climate change

At one time I thought we all believed in saving the planet, but it was moe important to some than others.  I was apparently wrong.  When you go out to vote tomorrow remember our friends on the east coast, and all of the pople, animals, and places that will continue to suffer if we continue to not care about climate change.

Ron Johnson spends half of his time expounding on issues he is clueless about, and the other half denying he ever said what he did.  This time it's a twofer, with Johnson backing off his claims that sunspots are responsible for global warming, and his willingness to horse trade on tax deductions for home mortgages.  WXOW-TV reports:

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Ron Johnson distanced himself on Saturday from his earlier claims that sunspots were a likely cause of global warming.

In "Fact Check" press release posted on his Web site, Johnson's campaign suggested that his remarks had been taken out of context and did not reflect the "true intent" of his answer.

In a 27 News interview at his Oshkosh plastics factory, Johnson said the rise in Earth's temperature was more likely caused by solar activity than man-made carbon dioxide emissions, and that shifting climate patterns were part of an ongoing natural cycle.

"There's a reason Greenland was called Greenland," he said.

Netroots Nation will be in Las Vegas in just a few weeks; with that in mind we are going to play “piano bar” and fulfill a couple of requests, one today and one tomorrow, from folks who would like to bring a couple of things to your attention.

Today’s topic: climate change.

As you know, there is a lot of legislation floating around Capitol Hill that would begin to use some sort of market-based mechanism to reduce the amount of carbon we emit. None of it will move unless it moves through the Senate, and today, that’s what we’ll be talking about.

Matter of fact, they will be too.

When is a "tweak" in a legislative bill a deal breaker?

Maybe, just maybe, when the change is to an already controversial section on nuclear power that's part of the proposed Clean Energy Jobs Bill for Wisconsin.

Many activists think the language agreed upon by the Governor's Task Force on Global Warming, which is the basis for the bill, already goes too far in relaxing state laws on nuclear reactors.

Now, at the request of utilities which want to be able to build new reactors, changes are being considered to make it even easier.

The utilities say it's just a little "tweak" in the language, and that the original draft may be unconstitutional. But some of the environmentalists and consumer advocates who have been supporting the bill are signaling that the changes could be a deal-breaker.

Environmentalists on the Task Force reluctantly agreed to swallow a compromise that removes the requirement that a federal nuclear waste repository be operating before a new reactor can be built in the state.

What they got in return, supposedly, was protection against so-called "merchant plants" -- reactors built by non-Wisconsin companies to send power elsewhere in the country.