environment Politics: assholes economics Keystone XL Tar Sands
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 13: You Can’t Spell Exaggerations And Lies Without X and L
The Chicago Tribune runs an op-ed strongly advocating approval of the KXL. Because fuck the facts, bitches. It’s all about FREEDOM.
President Barack Obama has a big decision to make about this nation’s economic future. The call is an easy one, and it’s long overdue.
The president should approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would link the rich oil sands in the Canadian province of Alberta to U.S. refineries and ports in the Gulf of Mexico. Last Friday evening, 17 Democrats joined all of the U.S. Senate’s Republicans in urging Obama to do just that. The 62-37 vote was nonbinding but signaled bipartisan frustration with the administration’s reluctance to approve the project.
The president is expected to make a decision by this summer. He rejected a Keystone plan a year ago, in the midst of his re-election campaign. That was applauded by some environmental groups and angered the Canadian government. But the most significant impact was this: It kept Americans from getting good-paying jobs.
They’re hardly even trying anymore.
Leaving aside the thousands of short-term construction jobs guaranteed to last exactly as long as it takes to build a segment of the Keystone XL pipeline, we can anticipate a hundred times that number in the long term. For example, the demand for toxic waste mitigation and cleanup experts will spike hugely along the pipeline’s route — not to mention the need for more oncologists, pharmacists, and medical support staff. And let’s not forget funeral directors!
Complex legal actions are guaranteed to proliferate, and no matter who “wins” a civil action against a Canada-based multinational corporation which inadvertently destroyed a region’s water supply, lawyers on both sides will profit hugely.
But the corporate consultants who wrote the State Department’s environmental impact statement say there’s nothing to worry about — a “fact” that’s probably a surprise to citizens of Arkansas and Utah whose communities have recently been devastated by pipeline leaks.
It is indeed an easy call to make.
Warren Senders
Education environment Gardening Politics: agriculture bees denialists idiots pesticides
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 12: When We Said We Were “Against Drones,” This Was NOT What We Meant
The NYT’s article on neonicotinoids and bee death has a fine conclusion:
Neonicotinoids are hardly the beekeepers’ only concern. Herbicide use has grown as farmers have adopted crop varieties, from corn to sunflowers, that are genetically modified to survive spraying with weedkillers. Experts say some fungicides have been laced with regulators that keep insects from maturing, a problem some beekeepers have reported.
Eric Mussen, an apiculturist at the University of California, Davis, said analysts had documented about 150 chemical residues in pollen and wax gathered from beehives.
“Where do you start?” Dr. Mussen said. “When you have all these chemicals at a sublethal level, how do they react with each other? What are the consequences?”
Experts say nobody knows. But Mr. Adee, who said he had long scorned environmentalists’ hand-wringing about such issues, said he was starting to wonder whether they had a point.
Of the “environmentalist” label, Mr. Adee said: “I would have been insulted if you had called me that a few years ago. But what you would have called extreme — a light comes on, and you think, ‘These guys really have something. Maybe they were just ahead of the bell curve.’”
If they can say “you told us so,” we won’t say “We told you so.” Idiots. March 30:
Bret Adee’s grudging recognition that tree-huggers’ warnings about the dangers of unrestricted pesticide use were “ahead of the curve” highlights a central dilemma: environmentalists would love to be proven wrong. We’d love to be wrong about pesticides, about pollution, about ocean acidification, and (most of all) we’d love to be wrong about climate change — but denial is not a viable option.
Facts are troubling things, as American apiarists are now discovering. As the dismaying data accumulates on their doorsteps, even the most ardent climate-change deniers will eventually have to face the painful truth that those hippie liberal scientists knew what they were talking about. But environmentalists are a forgiving lot: if erstwhile skeptics like Mr Adee can acknowledge that we were right all along about neonicotinoids, maybe they’ll pay attention to our concerns about the greenhouse effect — before it’s too late for action to be of any use.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 11: He Knows How To Nasty
The Tulsa World reports on “Greedy Lying Bastards,” and its star turn for Jim Inhofe:
The movie poster for “Greedy Lying Bastards” features several government officials and other individuals that Rosebraugh targets in the documentary as “casting doubt on climate science” and denying global warming effects.
Among the most prominent figures on the movie poster is U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma.
“I was not surprised to see myself front and center on the promotional material for this climate change movie, and quite frankly, I’m proud of it,” Inhofe told the Tulsa World on Wednesday when asked for a comment on the film, which he has not seen.
“As I said in July 2003, when I first called global warming the greatest hoax perpetrated on the American people, science has been co-opted by those who care more about peddling gloom-and-doom fear tactics to drive their own broader political agenda,” continued Inhofe, formerly the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
“Just by watching the trailer, that’s exactly what this video seems to do, as well, leveraging the unknown to incite fear and raise money to make people like Al Gore even wealthier.”
In the film, which is executive-produced by actress/activist Daryl Hannah, Inhofe is reportedly “singled out for his obstructionist rhetoric,” according to the Washington Post.
On the movie poster, Inhofe is joined as a target by former President George W. Bush, former Vice President Dick Cheney, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and the Koch brothers.
What a turd. March 29:
Even while Oklahoma’s farmers are facing one of the worst droughts the state has ever experienced, Senator James Inhofe continues to reject climate change’s existence, severity, and causes. Why such vehement dismissal of expertise, insight, facts and physical reality? The Senator’s motivations emerge from the interactions of two different kinds of fundamentalist thinking: Biblical literalism and crony capitalism. The first appears to have imbued Mr. Inhofe with a profound mistrust of the natural world in all its aspects, while the second has rewarded him amply for services rendered.
Either one of these worldviews by itself is bad enough, but when they combine, the resulting stew is both environmentally deadly and intellectually indigestible. Mr. Inhofe’s readiness to embrace lucrative conspiracy theories at the expense of his own home state’s well-being gives the measure of the man.
As long as his public contempt for scientific expertise keeps getting funds from fossil fuel corporations, Senator Inhofe will continue to be an “enemy of the Earth.” It’s Oklahoma’s misfortune that hefty contributions from big oil can’t relieve its parched and cracking soil.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture corporate irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 10: Keep Repeating, “It’s The Berries!”
U.S. News And World Report, on the looming end of coffee:
But in recent years, keeping the world’s coffee drinkers supplied has become increasingly difficult: The spread of a deadly fungus that has been linked to global warming and rising global temperatures in the tropical countries where coffee grows has researchers scrambling to create new varieties of coffee plants that can keep pace with these new threats without reducing quality.
While coffee researchers can do little to prevent climate change, they’re hard at work to keep up as Earth braces for temperature increases of several degrees over the next several decades.
“Coffee is the canary in the coal mine for climate change,” says Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you can’t think about the long term risk for planetary impacts, think about the short term risk for your coffee. Know that a day without coffee is potentially around the corner.”
The problem has gotten so bad that on March 18, Starbucks bought its first ever coffee farm, specifically to research new climate change-resistant coffee varieties.
“The threats climate change pose isn’t a surprise to us,” says Haley Drage, representative for the company. “We’ve been working on this for more than 10 years and it’s something we continue to work with farmers on.”
Drinking my cappuccino right now, in fact. I’m sure gonna miss it when I’m old. March 28:
The fact that climate change will significantly impact the world’s coffee growers should open a few more eyes to the dangers of a runaway greenhouse effect. But beyond the Arabica beans that go into our morning cup, practically every aspect of agriculture around the world is facing enormous disruption.
Starbucks’ work on developing new varieties which can withstand the coming weather extremes is a rare example of corporate readiness to look farther into the future than the next quarterly report — something which other corporations should emulate.
If fossil fuel companies behaved this way, they’d abandon an irresponsible fixation on short-term profits, and instead foster respect for the planetary environment. Instead of providing lavish funding for anti-science politicians, we’d see them investing heavily in the development of the sustainable energy sources we’ll be needing in the years to come.
And that would be a wonderful thing to wake up to.Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 9: 25 or 6 to 4
The Holland Sentinel (MI) runs an AP article discussing the President’s legacy:
Washington, D.C. —
The issue:
Slowing the buildup of greenhouse gases responsible for warming the planet is one of the biggest challenges the United States and President Barack Obama face. The effects of rising global temperatures are widespread and costly: more severe storms, rising seas, species extinctions, and changes in weather patterns that will alter food production and the spread of disease.
Politically, the stakes are huge.
Any policy to reduce heat-trapping pollution will inevitably target the main sources of Americans’ energy: the coal burned by power plants for electricity and the oil that is refined to run automobiles.
Those industries have powerful protectors in both parties in Congress who will fight any additional regulations handed down by the administration that could contribute to Americans paying more for electricity and gas at the pump. There’s also the lingering question of how much the U.S. can do to solve the problem alone, without other countries taking aggressive steps to curb their own pollution.
The promise:
“My plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet, because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke.” — Obama at the Democratic National Convention, Sept. 6, 2012.
Idealism in the service of cynicism. March 27:
President Obama’s natural political instinct is to seek compromise; the Platonic ideal of broad bipartisan agreement on core issues is central to his philosophy. This is a perfectly sensible notion, given a few shared assumptions about the rights of citizens and the responsibilities of government.
Historians evaluating the trajectory of the Obama administration won’t be able to ignore the inescapable fact that this skillful builder of consensus is facing two profoundly different forces with which negotiation is fundamentally impossible. The Republican party’s ideologically rigid and firmly oppositional stance towards the President’s initiatives has everything to do with the desires of their corporate and theocratic paymasters, and nothing to do with the national interest.
But a compromise with the hypothetical “reasonable Republicans” is at least imaginable. By contrast, there is no middle ground when it comes to the accelerating greenhouse effect and its likely consequences for our nation, our species, and our planet. The melting point of permafrost, the rapidly acidifying ocean waters, and the methane clathrates now entering the atmosphere are implacable, caring neither for President Obama’s eloquence or the bluster of the most anti-science conservative.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists hurricane media irresponsibility Storms
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 8: Thar She Blows!
Newsweek revisits the New Jersey coastline months after Sandy’s landfall:
Months after Hurricane Sandy, the Jersey Shore is full of talk of rebuilding, but still struggles to accept the march of global warming’s angry waters. Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?
The sand was the thing we noticed first. Mostly because it hadn’t been there yesterday, or any day before yesterday, and now it was absolutely everywhere.
For the first 23 hours after the storm, we hadn’t been able to see much of anything at all. On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy had made landfall just south of Long Beach Island, New Jersey, the narrow strip of coastline where I spent my childhood summers and where my parents have lived, full time, for the past eight years. Now a day had passed, and information was hard to come by. My parents were fine; they had evacuated earlier that week to friend’s place 45 miles inland. But the power was out, and the 18-mile-long barrier island, which is home to 20,000 year-round residents, was basically abandoned, so we still didn’t know how much damage our house in North Beach had sustained, or if there were even any houses left in North Beach to sustain damage. Also, the rumors were starting to spread. The Ferris wheel at Fantasy Island has collapsed. A shark is swimming around Surf City. The waves breached the dunes. The ocean met the bay. Whole towns have been washed out. The rumors were not helping.
And still they deny it. March 26:
“Will we be able to keep living where nature doesn’t want us?” Actually, it seems all too evident that nature has a point. Human industrial civilization has introduced hundreds of millions of years’ worth of fossilized carbon into the atmosphere in a geological instant, essentially breaking the Arctic and triggering consequences that are going to reverberate for centuries to come.
A post climate-change future will bring extreme environmental unpredictability. Optimistic forecasts include the destruction of billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure and the likelihood of increased geopolitical instability (a polite euphemism for wars). The damage inflicted by Hurricane Sandy is just a preview of coming attractions. The pessimistic forecasts suggest that our carelessness has condemned our descendants to a losing battle against implacable environmental forces.
If we are to secure happiness and prosperity for our posterity, we can no longer afford to irresponsibly ignore the frightening factuality of climate change.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: eschatology idiots religion
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 7: Only Sky
The Charleston Post And Courier (SC) runs a column from a religious apologist named Todd Levasseur:
I want to take this insight further to argue that religions also have ignored the climate crisis for 25 years. Mirroring American society at large, we see a slow but inexorable shift toward recognizing climate change as being a deeply ethical and religious matter, one that causes us to dig deeply and re-create our respective covenants with whomever we deem to be the creator’s.
Climate change brings an added urgency to the Holy City. We are at its “ground zero” with the emissions of the industrial economy set to trigger a predicted 3-foot rise in sea level this century. If climate models are correct, the standing water on East Bay Street during high tides is only the beginning, and the ports where cargo ships anchor will need to be raised quite a few feet.
We also are at “ground zero” for feeling the impact of ocean acidification, which can trigger the collapse of aquatic food chains and decimate our maritime economy.
Such scenarios call out for sober leadership from politicians and, especially, community leaders.
Religion historically has provided a seedbed from where our society could graft moral concerns onto progressive community change. Climate change may provide yet another occasion for the emergence of ecumenical, interfaith work.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. March 25:
The growing turbulence of a planetary environmental emergency may well bring together adherents of different belief systems in the recognition of a common adversary. But for such a confluence of diverse faiths to have an impact on the climate crisis will require religious adherents to practice a different sort of renunciation. The proximate cause of climate change is the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial society, but at root is something far older and more pervasive — the notion that our species is privileged by providence.
If we are to survive on a climatically-transformed planet, religious traditions can no longer invoke the will of a supernatural being to justify human ignorance of, and antagonism to, the natural world. The faithful must engage in a new form of spiritual discipline, leaving behind the magical thinking of medieval times and recognizing the hard truths offered by climate science about atmospheric CO2 and its impact on Earthly life. There is more genuine evidence for the greenhouse effect than for any of humanity’s thousands of deities.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresonsibility denialism energy renewables
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 6: I’m Not The Only One
Elisabeth Rosenthal has an excellent piece in the NYT on our visions for a future energy economy:
WE will need fossil fuels like oil and gas for the foreseeable future. So there’s really little choice (sigh). We have to press ahead with fracking for natural gas. We must approve the Keystone XL pipeline to get Canadian oil.
This mantra, repeated on TV ads and in political debates, is punctuated with a tinge of inevitability and regret. But, increasingly, scientific research and the experience of other countries should prompt us to ask: To what extent will we really “need” fossil fuel in the years to come? To what extent is it a choice?
As renewable energy gets cheaper and machines and buildings become more energy efficient, a number of countries that two decades ago ran on a fuel mix much like America’s are successfully dialing down their fossil fuel habits. Thirteen countries got more than 30 percent of their electricity from renewable energy in 2011, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, and many are aiming still higher.
Could we? Should we?
Waxing epistemological here for a minute. March 24:
Resistance to social and technological advances is always rooted in a poverty of imagination. American conservatism’s failure to entertain hypotheticals ensures that their anticipated futures are merely copies of the past — thinking vividly on display in our political and media culture as the necessity of shifting rapidly away from fossil fuels becomes obvious in the light of the climate crisis.
Actually, two mutually reinforcing failures of imagination are at work here. On one hand, the resistance to renewable energy sources, while partly explained by the undeniable cupidity of corporate interests, is at its core a refusal to allow any alternative to the approved vision of a future energy economy. On the other hand is the incapacity to imagine the terrifying realities of the present moment, in which a runaway greenhouse effect is dessicating farmlands, breaking the Arctic, and casting in doubt the future of our civilization and our species.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Ban ki-Moon Republican obstructionism United Nations Water
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 5: DiHydrogen Monoxide
The Washington Post runs an AP article on World Water Day, featuring that irresponsible hippie, Ban ki-Moon:
UNITED NATIONS — Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is warning that by 2030 nearly half the world’s population could be facing a scarcity of water, with demand outstripping supply by 40 percent.
Ban said one in three people already live in a country with moderate to high water stress. He spoke Friday at a U.N. event marking the opening of the International Year of Water Cooperation 2013 and the 20th anniversary of the proclamation of World Water Day.
He said “competition is growing among farmers and herders; industry and agriculture; town and country; upstream and downstream; and across borders.”
With a growing global population and climate change, he said international cooperation is essential to protect water resources.
“Let us use it more intelligently and waste less so all get a fair share,” Ban said.
Shrill, I know. March 23:
As Ban Ki-moon emphasizes, regional populations everywhere are coming under unprecedented environmental pressures. Even as extreme weather events increase, dumping huge quantities of rain or snow on ill-prepared communities, others are discovering that drought, once an unwelcome visitor, is now a permanent resident.
Barring new infrastructural technology that will allow regions buffeted by unseasonal precipitation to save their water and transport it to areas where it’s urgently needed, we can anticipate a profound humanitarian crisis. By delaying and hindering adaptation strategies, the climate-change deniers in our media and politics have ensured a tragedy of unprecedented proportions.
Singing of a “hard rain” in the early 1960s, Bob Dylan referred to nuclear annihilation. Fifty years later, his song’s an eerie prophecy of the burgeoning climate crisis — harkening to the “sound of a thunder, it roared out a warning,” and the “roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.”
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 4, Day 3: Little Willie Leaps
USA Today reprints a story from a Delaware paper about a visit from denialist demigod Willie Soon:
GEORGETOWN, Del. — One of the nation’s more controversial climate-change skeptics dismissed warnings about sea-level rise and global warming as “scare tactics” and “sick” science in a talk here.
Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and Professor David Legates of the University of Delaware, a former climatologist for the state, bluntly rejected leading climate change claims during the Monday event organized by two nonprofit groups that promote personal and economic freedoms, the Positive Growth Alliance of Millsboro, Del. and the Caesar Rodney Institute of Dover, Del.
“They’re a very sick group,” Soon said. “They’re not talking about science at all. It is all agenda-driven, science results.”
Sick. Right ho. March 22:
Upton Sinclair pointed out that “it’s very difficult to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on his not understanding it.” Climate-change “skeptic” Willie Soon carries Sinclair’s maxim one step further: Soon’s paycheck depends on the American public not understanding three important things. First, the facts of global warming; second, the truth about his employers’ ties to the fossil-fuel industries whose greenhouse emissions have been incontrovertibly linked to the accelerating climate crisis; third, that he was never formally trained in climatology.
Willie Soon’s lengthy affiliation with the Heartland Foundation is one of the warning signals. Decades ago, Heartland collaborated with big tobacco against the public interest — and they’re employing the same diversionary tactics now, in order to delay action on climate change for as long as possible. In the light of these troubling associations, it’s clear that Soon’s pronouncements on “sick science” are simply callous defensive rhetoric.
Warren Senders