TheGreenFront presents: This Day in Climate History November 25, 1973: President Richard Nixon announces a series of energy conservation measures that would be denounced by the American right wing as government tyranny today. youtube/watch?v=0bUA-uFNAYc presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=4051 November 25, 2006: The Washington Post reports: While the political debate over global warming continues, top executives at many of the nations largest energy companies have accepted the scientific consensus about climate change and see federal regulation to cut greenhouse gas emissions as inevitable. The Democratic takeover of Congress makes it more likely that the federal government will attempt to regulate emissions. The companies have been hiring new lobbyists who they hope can help fashion a national approach that would avert a patchwork of state plans now in the works. They are also working to change some company practices in anticipation of the regulation. washingtonpost/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/24/AR2006112401361_pf.html November 25, 2009: The White House announces that President Obama would travel to Copenhagen in December to attend the UNs climate change conference. m.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/president-attend-copenhagen-climate-talks November 25, 2013: Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan calls for action on climate change in a New York Times column. nytimes/2013/11/25/opinion/climate-crisis-who-will-act.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 November 25, 2014: In the New York Times, Joe Nocera observes: Since the early 1990s, the consensus view in the climate science community has been that if the world is going to escape the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, it needs to keep the average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, compared with preindustrial levels. A few years ago, the Presidential Climate Action Project issued a report in which it estimated that to meet that goal, global carbon dioxide emissions would need to be reduced by 60 percent by 2050 — and the industrialized world would need to reduce its emissions by 80 percent. This would seem, at first glance, an impossible task. Until, that is, you meet a man named David Crane. He is the chief executive of NRG Energy, the largest publicly traded independent power producer in the country. When he took over a decade ago, NRG was just emerging from bankruptcy. Today, it is a Fortune 250 company, with 135 power plants capable of generating 53,000 megawatts of power. NRG, Crane told an audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival this summer, is the country’s fourth-largest polluter. “We emit 60 or 70 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year,” he said, mainly because a third of its power is generated by coal-fired plants. “I’m not apologetic about that because, right now, owning those plants and operating those plants are critical to keeping the lights on in the United States.” But then he quickly added, “We have to move away from that.” And he has, reducing the company’s carbon footprint by 40 percent in the decade that he’s run the company. And, on Thursday, as The Times reported, he committed NRG to reducing its carbon emissions by 50 percent by 2030 and 90 percent by 2050. nytimes/2014/11/25/opinion/joe-nocera-committed-to-carbon-goals.html?ref=opinion
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 12:38:30 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015