12/13/12, "Al Gore Urges Hollywood to Recommit to Fighting Climate Change," Hollywood Reporter
"Al Gore slipped into town Dec. 6 for a quick chat with Hollywood environmentalists at the Beverly Hills estate of mega-concert producer Kevin Wall, the force behind Live Earth, a partnership with Gore.
Sources tell The Hollywood Reporter about 75 guests including Lawrence Bender, Leonard Nimoy and Lynn Lear gathered to hear Gore's impassioned plea for the entertainment industry to renew its focus on climate change."...
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2/21/11, "Global Warming: The United Nations courts Tinseltown," LA Times, Green blogs
"The United Nations has long courted celebrities for its peace-keeping and anti-poverty efforts, from Mia Farrow and Ricky Martin to George Clooney and Angelina Jolie.
It is a mutually beneficial arrangement. Hollywood stars grasp at gravitas; the U.N. pushes for publicity.
Now the beleaguered multi-national agency, fresh from a disappointing round of climate negotiations in Cancun, wants something more concrete: actual story lines in movies, television and social media drawing attention to the dangers of global warming.
The push comes at a time when public concern over climate change has plummeted in the polls and Congress has rejected federal legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
“Usually I speak to prime ministers and presidents, but that has its limits” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Los Angeles on Monday for a high-profile outreach effort. “Movie producers, directors, actors — they have global reach.”
Ban will sit down for a conversation with actor Don Cheadle before several hundred entertainment industry invitees at a “Global Creative Forum” Tuesday at the Hammer Museum.
The day-long gathering will feature panels titled “The United Nations and Hollywood for a Greener and Better Planet,” “Making Global Warming a HOT Issue” and "Empowering Women and Protecting Children for a Safer World.”
Panelists include such top U.N. brass as the Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; a Nobel-prize winning group of scientists; and Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who heads the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and chaired the Cancun talks.
The secretary-general will host a lunch and dinner for several hundred writers, directors and producers and meet with a handful in private. And he will participate in a "Facebook town hall" with several members of the band Linkin Park, which has used U.N. videos to raise money for Haiti relief efforts.
Ban has made global warming a major priority of the international agency. “The science is clear,” he said in an interview. “Climate change will continue unless drastic measures are taken to stop it.
“I have traveled around the world and seen it for myself from Antarctica to the Brazilian rain forest to Lake Chad, once a huge sea that has now dried up and become a small pond.”
Does Ban have in mind something like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth"? Or the Armageddon-style “The Day After Tomorrow"? He is making no specific recommendations. “I am sure Hollywood can make good stories from this,” he said, adding that the outreach effort “may be a small start.
We have to educate people who may not have the expertise and the information.”"
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6/4/12, “Climate change stunner: USA leads world in CO2 cuts since 2006,” Vancouver Observer, Saxifrage
“Not only that, but as my top chart shows, US CO2 emissions are falling even faster than what President Obama pledged in the global Copenhagen Accord.”…
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4/21/12, "Why [CO2] Emissions Are Declining in the U.S. But Not in Europe," by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, newgeography.com
"As we note below in a new article for Yale360, a funny thing happened: U.S. emissions started going down in 2005 and are expected to decline further over the next decade."
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8/16/12, “AP IMPACT: CO2 emissions in US drop to 20-year low,” AP, Kevin Begos
“In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.
Many of the world’s leading climate scientists didn’t see the drop coming, in large part because it happened as a result of market forces rather than direct government action against carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for “cautious optimism” about potential ways to deal with climate change….
In a little-noticed technical report, the U.S. Energy Information Agency, a part of the Energy Department, said this month that energy related U.S. CO2 emissions for the first four months of this year fell to about 1992 levels. Energy emissions make up about 98 percent of the total. The Associated Press contacted environmental experts, scientists and utility companies and learned that virtually everyone believes the shift could have major long-term implications for U.S. energy policy.”…
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