Waking Up America
Al Gore is waking up America to the extreme dangers of global warming with his film and new book--Inconvenient Truth.
After carrying a slide projector to over a thousand venues for more than thirty years, our former Vice President has turned to the big screen for help in conveying an urgent but inconvient truth to a Nation addicted to fossil fuels.
Most people know that global warming is happening because they see it in their communities with less winter, hotter summers, more intense storms, persistent droughts, forest and grassfires, melting icetop mountains, wildlife losses, etc.. However, few Americans understand that according to top US scientists, we have less than ten years to act before we lose control, that is until the planet hits a tipping point where so much ice has melted that permafrost gives off it's stored carbon, that dead and dying forests across the planet become carbon sources rather than carbon sinks and that large ice masses on Greenland and Antartica give way.
In the climate game, nature bats last and it can swing a mean bat. Overheated oceans and gulfs lead to overheated storms and human tragedy. Overheated soils lead to persistent droughts and deserts and agricultural calamity. Melting ice and warmer ocean temperatures lead to flooded coastal lowlands and displaced populations. We must act today to prevent unacceptable losses tomorrow.
By leading a worldwide effort to establish the Kyoto Treaty that starts to internalize the real cost of carbon, Vice President Al Gore and many other leaders from around the world created a framework for action that would put American industry in the forefront of inventing new energy technologies and efficiencies. (Kyoto after all, is a market-based treaty based on a US law that curbed acid rain. You would never understand that fact if you get your info-tainment from Fox News.)
Now private citizen, Al Gore is building a sky scraper not from the sky down but from the ground up. He is speaking to each of us across America, reminding us that we all have a moral obligation to act. Don't let Exxon/Mobile's flunkies mislead you about the dangers ahead. Global warming should not be a political issue. It's not about right or left, it's about right or wrong. It's wrong to overheat the planet and destory nature. It's right to work together to find a solution that our children can live with. Join the call for action to stop global warming: http://www.climatecrisis.net/
Go see the movie, Inconvenient Truth and make up your own mind.
I am concerned that in our haste to slow and reverse the impacts of global warming, many will fall for the too-good-to-be true rhetoric about industrial wind power and push for its development rather than for less expensive, more effective, and less environmentally harmful approaches.
In Pennsylvania, where industrial wind power development is being highly promoted yet PA has no state-level siting guidelines or state-level requirements for environmental assessments for it, our forested ridgetops are being highly targeted by private wind energy developers for placement of industrial wind power facilities.
Industrial wind power lacks the capacity, potential, and reliability to add more than a tiny amount of electricity to the PJM grid and it is not an effective way to offset fossil fuel use. It would take over 2700 giant turbines to produce even 1% of PJM's annual production. (Existing turbines in PA rarely achieve even 30% of their rated capacity.)
State renewable energy policies that focus heavily on wind, outrageous government financial incentives for industrial wind power, and the lack of regulations for industrial wind power development have created a feeding frenzy for forested ridge tops. Four to five acres of forest will be lost per turbine plus what is removed for access roads.
It makes absolutely no sense to sacrifice highly valuable natural areas for an energy source having costs that far outweigh its advantages.
Janis Kucas
Bedford, PA
(WPC member)
Posted by: Janis Kucas | June 16, 2006 at 12:43 PM