Watch: Rep. Ed Markey on Obama and the Climate Cliff

[unhappycamper]

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/12/watch-can-obama-avoid-climate-cliff

Watch: Rep. Ed Markey on Obama and the Climate Cliff
—By Chris Mooney
Mon Dec. 10, 2012 3:03 AM PST

#!

"It's good for us here, right now. But over time, it's going to have catastrophic effects."

The unseasonably warm December day—over 70 degrees in the D.C. area; the previous day had set a new temperature record—provided an apt backdrop for Rep. Ed Markey's remarks, which drew detailed parallels between two separate "cliffs"—fiscal, and climatic. Co-author of the Waxman-Markey bill, former head of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, and currently ranking Democrat on the Natural Resources Committee, Markey had been writing energy legislation since before some members of his audience were breathing. And as he noted, Washington seems to have been heating up lately over what ultimately looks like by far the lesser of two disasters.

"If our country goes over the fiscal cliff," Markey explained, "we will be able to climb back up. But if our planet goes over the climate cliff, we will plunge into an abyss of impacts that we cannot reverse."

Markey was speaking at the third Climate Desk Live briefing, headlining a panel of experts convened to discuss concrete steps that can be taken in the next four years to do something about the ever-worsening climate problem. With the World Bank releasing a scientific horror story about a planet 4 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100, and news that global carbon emissions climbed a dramatic 3 percent last year, taking action is now moving beyond a matter of mere urgency—it's a crisis, plain and simple.

"We don't need to go over the climate cliff to know what that plunge would look like," Markey continued, adding that "the last two years have been filled with scenes of the other side of the climate cliff that look like they were out of the disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow."