MotherJones.com | MoJoBlog - Social Issues and Political Commentary: September 17, 2006

« September 10, 2006 - September 16, 2006 | Main | September 24, 2006 - September 30, 2006 »

September 22, 2006

Census Bureau Loses 100s of Laptops

Also from AP:

The Census Bureau collects the most personal information about Americans, from how much money they earn and where they spend it to how they live and die. It's all confidential — as long as no one steals it.

Well, guess what...

Democrats' Strategy on the War on Terror

This just in from AP:

Six weeks before elections, the Democratic strategy for the war on terror is one part attack President Bush and one part agree with him. The goal is to court voters dissatisfied with the job the administration has done, yet avoid being tagged as soft on Osama bin Laden. ...

[A Democratic strategy memo] says "stress that Democrats offer a 'better way to fight terrorism.'" Example: call for the inspection of all cargo containers entering the country. ...

Republicans hope for an opening to outmaneuver House Democrats on an issue the GOP has long called its own.

They thought they had an opening recently when Rep. Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record), the Democratic leader, said of bin Laden: "He has done more damage the longer he has been out there. But, in fact, the damage that he has done is done. And even to capture him now I don't think makes us any safer."

Does this mean AP is moving in on The Onion's turf?

A Look At FEMA Today

Elva Galadas is a resident of Lacombe, Louisiana, on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Her house was as good as destroyed by Katrina, leaving her with rotten wood, mold, and "tin roof rusted." Galatas, who is 73, has a son who is paralyzed from the waist down and who has epilepsy. He also has a broken ankle, an injured arm, and allergies that require him to get daily oxygen treatments.

Galatas applied for a FEMA trailer, but didn't get one, so she moved back into her moldy, structurally unsound house, and her son went to live in a hospital in Winnfield, Louisiana, which is nowhere near Lacombe. Finally, after months of phone calls and frustration, FEMA sent Galatas a trailer in June of this year. The trailer was designated as handicap accessible, but it was not big enough for both Galatis and her son. According to FEMA, since there were only two people who planned to live in it, there could be only one bedroom.

So Galatis began going down the trail of red tape, phone calls and frustration a second time. And this month, FEMA removed the first trailer and replaced it with a second. The problem is that the second trailer is the same size as the first. On top of that, FEMA subcontractors dismantled the handicap ramp of the first trailer but failed to build one for the second. Galatas is still living in her moldy house, and her son is still in the hospital.

A FEMA spokesman says "We want to make it happen for her."

FEMA has agreed to reimburse $217 million of $394 million worth of claims filed by the city of New Orleans alone. So far, only $117 million has reached the city. One of the most dramatic examples of loss in New Orleans is that of City Park, which sustained $43 million worth of damage. So far, FEMA has authorized only $2.6 million for repairs, and the park has actually received only $250,000.

Aside from the obvious fact that the city of New Orleans needs federal aid badly is the ugly fact that the damage within the city was not caused by a force of nature, but by the Army Corps of Engineers, who designed and built levees its engineers knew were not adequate.

Branson Sees a Business Opportunity in the Global Warming Crisis

Richard Branson (profile) didn't make his billions by being a sap -- and the BBC didn't get to be the BBC by taking PR at face value -- so it's no surprise the Beeb today is suggesting Branson's move to invest $3bn in renewable energy technologies is "more than green philanthropy." Could he also be "making a canny attempt to get in on the ground floor of a fast growing and innovative global industry" and "fulfill his mission to turn Virgin Fuels into a power giant in the same class as Shell or Exxon Mobil"? (Where have all the saints gone?)

There's big money to be made in renewable fuels--at least that's the general assumption--and many US biofuel firms are small-scale oufits. An unsentimental venture capitalist (not that there's any other kind) tells the BBC, "Sir Richard wants to make money in a field where returns are being made right now." Should we care that there's a commercial logic to Branson's decision? Of course not--the guy's a businessman. I just hope this venture goes better than his round-the-world balloon voyages.

Hugo Chavez: Mediocrity or Thug? (Or Both?)

As I mentioned yesterday, I've long wanted to give Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez the benefit of the doubt (see this interview I did in 2005 with Richard Gott, a venerable British journalist who knows Chavez better than most and wrote a largely sympathetic biography of him). But with every week that passes--which is to say, with every new sign that, however sincere his commitment to his country's poor, Chavez's commitment to democracy is pretty tenuous; and with every new crackpot speech or unmistakable sign of galloping megalomania--I've found that position more difficult to sustain. Marc Cooper, who knows Latin American politics better than most, said it best this week in a blistering post occasioned by Chavez's crass, bizarre, and typically self-aggrandizing speech at the UN.

Marc Cooper:

If one ever had doubts that Hugo Chavez is at best an intellectual mediocrity (if not a thug) they should forever be confirmed by his speech Wednesday before the United Nations. I'm not going to bother to reproduce any excerpts here....

Suffice it to say it was juvenile showboating of the worst kind. And while it was chock full of applause and laugh lines as Chavez ripped at Bush, the Empire, the Fascists, the Assassins, the Israelis and the UN itself, it was -- in the end-- a completely vapid exercise. What sort of moral vision or leadership of behalf of the world's poor was voiced by the blustering buffoon of Caracas?

All I know is that if I were George W. Bush and was worried what the world thought of me, I would quickly choose Chavez as the guy to represent the global opposition. In any case, Chavez's performance is likely to backfire. His declaration that the UN is "worthless" is not likely to galvanize support for Venezuela's quest to win one of the rotating seats on the Security Council.

Amen.

September 21, 2006

U.N. Says Guantanamo Facilitates Torture

A U.N. inquiry into U.S. practices at Guantanamo finds, unsurprisingly, that the prison facilitates torture and violates international law, and investigators criticized the Bush admin for failing to take steps to close it.

"We note with the greatest concern that the government has not taken any steps to close Guantanamo," the rights experts said in a joint statement read by Algerian Leila Zerrougui, a specialist on arbitrary detention. "Indeed, a new block has been built and is set to open this month."

The U.S. government is blowing the report off, saying it's based reports in the media and allegations from detainees' lawyers. Which may have something to do with the fact that the investigators, who've been trying to get access to Guantanamo since 2002, were told they could visit the prison but not interview detainees. They went ahead with the inquiry and say they came by "reliable accounts" of torture.

British Royal Society Slams ExxonMobil on Global Warming

Via Crooked Timber, the British Royal Society has written to ExxonMobil, stating that 39 of the organizations listed in Exxon’s 2005 WorldWide Giving Report for ‘public information and policy research‘, feature information on their web sites that,

"misrepresented the science on climate change, either by outright denial of the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change, or by overstating the amount and significance of uncertainty in knowledge, or by conveying misleading impression of the potential impacts of climate change."

The author of the letter, Bob Ward of the RS, writes:

"At our meeting in July … you indicated that ExxonMobil would not be providing any further funding to these organisations. I would be grateful if you could let me know when ExxonMobil plans to carry out this pledge."

Recall that Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, in a piece for Mother Jones detailed how ExxonMobil ExxonMobil spends millions to support "public policy" groups whose aim is to undermine the scientific consensus on global warming (that it is real; that humans contribute to it).

Copy of the Royal Society letter here (PDF). Mother Jones' special report on global warming here.

Open Season on Menhaden Again?

Men-ha-what? Menhaden—in case you forgot—are smelly little fish that just happen to be the ecological lynchpins of the Chesapeake Bay ecosystem. As H. Bruce Franklin detailed in his story our Oceans package in March/April, "menhaden are the most important fish in North America." They're certainly the most important fish in the Bay—kill them off and you're condemning the Bay to become a giant dead zone. But menhaden are being overfished by the antiseptically named "menhaden reduction industry," a monopoly controlled by Omega Protein, which grinds them up into stuff like animal feed and fish-oil supplements. Now we learn, via Greenpeace USA, that the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council is considering lifting a recent (and, Greenpeace says, unimplemented) cap on menhaden fishing at the behest of Virginia Governor Tim Kaine and Omega. According to Greenpeace, the Kaine plan would allow Omega to "vaccuum up" a whopping 123,000 tons of menhaden in a season. Greenpeace and other Bay watchers want a moratorium on menhaden fishing. That's not going to happen soon, but the ASMFC is still considering public comments before making its next decision. For more info on how to weigh in, download this [PDF].

The Filibuster--It's Okay When Republicans Use It

Remember all the threats to use the "nuclear option" when Democrats planned to filibuster Bush's racist, sexist, homophobic judicial nominees? No one was pushing harder for it than Majority Leader Sen. Bill Frist.

Well, the worm--in this case, the cat-killing, TV screen-diagnosing, state medical board-deceiving Dr. Frist--has had a change of heart about the use of the filibuster. He has announced that Republicans in the Senate will indeed filibuster the bill dealing with detainee interrogation unless a few rebels from his own party rewrite sections of it opposed by George W. Bush.

The senators--John Warner, John McCain and Lindsey Graham--are opposed to the loosening of meaning of the Geneva Conventions ban on torture and other inappropriate treatment of prisoners. From the Washington Post:

For a bill to pass, Frist said, "it's got to preserve our intelligence programs," including the CIA's aggressive interrogation techniques, and it must "protect classified information from terrorists." He said that "the president's bill achieves those two goals" but that "the Warner-McCain-Graham bill falls short."

So...there are the priorities of the Senate's Republican leader. When it comes to getting around the Geneva Conventions, anything is okay--even the filibuster.

Iraq: Kidnappers Use Victims as Unwitting Bombers

Bush "the devil"? (I've mostly wanted to give Hugo Chavez the benefit of the doubt, but what the...?) Hardly. If we're handing out devil badges, let's start with this AP story.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Insurgents are no longer using just volunteers to drive suicide car bombs but are instead kidnapping people with their cars, rigging the vehicles with explosives, and blowing them up remotely, the Defense Ministry said Thursday.

In what appears to be a new tactic for the insurgency, the ministry said the kidnap victims do not know their cars have been loaded with explosives when they are released.

Unbelievable.

Obama: Debate About National Security? Bring It.

Sen. Barack Obama (will he? won't he?), in a speech yesterday at Georgetown University sponsored by MoveOn.org, outlined his vision for reducing US dependence on oil (by way of ethanol and subsidies for hybrid cars), saying the energy issue shouldn't be put on the back burner (so to speak!).

Obama also called the (mystifying) notion that President Bush "has been perfect in fighting terrorism" an illusion and said Dems should tackle Republicans on the issue. "On the terrorism front, I'm happy to have that debate."

That's the spirit.

September 20, 2006

Planespotting

Over at truthdig.com, ex-MJ intern Onnesha Roychoudhuri has a fascinating interview with the authors of Torture Taxi: On the Trail of the CIA's Rendition Flights, a new book about extraordinary rendition. It gathers a lot of information from amateur planespotters and supplements it with some on-the-ground reporting from the authors, Trevor Paglen and A.C. Thompson. One of the most telling points they make is that as they dug into the support structure of the rendition program, they "realized our neighbors were helping the CIA set up these structures. These are family lawyers in suburban Massachusetts and Reno, Nevada. People in our communities are doing dirty work for the CIA. This is not just people being snatched up from one faraway country and taken to a country that’s even farther away."

It's all too easy to be outraged by the secret torture programs. It is more uncomfortable still to acknowledge that for many people—some of whose daily jobs may depend on the rendition program—it is not outrageous. One of the airplane charter companies used by the CIA was Aero Contractors, based in Smithfield, N.C., a place Thompson discussed in the interview.

What you start to figure out by spending time in Smithfield is that a lot of people know about the company and have at least an inkling of what goes on at the airport. Most don’t want to talk about it and don’t take a critical view of it. Folks we met there framed the debate within this religious discourse. The activists that we talked to were god-fearing devout Christians who felt like this was not what they signed up for as religious people, that it violates the religious tenets they adhere to. Interestingly, folks on the other side of the debate seem to be coming from a similar place, but just coming to a different conclusion. The subject of whether or not torture was permitted by the Bible was discussed in church there—and many congregants believed it was.

Thompson's coauthor, Trevor Paglen, is an artist and geographer at U.C.-Berkeley. Check out his site for a look at some very cool art/activism projects, some of which you can participate in. Perhaps you'd like to join a surveillance trip of your own—to Area 51.

Also, look for a review of another rendition book, Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, by Stephen Grey, in the November/December 2006 Mother Jones.

Good News! Federal Court Reinstates Roadless Rule

Via, Earthjustice: A federal district court today ordered reinstatement of the Clinton era roadless rule to protect almost 50 million acres of wild national forests and grasslands from road building, logging, and development.

The Bush administration's has long fought to open these natural areas to development. We wrote about the roadless rule in this 2003 piece, in which an environmentalist said, "The roadless rule is one of the most popular federal policies in the history of the United States. We're talking about the last remaining 58.5 million acres of roadless forest, and one of the first things President Bush did in office was to tell the forest service to halt implementation."

Today's ruling does not address the roadless areas in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, which the Bush administration in 2003 exempted from the roadless rule in a separate procedure. The 17-million-acre Tongass is the largest federal forest and the biggest roadless area in the US. It's also the heart of the planet's largest and oldest temperate rainforest. Here's how Ted Williams described the forest a few years ago in a piece for Mother Jones.

"What had looked like another cloud bank sailing in high from the west turned out to be the ice fields of the Coast Range. Mountain bluebirds wafted along the river. Gulls wheeled and screamed over the first slug of spawning candlefish. Water ouzels on rocks and logs bobbed, dipped, then marched into and under the current. Ravens harassed bald eagles. A snowy owl patrolled the meadow at high noon. Upstream there were beavers, river otters, a freshly undenned black bear, and, though we didn't see them, brown bears, moose, Sitka black-tailed deer, mountain goats, and wolverines. The river's sandy banks were littered with the spines, jaws, and gill plates of last year's spawned-out salmon -- all five species. In the clear water, salmon-size steelhead trout, minutes out of the Pacific, surged from our shadows or eased through deadfalls."

Media Coverage of Voting Shenanigans Needs to Improve

CJR has a good editorial on press coverage of voting snafus, mishaps, and foul play. Journalists, it points out, "not only seek to publicize truths but also help determine which truths count. A story’s tone, its placement, and whether it gets followed up all have something to do with whether it is perceived by the public as a big deal. Sometimes the press seems leery of making that determination." For which, see the possibility of vote manipulation in national elections -- particularly the case of Ohio in 2004, where Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell doubled as co-chair of Bush’s re-election campaign in Ohio and where numerous irregularities-- barriers to registration; purges of voting rolls; the use of an illegal mailing tactic called “caging” to strike voters from the rolls if they failed to respond in time to a letter to their address of record; extremely poor distribution of voting machines in heavily Democratic urban areas--were alleged, many (though not all) with good cause.

But it didn’t get too much mileage. For one thing, unlike Florida’s razor-thin 537-vote margin in 2000, Bush officially carried Ohio by some 136,000 votes. Tales of vote manipulation were generally covered either as small potatoes or as squawks from the loony left (which some were). [...] When the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers Jr., issued a measured but blistering report that found “numerous serious election irregularities . . . which affected hundreds of thousands of votes,” Ohio got another few minutes in the spotlight.

Ohio popped up again in a June 15 piece in Rolling Stone by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The headline asked, “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?” Kennedy thought so. But most of the media yawned. The New York Times, typically strong on voting controversy, dealt with the Rolling Stone story in its abysmal Sunday Styles section with a profile of Kennedy that managed to mention the drug problem he had some twenty years ago, but not to fairly present his argument. One outlet that did not ignore the piece was Salon, where the staff writer Farhad Manjoo asserts that he takes Kennedy’s argument apart, but, upon close inspection, much of the Rolling Stone analysis survives. And Manjoo does not address a lot of what went wrong in Ohio. ...

I should point out that Mark Hertsgaard took a look at the Ohio brouhaha for Mother Jones and found that yes, there were major problems but they didn't justify the claim that Bush "stole" the election. CJR similarly concludes:

We’re not making the case that the election of 2004 was stolen, and we’d rather look ahead than back. But we are arguing that intolerable things happened in Ohio that merited more sustained attention from the national press. And that targeting particular groups for vote suppression is reprehensible, yet effective, and will continue unless challenged. (In late August, Salon named six states that appear ripe for trouble.) [And, ahem, this month Mother Jones examines the 11 worst places to vote in the U.S.] Guarding the democratic process is part of the journalistic mission, and with another election approaching, now is the time to think about that. Suppressing democracy is, yes, a big deal.

The Company They Keep

James Dobson, of Focus on the Family, is well known for his extreme anti-feminist, anti-gay, pro-child- (and dog-) beating, "pro-family" philosophy. Bill Bennet, self-appointed "values" czar, is known for his compulsive gambling problems. Sen. George Allen, who recently came under fire for making racist comments, is also known to have a history of violence. Ann Coulter is known for desiring the death and destruction of a number of non-conservative ("non-conservative" is actually a stretch when desribing the New York Times, but you get my point) citizens. Jerry Falwell blamed gays, feminists and the ACLU for the attacks of September 11, 2001. And Sean Hannity's nightly broadcasts speak for themselves.

These people are all part of the Values Voter Summit that will be held September 22-24 in Washington, D.C. to help mobilize conservative Christian voters.

But they are not alone. Joining them will be White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The ersatz president's official spokesman and the highest-ranking official in the Department of Justice will gather together to discuss how to "take back" the country from people who believe in free speech, separation of church and state, and equal rights. This is compassionate conservatism at its most flagrant.

Halliburton Tried to Shaft Its Own War Heroes

A Senate panel investigating U.S. military contractors Monday unveiled a letter sent from Halliburton subsidiary KBR to a former employee that sought, under the guise of awarding a medal, to waive the company of any liability for the infamous Good Friday Massacre, in which six Halliburton truck drivers were killed and others injured while delivering fuel in Iraq.

The letter notified former truck driver Ray Stannard that he would “most certainly qualify” for the Pentagon’s Defense of Freedom medal, an award created in the wake of 9/11 to recognize citizens injured while aiding the military. But as a condition of releasing Stannard’s medical records to the military, the letter asked him to sign a form that would absolve KBR and the military “from any and all claims and any and all cause of action of any kind or character, whether known or unknown, I may have against them.”

“That is almost unbelievable to me that a company would do that,” said Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND), chairman of the Senate Democratic Policy Committee. Democrats held the hearing on their own, arguing Republicans who control the Senate have shown little interest in pursuing the matter, the Houston Chronicle reported.

So much for Republicans supporting our boys in Iraq.

The Other 98 Percent of Iraq

This morning's Column One feature in the Los Angeles Times is a terrific first-person account of life in Baghdad. It is written by an unnamed Iraqi reporter for the paper, and reading almost any random paragraph shows why he had to go unbylined.

I see my neighbors less and less. When I go out, I say hello and that's it. I fear someone will ask questions about my job working for Americans, which could put me in danger. Even if he had no ill will toward me, he might talk and reveal an identifying detail. We're afraid of an enemy among us. Someone we don't know. It's a cancer.

It's a revealing look at the unspoken, and unreported, reality behind the news we do get from Iraq. Dexter Filkins, who has done terrific reporting for the New York Times from Iraq, recently said that 98 percent of Iraq, including most of Baghdad, is now off-limits to Western journalists, a startling figure that begs the question of why reports from Iraq don't include such a disclaimer

Filkin's talk at Manhattan offices of the Committee to Protect Journalists offered a revealing look behind the scenes of Iraq reporting. Editor & Publisher noted that the Times, employs "45 full-time Kalashnikov-toting security guards to patrol its two blast-wall-enclosed houses—and oversee belt-fed machine-guns on the roofs of the buildings."

American journalists, [Filkins] said, spend their days piecing together scraps of information from the Iraqi reporters to construct a picture, albeit incomplete, of what life is like these days in the war-torn country. But he says that the work is slow and difficult, and it is hard in such an atmosphere for reporters to nail down specifics. "Five people doing a run-of-the-mill story takes forever," he said.

Filkins' reading of the situation overall raises the question of where to Bush administration is getting its optimistic assessments of progress in Iraq:

Most troubling was Filkins' assessment that the U.S. military may not know much more than the Times does about what life is like on the ground in Iraq. Soldiers barely leave their bases and they don't interact very much with average Iraqis, he said, so it is hard to say who, if anyone, has an accurate picture of the current situation.

September 19, 2006

Opposing Torture Hurts McCain in 2008? (That's Sick.)

One thing that changed after 9/11 is this: we now live in a twilight zone where it's possible that a senator, John McCain, in expressing qualms at the Bush administration's determination to interpret the Geneva conventions at whim, can be seen as hurting his own presidential prospects. See this Washington Post piece, titled, "McCain's Stand On Detainees May Pose Risk For 2008 Bid."

The Geneva Conventions say wartime detainees must be "treated humanely." Bush says the United States complies so long as CIA interrogators abide by a 2005 law barring "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment of captives. McCain and his allies say that the requirement is too narrow, and that they are concerned Bush's approach would invite other nations to interpret the conventions in lax ways that could lead to abusive treatment of captive U.S. troops.

A Republican strategist tells the Post, "The politics of this for [McCain] are pretty dangerous. This is an issue that's the most important issue to the Republican base overall, and they're strongly with the president on this."

All of which goes to show that whatever changed after 9/11, very little has changed--at least not for the better--since Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.

When Even Kerry Gets Religion It's Time to Start Praying

Liberals are falling over each other these days to show how deeply religious (make that Christian) they are, from the "Faithful Democrats" to the "Red Letter Christians." Even Howard Dean's DNC has gotten itself a "faith advisory committe."

This is all well and good (and possibly even--who knows?--sincere in some cases). But here's cause for concern: John Kerry is starting to sound like Jim Wallis, which can mean only one thing--and not a good thing. Kerry gave a speech yesterday in Malibu, California, in which he said he'd "wandered in the wilderness" after the Vietnam War but, as the Washington Post puts it, came back to the Roman Catholic Church after a sudden and moving revelation in the late 1980s. He also said he wishes he'd given the speech before the 2004 presidential election.

"For 12 years I wandered in the wilderness, went through a divorce and struggled with questions about my direction. Then suddenly and movingly, I had a revelation about the connection between the work I was doing as a public servant and my formative teachings."

Well, let's take his word for that. He also said, of his 2004 run:

"I learned that if I didn't fill in the picture myself, others would draw the caricature for me. I will never let that happen again."

"Again"?! Please, God, no!

Gore Speech on Global Warming: "An opportunity for bipartisanship and transcendence"

Al Gore's speech at NYU on global warming (which called for, among other things, an "immediate freeze" of greenhouse gas emissions) was superb: urgent, substantive, refreshingly optimistic. (As the excellent Amanda Griscom Little observes over at Grist, "Having seen Gore's lecture on climate no less than seven times, I can vouch for the fact that this effulgent optimism is a new theme for the Veep. The whole lecture, in fact, seemed a response to criticisms I've heard repeatedly about Gore's stump speech and the movie that chronicles it, An Inconvenient Truth -- that they are too heavily clouded in doom and gloom, giving inadequate attention to solutions (despite his repeated insistence that the climate crisis presents equal parts danger and opportunity).

Well worth reading in (almost) full below. (Transcript here.)

(And may I recommend our own recent special report on global warming?)

Al Gore
Sep. 18, 2006
NYU Law School

Ladies and Gentlemen: [...]

A few days ago, scientists announced alarming new evidence of the rapid melting of the perennial ice of the north polar cap, continuing a trend of the past several years that now confronts us with the prospect that human activities, if unchecked in the next decade, could destroy one of the earth's principle mechanisms for cooling itself. Another group of scientists presented evidence that human activities are responsible for the dramatic warming of sea surface temperatures in the areas of the ocean where hurricanes form. A few weeks earlier, new information from yet another team showed dramatic increases in the burning of forests throughout the American West, a trend that has increased decade by decade, as warmer temperatures have dried out soils and vegetation. All these findings come at the end of a summer with record breaking temperatures and the hottest twelve month period ever measured in the U.S., with persistent drought in vast areas of our country. Scientific American introduces the lead article in its special issue this month with the following sentence: "The debate on global warming is over."

Many scientists are now warning that we are moving closer to several "tipping points" that could -- within as little as 10 years -- make it impossible for us to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability for human civilization. In this regard, just a few weeks ago, another group of scientists reported on the unexpectedly rapid increases in the release of carbon and methane emissions from frozen tundra in Siberia, now beginning to thaw because of human caused increases in global temperature. The scientists tell us that the tundra in danger of thawing contains an amount of additional global warming pollution that is equal to the total amount that is already in the earth's atmosphere. Similarly, earlier this year, yet another team of scientists reported that the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale -- a disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into the sea. Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now facing a planetary emergency -- a climate crisis that demands immediate action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to turn down the earth's thermostat and avert catastrophe.

The serious debate over the climate crisis has now moved on to the question of how we can craft emergency solutions in order to avoid this catastrophic damage.

This debate over solutions has been slow to start in earnest not only because some of our leaders still find it more convenient to deny the reality of the crisis, but also because the hard truth for the rest of us is that the maximum that seems politically feasible still falls far short of the minimum that would be effective in solving the crisis. This no-man's land -- or no politician zone –falling between the farthest reaches of political feasibility and the first beginnings of truly effective change is the area that I would like to explore in my speech today.

T. S. Eliot once wrote: Between the idea and the reality, Between the motion and the act Falls the Shadow. … Between the conception and the creation, Between the emotion and the response Falls the Shadow.

My purpose is not to present a comprehensive and detailed blueprint -- for that is a task for our democracy as a whole -- but rather to try to shine some light on a pathway through this terra incognita that lies between where we are and where we need to go. Because, if we acknowledge candidly that what we need to do is beyond the limits of our current political capacities, that really is just another way of saying that we have to urgently expand the limits of what is politically possible.

I have no doubt that we can do precisely that, because having served almost three decades in elected office, I believe I know one thing about America's political system that some of the pessimists do not: it shares something in common with the climate system; it can appear to move only at a slow pace, but it can also cross a tipping point beyond which it can move with lightning speed. Just as a single tumbling rock can trigger a massive landslide, America has sometimes experienced sudden avalanches of political change that had their beginnings with what first seemed like small changes.

Two weeks ago, Democrats and Republicans joined together in our largest state, California, to pass legally binding sharp reductions in CO2 emissions. 295 American cities have now independently "ratified" and embraced CO2 reductions called for in the Kyoto Treaty. 85 conservative evangelical ministers publicly broke with the Bush-Cheney administration to call for bold action to solve the climate crisis. Business leaders in both political parties have taken significant steps to position their companies as leaders in this struggle and have adopted a policy that not only reduces CO2 but makes their companies zero carbon companies. Many of them have discovered a way to increase profits and productivity by eliminating their contributions to global warming pollution.

Many Americans are now seeing a bright light shining from the far side of this no-man's land that illuminates not sacrifice and danger, but instead a vision of a bright future that is better for our country in every way -- a future with better jobs, a cleaner environment, a more secure nation, and a safer world.

After all, many Americans are tired of borrowing huge amounts of money from China to buy huge amounts of oil from the Persian Gulf to make huge amounts of pollution that destroys the planet's climate. Increasingly, Americans believe that we have to change every part of that pattern.

When I visit port cities like Seattle, New Orleans, or Baltimore, I find massive ships, running low in the water, heavily burdened with foreign cargo or foreign oil arriving by the thousands. These same cargo ships and tankers depart riding high with only ballast water to keep them from rolling over.

One-way trade is destructive to our economic future. We send money, electronically, in the opposite direction. But, we can change this by inventing and manufacturing new solutions to stop global warming right here in America. I still believe in good old-fashioned American ingenuity. We need to fill those ships with new products and technologies that we create to turn down the global thermostat. Working together, we can create jobs and stop global warming. But we must begin by winning the first key battle -- against inertia and the fear of change.

In order to conquer our fear and walk boldly forward on the path that lies before us, we have to insist on a higher level of honesty in America's political dialogue. When we make big mistakes in America, it is usually because the people have not been given an honest accounting of the choices before us. It also is often because too many members of both parties who knew better did not have the courage to do better.

Our children have a right to hold us to a higher standard when their future -- indeed the future of all human civilization -- is hanging in the balance. They deserve better than the spectacle of censorship of the best scientific evidence about the truth of our situation and harassment of honest scientists who are trying to warn us about the looming catastrophe. They deserve better than politicians who sit on their hands and do nothing to confront the greatest challenge that humankind has ever faced -- even as the danger bears down on us.

We in the United States of America have a particularly important responsibility, after all, because the world still regards us -- in spite of our recent moral lapses -- as the natural leader of the community of nations. Simply put, in order for the world to respond urgently to the climate crisis, the United States must lead the way. No other nation can.

Developing countries like China and India have gained their own understanding of how threatening the climate crisis is to them, but they will never find the political will to make the necessary changes in their growing economies unless and until the United States leads the way. Our natural role is to be the pace car in the race to stop global warming.

So, what would a responsible approach to the climate crisis look like if we had one in America?

Well, first of all, we should start by immediately freezing CO2 emissions and then beginning sharp reductions. Merely engaging in high-minded debates about theoretical future reductions while continuing to steadily increase emissions represents a self-delusional and reckless approach. In some ways, that approach is worse than doing nothing at all, because it lulls the gullible into thinking that something is actually being done when in fact it is not.

An immediate freeze has the virtue of being clear, simple, and easy to understand. It can attract support across partisan lines as a logical starting point for the more difficult work that lies ahead. I remember a quarter century ago when I was the author of a complex nuclear arms control plan to deal with the then rampant arms race between our country and the former Soviet Union. At the time, I was strongly opposed to the nuclear freeze movement, which I saw as simplistic and naive. But, ¾ of the American people supported it -- and as I look back on those years I see more clearly now that the outpouring of public support for that very simple and clear mandate changed the political landscape and made it possible for more detailed and sophisticated proposals to eventually be adopted.

When the politicians are paralyzed in the face of a great threat, our nation needs a popular movement, a rallying cry, a standard, a mandate that is broadly supported on a bipartisan basis.

A responsible approach to solving this crisis would also involve joining the rest of the global economy in playing by the rules of the world treaty that reduces global warming pollution by authorizing the trading of emissions within a global cap.

At present, the global system for carbon emissions trading is embodied in the Kyoto Treaty. It drives reductions in CO2 and helps many countries that are a part of the treaty to find the most efficient ways to meet their targets for reductions. It is true that not all countries are yet on track to meet their targets, but the first targets don't have to be met until 2008 and the largest and most important reductions typically take longer than the near term in any case.

The absence of the United States from the treaty means that 25% of the world economy is now missing. It is like filling a bucket with a large hole in the bottom. When the United States eventually joins the rest of the world community in making this system operate well, the global market for carbon emissions will become a highly efficient closed system and every corporate board of directors on earth will have a fiduciary duty to manage and reduce CO2 emissions in order to protect shareholder value.

Many American businesses that operate in other countries already have to abide by the Kyoto Treaty anyway, and unsurprisingly, they are the companies that have been most eager to adopt these new principles here at home as well. The United States and Australia are the only two countries in the developed world that have not yet ratified the Kyoto Treaty. Since the Treaty has been so demonized in America's internal debate, it is difficult to imagine the current Senate finding a way to ratify it. But the United States should immediately join the discussion that is now underway on the new tougher treaty that will soon be completed. We should plan to accelerate its adoption and phase it in more quickly than is presently planned.

Third, a responsible approach to solutions would avoid the mistake of trying to find a single magic "silver bullet" and recognize that the answer will involve what Bill McKibben has called "silver-buckshot" -- numerous important solutions, all of which are hard, but no one of which is by itself the full answer for our problem.

One of the most productive approaches to the "multiple solutions" needed is a road-map designed by two Princeton professors, Rob Socolow and Steven Pacala, which breaks down the overall problem into more manageable parts. Socolow and Pacala have identified 15 or 20 building blocks (or "wedges") that can be used to solve our problem effectively -- even if we only use 7 or 8 of them. I am among the many who have found this approach useful as a way to structure a discussion of the choices before us.

Over the next year, I intend to convene an ongoing broad-based discussion of solutions that will involve leaders from government, science, business, labor, agriculture, grass-roots activists, faith communities and others.

I am convinced that it is possible to build an effective consensus in the United States and in the world at large on the most effective approaches to solve the climate crisis. Many of those solutions will be found in the building blocks that currently structure so many discussions. But I am also certain that some of the most powerful solutions will lie beyond our current categories of building blocks and "wedges." Our secret strength in America has always been our capacity for vision. "Make no little plans," one of our most famous architects said over a century ago, "they have no magic to stir men's blood."

I look forward to the deep discussion and debate that lies ahead. But there are already some solutions that seem to stand out as particularly promising:

First, dramatic improvements in the efficiency with which we generate, transport and use energy will almost certainly prove to be the single biggest source of sharp reductions in global warming pollution. Because pollution has been systematically ignored in the old rules of America's marketplace, there are lots of relatively easy ways to use new and more efficient options to cheaply eliminate it. Since pollution is, after all, waste, business and industry usually become more productive and efficient when they systematically go about reducing pollution. After all, many of the technologies on which we depend are actually so old that they are inherently far less efficient than newer technologies that we haven't started using. One of the best examples is the internal combustion engine. When scientists calculate the energy content in BTUs of each gallon of gasoline used in a typical car, and then measure the amounts wasted in the car's routine operation, they find that an incredible 90% of that energy is completely wasted. One engineer, Amory Lovins, has gone farther and calculated the amount of energy that is actually used to move the passenger (excluding the amount of energy used to move the several tons of metal surrounding the passenger) and has found that only 1% of the energy is actually used to move the person. This is more than an arcane calculation, or a parlor trick with arithmetic. These numbers actually illuminate the single biggest opportunity to make our economy more efficient and competitive while sharply reducing global warming pollution.

To take another example, many older factories use obsolete processes that generate prodigious amounts of waste heat that actually has tremendous economic value. By redesigning their processes and capturing all of that waste, they can eliminate huge amounts of global warming pollution while saving billions of dollars at the same time.

When we introduce the right incentives for eliminating pollution and becoming more efficient, many businesses will begin to make greater use of computers and advanced monitoring systems to identify even more opportunities for savings. This is what happened in the computer chip industry when more powerful chips led to better computers, which in turn made it possible to design even more powerful chips, in a virtuous cycle of steady improvement that became known as "Moore's Law." We may well see the emergence of a new version of "Moore's Law" producing steadily higher levels of energy efficiency at steadily lower cost.

There is yet another lesson we can learn from America's success in the information revolution. When the Internet was invented -- and I assure you I intend to choose my words carefully here -- it was because defense planners in the Pentagon forty years ago were searching for a way to protect America's command and communication infrastructure from being disrupted in a nuclear attack. The network they created -- known as ARPANET -- was based on "distributed communication" that allowed it to continue functioning even if part of it was destroyed.

Today, our nation faces threats very different from those we countered during the Cold War. We worry today that terrorists might try to inflict great damage on America's energy infrastructure by attacking a single vulnerable part of the oil distribution or electricity distribution network. So, taking a page from the early pioneers of ARPANET, we should develop a distributed electricity and liquid fuels distribution network that is less dependent on large coal-fired generating plants and vulnerable oil ports and refineries.

Small windmills and photovoltaic solar cells distributed widely throughout the electricity grid would sharply reduce CO2 emissions and at the same time increase our energy security. Likewise, widely dispersed ethanol and biodiesel production facilities would shift our transportation fuel stocks to renewable forms of energy while making us less dependent on and vulnerable to disruptions in the supply of expensive crude oil from the Persian Gulf, Venezuela and Nigeria, all of which are extremely unreliable sources upon which to base our future economic vitality. It would also make us less vulnerable to the impact of a category 5 hurricane hitting coastal refineries or to a terrorist attack on ports or key parts of our current energy infrastructure.

Just as a robust information economy was triggered by the introduction of the Internet, a dynamic new renewable energy economy can be stimulated by the development of an "electranet," or smart grid, that allows individual homeowners and business-owners anywhere in America to use their own renewable sources of energy to sell electricity into the grid when they have a surplus and purchase it from the grid when they don't. The same electranet could give homeowners and business-owners accurate and powerful tools with which to precisely measure how much energy they are using where and when, and identify opportunities for eliminating unnecessary costs and wasteful usage patterns.

A second group of building blocks to solve the climate crisis involves America's transportation infrastructure. We could further increase the value and efficiency of a distributed energy network by retooling our failing auto giants -- GM and Ford -- to require and assist them in switching to the manufacture of flex-fuel, plug-in, hybrid vehicles. The owners of such vehicles would have the ability to use electricity as a principle source of power and to supplement it by switching from gasoline to ethanol or biodiesel. This flexibility would give them incredible power in the marketplace for energy to push the entire system to much higher levels of efficiency and in the process sharply reduce global warming pollution.

This shift would also offer the hope of saving tens of thousands of good jobs in American companies that are presently fighting a losing battle selling cars and trucks that are less efficient than the ones made by their competitors in countries where they were forced to reduce their pollution and thus become more efficient.

It is, in other words, time for a national oil change. That is apparent to anyone who has looked at our national dipstick.

Our current ridiculous dependence on oil endangers not only our national security, but also our economic security. Anyone who believes that the international market for oil is a "free market" is seriously deluded. It has many characteristics of a free market, but it is also subject to periodic manipulation by the small group of nations controlling the largest recoverable reserves, sometimes in concert with companies that have great influence over the global production, refining, and distribution network.

It is extremely important for us to be clear among ourselves that these periodic efforts to manipulate price and supply have not one but two objectives. They naturally seek to maximize profits. But even more significantly, they seek to manipulate our political will. Every time we come close to recognizing the wisdom of developing our own independent sources of renewable fuels, they seek to dissipate our sense of urgency and derail our effort to become less dependent. That is what is happening at this very moment.

Shifting to a greater reliance on ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, butanol, and green diesel fuels will not only reduce global warming pollution and enhance our national and economic security, it will also reverse the steady loss of jobs and income in rural America. Several important building blocks for America's role in solving the climate crisis can be found in new approaches to agriculture. As pointed out by the "25 by 25″ movement (aimed at securing 25% of America's power and transportation fuels from agricultural sources by the year 2025) we can revitalize the farm economy by shifting its mission from a focus on food, feed and fiber to a focus on food, feed, fiber, fuel, and ecosystem services. We can restore the health of depleted soils by encouraging and rewarding the growing of fuel source crops like switchgrass and saw-grass, using no till cultivation, and scientific crop rotation. We should also reward farmers for planting more trees and sequestering more carbon, and recognize the economic value of their stewardship of resources that are important to the health of our ecosystems.

Similarly, we should take bold steps to stop deforestation and extend the harvest cycle on timber to optimize the carbon sequestration that is most powerful and most efficient with older trees. On a worldwide basis, 2 and ½ trillion tons of the 10 trillion tons of CO2 emitted each year come from burning forests. So, better management of forests is one of the single most important strategies for solving the climate crisis.

Biomass–whether in the form of trees, switchgrass, or other sources–is one of the most important forms of renewable energy. And renewable sources make up one of the most promising building blocks for reducing carbon pollution.

Wind energy is already fully competitive as a mainstream source of electricity and will continue to grow in prominence and profitability.

Solar photovoltaic energy is–according to researchers–much closer than it has ever been to a cost competitive breakthrough, as new nanotechnologies are being applied to dramatically enhance the efficiency with which solar cells produce electricity from sunlight–and as clever new designs for concentrating solar energy are used with new approaches such as Stirling engines that can bring costs sharply down.

Buildings–both commercial and residential–represent a larger source of global warming pollution than cars and trucks. But new architecture and design techniques are creating dramatic new opportunities for huge savings in energy use and global warming pollution. As an example of their potential, the American Institute of Architecture and the National Conference of Mayors have endorsed the "2030 Challenge," asking the global architecture and building community to immediately transform building design to require that all new buildings and developments be designed to use one half the fossil fuel energy they would typically consume for each building type, and that all new buildings be carbon neutral by 2030, using zero fossil fuels to operate. A newly constructed building at Oberlin College is producing 30 percent energy than it consumes. Some other