California Pushes Forward on Solar & Wind Power

Photo Credit: CA Governor's Office

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With so much attention focused on health care, it seems that the media has all-but-forgotten that this was supposed to be the year the United States took the lead in fighting global warming.

Now it appears Congress may have also forgotten.

“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid just told reporters that the Senate could push back climate legislation until next years,” writes MoJo’s Rachel Morris today.

It’s a good thing that CA Governor Arnold Schwarztenegger remember’s the most important issue of our time.

Yesterday, the Governator signed an Executive Order ordering that rules and regulations be implemented to ensure that California gets a third of its electricity from renewable, clean energy sources by the year 2020.

It’s great that California leads the nation in this fight. If we want to actually win the battle, however, the federal government needs to act, and act now. Not next year.

Ernest Hemingway, of all people, understood the necessity of collective action. To quote the last words of his dying protagonist in Islands In the Stream:

A man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.

———–

Osha Gray Davidson is a contributing blogger at Mother Jones and publisher of The Phoenix Sun, an online news service reporting on solar energy. He tweets @thephoenixsun.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

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