According to the National Priorities Project, the COST OF IRAQ WAR is: $11 million per hour, $275 million per day, TOTAL: $406,592,561,811 and counting
According to The Census Bureau there are 111,162,000 households in the US.
If the average energy efficiency upgrade for a home is $10,000, then we could insulate EVERY HOME in the US in just 10 hours…
…with just the money we spend each day on the war.
We import 13.15 million barrels of oil per day. By doing these energy efficiency upgrades, we could save 15% of that, or some 2 million barrels a day.
That is more oil than we import from Saudi Arabia (about 1.5 million barrels/day).
What Are You Doing Here? He heads Treasury, not the EPA, but Hank Paulson is investing time in making this White House greener.
Paulson is a rare species inside the Bush administration. Environmentalists see this White House as a bastion of backward thinking; Bush has angered them (and America’s allies) by sometimes questioning the science of global warming. Yet Paulson cares deeply about climate change: during his seven-year run as chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, the investment bank issued a policy paper backing the science on warming and promoting investment in alternative energy.
It was Paulson who encouraged the former oil executives in the West Wing to embrace ambitious targets to cut by 20 percent the amount of gas Americans are forecast to consume by 2017 (part of the plan outlined in Bush’s State of the Union). Of course, now they just have to tell us HOW to do that!
The Bush Administration is going down in history as the Worst Environmental President according to the NRDC, Global Warming poster boy (and hopefully Presidential Candidate for 2008) Al Gore and many, many other respected organizations.
Bush Greenwatch is a project of Friends of the Earth which provides information on the Bush Administration’s assault on our environment and public health.
Hearing things like this shows the divide between politics and what is in the Public’s best interest.
But now this story about the investigation into the deliberate attempts by the Bush Administration to create doubt about Global Warming just reminds me how much this is true.
Apparently, 40 percent of the 279 climate scientists who responded to a White House questionnaire complained that some of their scientific papers had been edited in a way that changed their meaning. Nearly half of the 279 said in response to another question that at some point they had been told to delete reference to “global warming” or “climate change” from a report.
Rolling Stone has a great piece on why Al Gore should run for President in 2008.
History in the making: A stiff vice president campaigns on his administration’s legacy of unprecedented prosperity. Looks terrible on TV. Bows out, following a disputed vote count. Then, two terms later, with no incumbent in the race, he re-enters the fray. Promises to change the course of a disastrous war founded on lies. And charges to victory. I’m referring, of course, to the 1968 campaign of Richard Milhous Nixon. But four decades later, history has a chance to repeat itself for Albert Arnold Gore.
After all, Gore was right about the War, right about Global Warming, and won the 2000 election. Will he run?
Whenever I am outside of San Francisco, I often have to remind myself to not be so vocal about my more liberal opinions. After all, we are quite spoiled here in the “bastion of liberalism” as many have called it. I was booed once when giving a lecture and forgetting my location, both cultural and geographic, assuming everyone in the audience shared my distaste for the current administration.
But when it comes to the environment, I am even more particular to avoid any connection with politics. The worst thing one could do for the environmental movement would be to try to attach it to a specific political party. As RFK. Jr. says, “There are no Republican children or Democratic children.”
The environment MUST be seen as the only truly bi-partisan issue. It is not just in the domain of the Democrats, but should be the concern of everyone. Why else would the Republicans call themselves Conservatives if they are not conserving our planet.
So now, post election, we can start to see how the Republicans should no longer ignore the environment. Just ask Republican Rep. Richard Pombo of California whose openly hostile approach to the environment cost him is seven term seat in the House. Maybe if he wasn’t chairman of the House Resources Committee, which writes environmental laws, it would not have been such a big deal.
Perhaps surprises like this will show all politicians how protecting our environmental future is the responsibility of ALL government.
The National Priorities Project has a real eye-opening website that calculates the cost of the War in Iraq and them compares it to what we could do with that money.
As a resident of California, here’s what they say we could be doing:
Taxpayers in California will pay $40.3 billion for the cost of war in Iraq. For the same amount of money, the following could have been provided:
* 16,733,296 People with Health Care or * 627,551 Elementary School Teachers or * 4,767,634 Head Start Places for Children or * 25,168,314 Children with Health Care or * 235,246 Affordable Housing Units or * 4,390 New Elementary Schools or * 7,685,109 Scholarships for University Students or * 616,017 Music and Arts Teachers or * 741,482 Public Safety Officers or * 117,140,845 Homes with Renewable Electricity or * 601,790 Port Container Inspectors
Mark Morford wrote a great column today on George W. Bush… but global warming crept in as another black mark for the Bush Administration.
An excerpt: ..how obvious it is that 15 minutes after BushCo leaves office, we will have a radically new global warming policy. In other words, Bush won’t do a thing about it in the next two years, despite how obvious it shall become that we are in crisis, simply because he can’t risk finally coming out and admitting yet another enormous policy disaster. Not to mention how nearly six years of enviro policy abuse, from air quality to water to forestry to pollution deregulation on all his industrial pals, can’t be undone with a smirk and a prayer.
Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck…
Stolen elections, countless scandals, corporate favoritism… you cannot abuse Americans like that forever. Unfortunately for the world, the global warming issue is not immune to politics. After all, the US is only 4% of the world’s population, but produces 65% of the world’s greenhouse gases. If our President ignores the issue, we affect a large piece of the world by doing so.
Here is a great clip from one of my favorite shows, Futurama (Comedy Central just annouced they are making 13 new episodes). Al Gore discusses his new film and the global climate crisis. Gore’s daughter, Kristin, is one of the writers of the show.
I am not sure if having a sense of humor about global climate change is helpful or hurtful. The oil companies seem to be spreading lies about The Inconvenient Truth , maybe all we can do is laugh.
Al Gore opened Saturday Night Live last night with an Oval Office address to the nation that assumed we did not have a criminal Supreme Court in 2000 and that he has been president for the last six years. You really need to watch this clip.
An excerpt: Right now, in the 2nd week of May 2006, we are facing perhaps the worst gas crisis in history. We have way too much gasoline. Gas is down to $0.19 a gallon and the oil companies are hurting. I know that I am partly to blame by insisting that cars run on trash. I am therefore proposing a federal bailout to our oil companies because – hey if it were the other way around, you know the oil companies would help us…
