Just a few hours ago, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) introduced their clean energy and climate bill, called the "Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009." Emails, tweets, text messages and other assorted e-communications have been filling inboxes and keeping Blackberries and iPhones buzzing since around 11:30 AM. In other words, this is a big deal -- and here's our take on it.

Today ends an epic journey to raise awareness regarding the climate crisis and get Congress and President Obama to move on effective climate legislation. The Brita Climate Ride started on September 26 in New York City with the close of Climate Week NYC. While the UN talks were coming to a close these guys were just getting started.

Poor U.S. Chamber of Commerce...it can't seem to hold on to a friend these days. First Pacific Gas & Electric walked out on it. A few days later, PNM Resources followed PG&E out the door. And yesterday:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s opposition to climate-change legislation has cost it another member. Exelon, one of the biggest utilities in the U.S., said this morning it will leave the business lobby because of the latter’s increasingly strident opposition to climate legislation.

The announcement came as chairman and chief executive John Rowe spoke to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy about the importance of jumpstarting investment in energy efficiency.

I spent last week in New York at the U.N. Special Session on Climate Change and in Pittsburgh at the G20. The really good news from Climate Week is that everybody wants a deal to cut carbon emissions and jumpstart a clean energy future. The bad news is that just a few of the richest and most influential countries are still blocking progress.

By Mindy S. Lubber, president of Ceres. -- Luis

Maybe it's time for our congressional leaders to take a field trip to Montana. They could meet with dozens of business leaders there who today outlined a powerful economic future for Montana if a comprehensive climate and energy bill is passed.

The eyes of the world were on New York City this week for the U.N. Climate Summit convened by Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who urged world leaders to break the deadlock in international climate talks:

"Your decisions will have momentous consequences," he told the assembled leaders.

"The fate of future generations, and the hopes and livelihoods of billions today, rest, literally, with you," he added.

There's much more to say about this summit and the G-20, of course, but I'll let 1Sky Board President Betsy Taylor give you the full roundup in a forthcoming blog and I'll update this post when it's published.

By María Noel Álvarez, cross-posted from our friends at Global Observatory. -- Luis

This morning [Wednesday, Sept. 23] I had the chance to participate in a breakfast with Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and one of the Global Observatory’s Ambassadors. Pachauri is the global warming benchmark that received the Nobel Prize on behalf of the IPCC in December 2007.
He was invited by the Bahá’í International Community to the launch of their Appeal to world leaders to take into account the ethical and moral dimensions of climate change [PDF].

For residents of the Maldives, climate change is already, literally, a matter of life and death. The Maldives are the proverbial canary in the coal mine: if climate change is not curbed, it could be the first country to disappear off the face of the Earth due to global warming.

By Angela Alston, Outreach Coordinator for A Sea Change, a film about the effects of climate change on the world’s oceans. You can watch A Sea Change on the Planet Green Network, Sept. 26 at 8 pm EST. -- Luis

Imagine a world without fish. Barbara Ettinger was really not in the mood to do that. She and her husband Sven Huseby had just spent three years making a film. They were ready to take a six-month break, after going full out day, and sometimes night to shoot Two Square Miles, their documentary about a proposed coal-fired cement plant in Hudson, NY.

First post by 1Sky Communications Fellow Stefanie Zaenker. -- Luis

This morning, President Obama addressed an eager crowd at the United Nations Climate Change Summit in New York City, where he talked about the challenges that we face in our efforts to combat climate change. He also touched on what the U.S. is doing to show that we are ready to make a real commitment to combating global warming, such as the climate and clean energy bill passed by the House in June, and our investments in renewable energy.

Obama is a powerful speaker, but we're convinced he needs to show more personal engagement with this issue if we are to reach a strong global agreement at the Copenhagen negotiations this December. What we need is urgent domestic political action to show that we are ready to be a world leader in climate policy. As our campaign director Gillian Caldwell said,

Real action means using real political capital to push a clean energy jobs bill through the United States Senate in the coming months. That, more than any speech at the United Nations, will show the world that this time we are serious, and that the United States will lead once again on the global stage.