environment Politics: climate legislation Harry Reid renewable energy standard
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 12: In Some Parallel Universe, We Got Off Fossil Fuels in 1935.
Well, there are small mutterings that the Senate might try to pass a drastically stripped-down version of climate legislation in the lame duck session post-November. To wit, a Renewable Energy Standard, which would provide specific targets for alternatives to fossil fuels, and encourage them with tax credits.
Sometimes I think that writing to Harry Reid will actually put a jinx on it. Then I remember two things. First: I’m not superstitious. Second: Harry Reid has been wimping out on legislation for far longer than I’ve been writing letters.
Sorry, kids. It’s been fun.
Dear Senator Reid,
Environmentally aware citizens have had a steady diet of disappointment over the course of the past eighteen months. We knew that nothing would happen under a Bush presidency, but we did have hopes that the Obama administration would be able to muster the energy and political momentum to get wide support for meaningful climate legislation. Instead, we have witnessed failures of will from Democrats, exacerbated by failures of conscience and intellect from Republicans.
Now we are simply hoping that a single small crumb remains of what could have been a nourishing meal. What’s left of our aspirations for climate legislation? A Renewable Energy Standard.
Such a standard would be America’s first long-term policy supporting clean energy. Without such a policy, investors cannot plan for the long term; infrastructure cannot be developed; markets cannot be nurtured. When we do finally decide to get serious about climate change, we’re going to need those long-term plans, that infrastructure, those markets.
While we dither, China has left us behind; a recent study confirms that China is now the world leader for clean energy investment — a position that once was ours.
An R.E.S. would trigger investments and create jobs — not just jobs rebuilding older infrastructure, but jobs and opportunities for our country’s workers that will keep growing in the decades to come. We need a clear and unambiguous policy signal from our government: clean and renewable energy is the future of America, and we believe in our country’s future.
Please ensure that a Renewable Energy Standard comes to the floor of the Senate. It’s not what we were hoping for, a year and a half ago. But we’ll take it gladly.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Bill McKibben timidity White House
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Month 9, Day 11: Inspiration or Expiration?
An email from Bill McKibben:
Dear friends,
I just walked out of a disappointing meeting with the White House: they refused to accept the Carter solar panel we came to Washington to deliver and said that they would continue their “deliberative process” to discuss putting solar panels back on the White House roof.
My 9/11 letter to POTUS:
Dear President Obama,
I just heard that your staff refused to accept the solar panel that Bill McKibben and his team brought back to the White House after thirty years. Apparently you are going to continue the “deliberative process,” rather than simply saying “yes” to an idea that is obviously a good one — an idea that has broad-based support all over America.
An idea that would motivate thousands of people to get moving and put solar panels on their homes.
An idea that would give a boost to American manufacturers of renewable energy technology — manufacturers who are being left in the dust by China’s advances in this area.
An idea that would demonstrate your genuine commitment to energy independence.
An idea that would help mobilize the nation around the battle against climate change.
Alas, what we get instead is a deliberative process.
A deliberative process that won’t motivate anyone. A deliberative process that does nothing for American manufacturers. A deliberative process that says nothing about energy independence or climate change.
How long will this deliberative process take? Perhaps until after the elections? I have news for you and your team: the Republicans don’t care whether or not you install solar panels; they’re insane, and they’ll pillory you over trivialities regardless.
How hard would it have been to say “yes”?
Yours Regretfully,
Warren Senders
Ornette Coleman…
…is a genius.
His “Harmolodic Ballet,” titled “Architecture in Motion.”
I wish I knew who the tabla player was.
environment: China economics trade policies
by Warren
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Month 9, Day 10: Writing Without Understanding
The NYT ran an article about China’s trade policies and the response of the US Steelworkers’ Union to some of their subsidies. While I tend to glaze over when I read about international economics, this article made a good hook for a letter. If we hadn’t been asleep at the switch, America would be offering to share technology with the Chinese. Instead…
I welcome our coming national move to third-world status.
Questionable trade practices or no, China’s readiness to pick up the slack in renewable energy is an object lesson to American entrepreneurs and politicians. By procrastinating on the restructuring of economic incentives to encourage the development of new sustainable sources of power, we have sacrificed our nation’s role as a technological leader and a worldwide source of innovation. If we are lucky, the next decades will include cooperative programs with China and other countries that have taken the lead in the development of green technology. With an increasing likelihood of catastrophic effects from global climate change in the near future, it is absolutely critical for our long-term species survival that we learn to share technologies and techniques across national boundaries. International cooperation on renewable energy initiatives is the only way we can accomplish the most essential element of a long-term strategy for coping with climate change: global reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
Warren Senders
environment: oceanic acidification
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Month 9, Day 9: Sea Sea Rider, See What You Done Done…
I didn’t want to write about, well, anything. But I found an article in TIME on a climate monitoring project run by the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, and used it as the hook for a pretty standard screed.
Compared to the crisis in Earth’s atmosphere, the increased acidity of our oceans have received scant attention, which makes Bryan Walsh’s article on the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences very welcome. Radically altering the nature of our seas is likely to lead to disastrous consequences for all life everywhere. If the oceanic food chain collapses due to acidification, the lives of billions of people will be jeopardized, along with those of the other creatures with whom we share the Earth. Giant corporations and the climate-change denialists they fund are symptomatic of a short-sighted and ignorant fixation on immediate profits; when a good quarterly report outweighs the long-term health of the planet, humanity becomes an endangered species…which will surely be bad for business. America is the world’s largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases; we must take responsibility for the natural systems we are destroying.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change pakistan USA Today
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Month 9, Day 8: McNews.
When I did a search on “Pakistan” on the USA Today site, the top three listings all concerned Angelina Jolie. Maybe I should write a letter to her….
They ran an AP story on a farmer who’d gotten badly whacked by the flood, so I hung this letter on that.
Pakistan’s devastated agricultural infrastructure, like the droughts that have destroyed Russia’s wheat fields, is a tragic consequence of global climate change. Since the mid-1980s, climate scientists have predicted that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will increase the likelihood of catastrophic weather events. Unfortunately, corporate-funded denialists continue to receive equal coverage in our news media, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of climatologists agree on global warming’s human cause. Although stories like Abid Hussein’s put a human face on the disaster in Pakistan, they fail to point out the role of climate change in making that disaster possible. What will it take for Americans to wake up to our responsibilities as the world’s foremost per capita emitter of carbon dioxide? Twenty million people’s lives have been turned upside down in Pakistan — and that’s just a preview of what’s in store for the world in the coming years.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate change New York Times pakistan
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Month 9, Day 7: By “God,” Do You Mean “The Industrialized West?”
The New York Times had a front page story on Pakistan and its misery. It’s taken them a while.
HATA SIAL, Pakistan — When the governor of Punjab Province arrived recently in this small town with truckloads of relief goods for flood victims, his visit was as much a political mission as a humanitarian one. His message to the hundred or so displaced people gathered under an awning was that the government was there for them. Long after floodwaters subside, Pakistanis will face a lack of housing, food shortages and price spikes, among other hardships.
“The people say this was an act of God,” the governor, Salman Taseer, said in an interview after reassuring the crowd. “But what comes now, they say, is the act of man. If we don’t deliver, they will not forgive us.”
The “act of God/act of man” construction gave me a nice hook for the letter.
To the suffering Pakistanis, the floods that have destroyed their lives may seem an “Act of God,” and their government’s paralysis an “act of man.” But the grim reality is that the greenhouse effect brought about by the West’s profligate consumption of fossil fuels drastically increases the probability of catastrophic weather events. Thus, the floods are as much an act of man as the dysfunctionality of the Pakistani government. And just as Zardari’s administration is stymied and near-helpless in the face of this disaster, America’s national politics is mired in a quicksand of anti-science rhetoric that has rendered it unable to address humanity’s most pressing problem, or even to acknowledge that the problem exists. Global climate chaos is going to give us many Pakistans, each with an overwhelming share of human misery. Will we admit our own responsibilities, or will each new climate disaster still be an “Act of God?”
Warren Senders
Education Personal: Beacon College Campus-Free College learning self-education
by Warren
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Bright College Days
More thoughts & recollections from my life as a learner.
College:
As a college student, I was lucky; I did my learning through a now-defunct organization called Campus-Free College. Another CFC graduate described it nicely:
Campus-Free College unfortunately no longer exists. It provided a fabulous opportunity for self-directed students (seeking bachelor and master degrees) to design their own curriculum in coordination with professors at colleges throughout the world and professionals in their chosen field of study. It was the ultimate school for entrepreneurs.
LinkAnother student recalls:
“Campus Free College” was the place where I applied to work on an undergraduate degree. The school was later renamed Beacon College. It was a place where you could negotiate and design your own college level program and then recruit your own teachers and advisors.
Perhaps the most famous graduate of CFC was Mitchell Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3.
Every bit of learning I did at CFC (which later changed its name to Beacon College) was coordinated with two individuals: Larry L_____, who was assigned to be my “Program Advisor,” and was responsible for regular conferences with me about my learning goals and progress, and Joseph S____, who was assigned to be the “Monitor” for Larry and me, and was responsible for cross-checking with us about the larger context of what we proposed. Overseeing this three-part relationship was a body called the Academic Council, which approved the awarding of grades and offered feedback as required.
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environment: Boston Globe idiots
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The Boston Globe Publishes Me Again…
…and the comments on my letter (August 28, IIRC) are an awesome repository of stooooooopid.
Third time this year in the Globe. Can the NYT be far behind?
environment Politics: Koch Brothers Proposition 23 scoundrels
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Month 9, Day 6: Foulness, Foulness, Foulness.
It’s probably too late for this letter to be published, but I wanted to lend my voice to what I hope is a chorus of outrage triggered by Frank Rich’s description of the unmitigated vileness perpetrated by the Koch Brothers.
Frank Rich’s takedown of the Koch brothers does not go far enough. In their disregard for the continued health of our democracy, these arrogant billionaires reveal themselves as fundamentally anti-American. Even worse is their readiness to disseminate misinformation which is overwhelmingly likely, not just to mislead the the American populace, but to endanger the planet. Their recent donation of a million dollars to the proponents of the anti-environment Proposition 23 in California is an example of their long history of close engagement with the denial of the human contribution to catastrophic climate change. At this time in history, our continued national inability to grasp the genuine science of global warming has profound moral implications. The continued survival of our species is placed at risk by the Kochs’ continued readiness to fund an ideology that rejects robust scientific evidence in favor of fiscally expedient ignorance.
Warren Senders