Marianne Lavelle over at Beyond the Barrel sheds some light on the question: what is Iraq's carbon footprint?

She zeros in on one enormous source of greenhouse gas emissions, visible from 500 miles up in space: the burning off of natural gas at Iraq's oil wells.

Here's the situation in a nutshell.

The Air Force has been investing big in liquefying coal to use as a staple jet fuel. It’s also been staging a malicious PR campaign to trick the press and the public into believing that coal-to-liquid is clean energy, when it’s not. Not by far.

Could be a big mistake.

The Presidential Climate Action Project has posted a statement, open for signature, explaining to the President the urgent need for climate action, and what needs to be done. It's a masterful and inspiring letter that lays out a positive agenda for bipartisan action.

Here's an excerpt that explains why global climate change is more than an environmental issue:

There's a long and informative profile of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell in the current issue of the New Yorker, in which he makes an awfully unintelligent whopper of a comment about waterboarding: that for him, because he has a deviated septum, waterboarding might qualify as torture, but not necessarily for other people. Ouch.

But more to the point of this blog, it seems he didn't get the memo about global warming from the White House. He lets the cat out of the bag with this equally notable comment:

There are national security ramifications to global warming.

The comment may seem like a no-brainer coming from a national intelligence chief, but please notice something very important.

Those eight words uttered by the man in charge of the entire US intelligence community acknowledge that global warming is a fact; that it is a fact of great significance; of so great significance that it affects national security.

In case you missed it, the makings of a nuclear power revival are in the works in Europe that may have unfortunate consequences here at home and across the world. Instead of investing in a new energy economy, we could end up throwing billions and billions down the nuclear drain.