environment Politics: Barack Obama health care summit media Republicans
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Month 2, Day 27: If It’s Saturday, It Must Be POTUS
Now that we’re all done with HCR, and all that remains is to wait for April and a reconciliation vote (and to keep calling your Democratic congresscritters to make sure they won’t keep capitulating to the threat of a threat of a threat from some Republican somewhere) — well, it’s time for the President to kick a little butt on climate issues.
I only wish I were as sanguine about this as I was a year ago, shortly after the inauguration. This letter shows some of the erosion in confidence I have experienced.
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on the success of your meticulously prepared Health Care Summit. You demonstrated a thorough command of the issues as well as a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of patience. A political opposition that cares more about ensuring the failure of your administration than about the well-being of the country must be a source of considerable exasperation.
I’m afraid that Health Care Reform is going to be the easy part of your agenda to enact. The problems with passing a meaningful and robust climate bill are manifold and more widespread. Those of us who are at least marginally competent in interpreting basic science know that the climate crisis presents the gravest threat humanity has ever faced. We also know that the windows of opportunity are closing rapidly; as the planet races from tipping point to tipping point, the “worst-case” predictions of climatologists from a few years ago are the “best-case” predictions of today. We need to act; we need to act strongly; we need to act immediately.
Unfortunately, a significant proportion of the American public doesn’t even believe global warming exists. When the pronunciamenti of corporate-funded denialists are given national platforms by an irresponsible media, the climate crisis intersects with an ignorance crisis to create a perfect storm. Mother Nature isn’t helping; snowstorms in Washington, DC form the perfect context for Senator Inhofe’s inanities, which fit perfectly with our aggravated case of national ADD.
When you were elected, environmentalists were delighted. We felt that at last we had a president who was ready to embrace science, to advocate for a reality-based energy and climate policy, and who would not back down in the face of opposition from the Coal and Oil Industries. The past year has seen much progress in environmental issues; more of it through the application of Executive Orders than through bicameral legislation. But as the stage is set for climate legislation, there are a number of troubling signs in the way you and your team handled Health Care Reform.
1. You gave away your strongest negotiating position before you even started. If you and the Democrats had been advocating for Single Payer health care, you could have been negotiated down to a Public Option. Instead, what we have left is a bill that has been watered down repeatedly by acquiescence to Republican demands; while better than nothing, it is much weaker than it needs to be. This cannot be allowed to happen with a climate bill.
2. You allowed the opposition to define the terms of debate. Your administration’s passivity during most of 2009 may have been based on your desire to have the Senate re-assume its rightful place in our system of government — but by now it should be evident to anyone that our Senate is hopelessly dysfunctional. The Republicans and the Tea-Baggers dominated the national media, and it was clear that your team was unprepared for the sheer lunacy of their assault. This cannot be allowed to happen with a climate bill.
3. You allowed your desire for “bi-partisanship” to overwhelm your desire for a bill that really did the best thing for the American people. Watching Senate committees exclude single-payer advocates and bend to the whims of Olympia Snowe has profoundly demoralized your Democratic base (unlike the Republican base, we actually pay more attention to policy than politics). Watching Harry Reid and the Democratic leadership capitulate preemptively to the threat that a Republican might make a threat has destroyed any confidence among your liberal and progressive admirers that Democrats can be counted on to stand up for our beliefs. That cannot be allowed to happen with a climate bill.
Your Health Care Summit Conference was a tremendous success. Now what’s needed is a full-bore campaign to educate the public about the need for strong and urgent action to mitigate the worst effects of the looming climate crisis. There is no time to waste. Please make plans for a Climate Summit. Engage experts to testify, but don’t expect to change many Republican minds. They genuinely would rather see the planet perish in a Venusian pressure-cooker than allow you and your administration any successes whatever.
If you wait for them to come to their senses before trying to get a bill passed, we will still be waiting in 2016 and in 2020. We’ll still be waiting when gigatonnes of arctic methane have entered the atmosphere and the greenhouse effect has spiraled completely out of control. Get a strong bill passed, and once it’s done, a few of them (and a few coal-state Democrats, too) may realize that it was the right thing to do.
If we fail in this, the failure will be all humanity’s. This cannot be allowed to happen.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: Barack Obama consumerism economics
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Month 2, Day 20: Dis is a system?
Continuing on the theme of economic reformation, and using a rather intellectual mathematical analogy to convey why our present system of economics is fatally flawed. Thanks to G2Geek at Kos for that; it’s not something I would have thought of, and it makes me look really really smart.
Dear President Obama:
I supported you vigorously in the election, volunteering, donating, phonebanking and advocating as strongly as I could over the course of the campaign. In the past year, however, you’ve hired a number of people who I believe compromise your Administration’s ability to strive toward the goals we all share.
Your economic advisers are locked into a faulty and destructive model of economics. Lawrence Summers and Timothy Geithner, for example, are advocates of “limitless” economic growth as a universal good. But it is self-evident (or should be) that we live on a finite planet. Advocating indefinite and continual economic growth in a closed system like Earth is analogous to mapping an infinite plane onto a Euclidean solid. Which is impossible. An infinity cannot be a subset of an integer.
Leaving aside the ethical questions of putting the same people who broke the economy in charge of fixing it, leaving aside the obscene profits accrued by individuals and firms who are closely linked to Geithner, Summers and Bernanke, the most important thing is that you need economic advisers who understand that “limitless” economics does not work on a limited planet.
If we remain a society of consumers, we shall all of us be consumed. It’s happening now, Mr. President, and it’s not pretty.
Respectfully yours,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists Republicans
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Month 2, Day 13: Invite the Republicans to Talk in Public About Their Climate Stupidity.
It’s Saturday. Time for another email/fax/letter to the President.
It’s late. I’m tired. This letter is kind of a mishmash. I like the “swollen belly of a starving child” analogy so much I’m using it for the third day in a row.
Dear President Obama,
It is crucial for our country that you continue highlighting the obstructionist tactics of the G.O.P. minority. Your upcoming bipartisan conference on health care will do a great deal to make it clear to the American people where their real allies are. We need more such events, each focusing on different critical issues for our country.
It is absolutely crucial that our nation’s citizens learn the truth: failure to pass meaningful climate legislation will lead to a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Right now support for robust regulation of Greenhouse Gases is low; there are not enough Americans who are convinced of the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Recent events like Washington’s amazing blizzard have inflamed climate denialists, who are trumpeting the ludicrous notion that a snowfall somehow disproves global climate change. This is analogous to claiming that the swollen belly of a starving child disproves the existence of world hunger!
Please, Mr. President. Do a public bipartisan conference on climate issues. Bring expert climatologists to speak about the likely consequences of continuing our present level of Greenhouse emissions. Bring people from the Department of Defense to speak about the sociopolitical scenarios they envision as a result of catastrophic climate change. Bring people from the insurance industry to describe how they are refusing to insure properties in areas likely to be affected by rising sea levels. Bring economists to testify about the cost of action versus the cost of doing nothing. The American public is watching you more intently than any president has been watched in a long time; if you do something like this it will have a huge effect.
It is absolutely vital that we fight back against the climate-denial lobby and those members of our government who are in their thrall. This issue is too important. Waiting for the Rapture may be Senator Inhofe’s preferred environmental policy. For good and obvious reasons, it cannot be the policy of a rational Administration.
Your recent approach to dealing with the Republicans has been galvanizing. Please keep it up. Please intensify it. And please apply your keen focus to transforming our national understanding of the climate crisis. If ever there was an issue that calls for the Fierce Urgency of Now, this one is it.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama delusional paranoia Republicans
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Month 2, Day 3: In The Wake Of The Crazy Comet
The Amazing Dkos/R2000 poll of self-identified Republicans came out today, and gosh-a-roonie! It certainly revealed a lot. If you haven’t read it, you owe yourself a few horrifying minutes. These are the people who control the Opposition Party in our government. They would be funny if this was a movie or a TV show, but because Republicans are making governance impossible, it’s essential that we take notice of them.
So I wrote to the President, who seems like he’s been getting a little mojo rising recently.
Dear President Obama,
By now you must have seen the results of the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll of self-identified Republicans. These statistics are horrifying and revealing. Sixty-three percent of Republicans believe you’re a socialist (although I suspect that less than one percent know what the word means). Thirty-nine percent think you should be impeached (although it’s unclear that you’ve committed an impeachable offense). A third think you’re a racist; half think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than you are. A quarter of self-identified Republicans think their states should secede from the Union. And on and on. As you correctly noted in your Q & A session with the House Republicans, they cannot compromise with you, even a little, because their base is so insanely paranoid that it will erupt at the slightest hint of collaboration with their enemy.
The Republicans represented in the R2000 poll are clutching their remote controls, desperately pushing buttons in the hope that somehow, somehow, somehow you’ll just go away. It’s easy to blame Fox News for a big part of this. But I think Fox is a symptom, not a cause. The larger problem is the erosion of the national attention span, which means that our ability to think carefully about long-term issues is essentially non-existent.
Global climate change is both a long-term and an extremely urgent issue; never has the threat to humanity’s continued survival been as serious as the routine reports of climatologists now reveal it to be. James Hansen’s “Venus” scenario is easy to dismiss as a worst-case example — until we stop to consider that almost every day the “worst-case” predictions of climate scientists turn out to be unrealistically optimistic.
The Research 2000 poll did not specifically ask its Republican respondents whether they believed the Earth was only 6000 years old, but given the other answers to related questions, it seems a safe bet that a sizable majority are Young Earth Creationists. Many are probably anxious for the Rapture, which I suppose qualifies them as pro-global-warming. How can you talk rationally about climate change to a group of people who are unable to conceptualize long spans of time, or who are eager for the Earth’s incineration?
While I applaud your adherence to an ideal of bi-partisanship, it is impossible to form agreements with an entire political demographic that is clearly delusionally paranoid. The delusional paranoids will think you’re out to get them even if you adopt the entire Republican platform. Why bother? Please, Mr. President! The time is now for you to get the Democratic majority in the Senate to pass your policy agenda through reconciliation. Healthcare, Jobs, Financial reform — all of these are essential. But my deepest area of concern is the terrible threat of climate change, for if we don’t get that one right, none of the rest will matter at all in the long run.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama conservation
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Day 30: POTUS
In the wake of President Obama’s fine SOTU speech and his epic spanking of the House Republicans, I thought I’d send him a fax/letter combo. Some diarists at Kos were pointing out, rather ruefully, that while he’d called for nuclear power, offshore drilling and “clean coal” in the SOTU address, he didn’t mention the “C” word. Which, of course, has been entirely stigmatized by its association with Jimmy Carter and his cardigan sweater in the attention-deficit-raddled minds of our punditocracy.
So I thought I’d bring it up.
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on a brilliantly delivered State of the Union address, and on an equally brilliant exchange with the House Republicans. Your words on “tone” were entirely correct. Sadly, I have grave doubts that you will ever find the Republicans to be any more than a Disloyal Opposition; the habit of rhetorical posturing in the service of partisan political maneuvering is too deeply ingrained in them for your polite admonitions to have much effect. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, and I’m grateful to you for trying.
I write today, however, to urge you to use the Presidential “bully pulpit” to educate Americans about the importance of energy conservation as one of the most important ways of expanding our energy resources. While it’s a decidedly “unsexy” word, especially when compared with “drilling,” conservation will probably be the single biggest contributor to our nation’s energy reserves. The proper approach to this is to call on the nation to “eliminate waste.”
Just as you propose eliminating wasteful policies, programs and spending, so too should our citizenry be actively engaged in finding new ways to eliminate wasteful energy use. Local, regional, statewide and national competitions for energy-saving ideas could be incorporated into school science fairs and community events; citizen-generated proposals could be given prominence on a dedicated White House website. Let’s harness the vast ingenuity of the American people to make our energy usage leaner and more efficient. We could reduce our CO2 emissions, our particulate pollution, and our energy expenses — without affecting our lifestyles noticeably (granted, much in our lifestyles should probably be sacrificed for the greater good — but that’s for another letter).
Thank you for all you do.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
Have you written your president today?
environment Politics: Barack Obama Ben Bernanke climaticide economics Lawrence Summers Timothy Geithner
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Day 23: To the White House
It seems that watching my daughter swimming is conducive to epistolary composition. As she splashed happily, this emerged from my pen. I’d brought lined paper today, and that seemed to shrink my penmanship, resulting in a longer piece.
For a long time, I was reluctant to address economic issues in my letters, emails and blog posts. I felt that I had inadequate background to be able to speak with any authority. However, recent events have demonstrated that the people who are speaking with authority either don’t have a fucking clue or are eager participants in the undeclared class war against the economically disenfranchised.
So I figured, “why the hell not?” and wrote a screed addressing climate change in economic terms.
Dear President Obama,
It is increasingly apparent that the people you appointed as economic advisors are not operating in good faith. Messrs Geithner, Summers and Bernanke are obviously working against the best interests of both the American people and their American president. Mr. Summers’ near-complete denialism on the economic necessity of addressing global climate change in a substantial and meaningful way is just one example of this — an example which highlights the potential for an apocalyptic confluence of economic and environmental crises in the not too distant future.
The economic impact of climate change will be felt most severely by the world’s poor. By the time the wealthiest among the planet’s population are severely affected, it will be too late for any attempts at remediation or mitigation. “Disaster capitalism” can only succeed if there is a human population left to rob!
By aligning themselves with the big banks and the multi-national corporations, Geithner, Summers and Bernanke have lent their support to an undeclared class war: the wealthy against the rest of us. Uncontrolled and unregulated capitalism is the engine driving runaway climate change — a slow-motion catastrophe whose ultimate impact will be the annihilation of whole populations. Corporate climaticide’s impact on the world’s poor is the smallpox-infested blanket writ large — a toxic gift from the oligarchy to the everyone else. This gift will have your signature on it (along with all the rest of the world’s apologists for government of, by and for the supremely wealthy) unless you take the necessary steps — steps which will also help America’s middle-class and poor recover their economic footing. Fire Geithner and Summers. Withdraw Bernanke’s nomination. It may not be enough, but it’ll be a good start.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama executive orders MA-Sen Robert Gibbs
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Day 20: A Fax to the White House
Very busy tonight. Took a break and started to write a 1-paragraph fax to the WH (black ball-point pen on unlined paper) but it got away from me and ended up two pages long, and tackling two separate subjects. The first is of course the environment, and was specifically referencing the excellent record President Obama has built up (largely inconspicuously) of environmentally positive executive orders, but the second is the astonishing statement by Robert Gibbs that the President was “surprised and frustrated” with the outcome of the MA election. Normally I try to avoid jamming multiple subjects into a single letter or fax. Not tonight; I was just too pissed off.
Dear Mr. President,
Two things:
First, despite the lack of legislative action on climate-change issues and the disappointing outcome of the Copenhagen Conference, your first year in office has soon some good results in environmental areas through your use of executive orders. Thank you.
Second, I gather that you told Robert Gibbs that you were “surprised and frustrated” by the outcome of my state’s recent election. As a MA-07 resident and a lifetime progressive Democrat, I was certainly frustrated, but I wasn’t surprised. You need to get some new advisors; the ones you’ve got are hiding the truth from you. We are the people who worked to get you elected, donated beyond our budgets, called till we were hoarse. And what have we gotten? Geithner. Bernanke. Summers. Howard Dean excluded. Surrender fromthe Administration, on almost every front. It’s a politician’s prerogative to change his mind, but it is buzarre that after this past year you could not be aware of the growing despondency of the (formerly energized) progressives. And in a nutshell, that is what lost MA-Sen. Martha Coakley ran a terrible campaign, but her failure is a local one by comparison. November 2010 is going to be very unpleasant if you and your senior staff continue through the next six months as you have over the past twelve.
We need an aggressive president who will tackle these issues without a need for the conforting illusions of “bipartisanship.” We elected YOU president, not Olympia Snowe or Joe Lieberman.
Anyway, congratulations on your many successful executive orders on the environment, including increased mpg standards, protecting many Federal sites by blocking Bush rules, strengthening the EPA, establishing the new Wilderness Area, toughening smog rulings, and many others. I applaud this aspect of your presidency without reservation.
Thank you,
Warren Senders
No fancy verbiage there.
environment Politics: Barack Obama Desperation Pi***ng into the wind
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Year 1, Month 1, Day 9: Happy birthday!
She got up this morning and opened presents; this afternoon we’re having a party for the five-year-old birthday girl. Mid-morning she had a swim class, and while she was splashing around, I wrote a fax to the White House:
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on nearing the end of your first year in office. I hope that among your accomplishments you can also recognize the extraordinary degree to which your political opposition has dedicated itself to frustrating and hindering your political and legislative agenda. You have bent over backwards to accommodate the Republicans, and over and over your readiness to accommodate has been treated as a weakness, leading to a dilution of your policy initiatives.
In the long run, the looming climate crisis is without doubt the single most important problem that you (or any leader) will be called upon to address. It is imperative that you use your communication skills to educate the public on this subject; there is no time left for us, for our culture and civilization, for the web of biodiversity upon which all planetary life depends. I beg of you, sir, to publicly acknowledge the importance of Dr. James Hansen’s work — and to vigorously promote the absolute necessity for America to lead the world in the reduction of atmospheric CO2 to 350 parts per million.
Time is running out, and the Republican strategy appears to be, simply, to wait for the Rapture. We can’t afford inaction.
Thank you,
Warren Senders
Have you contacted your President today?
environment Politics: Barack Obama climate change Pi***ng into the wind Things to do
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Year 1, Month 1, Day 4: A Fax to the White House
Dear President Obama,
The urgency of the climate crisis is without a doubt increasing by the day. Yet our national media persists in fostering the misconception that there is doubt about the causes, effects and possible remedies for anthropogenic global warming. And (tragically) they appear to be succeeding.
If meaningful climate-change treaties are to be ratified, if meaningful legislation is to be passed, it will be because
you fought for it in the arena of public opinion. Please, sir — use the presidential “bully pulpit” to make the case for America’s full participation in global efforts to combat catastrophic climate change. We must lead; if we cannot lead, at least let us lend a hand, rather than hinder the efforts of others.Thank you,
Warren Senders
This was handwritten on the back of a previously used piece of paper and faxed at around 10 am this morning. I’ll email it in a couple of minutes.
The White House FAX number is: 202-456-2461
The White House web page is:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact
Go tell them something. Keep the pressure on.