Welcome to the Progressive Pathway blog, the virtual home of Corbett Kroehler’s climate crisis advocacy and authorship!

Living in Central Florida, along a common hurricane tracking path, I’ve been asked whether I believe that global warming causes wind storms. The short answer is that no, it does not.

However, it has a cause in common with the intensity and number of hurricanes, deforestation. The same apocalyptic burning of old-growth cloud forests and rain forests in Central America, South America and West Africa adds unspeakable tons of carbon to the atmosphere and robs the planet of a key defensive weapon in regulating wind storms.

By halting mass deforestation in those areas and replacing it with new plantings and sustainable forestry, we can begin to reverse the trend toward greater and greater levels of carbon in the atmosphere and reduce the intensity of hurricanes at the same time.

Political inaction on global warming and climate change shares a cause with another crisis, voter apathy in the United States. The average citizen of this country now is more likely to vote in an American Idol competition that a national election.

While laughable, this statistic represents a grave threat to a fundamental principle which underpins our republic.

President Lincoln give it to us very succinctly in the final stanza of his Gettysburg Address: “Government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

If voters deliberately opt out of the political process, either in protest or because they believe that their time on election day is wasted, they diminish the sacrifices of their forebears who fought to give everyone the right to vote and they make it easier for politicians to base their decisions on national TV ratings and poll results rather than healthy discourse with their constituents.

Please visit my next three posts to read how inaction on global warming and voter apathy have a common solution.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

Scientists who perpetuate the claim that humanity is not the primary cause of global warming either are quacks or have their work funded in one way or another by industries and their financial allies who profit from the destruction of the earth.

I have yet to encounter an argument against the fundamental truths of global warming which did not fit the previous sentence. As Vice President Al Gore recently told us, the planet has a fever.

Where there is legitimate debate is just how bad the situation is as it stands today. The options go from bad to horrific to doomsday scenarios. In the interest of holding my audience, I limit myself to conclusions which I know can survive the most strident scrutiny.

Not surprisingly, since I am running to represent Florida’s eighth congressional district in Washington, I will focus this post on the Sunshine State.

The explanation is quite simple. The once-permanent ice shelf of Greenland will melt completely in a few short years. The damage is done.

If we parked every car, decommissioned every fossil-fueled power plant and extinguished every forest fire in every nation of the world, we could not save the Greenland ice shelf.

Can I provide a definite year in which the last layer of ice will fall into the North Atlantic Ocean?

No but the best-case as I see it is the year 2025.

What I can say for certain is that the rapid melting underway there today will cause a permanent sea rise of between two and three feet by the year 2015, perhaps as early as 2010.

What does that mean to Florida? Visit the following URLs for the answer:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/si_online/covers/issues/2007/0312.html

and

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2007/more/03/06/eco0312

Florida’s eighth congressional district includes the heart of our tourism industry, including Orlando International Airport, the busiest in the state, the major theme parks, including Walt Disney World, and many of our largest hotels.

Even if the first round of sea rise does not impact Orlando directly, the Sports Illustrated story linked above paints a very gloomy picture: every major professional sporting venue in Florida, Jacksonville, Miami and Tampa Bay, will face great challenges from the encroaching seas.

Clearly, if Sports Illustrated runs a theoretical image of the Dolphin Stadium infield under two feet of salt water and states “Global warming is not coming; it is here.”, we have passed the point of serious doubt in the commercial news media that global warming is not a myth and that the consequences will be here sooner than we like.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

Congratulations go out to the leadership of most of the G-8 nations last week! Most of the G-8 will do more to reduce their contributions to global warming and the climate crisis.

Sadly, at least for now, the United States will not be among them.

Here in the America, some states have made great strides while others struggle with archaic approaches, including Florida. At the national level, of course, the results are similar. Some progress has been erased by retrograde policies while other successes go unheralded.

What we need to do is look to a pair of G-8 peers and one of our largest trading partners.

Austria and Germany now are a full decade ahead of the United States in their investment in solar and wind technology in order to save their electric ratepayers millions of dollars in future rate increases and, not coincidentally, bring about a corresponding drop in emissions of greenhouse gases.

China, on the other hand, while moving in exactly the wrong direction in the construction of hundreds of new coal-fired power plants, is setting global records for installation of solar-powered water heaters, such as my wife Catrin and I have on our Orlando home.

Indeed, there are more than 700 manufacturers of solar water heating systems in China and together, they install more than 5,000,000 square meters of new rooftop solar collectors each year, an amazing statistic.

How have these nations managed to forge ahead with next-generation energy solutions while some members of their domestic energy sector advocate the status quo?

They did two key things:

1) They helped their citizens focus their collective voice in demanding consumer and environmentally-friendly solutions so that the small number of special interest mouthpieces were not heard; and

2) They made it cultural.

It is these two methods which I try to emulate and the reason for the existence of my expert blog here on Keyboard Culture.

The State of Florida, which welcomed me open arms in 1987, is threatened by rising seas. The solution to the problem is not a mystery. We know how to prevent catastrophic sea rise. What is missing is the will to stop it.

In Austria and Germany, the government has reached out to the people to convince them to participate in buying electricity produced from renewable energy as a matter of national pride. In China, there are entire towns which turn out for fairs and parades to celebrate the environment and how heating their water with the power of the sun helps keep the air they breathe clean. In some of those towns, the fairs adopt a green theme and nearly all of the people turn out to participate, dressed in the same color. The photographs I’ve seen struck me as St. Patrick’s Day in the Far East.

Environmental Defense, of which I am a proud member, has a convenient website which lays out steps you can take to blend conservation into your lifestyle. Please visit http://fightglobalwarming.com

To every reader who lives in the eastern half of the United States: the 2007 hurricane season is off to a troubling start, with the Southeast suffering from a severe subtropical storm (Andrea) fully 3 weeks before the beginning of the annual hurricane season.

Then, Tropic Storm Barry accelerated to 50mph wind speeds on June 1, among the earliest storms ever. 2006 may have been a quiet year in terms of hurricanes which struck the United States but globally, it was quite bad.

We did not receive a reprieve, just a temporary detour.

Environmental Defense has another very good section of their website which walks you through the bad news. It definitely is worth an hour of your time. http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagid=489

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

I love YouTube! What a wonderful invention! 15 years ago, when I first heard the term "Information Age", I had no idea how transformative it would be.

Well, I just watched an amazing 20-minute video on the climate crisis. It is a must-see video, period. I encourage you to watch it at the following address and then return for my commentary:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuXJFbJNltg

First a few sticking points and then I'll editorialize:

1) The facts and figures are accurate, which I hope means that you were left with a tremendous sense of foreboding.

2) Wal-Mart is not green, although it is greener than before.

For years, it was a big part of the problem and refused every single request for dialog which the environmental community attempted. Moreover, even though its commitment to a 20% reduction in energy use in its existing stores and 30% in its new stores is a leap in the right direction, it still takes a very predatory stance as regards the placement of new stores and how those locations affect land use issues such as urban sprawl.

3) BMW also is part of the problem. Hence, while they are to be commended for sponsoring this very important session, their reputation with regard to tailpipe emissions still needs another wash and wax job.

4) It is truly wonderful that the video addresses several key details which often are lost in the climate debate. My favorite is bottled water from Fiji. I'm sure that the water down there is naturally pure but shipping it literally half-way around the world for us to consume is, just as the video states, "stupid."

and

5) Instead of being the 400-pound gorilla in the room, Exxon is the $40 billion gorilla. Dealing with that aspect of the problem will require more than just political will. We must employ the wishes of the entire planet to bring about change in that energy behemoth.

Now, the editorial: this video relates better than even I can do with my own words just how powerful the realization is when we are presented with all of the facts, in an unvarnished manner. It is right on point to state that we will not make it without swift and sweeping change. I misted up the first time I grasped what will happen to Florida in my lifetime and remember exactly where I was when the tears welled up in my eyes. That is not a moment which one easily forgets.

Get on board, everyone. The next generation of humanity is counting on us.

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler

My wife Catrin and I simply love the solar water heater we had installed in February of 2007. It has given us nothing but reliable service and very hot water.

As I've traveled and told growing numbers of people about the virtues of solar hot water as the easiest way of reducing our need for fossil fuels, the thought struck me that the masses need to know how painless the installation process was and how little space the collector consumes on the roof.

In exchange for giving them a review for their second-quarter newsletter, the Sierra Club of Central Florida has been kind enough to host a photolog of installation day on their website.

It is available for free at http://florida.sierraclub.org/central/solar

All of the images are clickable so don't hesitate to click on them to view enlargements.

The 25% reduction in our monthly utility bill happened because of what you will see in the photos. A comparable system on most any home with decent southern exposure and 2 adults using hot water would cost approximately $5,000.

With tax incentives currently available, our return on investment (ROI) period will be about 7 years but of course, the smiles we derive from knowing that we heat our water without causing air pollution are priceless!

Sustainable Justice For All!

Corbett Kroehler