For the past two weeks I’ve had this partial paragraph hanging out on my desktop waiting to speak.

CHICAGO, Feb. 14 ‐‐ The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because
industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are
triggering self‐reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate
model simulations.” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global
Ecology at Stanford University.

Today Feb. 26; Democracy Now offered an exclusive broadcast dealing with Global Climate Change in which Amy and Juan interviewed Christopher Field to investigate the politics and implications of the issue. There was even a passing nod to the idea of a Carbon Tax, something often overlooked in favor of the more precarious cap and trade “solution”.

Juan Gonzalez: A leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is rising more rapidly than expected in recent years. The scientist, Chris Field, says the current trajectory of climate change is now much worse than the IPCC had originally projected in part due to China and India’s increasing reliance on coal power.

The research shows carbon emissions have grown sharply since 2000, despite growing concerns about global warming. During the 1990s, carbon emissions grew by less than one percent per year. Since 2000, emissions have grown at a rate of 3.5 percent per year. No part of the world had a decline in emissions from 2000 to 2008.

Full Democracy Now Video

Despite Christopher Field’s even handed assessment of the Climate Crisis, he like many others is looking to the technology fix for the issues at hand. It is dissappointing to me to see we are still afraid to tackle this issue head on and recognize: if human beings, the consumers of products and energies producing CO2 are the problem, we can also be the solution. We as a nation once prided ourselves on being able to live with less, to create happiness in the absence of surplus. I believe we can do that again, we don’t need to wait for the technology fix to continue the status quo. So let’s take the responsibility and take the planet back!