Founder of 350.org: on Copenhagen: Mother Jones:

[amborin]

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"....The problem is the basic charade underway here. This conference, at least at the moment, is not about "saving the climate" in any meaningful way—more and more it's about saving the political skin of certain leaders, Barack Obama among them.

So let's begin with how his spokesman, Jonathan Pershing, described America's commitment to progress yesterday. "It's a vision that moves the United States down the curve of greenhouse gas emissions at a level that no other country has even begun to seriously contemplate."

This is a lie inside a fib, and so coated with spin you can hardly begin to imagine. For one thing, some other countries have committed to emitting no carbon at all by 2020—the Maldive Islands, for instance. And the Europeans have offered to cut their emissions 20 percent by 2020, and pledged to increase that number to 30 percent if the Americans would go along.

In return, Pershing's boss, who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by mentioning global warming in passing as a military threat, has offered a cut of 4 percent from 1990 levels by 2020.

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The problem is that it doesn't come anywhere close to doing what scientists have called necessary. His own NASA researchers have said that the world needs to return to 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere to have a hope of climatic stability, a target endorsed by 92 countries. Yesterday the Association of Small Island States repeated the demand for those numbers.

But when you feed in the current proposals from the big emitters, including the US to a computer spreadsheet, it spits out a world with 650 parts per million CO2. That is, no ice, half its species gone. To use the technical term, hell....."

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<http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/obamas-climate-position-lie-inside-fib-coated-spin>