They Get It. We Don't.

California has set an ambitious target for greenhouse gas emissions.  Their target is to cut emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.  That's an ambitious target but, let's face it, 2050 is a long way off in the world of politics which means there's lots of time to duck any meaningful action, enough that it can be left until it's simply too late.

Apparently California governor Jerry Brown knows the best way to make that 80% of 1990 by 2050 target a reality is to trim the lead time.  What better way than to order an interim emissions reduction target.  And so he's ordered the state to cut emissions from 1990 levels by 40% by 2030.  

2030 is not that far off for reductions of the magnitude governor Brown has ordered.  Analysis, planning and implementation have to get underway almost immediately.

Mr. Brown’s order marks an aggressive turn in what had already been among the toughest programs in the nation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Under the law put into place by Mr. Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the state was required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 on the way to reach the 2050 target; California is already well on its way to meeting the 2020 goal, and may exceed it, officials said Wednesday.

So California is just five years away from reducing its emissions to 1990 levels and they might exceed that target.  Ten years after that, they have to cut their emissions a further 40%.  

Now remind me, what are Canada's targets?  What are we aiming for?  Oh yeah, a 17% reduction below 2005 levels by 2020.  And, what, we're not going to make even that?  Even as Ontario and Quebec make inroads on cutting their emissions, Alberta's are already far more than those two provinces combined and are set to soar even further.  Price of progress, I guess.  

A Growing Chorus Demanding an End to Denialism.

Climate change denial is immoral.  Who says?  A growing chorus of voices in the United States for starters.

California governor Jerry Brown slammed radical Republican, Ted Cruz, for his denialism arguing it made him "absolutely unfit" for the office of president.

“That man betokens such a level of ignorance and a direct falsification of scientific data,” Brown said Sunday during an appearance on Meet the Press. “It’s shocking and I think that man has rendered himself absolutely unfit to be running for office.”

Now the top woman in the Anglican Communion, a former oceanographer, has denounced climate change denial as an immoral position that reject's God's gift of knowledge.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.

“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”

They're in good company.  Pope Francis, who intends to release a Papal Encyclical on climate change, isn't hedging on the issue.

“An economic system centred on the god of money needs to plunder nature to sustain the frenetic rhythm of consumption that is inherent to it.

“The system continues unchanged, since what dominates are the dynamics of an economy and a finance that are lacking in ethics. It is no longer man who commands, but money. Cash commands.

“The monopolising of lands, deforestation, the appropriation of water, inadequate agro-toxics are some of the evils that tear man from the land of his birth. Climate change, the loss of biodiversity and deforestation are already showing their devastating effects in the great cataclysms we witness,” he said.