Arctic Leaders Enlighten US Senate
by Clive Tesar
The United States Government is beginning to show signs that it understands the seriousness of climate change. A new Bill in the United States Senate backs an 80% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050. The Bill, sponsored by Senator Boxer, has attracted the support of democratic presidential hopefuls Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama.
A senior Senate staff official told a visiting delegation of Arctic Leaders,
We hope to be in a position to do something very aggressive on global warming when we have a new President. However, we still have a lot of difficult people, including two senators from Alaska who won’t agree.
The Arctic Leaders have been visiting Senators’ offices in Washington DC, for the past three days to persuade the Senators to back urgent action on climate change. The Leaders have stressed that they are not backing any particular Bill, or any particular US political party, but simply want to see the United States take any action that will start to stabilize temperatures in the Arctic.
Olav Mathis Eira of the Saami Council and Sarah James of Gwich’in Council International were joined for a day of Senate meetings by Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, a representative of Inuit youth. She spoke of the despair in Inuit communities over the loss of culture, a despair that is driving disproportionate numbers of Inuit youth to commit suicide. Alvana-Stimple noted that climate change further threatens Inuit culture. Disappearing ice is a threat to Inuit hunting, as it makes it more difficult and dangerous for hunters to access prey species, but is also threatening the populations of those prey species, such as seals. The warming Arctic is also expected to bring more development and more people from other parts of the world.
The Arctic Leaders’ message has mostly been well received by senators and their staff, both democrats and Republicans.
We must accept that climate change is real,
said Senator Mark Pryor after meeting with the Arctic Leaders.
We are trying to build consensus on what to do, although that may take us a couple of years.
Staff members from several Senators’ offices have commented that hearing directly of the impacts of climate change from Arctic Peoples has made the issue so much more real for them. The Arctic Leaders hope that this new understanding of Arctic realities will lead to real action from the US government.
July 11th, 2007 at 9:41 pm
As an American, I must agree that significant action on climate, and serious environmental action in general, will need to wait until after the 2008 presidential election, although there may be small moves in a good direction by Republican congresspeople who are hoping to be re-elected, and they may get their president to approve of those small steps.
Will Ferrel, in his video (search on YouTube under “George Bush Will Ferrell”, and choose the Global Warming one) got the current attitude right (paraphrasing): “We don’t have to listen to Nature, Nature has to listen to us“. Well, Mr. President, that does not seem to be working.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I read that George Bush is indifferent to global warming; he just doesn’t care. And apparently Bush is focused more on Cheney’s interests in the energy industry. Probably both Bush and Cheney will ignore global warming… they don’t want to sign the Kyoto Protocol. Environmentalists will be angry at them, but then again much of the American public doesn’t care about climate change.
Myself, I can’t decide… depends whether global warming disasters will happen soon, or in 20 years or 100 years… who knows…