Now Will the Terrorist Hysterics See the Real Threat?

Not as long as the big money is in maintaining Permanent War and Big Oil's profits demand burning the planet to a crisp.

David Atkins at Hullabaloo:

You would think that with all the global money being spent on stopping a few religious conservative miscreants from killing small numbers of people with bombs, someone would do something about climate change which will certainly kill millions:

The Philippines government has firmly connected the super typhoon Haiyan with climate change, and urged governments meeting in Poland on Monday to take emergency action to resolve the deadlocked climate talks.

"We cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to take action. We need an emergency climate pathway," said Yeb Sano, head of the government's delegation to the UN climate talks, in an article for the Guardian, in which he challenged climate sceptics to "get off their ivory towers" to see the impacts of climate change firsthand.

SNIP

The worst part is that, as I and many others have noted, the world is facing not only a climate crisis, but an unemployment crisis as well. Those two crises are perfectly fitted to solve one another. If most of the world's industrialized nations came together in a concerted effort to immediately transition from a fossil fuel economy into a renewable energy economy, it would be a truly massive undertaking. It would be expensive in the short term, but it would also be incredibly economically stimulative at a time when the world desperately needs Keynesian stimulus. The number of workers who could be employed productively in research and implementation of renewable energy and conservation policies would number in the tens if not hundreds of millions worldwide.

And in the end, not only would we have a chance to avert the climate disaster, but we would live in a cleaner, more stable, more bio diverse and healthier planet.

The only downside is that the world's tiny sliver of its richest people would be somewhat poorer in the short term.

It's a total no-brainer. The fact that we haven't done it yet is proof that we have a very long way to go as a species.

Time to start calling out the traitors to the planet and to our posterity.

Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars:

First of all, let's get the terms straight. They're not climate change "deniers". They're climate change enablers. And I don't care if they're sincerely misinformed Christianists, Teabaggers, plutocrats or just stupid. Stop treating them as if they might have a point. They don't.

This legalistic game of insisting that no particular weather event can be linked to global warming is just a strategy, and if we play by their rules (and God knows, liberals are nothing if not rule followers), they will win. They're winning now. Ask the citizens who are waking up to devastation in the Philippines this week.

We need to call out, harangue and punish every single politician who even hints at the idea that global warming is not settled science, that nothing can be done, and is not doing everything in his or her power to stop it. (i.e. anyone who supports the Keystone XL pipeline).