CHILDREN’S CHAMPION HILLARY CLINTON is on the verge of becoming President of the United States. What should her number one priority be? What is the greatest danger facing our children and grand-children? How do we help her defeat the powerful Fossil Fuel industry and their wholly owned lawmakers in D.C? And what can we do to insure she will lead this fight as outlined in the Democratic Platform? Combining Children’s Issue with Climate Change will help HRC win the Presidency
As Children’s Champion Hillary Clinton is uniquely placed to carry the fight that will address Climate Change. Make Climate Change a Children’s issue and connect the two in the narrative going forward. We must address the world as it will become for our children and grand-children to win this fight against the Fossil Fuel Industry only concerned with profit this quarter.
It was Dr James Hansen, who first brought global warming to the attention of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee 28 years ago, is arguably the planet's most reliable champion of climate health. "the real story—that this is tragedy. Because it's avoidable."
Despite 28 years of effort Dr Hansen who’s latest paper issued Mar 22 2016 via the Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Journal of the European Geosciences Union showed rates of ice melt, sea level rise, and superstorms proving that Earth’s ice is melting and its seas are rising much faster than expected. As covered in great detail in this SLEEPWALKING TOWARD OBLIVION Diary
Those dire warnings managed 81 recs and 150 comments but the follow up WAR HAS ALREADY BEGUN — WILL WE FIGHT BACK? diary that laid out exactly what a President Hillary Clinton could do unilaterally to greatly impact our climate change effort went virtually undetected. That’s my fault and I accept the collective judgment of my fellow Kossacks.
Still I am dedicated to trying to find a way to invigorate progressives to show our candidate how important the Climate Change issue is to us. Am I wrong? Do we not see Climate Change as the single most dangerous threat to our children and grand children?
Bernie Sanders said it time and again and the final platform of the Democratic Convention put it forward in Bernie’s terms
In July, the Democratic Party issued a platform that called for a World War II–type national mobilization to save civilization from the “catastrophic consequences” of a “global climate emergency.” In fact, Hillary Clinton’s negotiators agreed to plans for an urgent summit “in the first hundred days of the next administration” where the president will convene “the world’s best engineers, climate scientists, policy experts, activists, and indigenous communities to chart a course to solve the climate crisis.”
Will it take an event akin to Pearl Harbor to galvanize our collective desire for Climate Change action into a concentrated effort that will finally stop the most wealthy and powerful industry on the planet? FDR got Pearl Harbor after months of ramping up the US arms effort. We have the 2015 Record Breaking Hottest Year in History, greatest sea level rise, highest CO2 levels, and warmest upper sea temperatures and 15 straight record breaking months. But:
Perhaps the closest we’ve come to FDR’s “date of infamy” speech—and it wasn’t all that close—was when Bernie Sanders, in the first debate, was asked to name the biggest security threat facing the planet. “Climate change,” he replied—prompting all the usual suspects to tut-tut that he was soft on “radical Islamic terrorism.” Then, in the second debate, the question came up again, a day after the Paris massacres. “Do you still believe that?” the moderator asked, in gotcha mode. “Absolutely,” replied Sanders, who then proceeded to give an accurate account of how record drought will lead to international instability.
Certainly we must realize that “radical Islamic terror” is but a blip on the screen compared to the horror of seeing 6 to 10 meters of sea level rise in say the 2030 to 2050 to 2080 range if we were to stop pouring more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere last month. The death and destruction wrought by radical Islam if it measured 50,000 would be nothing compared to the havoc and death caused by displacement of 40% of the World population. We do know that don’t we?
Are We Feeling Collective Grief Over Climate Change? And are we paralyzed by it?
The idea is highly controversial, but at least one psychiatrist is convinced that we are, whether we know it or not By Margaret Hetherman Aug 16, 2016
Perhaps the author of this Scientific American piece using the Stages of Grief as an example is on to something. Is any effort to arrest the slow moving apocalypse of warming doomed to failure because we are psychologically hamstrung by grief?
I wonder if our progressive community that supported Bernie Sanders and now pins our hopes on Hillary as was my personal journey is too caught up in the daily horror show of the absurd Republican candidate to take advantage of an opportunity to make certain that Hillary heeds the example of Bernie and his progressive supporters who fought so hard for the Climate Change provisions in the platform. Bill McKibben relates his experience on the Climate Change commission appointed to draft the platform:
At 11 p.m. Friday night, in a mostly deserted hotel ballroom in St. Louis, I was given an hour to offer 9 amendments to the platform to address climate change. More bike paths passed by unanimous consent, but all the semi-hard things that might begin to make a real difference—a fracking ban, a carbon tax, a prohibition against drilling or mining fossil fuels on public lands, a climate litmus test for new developments, an end to World Bank financing of fossil fuel plants—were defeated by 7–6 tallies, with the Clinton appointees voting as a bloc.
To my surprise, things changed a couple weeks later, when the final deliberations over the Democratic platform were held in Orlando. While Clinton’s negotiators still wouldn’t support a ban on fracking or a carbon tax, they did agree we needed to “price” carbon, that wind and sun should be given priority over natural gas, and that any federal policy that worsened global warming should be rejected.
Clinton had taken notice of Bernie’s growing support and moved toward platform policies that would actually make a difference. Now it is up to us to keep up the pressure to make certain the platform becomes practice. We must set aside grief and go for action in an unprecedented dismissal of all fossil fuel acquisition and a move to put all those WVa coal miners to work building Solar and Wind farms.
My SLEEPWALKING TOWARD OBLIVION diary purposefully painted a bleak almost overwhelming picture of the reality our children and grand children face. We know Hillary Clinton is nothing if not a champion of children and climate change is the biggest threat to their future.
For the sake of the World and particularly the children we must maintain a focus on Climate Change. That focus will help us defeat the fossil fuel owned lawmakers.
That focus will help Hillary keep the promise of the hard fought Democratic Platform
That focus will help Hillary keep the promise to Bernie Sanders and his backers on Climate Change
That focus will show how we are selflessly devoted to the future generations.
As we see the shift toward a Clinton win in November and the strong chance of a Democratic majority Senate with a shot at Congress — we must keep up the pressure until every vote is counted. And we must remember Climate Change is the #1 danger — especially for the children
Will you help focus the progressive Democrats who are dedicated to keeping Climate Change at the forefront of our efforts to make the US Government into a leader in the Climate Change fight?
The children are the future as trite as that may sound. What can we do to soften the impact of what our collective greed and need has done to the planet our children and grand-children inherit?
Climate Change is a Children’s Issue and Children are who Hillary Clinton champions.