On January 23th-25th, I had the opportunity to present a proposal on mitigating climate change to the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change(UNFCCC) and to Rio+20 coordinators Brice Lalonde and Elizabeth Thompson. The presentations were sponsored and arranged by the MIT Climate CoLab and I can tell you that the people involved in these meetings are passionately involved in trying to break through the stalemate of inaction that has crippled any positive movement on climate change. The meeting with the UNFCCC was a video conference with the committee which has an international composition. Our group also had international participates but included several from the US, including myself. I was totally embarrassed at one point in the meeting when the head of the committee asked those of us from the US if there was anything we could do about the Republicans. The world knows that it is the Republican party of the US who is the major obstruction to any positive movement on climate change.
My proposal entitled The Planet Or Your Plate was presented jointly with Gerard Widderburn-Bisship, senior scientist at The World Preservation Foundation and was about reducing Short Lived Climate Forcers as this is essential to buying time to reduce CO2 which has an atmospheric lifetime of hundreds of years.
The Good News is that the US is Leading a New Coalition to Reduce "Short Lived" Climate Pollution
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton Thursday announced a new global initiative to reduce short-lived climate pollutants.
Working together as the Climate and Clean Air Coalition, Bangladesh, Canada, Ghana, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States will conduct what Secretary Clinton described as "a targeted, practical, and highly energetic global campaign to spread solutions to the short-lived pollutants worldwide."
Of course, this is the beginning but the US is acknowledging the science and is leading on this vital initiative. They also are missing the elephant in the room which is that the major contributor to the Short Lived Climate Forces is livestock production. I know the United Nations is aware of the major contribution of animal agriculture to the Short Lived Climate Forcers and I believe the US is too. Even on this site it is apparent that advocating for reduced meat consumption is not a political winner
The Obama administration has recently helped this new initiative by greatly reducing their meat purchasing for the public school breakfast program. The school breakfast program served 8.2 Million children daily breakfast in 2002. So the US is also acknowledging that it is not necessary to build a healthy meal around animal protein that plant protein can be a healthier choice.
The US needs to broaden the coalition to include many more countries and also needs to acknowledge the contribution of livestock production to Climate Change. But that is coming. We can all do our part by voluntarily reducing/eliminating our meat consumption.
Here is a video presentation of the science of Short Lived Climate Forcers: