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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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27Mar2011
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As a participant in this game, you need to to figure out a way to help save the planet from the effects of climate change up until 2010. A cute Frog is your partner. You have to help him by choosing the smartest ways to help the planet feel better.
The deal is this: You have 250 billion US dollars available each year to spend to figure this out. You can also save up money to spend on other good stuff. The game lasts for 90 frog years which is about one week of game playing. Based on real scientific results developed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
Any players out there? Need more details? Read on…
Which response to global warming do you think will be the smartest for the planet? Should we spend money on adapting to living in a warmer world? Should we immediately regulate greenhouse gas emissions to minimize the causes of global warming? Should we invest in technological solutions like a large-scale manipulation of the planet’s atmosphere?Different solutions to climate change will achieve different things, and cost varying amounts. Help the frog saving the planet from climate change in the smartest way.
How do you do it? You have to help him by investing in the smartest solutions to climate change. The game lasts for 90 Frog Years – each one corresponds to one week. The cash balance tells you how much money you can spend on the 8 different solutions to climate change at any given point in time. The balance grows over time. You have 250 billion US dollars available each year. This amount corresponds to real estimates of the potential cost of avoiding damages from climate change. The actual total cost depends on the solutions you choose. If you spend it smartly, you can save money to help the world in other ways: doing ‘Other Good Stuff’.
This timeline tells you what year you are in. The time is accelerated so one Frog Year corresponds to 2 hours; that is 12 frog years per day or 90 frog years per week. So the game will last for 90 frog years or about one week in your human terms. You have to help your frog during this week, by choosing the best ways to make the Earth feel better. If you spend your money wisely, you can save up money to spend on other good stuff.
Four Prizes This game has four prizes – one for the frog that tops each Hi-score in the end of week 1.
Each prize consists of one iPod with key material from the Copenhagen Consensus Climate Change Projects, and signed copies of the two exciting books ‘Cool It’ by Bjorn Lomborg and ‘Global Crises, Global Solutions’ edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
The winners will be notified by: Jan 5, 2009.
Readers: Think you can do it? Wanna try? Go ahead, It’s Friday – give it a go.
Roy: Hi – good to hear from you. I am a bit concerned from your blog comment. How are you and is there anything I can do for you?
Anna: I am aware that there are issues getting on…so sorry. Thanks for being persistent! Hafa Adai!
HI Al: How are you?
Got to run…it’s my early morning..peacin’ and blissin’ out….
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: Your Bad Ass Bitch Editor
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the ‘Donate’ button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my ‘Donate’ page)
I have spent the better part of the morning catching up on the goings on with the health care bill. And after watching many news videos, I have to say that I have little faith left, that this bill as it stand now, if it passes, will be good for the American people. At this point I am questioning it…and I really don’t know. And I don’t like the fact that I am unsure.
We have fought so hard these past months to pass a bill that would benefit all. I truly thought that we had a strong voice and that the system would work…that if we shouted hard enough by writing letters and signing petitions, by doing our part, that we would be heard, and we could make a difference.
I know that I am usually a positive person, with visions of the glass being half full, but I have to be honest and say that today, I am doubting the system. Today, I have nothing inspiring to say. Today, I am confused, upset, and disenchanted about the entire thing and the entire process.
Those that oppose and wish to ‘Kill the bill’ at every and all cost, today, is a kill to my will.
Of all the videos that I watched this morning in regards to the health care bill, I decided to post Keith Olbermann’s Special Comment from last night.
Readers: Where are you with all of this? I miss the hearing from you. I wish that I could open the flood gates. Although I know I am not alone here…although I know you are reading, not being able to hear from you is weighing heavy on me today. We have been through so much together on this blog. I value your input, your insight, your inspiration. I just want you to know your presence here is missed.
However, where ever you are, we are still connected. Stay strong and keep the faith, and I will do the same. Today is still ahead of us. Keep the collective intention going. Ah…I knew I had a tiny bit of inspiration still left inside of me :)
Doug: Thank you for your insight on yesterday’s subject.
Zen Lill: Nice to hear from you too – happy that you made some time to grace us with your presence.
Peace out…
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: Your Bad Ass Bitch Editor
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the ‘Donate’ button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my ‘Donate’ page)
When I first saw the photo of Ben Bernanke as Time’s choice for the ‘Person Of The Year’ 2009, I had to remind myself that the word ‘Best’ wasn’t part of the title.
The definition for Time Magazine’s ’Person Of The Year’: “A person or thing that has most influenced the news in the past year for good or for ill. Not an honor, not an award…”
A bald man with a gray beard and tired eyes is sitting in his oversize Washington office, talking about the economy. He doesn’t have a commanding presence. He isn’t a mesmerizing speaker. He has none of the look-at-me swagger or listen-to-me charisma so common among men with oversize Washington offices. His arguments aren’t partisan or ideological; they’re methodical, grounded in data and the latest academic literature. When he doesn’t know something, he doesn’t bluster or bluff. He’s professorial, which makes sense, because he spent most of his career as a professor.
He is not, in other words, a typical Beltway power broker. He’s shy. He doesn’t do the D.C. dinner-party circuit; he prefers to eat at home with his wife, who still makes him do the dishes and take out the trash. Then they do crosswords or read. Because Ben Bernanke is a nerd.(See pictures of Ben Bernanke’s life from childhood to chairmanship.)
He just happens to be the most powerful nerd on the planet.
Bernanke is the 56-year-old chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S., the most important and least understood force shaping the American — and global — economy. Those green bills featuring dead Presidents are labeled “Federal Reserve Note” for a reason: the Fed controls the money supply. It is an independent government agency that conducts monetary policy, which means it sets short-term interest rates — which means it has immense influence over inflation, unemployment, the strength of the dollar and the strength of your wallet. And ever since global credit markets began imploding, its mild-mannered chairman has dramatically expanded those powers and reinvented the Fed.
Professor Bernanke of Princeton was a leading scholar of the Great Depression. He knew how the passive Fed of the 1930s helped create the calamity — through its stubborn refusal to expand the money supply and its tragic lack of imagination and experimentation. Chairman Bernanke of Washington was determined not to be the Fed chairman who presided over Depression 2.0. So when turbulence in U.S. housing markets metastasized into the worst global financial crisis in more than 75 years, he conjured up trillions of new dollars and blasted them into the economy; engineered massive public rescues of failing private companies; ratcheted down interest rates to zero; lent to mutual funds, hedge funds, foreign banks, investment banks, manufacturers, insurers and other borrowers who had never dreamed of receiving Fed cash; jump-started stalled credit markets in everything from car loans to corporate paper; revolutionized housing finance with a breathtaking shopping spree for mortgage bonds; blew up the Fed’s balance sheet to three times its previous size; and generally transformed the staid arena of central banking into a stage for desperate improvisation. He didn’t just reshape U.S. monetary policy; he led an effort to save the world economy.(See pictures of the Federal Reserve Bank’s history.)
No wonder his eyes look tired.
The last Fed chair, Alan Greenspan, inspired an odd cult of personality. Bernanke hoped to return the Fed to dull obscurity. But his aggressive steps to avert doomsday — and his unusually close partnerships with Bush and Obama Treasury Secretaries Henry Paulson and Timothy Geithner — have exposed him and his institution to criticism from all directions. He’s Bailout Ben, the patron saint of Wall Street greedheads, or King Ben, the unelected czar of a fourth branch of government. He’s soft on inflation, bombarding the country with easy money, or soft on unemployment, ignoring Main Street’s cries for even more aggressive action. Bleeding-heart liberals and tea-party reactionaries alike are trying to block his appointment for a second four-year term. Libertarian Congressman Ron Paul is peddling a best seller titled End the Fed. And Congress is considering bills that could strip the Fed of some of its power and independence.(Watch the video “Why TIME Chose Ben Bernanke.”)
So here he is inside his marble fortress, a technocrat in an ink-stained shirt and an off-the-rack suit, explaining what he’s done, where we are and what might happen next.
He knows that the economy is awful, that 10% unemployment is much too high, that Wall Street bankers are greedy ingrates, that Main Street still hurts. Banks are handing out sweet bonuses again but still aren’t doing much lending. Technically, the recession is over, but growth has been anemic and heavily reliant on government programs like Cash for Clunkers, not to mention cheap Fed money. “I understand why people are frustrated. I’m frustrated too,” Bernanke says. “I’m not one of those people who look at this as some kind of video game. I come from Main Street, from a small town that’s really depressed. This is all very real to me.”
But Bernanke also knows the economy would be much, much worse if the Fed had not taken such extreme measures to stop the panic. There’s a vast difference between 10% and 25% unemployment, between anemic and negative growth. He wishes Americans understood that he helped save the irresponsible giants of Wall Street only to protect ordinary folks on Main Street. He knows better than anyone how financial crises spiral into global disasters, how the grass gets crushed when elephants fall. “We came very, very close to a depression … The markets were in anaphylactic shock,” he told TIME during one of three extended interviews. “I’m not happy with where we are, but it’s a lot better than where we could be.”(See pictures of Ben Bernanke’s office.)
Bernanke also has thoughts about the economy’s future — and we’ll get to them soon. First, though, we should explain why his face is on the cover of this issue. The overriding story of 2009 was the economy — the lousiness of it, and the fact that it wasn’t far lousier. It was a year of escalating layoffs, bankruptcies and foreclosures, the “new frugality” and the “new normal.” It was also a year of green shoots, a rebounding Dow and a fragile sense that the worst is over. Even the big political stories of 2009 — the struggles of the Democrats; the tea-party takeover of the Republicans; the stimulus; the deficit; GM and Chrysler; the backlash over bailouts and bonuses; the furious debates over health care, energy and financial regulation; the constant drumbeat of jobs, jobs, jobs — were, at heart, stories about the economy. And it’s Bernanke’s economy.
In 2009, Bernanke hurled unprecedented amounts of money into the banking system in unprecedented ways, while starting to lay the groundwork for the Fed’s eventual return to normality. He helped oversee the financial stress tests that finally calmed the markets, while launching a groundbreaking public relations campaign to demystify the Fed. Now that Obama has decided to keep him in his job, he has become a lightning rod in an intense national debate over the Fed as it approaches its second century.
But the main reason Ben Shalom Bernanke is TIME’s Person of the Year for 2009 is that he is the most important player guiding the world’s most important economy. His creative leadership helped ensure that 2009 was a period of weak recovery rather than catastrophic depression, and he still wields unrivaled power over our money, our jobs, our savings and our national future. The decisions he has made, and those he has yet to make, will shape the path of our prosperity, the direction of our politics and our relationship to the world.
Readers: Thoughts? Comments? I know you’re reading – Blog me if you can. Miss my peeps. :)
Hi Al: I am not sure why you are not able to sign the petition. I clicked on the links that I provided and the Bold Progressives’ website immediately came up. I filled out the form, clicked submit, and although a blank page came up telling me: ‘Sorry, the URL you tried to load doesn’t exist. Check that it’s typed correctly’, Did this happen for you too? However when I checked my e-mail, I received a ‘thank you for signing the petition’. Maybe check your e-mail too. FYI: I did e-mail Bold Progressives to inform them of this glitch.
Maybe try going to the home page of boldprogressives.org and see if you find it from there. Thanks for being so persistent in trying to make a difference!
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the ‘Donate’ button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my ‘Donate’ page)
I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with everything that has been going on with Joe Lieberman, but this man has got to be stopped. He is one man who is getting in the way, in any way he can, to stop real health care reform. If you agree, and want to take action, keep reading.
Sen. Joe Lieberman announced Sunday that he will join Republicans in blocking a vote on any real health care reform bill — including any public option and even the fake “compromise” floated last week.
The Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein writes, “At this point, Lieberman is just torturing liberals. That is to say, he’s willing to directly cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in order to settle an old electoral score.”
Lieberman was asked if he’d accept losing his powerful committee chairmanship as a consequence of blocking reform, and he answered, “Oh, God no.” Our message to Sen. Harry Reid and other Democratic leaders says:
“Any Democratic senators — including Joe Lieberman — who support a Republican attempt to block a vote on health care reform should be stripped of their leadership titles. Americans deserve a clean up-or-down vote on health care reform that includes a public option.”
Today, we are releasing a new poll with Howard Dean‘s Democracy for America that shows wide support for our petition:
Democratic voters think Senate Democrats should take away Lieberman’s chairmanship by 81% to 10%. Independents also support it by 13 points.
Democratic voters want Senate Democrats to use “reconciliation” by 73% to 13%. This requires just 51 votes to pass reform instead of 60, bypassing Lieberman.
Voters favor Howard Dean’s “We Can Do Both” proposal (a public option PLUS a Medicare buy-in for ages 55-64) by 57% to 32%. Among Independents, it’s 56% to 28% (2 to 1).
84% of Democratic voters want progressive primary challengers to congressional Democrats who oppose a public option.
This poll is being reported by many news outlets. Now, we need to back it up with grassroots action.
–Adam Green, Stephanie Taylor, Aaron Swartz, Michael Snook, Natasha Patel, and the PCCC team
And what about Mrs. Lieberman, the other half of the ‘party of Joe’? Let’s take a look and see what his other half is up to, shall we?
What should surprise you is that donations to find a cure for cancer are paying the salary of Hadassah Lieberman, wife of Joe and former employee of the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbying complex.
We’re calling on Susan G. Komen for the Cure and its celebrity endorsers to remove Hadassah Lieberman as a compensated “Global Ambassador.” Will you join us?
Hadassah Lieberman’s relationship with Susan G. Komen for the Cure is unethical and misleading. Important and often very personal donations made to Susan G. Komen for the Cure to benefit the sick and dying are essentially undermining their intended use.
Hadassah Lieberman has worked for the insurance-pharmaceutical-lobbying complex, making her role with Susan G. Komen for the Cure already questionable. And as Hadassah travels the globe under the banner of Susan G. Komen for the Cure, decrying the inadequacies of our health care system and the need to reform it, her husband is at home to kill the reform efforts we so desperately need.
People who are racing for the cure wouldn’t be racing to pay Hadassah Lieberman money, especially if they knew her ties to the same corporations that are blocking women’s health reforms currently being debated in Congress.
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the ‘Donate’ button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my ‘Donate’ page)
The talks in Copenhagen continue on this week, and throughout the talks the country of Tuvalu, a small island and the poster child for many other developing countries, has been the hot topic.
Ian Fry, the lead negotiator for the small island nation of Tuvalu — one of a handful of countries severely threatened by climate change — called for the strongest of possible agreements: a legally-binding treaty that would demand developed countries help bring atmospheric CO2 down to 350 ppm. It’s a bold demand that the US and other developed countries will not accept, and which developing countries, bent on a renewal of Kyoto, also reject. Today he delivered a speech that, according to Jamie at 350.org, “had delegates from around the world in tears.”
Though the EU just announced it would pledge $3.6 billion a year until 2012 to a short-term fund for poor countries, a draft agreement sent around Friday to the 192-nation conference set no firm figures on financing or on cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
The provisional text calls for emissions reductions by a wide range — 50 percent to 95 percent by 2050 — and asks rich countries to cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020, both against 1990 levels.
Todd Stern, the special U.S. climate envoy who earlier this week balked at developing countries’ demands for what he referred to as “reparations,” called the text “constructive” but said the section on helping developing nations lower their growth of CO2 was “unbalanced.” Because the requirements on industrial countries were tougher than on developing nations, he said the section was not “a basis for negotiation.”
The next few days will tell whether negotiations can yield something more than tears and tough talk.
Readers: I blogged about the importance of our CO2 emissions dropping down to 350 ppm awhile ago.
“Climate change is not a crisis of developing countries’ making, yet the impacts of global warming will disproportionately hit the world’s poorest people.”
The question is, will we as a country, will we as one world, do our part to save all world citizens? The planet will survive, no doubt, but will we? Blog me your thoughts.
Gratefully your blog host,
michelle
Aka BABE: Your Bad Ass Bitch Editor
If you love my blog and my writes, please make a donation via PayPal, credit card, or e-check, please click the ‘Donate’ button below. (Please only donations from those readers within the United States. – International readers please see my ‘Donate’ page)
