It's Up to Us

And so it begins. The Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is an established fact. Rep. Nancy Pelosi has been sworn in as the first woman in American history to be elected Speaker of the House.

Next is the fulfillment of the "first 100 hours" agenda, including raising the minimum wage. The hearings on Iraq and many other matters will soon begin. And the first moves to take back the future are beginning. Thursday's front page Washington Post story begins:

House Democrats are crafting an energy package that would roll back billions of dollars worth of oil drilling incentives, raise billions more by boosting federal royalties paid by oil and gas companies for offshore production, and plow the money into new tax breaks for renewable energy sources..."

"The Democrats are appropriately shifting money from the 20th-century technologies to the 21st-century industries," said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association. "If we want to see solar, wind and biofuels, we have to make that investment today."

A number of newly elected Democrats made clean energy and the Climate Crisis important parts of their campaigns. Newly announced Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is making these issues priorities of his campaign, as he said in his impressive announcement of his candidacy. Governor Bill Richardson, a likely entry into the 2008 field, signed an executive order for New Mexico which

directed state agencies to follow many of the bold recommendations of the Climate Change Advisory Group, which produced a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 267 million metric tons and create a projected $2 billion net economic savings for New Mexico’s economy.

“Climate change is the major environmental issue of our time,” Governor Bill Richardson said. “Nothing poses a bigger threat to our water, our livelihood and our quality of life than a warming climate. Today I am taking the first step toward implementing as many of these recommendations as are possible, feasible and effective.”

The awareness grows. Global warming is the greatest environmental threat that humanity has ever faced, said a late December editorial in the San Jose Mercury News. The paper calls for Congressional action, private initiative in clean energy technology and the Supreme Court to force the federal government to regulate carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, the crisis grows more ominous. A giant ice shelf, in place for thousands of years, suddenly broke off from the Canadian Arctic, scientists recently discovered. An Australian climate scientist gives ten reasons why the Climate Crisis may be more severe than predicted so far. Such evidence of shockingly rapid melting in the Arctic and Antarctic is one of those reasons. And this scientist is not alone in believing that "the balance of evidence may be swinging towards a more extreme outcome," according to Climate Progress. Several scientists in England believe that a combination of the Climate Crisis and an active el Nino will make 2007 the hottest year in history.

Sadly, the Bush-Cheney administration, loyal lackey of the energy industry, has consistently opposed any national efforts to reduce carbon emissions, wrote the Mercury-News. But elements of the extractive energy industry have done more than simply pull the Smirk's strings. Confirming previous reporting, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a study showing how Exxon Mobil bankrolled the Climate Crisis Deniers, using many of the "disinformation tactics" of the tobacco companies in their decades of denying the harmful effects of smoking.

Those four British climate scientists, the Independent reported, offered "sobering predictions" that "2007 will be a crucial year for determining the response to global warming and its effect on humanity." It's up to us.