C-Span archived coverage of 1hr 24mins of the Forward on Climate Rally.
Climate change is the biggest story of this decade. Of this century. It's a bigger threat to humanity than communism, fascism and terrorism. Where the hell is the front page on this?
There is no environment silo that limits the damage of climate change to environmentalists. This is not our narrow pet issue. This is our water, our food, our air and our land. Our survival. We are all in this together. Where the Hell are you?
As climate change heats up the north Atlantic, the U.S. will heat up and dry out. Last summer was just the beginning of the catastrophic warming that will cause droughts that make the dust bowl look like the salad days...if we don't leave most of the world's remaining carbon in the ground.
Our climate is rapidly changing as the Arctic sea ice goes into a death spiral.
Here's why we must stop Keystone XL and the exploitation of Canada's tar sands. In depth scientific and statistical analysis of hundreds of papers determined that most of the world's carbon must stay in the ground to avoid catastrophic climate change of greater than 2 °C. Vast coal resources and most of the carbon intensive tar sands must stay in the ground to stay within our carbon budget. The real budget cliff is our carbon budget, not the federal budget.
What they found was stark: To have a 50-50 chance of keeping temperature rise below 2 degrees, humans would have to stick to a carbon budget that allowed the release of no more than 1,437 gigatons of carbon dioxide from 2000 to 2050.
To have an 80 percent chance of avoiding that threshold, they would have to follow a stricter budget and emit just 886 gigatons.
The paper found that by 2006, nations had already spent a quarter of that amount, or 234 gigatons. Meaning, the planet's carbon budget would be exhausted by 2024—11 years from now— if emissions levels stayed the same, or even earlier if they continue their upward trend.
From a scientific point of view, burning all of the world's proven fossil fuel reserves isn't an option, the paper suggested. The reserves "vastly exceed the allowable CO2 emission budget for staying below 2C" of warming...
What most U.S. politicians and the the political junkies here don't understand is that the U.S. is ground zero for climate change. Most of the additional heat from global warming is going into the oceans and the north Atlantic is taking up the most heat of all the world's oceans. That heat is moving the big high pressure north and east towards Europe. That shift of the high pressure dries out the western and central U.S. Our bread baskets heat up and dry up.
The U.S. is ground zero for climate change.
The world depends on U.S. agriculture to feed hundreds of millions of people. If we don't stay within the carbon budget millions of people will go hungry.
Stopping Keystone XL is literally a matter of life and death.
2 Livestream links on Keystone XL rally diary with additional links