As part of an ongoing effort to fight the Keystone XL pipeline, community members and Virginia Commonwealth University students met with Senator Mark Warner’s staff during Earth Week to set the record straight on the Tar Sands pipeline project.
VA students and parents deliver Earth Day message to Dominion: Take meaningful climate action for our future!
Today, Virginia students and parents sent an Earth Day message to Dominion Power: It’s time to move beyond token green efforts and start taking meaningful climate action for the sake of our future. They delivered nearly a thousand petition signatures collected this month, photos and artwork created by children to Dominion’s Richmond office and called on the company to invest in energy efficiency, wind and solar power instead of a huge new natural gas-fired power plant.
Student leaders build long-term vision for Virginia's youth climate movement
Crossposted from WeArePowerShift.org
On April 5-7, the Virginia Alliance for a Cleaner Environment (VACE) and CCAN hosted a leadership summit in Richmond for students from around the state to gather and develop a long-term vision for what a unified climate movement across our campuses looks like in Virginia.
Ken Cuccinelli Gets a Science Lesson
If VA Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli was featured on the TV show, Are you smarter than a 5th grader, he would have been out before the first commercial.
In his new book, “The Last Line of Defense,” Cuccinelli has a chapter called “Weird Science” dedicated to his qualms with climate science and his use of taxpayer dollars for lawsuits to fight it. As highlighted in Beth’s blog post last week, among other things, the chapter quips that perhaps 97% of the world’s climate scientists are confusing the ‘supposedly dangerous’ greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, with the deadly household gas, carbon monoxide.
Feel free to check out the book yourself for a play by play of his losing lawsuit against the EPA, but for now, it’ll suffice to say that on a basic level, our Attorney General doesn’t understand why carbon dioxide is so dangerous–after all, it’s in our soda!
So what did I do about it? Last Friday during his book signing in Fredericksburg, I gave our Attorney General a 2nd grade science lesson to catch him up with the majority of elementary school students who understand the Carbon Cycle.
And thanks to stretchy yoga pants and my cell phone, I was able to catch the action on film.
Charlottesville climate activists tell Sec. Kerry: No KXL!
Armed with a huge banner and chanting “No tar sands pipeline!” the group drew attention from passersby and Secretary Kerry himself, who walked by with a wave to acknowledge our message. During his speech, Kerry came out swinging on climate change. He made the economic case for climate action, tying rising seas and higher temperatures to greater costs from extreme weather and other climate impacts.
Secretary Kerry is right – we need to see climate action and we need to see it now. He and President Obama have a great opportunity, a great responsibility, to match their words with action.
A Voice for Climate, 40,000 Strong
By Jaime Fuller
Allison Chin, president of the Sierra Club, knows now is the moment to think big on climate. It’s been a year of “records”: A record number of droughts have hit towns across the country, record temperatures slowly roast the planet, and storms have left record amounts of snow and rain in their wake. Finally, too, a record number of people have conceded that we’re changing the environment for the worse. “Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, businessmen, people of the faith—it’s not just environmentalists that are affected by this,” Chin says. She knows that environmentalists need to be practical—they need concrete demands that all people left adrift by a changing climate can endorse. But facing such long odds and high stakes, how can they be anything but ardent about the environment?
Forecast calls for pain
The Baltimore Sun
By Mike Tidwell
Not long after President Barack Obama promised to fight climate change in his inaugural address, temperatures soared to 70 last week in Baltimore — in late January. Our weather continues to be unrecognizable. Last summer was the hottest ever recorded at Baltimore/Washington Thurgood Marshall International Airport. And across the 48 contiguous states, 2012 was the warmest on record by a huge margin. Globally, the heating trend — fueled mostly by the combustion of fossil fuels — proceeds apace. The years 2000-2009 were the warmest decade in 120,000 years.
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VA Legislators: This is Your Wake Up Call
When signs aren’t allowed, demonstrations need permits, and your legislators aren’t hearing what you have to say, sometimes the only thing you can do is dance. And that’s what dozens of students did in Richmond today, as they stormed the State Capitol with a flash mob.
After Hurricane Sandy, can we finally talk about climate change?
The Baltimore Sun
By James McGarry
The candidates won’t discuss a warming planet, but Hurricane Sandy filled in the silence
Every four years, presidential candidates tell the American people that this election is a turning point for the country. This year they might actually be right. To be sure, there are always differences between candidates. On a range of issues, from health care to tax reform, voters face a real choice about two different approaches to governing.
But the most profound turning point in this election may be the fact that the neither candidate is talking about one of the most critical issues of our time. I refer to the silence around climate change.
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We Are All from New Orleans Now: Climate Change, Hurricanes and the Fate of America's Coastal Cities
The Nation
By Mike Tidwell
The presidential candidates decided not to speak about climate change. But climate change has decided to speak to them. And what does a thousand-mile-wide storm pushing 11 feet of water toward our biggest population center want to say just days before the election? It is this: We are all from New Orleans now along the U.S. east coast. Climate change – through measurable sea-level rise and a documented increase in the intensity of Atlantic storms – has now made 100 million Americans virtually as vulnerable to catastrophic impacts as the victims of Katrina seven years ago.
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