October 7, 2008 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Politics ·Tagged 5 friends, Ashton Kutcher, Courtney Cox, Don't vote, Ellen DeGeneres, Eva Longoria, Forest Whitaker, Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston, Leo DiCaprio, register to vote, Sarah Silverman, Tobey McGuire, voter registration, will.i.am, You can register to vote while pooping
Did you know that? It would never occur to me to think of that. Of course, it did occur to Sarah Silverman. And she’s talkin’ about it. She’s got your number, Laptop Americans.
Oh yeah, and there are a bunch of other A-list celebrities in this non-partisan PSA produced by Leonardo DiCaprio urging Americans, “Don’t Vote!” Just Kidding.
October 7, 2008 at 2:18 pm · Filed under Economy, Environment, Politics, domestic policy ·Tagged Barack Obama, Bush administration, climate crisis, energy independence, extinction, International Union for Conservation of Nature, mammals, oil companies, regulation, Ronald Reagan, Sarah Palin, vice presidential debate
At last Thursday night’s debate, Sarah Palin issued a dire warning about our way of life as we know it:
It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.
Hmm, what a coincidence that she would talk about “extinction” and tellin’ our kids and grandkids about what life used to be life. 1,700 conservation researchers met for the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Barcelona this week, and they delivered a similarly dire, if a bit more specific, warning:
The researchers concluded that 25 percent of the mammal species for which they had sufficient data are threatened with extinction, but Schipper added that the figure could be as high as 36 percent because information on some species is so scarce.
Land and marine mammals face different threats, the scientists said, and large mammals are more vulnerable than small ones. For land species, habitat loss and hunting represent the greatest danger, while marine mammals are more threatened by unintentional killing by pollution, ship strikes and being caught in fishing nets . . .
Primates face some of the most intense pressures: According to the survey, 79 percent of primates in South and Southeast Asia are facing extinction.
But Governor Palin gets it.
We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.
Well, sort of.
The chant is “drill, baby, drill.” And that’s what we hear all across this country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into . . . And we’re building a nearly $40 billion natural gas pipeline which is North America’s largest and most you expensive infrastructure project ever to flow those sources of energy into hungry markets . . . And East Coast politicians who don’t allow energy-producing states like Alaska to produce these, to tap into them, and instead we’re relying on foreign countries to produce for us.
You just don’t get a sense of urgency from either campaign about the state of the natural world around us. And when they talk about it, they never talk about human development – no matter what kind of fuels it uses – and its nearly total encroachment of wildlife habitats. The climate is in crisis; from the air we breathe, to the animals large and small, land and marine, that depend on complex, fragile econsystems that are experiencing a meltdown more dangerous and irrevocable than a handful of giant banks holding bad paper.
Where’s the climate bailout? Where are the regulators? Our forests and our oceans are over-leveraged and it is time to inject some liquidity into this market.
When I hear Sarah Palin boil it all down to buying less oil from ‘countries that don’t like us very much’ and more from the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, I shudder. I see myself reading to my disbelieving grandchildren about yesterday’s forests and up in the treetops, animals called monkeys used to swing.
But it doesn’t have to end that way – not yet. The International Union for Conservation of Nature study came just before tonight’s townhall-style presidential debate. Surely some audience member will ask the candidates to think about the planet, and all life on it, for just a moment?
The issue of humans and our interdepedence on this planet is still considered softball territory in the American political debate landscape. (Gosh, China sure has an overpopulation problem!) But how seriously and in depth McCain and Obama take the question will tell us something about their commitment to the real transcendant threat of our times.
Both campaigns badly want to turn the page on the Bush administration. Reinvigorating U.S. leadership on the climate crisis is an easy, and strategic way to truly do it, and show the world that America cooperates again. Let’s hope someone asks the candidates.
