Month 11, Day 4: NOW You Tell Us?

I’m glad Jerry Brown won in CA. I’ve always liked him, and Meg Whitman’s plans to sell off the state on Ebay were hard to swallow.

The San Francisco Chronicle posts an AP article which carries the somewhat hard-to-believe news that Arnold Schwarzenegger and George Schultz are going to try and persuade Republicans to do something about climate change. They also quote the big cheese from the NPRA about how Proposition 23 was badly misunderstood and all the environmentalists were mean to them:

The National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, which contributed $100,000 to the yes vote, called the measure’s defeat “tragic.” The association blamed it partly on the voter wave that elected Jerry Brown governor, re-elected Barbara Boxer to the U.S. Senate and sent their fellow Democrats to several other statewide offices.

The association’s president, Charles Drevna, also accused the measure’s opponents of leading a “sophisticated multimillion-dollar misinformation campaign” that he said would ultimately drive companies out of the state.

Schwarzenegger and Schultz both agree that climate change is real, and they think this is the perfect time to bring it back on the national stage.

Good luck with that, guys. I’m afraid that your party may have gone too far in deliberately cultivating stupidity as an ideology for that to work. But if you try, I’ll write letters in support, OK?

It is a glimpse into true bizarro-world when the head of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association can state with a straight face that the opponents of Proposition 23 ran a “misinformation campaign.” The initiative’s resounding defeat is more than just good news for California; it’s a rebuke to the anti-science agenda promoted by the Koch brothers and their associates. Governor Schwarzenegger and Secretary Schultz are members of an increasingly small and exclusive group: Republicans who recognize the severity of the threat posed by global warming. It is heartening to hear that they’re planning on pushing for legislative action on climate change at the national level. However, given the House takeover by GOP legislators who reflexively dismiss scientific expertise when it is inconvenient to their ideology, the “Governator” is going to have his hands full. Meanwhile, steadily increasing atmospheric CO2 is bringing the planet ever closer to the precipice.

Warren Senders