Thursday night, a committee in the House of Representatives passed an ambitious climate bill ”” a big step toward having a law that controls greenhouse gases. At the heart of the bill is a mechanism called cap-and-trade. It’s a careful mix of government mandate and free-market economy. How successful it will be is a matter of some debate.

Cap-and-trade is one of those wonky terms that have permeated the world of Washington, D.C. Part of its mystique is that a lot of people don’t know what it really means.

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Some soccer moms will have to give up hulking SUVs. Carpenters will still haul materials around in pickup trucks, but they will cost more. Nearly everybody else will drive smaller cars, and more of them will run on electricity. The higher mileage and emissions standards set by the Obama administration on Tuesday, which begin to take effect in 2012 and are to be achieved by 2016, will transform the American car and truck fleet.

The new rules would bring new cars and trucks sold in the United States to an average of 35.5 miles per gallon, about 10 mpg more than today’s standards. Passenger cars will be required to get 39 mpg, light trucks 30 mpg.

That means cars and trucks on American roads will have to become smaller, lighter and more efficient.

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Climate change expert Ross Garnaut believes the federal government is on the right track with its climate change policies.

At a public discussion on the sustainability of the future, hosted by the Anglican church in Melbourne, Professor Garnaut praised the government.

“It’s a great relief to me that the government has put the 25 per cent by 2020 target back on the table,” Mr Garnaut told his audience.

“It would have been a regretful thing in the international context if we did not set a very ambitious target.”

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Last night I went with Dad to a benefit concert at Fort Ticonderoga(they did Randall Thompson’s Testament of Freedom, hence the earlier post). We had dinner afterwards and I was chatting with Kay Barton, one of Dad’s many friends, whose son-in-law is the Lake George water keeper. I got quite an education It is a fascinating and demanding job. Find out more about it here–KSH.

In the serene hills of rural upstate New York, Kathie Breault is hunkering down for doomsday. It’s not an all-out Armageddon that the 51-year-old grandmother is convinced of, but an imminent economic apocalypse.

A few years ago, Breault began reading about what happens when the world surpasses “peak oil” — a point where we will use more oil than we can produce.

“I was afraid that any day that oil would disappear, that gas would start to disappear, that I wouldn’t be able to get to work, I wouldn’t have money, I wouldn’t have food that I needed,” she said. “It was frightening — the picture that was painted.”

Read it all or if you prefer watch the video report here.

To replace the fossil fuel food economy, we need a sunshine food economy. A sunshine economy represents a unique revolution in human consciousness and practice. In contrast to civilization’s previous revolutions””the agricultural, iron, industrial, green and now global revolutions””the sunshine revolution restores rather than burns up carbon. Each of the previous revolutionary advances depended on the exploitation of previously untapped forms of carbon””they used the soil, burned forests, consumed coal or burned oil and natural gas. A sunshine economy would cultivate diverse forests and return green cover to the bulk of the earth’s landscapes. Keeping carbon in the ground rather than burning it up is a vital step in the effort to halt, if not reverse, the worst effects of climate change.

Over the past several months a number of this nation’s leading agrarians, including Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, David Orr, Herman Daly and Fred Kirschenmann, have been meeting to work out the conceptual and practical details necessary to move beyond today’s fossil fuel addictions. They are devising a 50-Year Land Use Bill that will nurture soil fertility, conserve forests and watersheds, rebuild rural communities and bring food production into harmonious alignment with ecological systems.

Intended as legislation, this bill would supplant the dismal farm bills adopted by Congress every five years that keep the nation mired in policies that exhaust and degrade waters, lands and bodies and that prevent good forestry and agricultural practices. Sunshine-powered, natural-systems agriculture must replace many of the current agriculture policies and practices if we hope to eat healthy food in the long term in a world of growing populations and declining habitats. It will not be enough simply to tweak today’s food economy and expect healthy, sustainable food production.

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Vauban, Germany–Residents of this upscale community are suburban pioneers, going where few soccer moms or commuting executives have ever gone before: they have given up their cars.

Street parking, driveways and home garages are generally forbidden in this experimental new district on the outskirts of Freiburg, near the French and Swiss borders. Vauban’s streets are completely “car-free” ”” except the main thoroughfare, where the tram to downtown Freiburg runs, and a few streets on one edge of the community. Car ownership is allowed, but there are only two places to park ”” large garages at the edge of the development, where a car-owner buys a space, for $40,000, along with a home.

As a result, 70 percent of Vauban’s families do not own cars, and 57 percent sold a car to move here. “When I had a car I was always tense. I’m much happier this way,” said Heidrun Walter, a media trainer and mother of two, as she walked verdant streets where the swish of bicycles and the chatter of wandering children drown out the occasional distant motor.

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When the Rev. James Merritt wants to talk about the environment, he does what any good Baptist preacher would do. He picks up the Bible.

“The first assignment that God gave to Adam was to take care of the Garden,” said Merritt, who was president of the Nashville-based Southern Baptist Convention from 2000-02. “As far as I know, that job has never been revoked.”

While most Christian ministers agree that human beings are to care for creation, they disagree on the details. That’s especially true about the topic of global warming.

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Lisa Jackson, the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is re-energizing the agency with a sweeping agenda.

Jackson made waves recently with a ruling that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. That opens the way for new ”” and some say costly ”” regulations.

Listen to it all from NPR.

Dr Jones, in his recent Kreitler Lecture (at the Virginia Theological Seminary) picked out something I had not realised. When God put Adam in the Garden of Eden “to dress it and to keep it”, the two words dress and keep in Hebrew are also found in the prescription of the Levites’ duties in the sanctuary of God. This, Dr Jones says, suggests that Adam, standing for all mankind, has a priestly role in uniting nature to God.

Dr Jones points out that the Old Testament is much quoted in the theology of the ethics of the environment. What about the connections between ecology and Christ? The bishop has touched on this before, in his book Jesus and the Earth (SPCK, 2003).

Jesus, we know, is the second Adam. As, in Eden, the disobedience of the first man, Adam, led all mankind into alienation from God, so the Son of Man reconciles all mankind to God. At his Resurrection, Jesus is even taken for the gardener by Mary Magdalen, as this paper noted in its leading article for Easter.

Jesus habitually referred to himself as the Son of Man, and the name Adam means “man”. But the Hebrew also seems to be connected with the word for “earth”, and “God formed man of the dust of the ground”.

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. This involves our son’s school, Pinewood Prep. Watch it all.

Led by a coalition of more than a dozen Catholic organizations, religious communities are ramping up efforts to ensure that the legislative debate on climate change beginning April 22 in Congress will not overlook the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people.

The effort of the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change and the National Religious Partnership on the Environment came as the House Energy and Commerce Committee opened hearings on a clean energy bill.

The Catholic coalition unveiled the Catholic Climate Covenant, a wide-ranging climate-change campaign, during a nationwide teleconference April 21.

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Earth Day is upon us, and with it, several “green” events, including the broadcasting of “Walden: The Ballad of Thoreau” on public television and in schools. This is surprising at a time when government involvement in the environment is all the rage. Henry David Thoreau, who wrote that “government is best which governs not at all,” is probably writhing in his grave.

Instead of keeping environmental management at the local level where it is most efficient, we are moving toward more centralization.

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St. Francis Episcopal Church is observing Earth Day early this week with a Monday night covered dish dinner and distribution of reusable bags.

Outreach Chairman Harriet Pegram said attendees will receive one of 100 reusable bags donated by Wal-Mart to take to the churches in their community. The church already has distributed bags donated by earlier this year.

Mrs. Pegram said the project is part of the 15-year Millennium Development Project developed by world leaders in 2000 to reduce poverty and boost renewable energy. One of the eight goals developed was to ensure environmental sustainability.

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The Obama administration will declare greenhouse gases a threat to public health today, sources said, marking a major step — both practically and symbolically — toward federal limits on the carbon dioxide emissions scientists blame for global warming.

The move by the Environmental Protection Agency is prompted by a two-year-old Supreme Court decision. It paves the way for the White House to regulate emissions from vehicles and effectively force the U.S. auto fleet to be cleaner and more efficient – a plan the administration is expected to put in place soon.

It also opens the door to broad emissions limits in all other parts of the economy, including power plants and construction sites, which critics say could further chill an already recessionary economy. Administration officials insist they’d prefer to let Congress set those limits, and that they will help spur millions of clean-energy jobs in the years to come.

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Advocates of cap-and-trade argue that it is preferable to a simple carbon tax because it fixes a national cap on carbon emissions and it “hides the ball” ”” it doesn’t use the word “tax” ”” even though it amounts to one. So it can get through Congress. That was true as long as no one thought cap-and-trade could ever pass, but now that it might under Mr. Obama, opponents are not playing hide the ball anymore.

In the past two weeks, you could hear a chorus of Republicans, coal-state Democrats, right-wing think tanks and enviro-skeptics all singing the same tune: “Cap-and-trade is a tax. Obama is going to raise your taxes and sacrifice U.S. jobs to combat this global-warming charade, which many scientists think is nonsense. Worse, cap-and-trade will be managed by Wall Street. If you liked credit-default swaps, you’re going to love carbon-offset swaps.”

Some of the refrains from this song have a very catchy appeal. They could easily kill this effort. So, if the Obama team cares about the “ends” of a stronger America and a more livable planet, as much as the “means,” I hope it will consider an alternative strategy, message and messenger.

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President Obama is facing challenges to American power on multiple fronts as he prepares for his first trip overseas since taking office, with the nation’s economic woes emboldening allies and adversaries alike.

Despite his immense popularity around the world, Mr. Obama will confront resentment over American-style capitalism and resistance to his economic prescriptions when he lands in London on Tuesday for the Group of 20 summit meeting of industrial and emerging market nations plus the European Union.

The president will not even try to overcome NATO’s unwillingness to provide more troops in Afghanistan when he goes on later in the week to meet with the military alliance.

He seems unlikely to return home with any more to show for his attempts to open a dialogue with Iran’s leaders, who have, so far, responded with tough words, albeit not tough enough to persuade Russia to support the United States in tougher sanctions against Tehran. And he will be tested in face-to-face meetings by the leaders of China and Russia, who have been pondering the degree to which the power of the United States to dominate global affairs may be ebbing.

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It sounds like such a simple thing to do: buy some new light bulbs, screw them in, save the planet.

But a lot of people these days are finding the new compact fluorescent bulbs anything but simple. Consumers who are trying them say they sometimes fail to work, or wear out early. At best, people discover that using the bulbs requires learning a long list of dos and don’ts.

Take the case of Karen Zuercher and her husband, in San Francisco. Inspired by watching the movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” they decided to swap out nearly every incandescent bulb in their home for energy-saving compact fluorescents. Instead of having a satisfying green moment, however, they wound up coping with a mess.

“Here’s my sad collection of bulbs that didn’t work,” Ms. Zuercher said the other day as she pulled a cardboard box containing defunct bulbs from her laundry shelf.

Read it all from the front page of today’s New York Times.

The development of the Athabasca oil sands has led to dueling pastoral letters from Northern Alberta’s Anglican and Roman Catholic bishops. Bishop Luc Bouchard of the Roman Catholic Diocese of St. Paul has called for a halt to mining, saying its development “constitutes a serious moral problem.” However, Archbishop John Clarke of the Anglican Diocese of Athabasca has endorsed development, chastising those who were “vilifying one of the most exciting and challenging projects in Canadian history.”

Spread across 54,000 sq miles of sparsely populated Northern Alberta, the Athabasca oil sands contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of heavy oil or bitumen, and are roughly equal to the world’s total proven reserves of conventional petroleum. Commercial extraction of oil from the tar sands began in 1967, but recent developments in oil extraction technology as well as the spike in world petroleum prices has led to considerable private and government investment in the region.

On Jan 25, Bishop Bourchard released a pastoral letter to his diocese urging a halt to exploration and surface mining. “The integrity of creation in the Athabasca oil sands is clearly being sacrificed for economic gain,” he argued.

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One of the resolutions up for consideration at General Convention in July is endorsement of the Earth Charter together with the development of “action steps for diocese, churches and individuals to implement its principles locally, nationally and internationally.”

The Earth Charter is a declaration of fundamental principles for building a just, sustainable and peaceful global society in the 21st century. Following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, it was drafted over a multi-year period by an international drafting committee that engaged literally thousands of ordinary people and hundreds of local and international organizations. It was formally launched in June 2000 and has since received formal endorsements by thousands of groups worldwide.

Read it all and follow the link to the full text of the charter.

Renewing the face of the earth, then, is an enterprise not of imposing some private human vision on a passive nature but of living in such a way as to bring more clearly to light the interconnectedness of all things and their dependence on what we cannot finally master or understand. This certainly involves a creative engagement with nature, seeking to work with those natural powers whose working gives us joy, as St Augustine says, in order to enhance human liberty and well-being. But that creative work will always be done in consciousness of costs, seen and unseen, and will not be dominated by fantasies about unconditional domination. It is a vision that, in the Christian context, is founded on the idea of humanity as having a ‘priestly’ relationship with the natural order: the human agent is created with the capacity to make sense of the environment and to move it into a closer relation with its creator by drawing out of it its capacity to become a sign of love and generosity. This entails so using the things of the earth that they promote justice between human beings ”“ making sense so as to make peace, equity and so on, using the skills of negotiating the environment in order to alleviate suffering and spread resources. Used in this way, the raw material of the environment is seen as serving human need ”“ but only by being used in awareness of its own integrity and its own constraints. It remains itself, but in its use for the sake of healing or justice becomes ‘sacramental’ of the infinite gift from which it originates. The ‘face’ of the earth becomes an aspect of the face of God. And a good many theologians have started from here in explaining what the actual sacraments of the Church mean ”“ especially the Eucharist ”“ as the firstfruits of a world of material things that has been given meaning in the context of communicating divine generosity.

All this echoes what St Paul touches on in Romans 8: creation is in some sense frustrated so long as humanity is ‘unredeemed’. The world is less than it might be so long as human beings are less than they might be, since the capacity of human beings to shape the material environment into a sign of justice and generosity is blocked by human selfishness.

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[We need]…A Green New Deal. If Roosevelt’s big idea for the Great Depression was public works, then it makes sense to use this crisis to start the long, hard process of making economies more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels. A combination of low interest rates and fiscal expansion is ideal – provided the investment is used productively rather than for speculation. That will involve two concepts that have been anathema during the heyday of laissez-faire: industrial policy and credit controls.

A Green New Deal is vital for the world. The US has only 4 per cent of the world’s population, but is responsible for 25 per cent of global CO2 emissions. The problems of the big three car makers provide Obama with an unprecedented opportunity to send the gas guzzler to the scrapheap. Rebalancing the global economy means countries such as China must increase domestic demand; one way to do that would be through investment in greener energy.

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Growing world population will cause a “perfect storm” of food, energy and water shortages by 2030, the UK government chief scientist has warned.

By 2030 the demand for resources will create a crisis with dire consequences, Prof John Beddington said.

Demand for food and energy will jump 50% by 2030 and for fresh water by 30%, as the population tops 8.3 billion, he told a conference in London.

Climate change will exacerbate matters in unpredictable ways, he added.

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The debate over Alberta’s oilsands is taking on religious overtones these days.

Two months after a Roman Catholic bishop wrote a scathing letter against the province’s vast and controversial energy development, an Anglican bishop has spoken out against “vilifying one of the most exciting and challenging projects in Canadian history.”

John Clarke, bishop of Athabasca ”” a diocese that covers all of northern Alberta ”” said in a pastoral letter that some politicians and news reports focus on negative images of the oilsands, such as the mining process, tailings ponds and dead waterfowl.

“It is time for all (of) us across the Diocese of Athabasca and the Canadian Church to support the good work of the people of Fort McMurray, and not allow the agenda to be driven by the sensationalism of the National Geographic approach,” Clarke wrote in a letter published last week.

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The Ford and Honda hybrids due out this month are among dozens planned for the coming years as automakers try to meet new fuel-efficiency standards and please politicians overseeing the industry’s multibillion-dollar bailout.

Unfortunately for the automakers, hybrids are a tough sell these days.

Americans have cut back on buying vehicles of all types as the economy continues its slide. But the slowdown has been particularly brutal for hybrids, which use electricity and gasoline as power sources. They were the industry’s darling just last summer, but sales have collapsed as consumers refuse to pay a premium for a fuel-efficient vehicle now that the average gallon of gasoline nationally has slipped below $2.

“When gas prices came down, the priority of buying a hybrid fell off quite quickly,” said Wes Brown, a partner at Los Angeles-based market research firm Iceology. “Yet even as consumer interest declined, the manufacturers have continued to pump them out.”

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The wind and solar industries in America “were dead in the fourth quarter,” said John Woolard, chief executive of BrightSource Energy, which builds and operates cutting-edge solar-thermal plants in the Mojave Desert. Almost five gigawatts of new solar-thermal projects ”” the equivalent of five big nuclear plants ”” at various stages of permitting were being held up because of a lack of financing.

“All of these projects will now go ahead,” said Woolard. “You are talking about thousands of jobs … We really got something right in this legislation.”

These jobs will be in engineering, constructing and operating huge solar systems and wind farms and manufacturing new photovoltaics. Together they will drive innovation in all these areas ”” and move wind and solar technology down the cost-volume learning curve so they can compete against fossil fuels and become export industries at the “ChinIndia price,” that is the price at which they can scale in China and India.

That is how taxpayer money should be used to stimulate: limited financing, for a limited time, targeted on an industry bristling with new technology start-ups that, with a little push from Uncle Sam, won’t just survive this crisis but help us thrive when it is over. We need, and the world needs, an America that is thriving not just surviving.

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Meeting in special convention on Feb. 7, nearly 140 delegates in the Diocese of Fond du Lac ventured into the arena of online meetings in order to complete work on the budget left unfinished during the annual convention last fall.

“Trying something new is always a challenge, but using new technology can be downright scary for some people,” said the Rt. Rev. Russell Jacobus, Bishop of Fond du Lac. “Even so, we’ve had mostly positive response to the online meeting.”

The purpose of the special convention was to consider approval of a 2009 budget. The annual convention failed to approve it because of concerns about mission strategy and youth ministry. After receiving reports from task forces appointed to address those concerns, a line-by-line review of the budget was made by the finance committee. Delegates registered online, participated in practice sessions, and discussed issues during pre-convention meetings, held both in-person and online.

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[Martin] Schur’s death last month shocked Bay City, a town of about 37,000 on Lake Huron’s Saginaw Bay.

The World War II veteran’s frozen body was found in his home January 17, just four days after a device that regulates how much power he uses — installed because of failure to pay — shut off his power. A medical examiner said the temperature was 32 degrees in the house when Schur’s body was found.

The medical examiner told The Bay City Times that Schur died a “slow, painful death.” “It’s not easy to die from hypothermia without first realizing your fingers and toes feel like they’re burning,” Dr. Kanu Virani told the paper.
The Michigan State Police launched an investigation into Schur’s death for possible criminal violations. “We have to do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t happen again, whether it’s Bay City or in any one of the cold weather states,” Bay City Mayor Charles Brunner said last week.

The death has prompted a review of Bay City Electric Light & Power’s rules and procedures for limiting or cutting off power. It also resulted in Bay City residents protesting Monday to the city about its handling of the whole situation.

This actually made me physically sick. Read it all.

Google has lifted the lid on its first major upgrade to its global mapping software, Google Earth.

Google Ocean expands this map to include large swathes of the ocean floor and abyssal plain.

Users can dive beneath a dynamic water surface to explore the 3D sea floor terrain.

The map also includes 20 content layers, containing information from the world’s leading scientists, researchers, and ocean explorers.

Al Gore was at the launch event in San Francisco which, Google hopes, will take its mapping software a step closer to total coverage of the entire globe.

Read it all and the new Google ocean link is here.