is appropriate now.

The Environmental Protection Agency plans to announce today that it will seek months of further public comment on the threat posed by global warming to human health and welfare -- a matter that federal climate experts and international scientists have repeatedly said should be urgently addressed.

The entire article by the Washington Post is well worth the read, as it details the games the administration has been playing in order to avoid dealing with the looming global climate crisis. A Supreme Court ruling last year ordered the EPA to determine whether or not global warming is a threat to human health and welfare, but the inevitable results -- there is really only one concolusion they can reach, after all -- would have required the EPA to set federal standards to remedy the problem. Rather than provide real leadership on this dire issue, the administration has shamefully pulled every trick they could think of to delay and stall, including censoring their own scientists, suppressing official reports they themselves commissioned, and deliberately fudging data provided to them by their own experts.

Nontheless, I think there are two positives we can take away from this: 1) Even the Bush Administration can't outright deny global warming any more (as much as they'd probably like to), and the call for solutions has grown so loud that they can't ignore it, either; and 2) We're so close to the end of the disastrous Bush Administration that they can choose to run out the clock rather than deal with global warming.

Greenpeace’s global warming campaign, Project Hot Seat, has enjoyed great success through the last few years. We’ve been building champions on global warming in Congress, flipping key swing votes in the House of Representatives, and getting heaps of media hits around the country. We’ve done this entirely through the use of grassroots organizing and independent contributions from supporters around the country.

The success we’ve had is turning heads in Congress and also in Big Energy, which could be why corporate-funded Americans for Prosperity recently launched something called the Hot Air Tour (http://hotairtour.org/). The tour, which is going through the Midwest and Southern States, wants to share “about climate alarmism” as well as promote the industry viewpoint that legislation that aims to limit global warming pollution will damage the economy and steal freedoms from everyday Americans (the freedom from wildfire and drought, perhaps?). In short, they aim to undercut advances in public education and legislative support on global warming.

Unfortunately for the tour, they have a major lack of legitimacy, because it is funded by the dirty energy industry. Americans for Prosperity (formally called Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation) is largely funded by Koch Industries, which is the largest privately owned energy conglomeration in the United States, with annual revenues of over $25 billion. In 2000, internal documents leaked to the Washington Post showed that 85% of CSF’s funding came from other corporate gems like ExxonMobil and Phillip Morris.

Clearly, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil will stop at nothing to ensure that the government will not regulate pollution from Big Energy as our country aims to tackle global warming. In fact, they have a long history of funding global warming skeptics, check out http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/exxon-secrets
to see other contributions by Koch Industries and ExxonMobile to global warming deniers.

It all goes to show how effective our grassroots campaign to stop global warming has been. When poorly veiled events like the Hot Air Tour take place, it’s a frustrating signal that we are slowly winning the fight to stop global warming. But they also serve as a reminder that nasty energy conglomerates will do anything to debunk science, even if it means taking the moral low-road, yet again.

This is very, very cool (h/t Idealog):

On July 7, 2008, the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly – composed of one hundred and thirty (130) delegates elected countrywide to rewrite the country’s Constitution – voted to approve articles for the new constitution recognizing rights for nature and ecosystems. “If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” stated Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. (Read the entire Rights of Nature Language Approved by the Ecuador Constitutional Assembly doc on CELDF’s website.)

The environmental movement in the US has always been a voice for the voiceless – the wildlife, the ecosystems, all of the inhabitants of the Earth that have a right to life every bit as much as humans do but that can’t speak up for themselves. Rarely do enviros organize around the idea that those rights should be made law. And yet look at all of the great movements in American history: abolition, women’s suffrage, civil rights – all rights-based movements. Perhaps it is time to rethink our strategies if we are to effect lasting protections for the natural world. All too often we’ve discovered that it’s not enough to get a species listed as endangered or to stop a dam project from going forward. Our opponents will simply regroup and redeploy with new tactics and new ways to spin the facts. If we codify the rights of the natural world to exist, not only do we have lasting protections for the environment but powerful new tools to stop the polluters and robber-barons who are befouling and plundering the Earth for their own gain.

Recently, our own Carroll Muffett wrote some excellent blogs about his experience attending a coal industry conference and how many of the people working in the industry feel that it is the corporation that is damaging the world, not them. This idea is fostered by the legal rights we’ve afforded to corporations as entities in and of themselves, as if they are people who should enjoy equal rights under the law. This is a misguided notion, to be sure, and the laws that established corporate personhood are “illegitimately” based on Constitutional law, according to Richard Grossman, co-founder of Programs on Corporations, Law and Democracy (read more). Given that corporations are responsible not just for a huge amount of the pollution dumped on our planet but also for obstructing most progressive, environmental causes like global warming legislation, emissions standards, etc., opposing legal corporate personhood should probably be a part of any rights-based environmental movement. We need to assert the rights of the Earth over the rights of the corporations that have been pillaging the Earth.

The world “leaders” attending the G8 summit in Japan issued a statement on global warming today committing their nations to doing pretty much nothing. They boldly declared they would half emissions by 2050 but set no binding targets, no interim targets of any kind, and didn’t even set a base year off of which the 50% reduction would be measured.

World leaders embraced for the first time on Tuesday an ambitious but nonbinding goal of slashing greenhouse-gas emissions in half by midcentury to stave off global warming. Unimpressed environmentalists called the effort too slow and too uncertain.

Leaders of some of the world's richest nations praised the agreement, which endorsed President Bush's insistence that fast-developing countries like China and India join in the effort. But one environmental critic suggested that by 2050 those leaders would be forgotten and "the world will be cooked."

Details were scant in the statement issued by the Group of Eight. Some could become clearer Wednesday when China, India and six other fast-developing nations sit down with the Group of Eight industrial nations — the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy and Canada — to discuss climate change strategies.

The G-8 did not specify a base year for its proposed 50 percent cut, and the actual emissions reductions and the effect on the environment could vary hugely depending on what is eventually decided. Reductions from 2005 levels, for instance, would be far less than from 1990 levels, as in the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.

It would appear the rest of the 8 “leaders” are prepared to follow Bush into hell and high water, whining about India and China all the way and paying no mind to the moral responsibility of the developed world – which created the problem in the first place – to lead on this global issue. They could perhaps amend this statement after Wednesday’s meeting when they meet with China and India and other developing nations, but developing nations are far more worried about providing basic necessities to their people than global warming. If “the world’s richest nations” won’t commit to really addressing this crisis, why should they? It’s disappointing that the European leaders at the summit, most of whose countries have been far more aggressive about global warming than the US, caved to Bush’s obstructionist tactics. The growing global climate crisis will almost surely be looked upon as yet another massive failure by the Bush administration.