A message from Maggie L. Fox, C.E.O. of the Climate Protection Action Fund.
This is a big week. Tomorrow, President Obama is bringing a bipartisan group of Senate energy leaders to the White House to craft a clean energy bill in response to the Gulf oil disaster. And afterward, on Thursday, the Senate Democratic Caucus will meet again to decide its course of action.
But in the face of pressure from corporate lobbyists, there’s a very real chance that the Senate will wind up with a bill of half-measures, slapping a band-aid over the approximately 3 million barrels spilled into the Gulf so far, while ignoring the untold damage we cause by consuming over 2,000 times as much oil every year. We have to address the underlying causes of our addiction to dirty energy, not just the symptoms — and as President Obama said earlier this month, “The only way the transition to clean energy will ultimately succeed … is by finally putting a price on carbon pollution.”
Join Repower America and 17 other organizations in signing an urgent letter to President Obama and Senate energy leaders demanding they make comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation a reality — and we will deliver your signatures directly to the White House.
Nearly one full year after the House of Representatives passed comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation, the President is calling on the Senate to find consensus and pass a bill that addresses America’s addiction to fossil fuels.
But time is running out to pass this legislation before Capitol Hill grinds to a halt in August so lawmakers can campaign for the November midterm elections — even as oil may still be still pouring into the Gulf.
To adequately address the disaster on our hands, this legislation must accomplish four essential goals:
- Respond directly to the Gulf oil disaster to begin to remedy the damage and hold BP accountable
- Reduce U.S. dependence on fossil fuels
- Set limits on carbon pollution
- Improve energy efficiency and expand renewable energy production
Our letter to the President and Senate leaders emphasizes these essential points and stresses the need to include them in a comprehensive climate and clean energy bill, and pass this bill as soon as possible. Seventeen partner organizations have already signed on, but that’s not enough: We also need as many citizen co-signers as possible to demonstrate to our leaders in Washington that Americans all across the country demand a comprehensive solution.
Read the letter and add your name before the White House clean energy meeting tomorrow.
Right now We have about 2,000 +resumes for the construction of the Trident Energy Power Plant to be built in southern Texas and another in Southern Georgia. These power plants will be the largest in the world and uses renewable energy.
In reply to Maggie Fox:
Dear Maggie,
Thanks much for your email about tomorrow’s WH meeting. I’ll do anything and join anything and sign anything you ask me to as soon as the president (and the fools advising him) stop with this bipartisan nonsense. It’s been made abundantly clear that GOP-Teabaggers don’t want this president to succeed at anything. It’s time to give them the flick and just get on with the work Mr. Obama said he’d do if elected.
Till then, don’t bother me. Enough already!
Ersie Burke
[...] time for change is now. Let’s demand it so that our next president will no longer only be talking about getting us off of oil, but [...]
Besides repowering Amreica, we need to change the existing federal regulations that govern energy exploration and production.
To wit, the Wall Street Journal reported today that “BP PLC and other big oil companies based their plans for responding to a big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico on U.S. government projections that gave very low odds of oil hitting shore, even in the case of a spill much larger than the current one.”
The article went further, “BP was required by federal regulators to base its preparations on Interior Department models that were last updated in 2004.”
Part of the Department of the Interior’s reasoning was that “most of the oil would rapidly evaporate or get broken up by waves or weather.”
I called the Department of the Interior’s Communications office earlier this afternoon. T\Interestingly, the person whom I spoke claimed that they were totally unaware of the WSJ’s article and had no knowledge of any ‘model’ that the story was based upon.
Without the federal government coming ‘clean’ on what happened, as a party to the disaster, they must significantly tighten regulation and tax all harmful non-renewable energy, just like more civilized European countries already do.
So… the US is going to solve our petroleum energy dependence by conservation, solar and wind turbines. The liberals are using the courts to stop building solar in the West and turbines off of the East Coast. Sorrrry. The numbers just don’t add up and is short sighted. The only answer using current technology is nuclear. If you are a real global warming believer why not? We can’t keep increasing our population and rely on conservation alone… or is that the point, kill off the undesirables???
Reply to Ersie:
GOP-Teabaggers, huh… It really wasn’t funny the first time I heard it. Why is it that when moral equivalency steps in, it is fair to have a slash and burn policy to destroy someone or some organization in the name of saving the planet. It looks to me like the President is getting most of what he wants. Let’s see, shredding the Constitution, three trillion spent, double the unemployment, ohh and still blaming W. GROW UP!
Obama is doing his best with the mess he was left and cleaning up other peoples crap as well. The thing he really needs to focus on though is war. Stop war, bring them home and rebuild. Slow down the money making war machine. It doesn’t have to go looking for oil anymore overseas, it’s on his own beaches. My God help him to clean up the big mess they, we are in! I’m a Canadian and I hope our neighbors can stop fighting over oil and clean up their problems.
I am waiting to see RePower America take a definitive stand against nuclear energy. President Obama seems to think that nuclear energy is clean and green. I live in the state of New Mexico where we have learned that uranium mining is neither clean nor green. We have seen people die from cancers traceable to uranium exposure. We have had our water, air and land polluted. Now uranium companies want to attack our precious high desert aquifers by a process called in situ leach mining of uranium to support nuclear energy. We don’t have anything as plaintive as an oil-soaked pelican to show in support of our opposition to this planned rape of our land, but we are as much at risk as the Gulf Coast. RePower America people, PLEASE SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE environmental hazards of uranium mining and how very unclean this source of energy really is.
I am a planner/Environmentalist for Town’s and Cities in NY and MA. Whatever happened to bonds(eg.$bonded in case of this type of catastophy to pay for cleanup?)Was there a economic assessment and impact assessment on the environment prior to action and/or permits? Programs, plans put in place in case of this type of event happened? Did anyone at all THINK about any impacts? I guess it’s a free for all. THe RULES are there are no rules- Sounds like CIAOS and thats what we GOT- IDIOTS!
This is a common result of Garbage in=garbage out- no surprise here.
Let’s try to get smart people- we’ll only help ourselves in the end.
What is SO wrong with a nice, clean good world or is that unpopular today- Let’s do what the English did and put all the idiots on another planet far away and let them destroy themselves.
I have been signing letters, writing letters and signing petitions for years. Just how many do they need?
http://www.circleofblue.org/waternews/2010/world/70-percent-of-himalayan-glaciers-gone-by-next-century-studies-say/
I think the time for writing letters to those who obviously don’t care is going to run out very very soon.
So tell us more about the jobs from the Trident Plant in Texas and Georgia. Hello people! Someone is creating jobs during this mess? I have not heard seen anything Gordon, tell us more please.
Looking for employment
United States’s economy does not succumb to the OPEC’s quota. All of us must stop our insatiable desire for fossil fuels. United States has done it before , for example the landing of spacecraft on the moon. United States must push harder for the absolute, independent usage of renewable energy.
With no fossil fuels, there will not be second 9/11 incident on the U.S. soil.
I personally, being from the oil ravaged Gulf coast, would like to see the United States not be so dependent on oil. I understand that we cannot stop using oil completely because we use it to make most everything we use in everyday life. I do feel that Mr. Head has hit on something that, being in the power plant building business for 15 years, sounds like could pull us away from so much dependence on oil and coal.
Unfortunately humans on the whole don’t have the moral compass necessary to stop the exacerbation of climate change otherwise we wouldn’t need mechanisms like cap and trade. I personally do not think cap and trade will be implemented fast enough to beat the tipping point that is coming upon us ever faster and will not now
have the effect people think it will (but I would welcome seeing statistics to refute that and that it wouldn’t be abused and take advantage of the world’s poor and indigenous people)because unless humans are willing to change how they live on a massive scale and given the tools to do so, it won’t matter. What good will cap and trade do in industry if consumers don’t have alternate energy sources
and sustainable agriculture available to them to go hand in hand with it? The timeframe between implementation of a bill and it’s enforcement(which is the actual key here) with affordable clean
energy choices being made available to the public enmasse and the tipping point(which is being reached in the Arctic) are at this point not in sync. That does not bode well for success.