There will be a rally for addressing Climate Change at the State House on Saturday, Oct 24. The event will be one of 3,769 actions in 163 countries taking place on that day, according to the website of 350, the environmental group founded by writer Bill McKibben and some of his colleagues. Fittingly, the rally in downtown Columbus is scheduled to begin at 3:50 pm, not to be confused with, but surely to be mentally associated with, 350 ppm (parts per million). That is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that NASA’s James Hansen and other scientists say the world should be below in order to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Compare that with the 450 parts per million target of the Waxman-Markey Bill which passed the House at the end of June and the Kerry-Boxer Bill now in the Senate. Many environmentalists such as Deborah Steele, a Columbus-based field organizer for Greenpeace USA, are calling for stronger measures, ones that involve stabilizing atmospheric C02 at 350 parts per million. “The main point of the rally is that the science is clear. We need to take bold action,” Steele said.

Remarks at Who Decides about War conference

Who actually does: the media, weapons companies, the permanent government, presidents (including simply by decreeing a "war on terror", through misspending, lying, simply acting, signing treaties), political parties, culture (the one Biden lives in, in which Israel's sovereign right to attack Iran is uncontroversial), soldiers who obey illegal orders and the culture that leads kids to that place.
Who should decide: we the people of the world, through democratically created and enforced international and national and state laws. 

This is complicated by another question: what does the law say?  But we may give too much importance to that.  Laws violated for decades can be as hard to enforce as laws not written yet.  But getting old laws enforced and new laws created has to be part of our strategy.

Who is graduating in Ohio? According to the America's Promise Alliance, approximately 1.2 million students drop out of American schools each year: about 7,000 every school day, or one every 26 seconds. The dropouts from the class of 2008 will cost Ohio almost $9.8 billion in lost wages over their lifetimes. The graduation rate here in Columbus, Ohio is 40.9 %. The key to increasing graduation rates is to stop working in isolation and to start working together. The communities in which these students live, and their society keeps them from finishing high school. According to state and independent sources, there are significant graduation gaps and inequities among students and their subgroups.

Is the Climate Bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants?

Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of Climate Protection has been highlighted in a New York Times op ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem."

The Senate Bill as now drafted also includes a "Clean Energy Development Administration" that could deliver virtually unlimited federal cash to build new reactors and fund other mega-polluters.

Also on the table are vastly expanded permits for off-shore drilling. And Kerry/Graham have talked of making the US "the Saudi Arabia of clean coal" while bringing "new financial incentives for companies that develop carbon capture and sequestration technology."