Environmentalist

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), a national nonprofit organization established in 1967, has helped forge a cross-sector alliance between corporate and environmental leaders, with the intent to achieve economically viable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The group, the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), is thus far composed of 10 dominant corporations and 6 leading environmental groups, including such big names as Alcoa, General Electric, and DuPont, as well as EDF and the National Resources Defense Council.

The alliance's proposal, "A Call For Action" [pdf], requests immediate federal government limits on greenhouse gas emissions and the creation of market-based incentives to achieve those limits. There is a clear need for such cap-and-trade requirements to be mandatory, so that early adopters will be rewarded by being able to stay competitive in relevant markets.

USCAP motivates its incentives with the NAS survey result:

In June 2005, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences joined with the scientific academies of ten other countries in stating that "the scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt actions."

Just out of the blue Thing 1 said to me yesterday : "Mommy, did you hear the polar ice caps are melting?" Thing 2, who was nearby jumped into the conversation with a "Yeah, and supposedly the polar bears are dying because the world is getting warmer. Is it true mommy, is is true the polar bears are dying?" With misty eyes Thing 1 added, "And the penguins, mommy. Are they dying to?"

I wasn't surprised that my kids asked me these questions. I was surprised it took them so long.

All of my kids education, political or otherwise, is based on evidence. When we went to see the penguin movie, Happy Feet, I explained how the movie uses Mumble the penguin's oddyssey to talk about the UNification of Antartica (which happened in 1959) and the politics behind not recognizing global treaties.

Wikipedia, by the way, plays an astoundingly important part of these conversations.

Notwithstanding they know mommy does something with a thing called "politics" that keeps her tied to her computer and her blog, they rarely hear me haranguing them about the ills of the world. What they hear me talking about, at least during most of these conversations, is about facts. So George W. Bush is not a bad man : Categories of bad or good in people are problematic to me. Yet in his capacity as President (and leader and representative of the US) George W Bush has been astoundingly bad. And there's enough evidence to support the "GWB is a bad president" judgement.

Anyway ... Back to the kidlets.