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Sunday, September 30, 2007

Neglected blog

Sorry to have neglected posting this past month. I can't point to a specific event, but somehow I've been in permanent catch-up mode recently and the poor blog has suffered.

Hopefully I can get back into it in October.

A neat upcoming event is the blog action day in a couple weeks. I'm gonna try to focus on environmental issues in the coming weeks.

One thing that strikes me as interesting over the past year and a half that I've been blogging is how dramatic the shift in public debate has been. The fulcrum/trigger point seems to be Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth", although he was simply the (able) messenger.

As depressing as the film was, it established a baseline set of facts for the public debate. I've been arguing with my mother recently about the odd disconnect between the issues that Democrats debate and Republicans debate (when they appear at all) in their separate debates.

It is ironic (and repulsive) to hear George Bush talk to the largest polluters about the need for action on global climate change--but that any action needs to be voluntary (i.e. no mandate/binding target--which I take to mean action somewhere between incremental and non existant.) Especially as I'm still not sure GWB understands "science" or accepts that climate change is caused by us. Still no more than his recognition (without action) that America is addicted to oil 21 months ago, it does seem like progress from such a slow pupil (and almost unimaginable from a candidate that ran numerous attack ads ridiculing Kerry's support for a 5 CENTS A GALLON GAS TAX!--as if Kerry was advocating puppy torture--throughout 2004).

Still everyone (it seems) is on the green bandwagon now, which is great if we can keep the public's attention focused on energy effeciency and alterantive sources long enough to start implementing the solutions that are so close to going mainstream.