Emissions - 80% of 1990 levels by 2050

Why US States Have A Duty To Reduce Their Emissions to Their Fair Share of Safe Global Emissions: The Case of Pennsylvania.
"A new report that looks at Pennsylvania examines why US states must reduce their greenhouse gas (ghg) emissions to their fair share of safe global emissions. Although this report focuses on Pennsylvania, the conclusions in this report could be applied to other US states as well as sub-national and regional governments around the world."

 

 
via Bill McKibben @billmckibben
 If Alan Greenspan Wants To 'End The Fed', Times Must Be Changing <link here>

 

 

Keystone pipeline decision will determine Obama's legacy (06 Feb 2013)

Watching President Obama give his inaugural address was uplifting. "We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations," he said /.../
But I fear the intervening quarter-century has allowed just the tiniest bit of cynicism to seep into my soul.

 Here's why: the president didn't go on to say, "and therefore I'm going to kill the Keystone pipeline just as soon as I can."

If there were ever a stupid and indefensible scheme, it's this long straw from the tarsands of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

/.../

In fact, Keystone is the only environmental issue that has drawn large numbers of activists into the streets across the country in many years.

 

Want to know why? Because 18 months ago, our most respected climatologist, NASA's James Hansen, calculated that because that patch of tarsands oil is so big, and because the sandy bitumen it contains is the dirtiest oil on earth, burning it on top of everything else we burn would mean it was "game over for the climate."

The president apparently wasn't quite sure Hansen was correct — he asked for a year's delay to study the pipeline more deeply. In that year, Mother Nature filed fairly compelling public testimony, including the hottest year in American history, the deepest drought since the Dust Bowl, and Hurricane Sandy. Oh yeah, and the Arctic melted — but hey, it's just one of the four or five biggest physical features on earth.
/.../
It will create a few thousand good construction jobs, but every analysis for more than a year has shown these would be far outweighed by the people put to work building a clean-energy economy.