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from ODE
Magazine --
 It
was announced this week that author and activist Van Jones will
serve as special White House adviser for "green" jobs, enterprise
and innovation. Jones, 40, will work within the Council on
Environmental Quality, which coordinates President Obama's climate,
energy and other environmental policy initiatives with federal
agencies. CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley said in a written statement
Tuesday night, "Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs,
and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies
to advance the president's agenda of creating 21st century jobs that
improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources,"
Jones, a Yale Law School
graduate and veteran human rights and environmental activist,
participated last month in the first meeting of the White House Task
Force on Middle-Class Working Families. The panel, convened by Vice
President Joe Biden, focused on how the public sector can create
"green-collar" jobs such as installing solar panels and retrofitting
inefficient buildings
Jones urged Biden and other
administration officials who participated in the Philadelphia panel
to use the $787 billion economic stimulus to provide training for
such jobs, which cannot be outsourced. Economically depressed areas
should be a priority, he underscored. "Let's green the ghetto
first," Jones said to applause.
From BBC --
Last
summer, for the first time in human history, boats could
circumnavigate the North Pole. To the oblivious observer, this
might seem like a good thing. However, the year 2009 may be the
tipping point in human history. The UN climate meeting scheduled
for Copenhagen in December may be humanity’s last chance to
avoid total chaos. It is already too late to avoid some climate
chaos. Global climate news during the last year revealed an
order-of-magnitude change in the effect of human greenhouse gas
emissions.
 The news is the
scale
of the impact we are having. Climate scientists are so concerned
by emerging data, that they doubt the reporting process can keep
pace with actual impacts, and they’ve scheduled an emergency
summit for Copenhagen this month to communicate the climate
urgency to world governments. Alarm bells sounded last summer in
the UK, at Exeter University, when climatologist Kevin Anderson,
presented evidence to a climate conference that the Kyoto
exercise has had zero net effect, and greenhouse gas emissions
have increased beyond the bleakest earlier scenarios.
For example, the
2007
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
report projected that Arctic summer sea ice
would "disappear almost completely towards the end of the 21st
century." Now, data suggest the ice will be gone before 2015, a
century ahead of previous estimates.
In 1992, when
delegates first drafted the Kyoto outline, net global CO2
emissions were increasing by about 1% per year. Today, net
emissions are increasing three hundred persent faster, driven by
increased fossil fuel burning in Europe and North America,
China’s coal-powered boom, and industrial growth in the
developing world, exacerbated by disappearing forests. Former
IPCC head, Bob Watson, warned that the world should prepare for
drought, food shortages, sea rise, and more forest loss,
decimating species and displacing millions of people. "We’re at
the very top end of the worst case scenario," he explains.
Glacial melt in
the Himalayas and Andes has reduced river flow and drinking
water for billions of people. Agriculture is suffering from low
water in China, Peru, East Africa and the American southwest.
U.S. Energy Secretary, physicist Steven Chu,
told a U.S. audience in February, "We are on a path that scares
me."
Katherine Richardson, from
Copenhagen University,
host of the Emergency Climate Summit this month, says, "This is
not a regular scientific conference. This is a deliberate
attempt to influence policy." The scientists will present
"disturbing" new data about the pace of global warming. Later,
in December, nations will meet in Copenhagen to replace the
ineffective Kyoto agreement. This meeting may be humanity’s last
chance .
from
The Wall Street Journal
--
This
week US Attorney General Eric Holder announced that the federal
government will no longer raid medical marijuana shops in
California. It was
 seen by California legislators as a step toward
legalization and tax sales of marijuana. Under the Bush
administration, the DEA raided shops across the country. The
Attorney General recently said that states will be able to set their
own medical marijuana laws, which president Obama. “We may be seeing
the end of an era,” says Rob MacCoun, a law professor of drug policy
at
University of
California,
Berkeley.
from
HolisticFuture.com
--
Over the past of seven years there’s been a downshift in the number
of Americans who attach themselves to a Christian religion,
 and
an upswing in the number of those who don’t profess to any religion
at all.
A report by
The Program on Public Values
at
Trinity College
in Hartford,
Connecticut surveyed 54,461 adults across America, which highlighted
religious trends in the U.S. compared to previously released
statistics. 76 percent of the U.S. population are Christians, down
from 86 percent in 1990. The study noted a slight increase in the
number of people who profess adherence to non-traditional
organizations such as Scientology, Wicca, and New Age philosophies, 12
% believe in a higher power, but not the God of traditional
monotheistic religions
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