environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 12: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain
The Austin Statesman runs an AP article on the sudden rash of Republican presidential wannabes jettisoning their previous “well, maybe” positions on climate change, the better to appeal to their knuckle-dragging base:
WASHINGTON — One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders are running away from their past positions on global warming .
All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven’t fully recanted are under pressure to do so.
It’s an indicator of a shift on the issue among conservative Republicans, who have an outsize influence in the party’s presidential primary elections. Over the past few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming’s effects have already begun — from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. . In 2008, 50 percent of conservatives said they believed global warming already is having effects; that figure dropped to 30 percent this year. By contrast, among liberals and moderates there’s been little movement, and broad majorities say warming is having an impact now.
These people are a clear and present danger to all of us.
Sent May 30:
Republican readiness to abandon any vestige of fact-based policy on climate change is unsurprising; these politicians have without exception declared their preferential allegiance to the short-term profitability of their sponsors in the fossil fuel industry. It’s too bad, for the conservative “base” badly needs to hear some plain talk about the reality of global warming and its implications for this country and the world. While tea partiers eagerly imagine the existential terrors of Sharia law, gay marriage, and universal health care, the genuine threat posed by increasing greenhouse gases is ignored, misunderstood and ridiculed. The facts are in: if the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as robust as that for human-caused climate change, we’d have found loose nukes on sale in the bazaars of Baghdad. But no GOP primary candidate dares to acknowledge this inconvenient reality. Our descendants will have harsh words for these willfully ignorant hypocrites and their enablers.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Bill Clinton Michael Bloomberg
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 11: Bill and Mike’s Excellent Vacation
Clinton and Bloomberg are going to tackle climate change together. What fun!
WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton and Michael R. Bloomberg have circled each other warily for a decade, ever since Mr. Clinton landed in Harlem after leaving the White House and Mr. Bloomberg ascended from a hugely successful business career to become the mayor of New York City. They have appeared together at a few civic functions, dined out a couple of times a year and hacked at golf balls on the same course.
But until now they have never joined forces on a project with global reach that could advance both of their legacies. They are taking on an issue — climate change — that may well shape the world’s economic and social future for decades to come.
Good for them, I suppose. Sent May 29:
Bill Clinton understates things: climate change isn’t merely one of the world’s two or three biggest challenges, but the most significant problem we’ve faced in the history of our civilization. By far. All the agenda items commonly represented at meetings of the world’s movers and shakers: the endless wars, incessant bickerings over trade, and our violations of what have only recently been recognized as “human rights” — all deal with essentially short-term concerns, and all can at least potentially be solved with enough careful discussion and the gradual development of mutual understanding between tribes, cultures and nations. The greenhouse effect and the laws of physics, by contrast, will be indifferent to Mr. Clinton’s eloquence and to Mr. Bloomberg’s business acumen. All their fine words will amount to nothing unless we — all of us — can stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.
Warren Senders
environment: common sense extreme weather tornadoes
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 10: Waking Up A Bit.
The Booneville Daily News has a pretty good editorial on the complications attendant on attempts to directly link awful weather with climate change:
You won’t receive a text message alerting you to start worrying about climate change. There will be no ransom note left at your door, warning of the natural disasters that will strike if you fail to comply.
It is the uncertain and ambiguous nature of how rising global average temperatures impact people around the planet that makes arguing for the need to take action on climate change a tough sell and scarier for it.
I’m heartened by voices from the heartlands rejecting denialist propaganda. Sent May 28:
While simplistic attempts to link tornadoes and climate change are easily debunked, so are the equally simplistic attempts to deny correlations between them. Both climate and weather are complex systems, making any attempt to state unambiguous relationships between these global and local phenomena profoundly flawed. But the difficulty of establishing direct causal links between the greenhouse effect and any specific weather event is not a rationale for inaction. The scientific consensus on climate change is overwhelming; the only “expert” voices denying either its dangers or its human causes turn out on examination to be those in the pay of corporations sociopathically reluctant to sacrifice future profits. The danger to us and future generations is very clear. Even if a particular catastrophe cannot be directly tied to your SUV’s CO2 emissions, we know that continuing with “business as usual” will load the climatic dice, making tragedies like Joplin’s ever likelier.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cap and trade Chris Christie RGGI
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 9: Only Nixon Could Go To China?
Erstwhile climate zombie Chris Christie (NJ-GOV) has apparently seen the light. Or seen something, anyway. He’s simultaneously asserting that climate change is real (and anthropogenic!) while withdrawing New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans yesterday to pull the Garden State out of the nation’s only operating cap-and-trade system, spurring environmental anger, conservative cheers and speculation about his national ambitions.
It also stirred confusion about the governor’s legal authority and what will happen to the carbon trading program, which caps utility carbon dioxide emissions in 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, at a time when national climate legislation appears dead on Capitol Hill.
At a news conference in Trenton, N.J., the Republican governor said he believed after months of study and meetings with scientists that humans were causing climate change and that his government needed to put policies in place to curb warming temperatures. That is a shift from last year, when Christie expressed doubts about the science behind global warming.
It’s a little like the joke about your mother-in-law driving off the cliff in your new Cadillac. Except that I love my mother-in-law, and Cadillacs (at least the ones I’ve driven) are overpriced and grotesque pieces of shit.
Sent May 27:
New Jersey’s Governor Christie’s sudden readiness to embrace climate facts while rejecting any climate action is a real headscratcher. The governor may be trying to appease environmentalists with a verbal gesture while mollifying his corporatist base with something more substantial. It’s barely possible that his withdrawal from the RGGI’s cap-and-trade policy will balance his acknowledgment of climate change with the paranoid and anti-science tea-partiers who hold the key to Republican primary success in 2012. It is a sad commentary on the state of our contemporary politics that a politician’s public recognition of a genuine threat to our civilization cannot be heard unless it’s couched in the cynical language of short-term political expediency. It would be splendid if Mr. Christie were able to convince the rabidly anti-science Republican base of the facts of climate change; even better would be the news that he’d succeeded in changing the minds of his corporate sponsors.
Warren Senders
environment: extreme weather tornadoes
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 8: Auntie Em?
The Charlotte Observer has an editorial connecting some of the dots between the Joplin tornadoes and climate change. But it’s a tricky thing:
No one storm, drought or flood can be proof of global climate change, of course. Weather varies; it takes decades for scientists to document trends. Yet climate scientists for years have warned that climate change will bring more extreme storms, more rain and more drought. Regardless, the very existence of climate change remains politically controversial. This spring the Republican-dominated U.S. House, voting 240-184, rejected a resolution saying “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Never mind that among the groups accepting that proposition are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the World Meteorological Organization, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.
I was very grateful for Greg Laden’s explanation, which gave me the robbery analogy I used in my letter, and which I strongly recommend.
My letter, sent May 27; I am very pleased with my last sentence:
While it’s easy and facile to attempt a direct linkage between devastating tornadoes and global climate change, asking if those destructive storms were “caused” by global warming isn’t going to provide a meaningful answer — because there are many different ways to understand causality. The greenhouse effect impacts climate, a planetary system, while storms, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods and unseasonal precipitation are local and regional. By analogy: just because crimes of robbery increase during economic downturns doesn’t mean your brother-in-law got mugged because times are hard, and just because teen drinking is generally correlated with automobile accidents doesn’t mean that your neighbor’s specific fender-bender was caused by a six-pack in the wrong hands. And just because we can’t claim direct causal relationships between tornadoes and climate change doesn’t relieve us of our responsibilities to our descendants, who will live in a world where such destructive weather is horribly routine. Ignorance of the laws of probability is no excuse.
Warren Senders
environment: allergies asthma denialism hay fever
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 7: Nothing To Sneeze About.
The LA Times notes that the greenhouse effect is going to make allergies more severe.
The sneezing, eye-watering, itchy-throated misery that comes with allergies is on the rise, led by a growing numbers of Americans sensitive to ragweed and mold. And in certain big cities — Phoenix, Las Vegas and the Riverside-San Bernardino area among them — the misery of ragweed allergies has lots more company than in others, says a new national study.
The study, to be released by Quest Diagnostics Health Trends, identifies the U.S. cities where allergies to ragweed and mold are most common, based on test results for allergens nationwide. Those sensitive to mold were most plentiful in Dallas, Riverside-San Bernardino, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The study found that sensitization to ragweed and mold increased 15% and 12%, respectively, over the study’s four years. That’s consistent with recent research suggesting that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are causing a dramatic increase in the release of ragweed pollen, while rising temperatures promote an increase in birch tree pollen, a major allergen in Europe.
Aaaaah-choo! Sent May 26:
As the greenhouse effect intensifies, we’re going to be seeing more and more adverse effects at all levels of experience — from disasters at the regional and national scales all the way to upticks in such localized miseries as poison ivy and allergic asthma. It would be nice to think the denialists will relinquish their bizarre conspiracy theories when the pollen count gets high enough, but if increases in the severity and frequency of tornadoes aren’t enough to make them acknowledge the reality of climate change, a few million runny noses probably won’t do the trick. What will it take to get the “climate zombies” in Congress and the media to wake up to the gravest threat our species has yet faced? We’ll probably remain mired in collective inaction until the fossil fuel industry recognizes that species survival is more profitable than extinction. In the meantime, get out your handkerchiefs.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 6: Take A Deep Breath. Now Cough, Please.
The President was in England recently, and addressed Parliament — without, apparently, mentioning climate much at all:
“No country can hide from the dangers of carbon pollution, which is why we must build on what was achieved in Copenhagen and Cancun, to leave our children a planet that is safer and cleaner,” Obama said in one of only two references to climate change brought on by human activity.
In a reference to the ongoing struggle to emerge from economic recession, Obama added, “The successes and failures of our own past can serve as an example for emerging economies: that it’s possible to grow without polluting, that lasting prosperity comes not from what a nation consumes, but from what it produces and from the investments it makes in its people and its infrastructure.”
The latter comment appears to be directed in part at China and India, whose spectacular economic growth threatens to multiply emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. The negotiations to renew a global climate pact, held in Copenhagen in 2009 and last year in Cancun, have been thwarted by tensions among developed and developing economies.
I had a version of this letter a while back in the Boston Globe. Sent May 25:
The Obama administration’s reluctance to address the problems of climate change is by now hardly a surprise. Given the vociferous nature of the denialist forces in Republican politics, and the pusillanimity of the media which should by rights be sounding the alarm, it is hardly surprising that the President has chosen to avoid the issue whenever possible. But this is not only because the GOP ranks are filled with “climate zombies,” ideologically fixated on absurd anti-science conspiracy theories, and it’s not only that the fourth estate has abdicated its responsibility to genuine journalism. Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use the phrase “climate change” must be understood diagnostically, as an indicator of the extent to which both political parties are controlled by the same corporate interests. Transforming our energy economy will be all but impossible until the fossil fuel industry can be persuaded that planetary survival is as profitable as species suicide.
Warren Senders
environment: economics MA Department of Environmental Protection real-estate sustainability
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 5: We Need This Land For Future Exploitation!
Something a little different today. The Fall River Herald News (MA) runs a guest editorial from a couple of real-estate guys, extolling the importance of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection — from an economic POV. Good stuff, especially for those people who aren’t persuaded by anything other than the slavering jaws of naked capitalism:
It’s not every day the real estate community and the environmental community share common ground.
Increasingly, however, we understand a healthy economy and a healthy environment are mutually beneficial. We also understand the commonwealth, like every other state, faces a fiscal crisis that must be met with painful budget cuts and a disciplined focus on economic development. But we must avoid cuts which undermine the very economic growth and job creation essential to our recovery.
The commonwealth’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is more than a protector of the environment.
The “climate change news” for today (5/24) is all Australia, all the time. I haven’t gotten into an Aussie newspaper yet (though I did make New Zealand once), so I did a search for something closer to home. Sent May 24:
The “conflicting interests” of the real estate and environmental communities vanish when things are viewed from the proper perspective. It is only in the past century that people began purchasing land in order to make a quick profit; the notion of real estate as a short-term, high-yield investment is a relatively novel one. It’s also an idea with profoundly damaging consequences for the long-term health of entire regions, for if the land’s owners never know the land as our forbears once did, nothing can prevent grotesquely destructive exploitation. Nothing, that is, except local regulations and the Department of Environmental Protection. Needless to say, both of these are under attack from budget-cutting proponents, which makes the authors’ cogent defense of the DEP’s core mission very welcome. The interests of real-estate investors and environmentalists necessarily coincide; both groups have an interest in keeping the land alive and beautiful for centuries to come.
Warren Senders
environment: Australia media irresponsibility rising ocean levels
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 4: Lending A Word Here And There
An editorial in the Australia Courier calls for “Less Hot Air On The Climate Change Debate, Please.” A good piece, and worthy of some support from over here on this side of the marble:
For every scientist who supports common acceptance of global warming, the sceptics can roll out one who says the opposite.
But there needs to be a point where we, as a nation, take a side. And in this case, the cautious approach is to act, rather than do nothing.
It is time for the conversation to move past the debate and onto what we can do to ensure that we are acting before a crisis is upon us. Simply, the time is now.
Sent May 23:
The facts of climate change have been incontrovertible for a fairly long time. As early as 1953, Arctic ice melt was predicted as a consequence of the greenhouse effect, and for the past six decades the evidence has been accumulating. At this point the scientific consensus on human causes of global warming is extremely robust; the only people in the climate science community who disagree turn out to be in the pay of industries with much to lose in a transition to a low-carbon energy economy. And by presenting these “skeptics” as equal countervoices to the thousands of very worried climatologists, the world’s news media provide protective cover for those who seek to delay a shift to energy sustainability. Were this a trivial political matter, it would sort itself out, given a chance. But these stakes are very high indeed; it is not only Australia whose future hangs in the balance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism idiots Republican obstructionism Rick Scott
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 3: Rick’s A Dick
The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm has a column reprinted in the Kansas City Star, noting the ignorance of Rick Scott and the problems it presents:
Climate scientists are lending their computer modeling and data analysis and research findings and learned assumptions to the new governor’s first state hurricane conference this week. Gov. Rick Scott seems fine with that, as long as the brainy guys confine their theories to the short term.
In his short speech opening the conference Wednesday, for example, Scott didn’t object to warnings that Florida is statistically likely to absorb a big hit in 2011. He promised Florida would be ready. “We’re going to be very prepared.”
Scott, however, only accepts climate science devoted to the upcoming hurricane season. When it comes to the long-term stuff – the overwhelming research that warns of man-made global warming – he remains Florida’s denier in chief.
Idiot. Buffoon. Psychopath. Sociopath.
Sent May 22:
Of course Florida governor Rick Scott has seen nothing to persuade him that global climate change is real and dangerous. He’s a perfect specimen of the modern Republican politician: obsessed with short-term gain, oblivious to long-term consequences. For Governor Scott and others of his ilk, “future generations” exist only as a phrase to be used in public in order to manipulate low-information voters. Like the Rapturists whose vision of the future ended last Saturday, these politicians think no further than the next election cycle; their corporate sponsors, similarly, think no further than the next fiscal year’s profits.
When it comes to the dangers posed by climate change, we need genuinely far-sighted leadership — leaders who are ready to confront the scientifically confirmed bad news head on and help all of us understand what we as a country need to do in order to secure a sustainable future for our descendants.
Warren Senders