Senator John Kerry Speaks the Scary, Ugly Truth on Climate Change

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There are precious few voices in the U.S. capital these days that are speaking the truth about climate change. Which is what makes Senator John Kerry’s speech on the Senate floor today so powerful, and soย necessary.ย 

In his speech, which clocked in at nearly 55 minutes, Senator Kerry attacked a โ€œcalculated campaign of disinformationโ€ that, he says, โ€œhas steadily beaten back the consensus momentum for action on climate change and replaced it with timidity by proponents in the face of millions of dollars of phony, contrived โ€˜talking points,โ€™ illogical and wholly unscientific propositions and a general scorn for the truth wrapped in false threats about job loss and taxย increase.โ€

The senator from Massachusetts’ words were clearly timed to inject some energy into the Rio+20 meetings of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which begin in earnest tomorrow and which are struggling to stay relevant during a time when Europe is barely functioning and the U.S. is moving into election season. President Obama’s decision not to attend the meetings has many diplomats and activists gathering in Brazil questioning the American committment to climate change and the great global environmentalย challenges.

Senator Kerry didn’t mince words in his talk, calling out the โ€œdisgracefulโ€ campaign of climate denial as the โ€œconspiracyโ€ that it is, and also placing some blame on the media for its reluctance or inability to bring reason and truth to the climateย conversation.

The media hardly murmurs when a candidate for President of the United States in 2012 can walk away from previously held positions and blithely announce that the evidence is not yet there about the impact of greenhouse gases onย climate.โ€

Over the past decade, Senator Kerry has established himself as one of the very few members of Congress who both understand the severity and urgency of the climate threat and use their position of power to try to do something about it. Kerry’s push for a comprehensive climate and energy bill fell apart in 2010, and since then the issue has been essentially dead in D.C.

Senator Kerry also attacked the senseless partisanship that has plagued the climate debates, channeling George H.W.ย Bush:

โ€œTwenty years ago this month, a Republican President of the United States helped bring together all the worldโ€™s largest economies in Rio to confront the issue of global climate change. The President was unequivocal about the mission. George Herbert Walker Bush said simply, โ€˜The United States fully intends to be the worldโ€™s preeminent leader in protecting the global environment,โ€™โ€ said Sen. Kerry.ย  โ€œHow dramatic and sad it is that twenty years later, shockingly, we find ourselves in a strange and dangerous place on this issueโ€”a place this former President wouldnโ€™t even recognize. When it comes to the challenge of climate change, the falsehood of todayโ€™s naysayers is only matched by the complacency of our political systemโ€ฆWe should be compelled to fight todayโ€™s insidious conspiracy of silence on climate changeโ€”a silence that empowers misinformation and mythology to grow where science and truth should prevail. It is a conspiracy that has not just stalled, but demonized any constructive effort to put America in a position to lead the world on this issue, as President Bush promised we would and as Americans have a right to expect weย will.โ€

If you’d like to watch the speech in its entirety, here itย is:

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Ben Jervey is a Senior Fellow for DeSmog and directs the KochvsClean.com project. He is a freelance writer, editor, and researcher, specializing in climate change and energy systems and policy. Ben is also a Research Fellow at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at Vermont Law School. He was the original Environment Editor for GOOD Magazine, and wrote a longstanding weekly column titled โ€œThe New Ideal: Building the clean energy economy of the 21st Century and avoiding the worst fates of climate change.โ€ He has also contributed regularly to National Geographic News, Grist, and OnEarth Magazine. He has published three booksโ€”on eco-friendly living in New York City, an Energy 101 primer, and, most recently, โ€œThe Electric Battery: Charging Forward to a Low Carbon Future.โ€ He graduated with a BA in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College, and earned a Masterโ€™s in Energy Regulation and Law at Vermont Law School. A bicycle enthusiast, Ben has ridden across the United States and through much ofย Europe.

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