environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 19: Nail Your Shoes To The Kitchen Floor
An Op-Ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch demonstrates conservative myopia nicely:
President Obama’s climate plans, which he outlined Tuesday, address a real problem using the sub-optimal methods that have become the hallmark of his administration. As in health care, he would make gargantuan government even bigger, more complex, and more opaque. As in questions ranging from labor relations to Libya, he would act by executive fiat. And as always, he would shift ever more control from private to government hands.
The current plateau in global warming is not unique, and does not invalidate the scientific consensus that human activity is making the planet hotter in ways that will cause significant harm to millions of people. Government has a legitimate role to play in ameliorating that situation.
Unfortunately, Obama has chosen poor means to do so. Setting carbon quotas, appliance standards and mileage rules, for instance, requires armies of bureaucrats to oversee entire industries. A far more efficient and market-friendly answer to the negative externalities inflicted by greenhouse-gas emissions would involve taxing them so producers would have to internalize the costs. This would do much to level the energy playing field and make green energy price-competitive.
But letting market forces do their work is not this president’s way. He prefers the heavy and visible hand of government, preferably his. So he also has proposed further privileging renewable energy, even though some renewables inflict negative externalities that are far harder to quantify. (Wind turbines, for example, kill more than 573,000 birds a year.)
Some of the president’s proposals – such as a quadrennial energy review, similar to the quadrennial defense review conducted by the Pentagon – make good sense. Taken together, however, the package represents an unwieldy attempt to micromanage multiple sectors of the economy without the bother of involving the democratic process. It may become part of his administration’s legacy – but that is no cause for celebration by anyone.
Nothin’ to see here, folks. Move along. July 1:
If President Obama’s climate-change proposals really are big-government overreach, then perhaps it’s time for vocal advocates of market-based small-government solutions to step up to the plate. Where are the Republicans advocating ways to incentivize CO2 reductions? Where are conservative politicians who recognize the dangers of climate change, who seek to enlist the mechanisms of capitalism in the defense of our species, our civilization, and our planet?
Well, I won’t keep you in suspense. They’ve been expelled from their party. Thanks to the Tea Party coalition’s effective control of primary nominations, any member of the GOP who acknowledges the existence of human-caused climate change can expect the fate of former South Carolina Representative Bob Inglis, whose 2010 primary defeat was largely due to his willingness to elevate scientific facts above anti-science ideology.
To criticize the President’s plans without acknowledging that Republican intransigence makes legislative action on the crisis impossible is journalistic irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 18: Tied To A Whippin’ Post
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel opines on the POTUS’ speech:
President Barack Obama’s speech last week on climate change was a welcome call to action on one of the great challenges of our time. If the science is right — and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t — climate change is here and could have severe consequences for human health, the environment and the economy. Meeting the challenge will be difficult and costly but also affords opportunities, especially for job growth in green industries.
As the president said Tuesday, “the question is not whether we need to act.”
The problem is that similar calls to action have been issued for decades and not much has been done to curb the belching of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Utilities such as We Energies, car manufacturers and some governments have taken important steps to reduce air pollution from a number of sources and have worked to reduce carbon emissions. They deserve credit for that.
But reductions of carbon dioxide significant enough to have an impact on climate change have remained elusive.
If Obama wants to change that pattern, his administration needs to follow through. The trick will be to do so without harming economic growth. New rules also need to be based on available cost-effective technologies that can actually reduce emissions. It can be done. And while the president’s plan may be light on details, he is at least pointing the country in the right direction.
Obama is directing his administration to launch the first-ever federal regulations on heat-trapping gases emitted by new and existing power plants, boost renewable energy production on federal lands, increase efficiency standards and prepare communities to deal with higher temperatures.
The ideology of the cancer cell. June 30:
It takes extraordinary intellectual insulation to continue rejecting the scientific evidence of global climate change. By analogy, imagine buying a house condemned as unsafe by 97 out of 100 home inspectors, eating in a restaurant that had failed 97 out of 100 health inspections, or the same proportion of oncologists when they tell you to start therapy immediately.
But even those who are prepared to argue forcefully for action on the climate crisis still observe powerful taboos against questioning the desirability of continued economic growth. To fetishize economic expansion ignores the fact that we live on a finite planet with finite resources; it’s like saying that gaining weight is healthy for infants, so it must be good for adults as well.
Infinite expansion is impossible in a bounded area; we can have sustainability or growth, but not both. If we wish a viable long-term future for humanity, this is a debate we need to have.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 17: The Rain Continued For An Hour
Krugthulu, in the Times:
It’s always important to remember that what ails the U.S. economy right now isn’t lack of productive capacity, but lack of demand. The housing bust, the overhang of household debt and ill-timed cuts in public spending have created a situation in which nobody wants to spend; and because your spending is my income and my spending is your income, this leads to a depressed economy over all.
How would forcing the power industry to clean up its act worsen this situation? It wouldn’t, because neither costs nor lack of capacity are constraining the economy right now.
And, as I’ve already suggested, environmental action could actually have a positive effect. Suppose that electric utilities, in order to meet the new rules, decide to close some existing power plants and invest in new, lower-emission capacity. Well, that’s an increase in spending, and more spending is exactly what our economy needs.
O.K., it’s still not clear whether any of this will happen. Some of the people I talk to are cynical about the new climate initiative, believing that the president won’t actually follow through. All I can say is, I hope they’re wrong.
Near the end of his speech, the president urged his audience to: “Invest. Divest. Remind folks there’s no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth.” Normally, one would be tempted to dismiss this as the sound of someone waving away the need for hard choices. But, in this case, it was simple good sense: We really can invest in new energy sources, divest from old sources, and actually make the economy stronger. So let’s do it.
“Stronger” should not mean “bigger.” June 29:
As accumulating atmospheric CO2 triggers extreme weather events everywhere on Earth, it underlines a simple, inescapable truth: we live on a finite planet with finite resources. Whether it’s food for the multiplying masses, energy for our industries, or just a safe place to put our waste, there is no dispute: we’re running out.
President Obama’s recent invocation of “economic growth” indicates how hard it is to abandon the delusion that our species can expand indefinitely without paying a terrible price. A healthy baby’s weight may double in a few months, but an adult doing likewise would be very sick indeed. Our species is no longer an evolutionary infant, and we can no longer base our lives on continuous expansion, for there is nowhere left to expand to.
We can have sustainability, or we can have growth, but trying to have both will inevitably lead to tragedy: having neither.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 15: Until The Crowd Got Wise
The Des Moines Register notices that AgSec Tom Vilsack supports President Obama’s climate initiatives:
WASHINGTON — The White House stepped up its campaign for a sweeping new climate change plan Wednesday as Obama administration officials highlighted the effects of recent extreme weather on Iowa and other states.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters the 2012 drought, the worst to hit the United States since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, and the wet weather and flooding this year demonstrated the need to act. He also pointed to the recent uptick in forest fires, including one near Colorado Springs, Colo., that has burned hundreds of homes and forced residents to flee.
“This is a real issue and something that requires immediate attention,” Vilsack said. “It’s absolutely essential that we respond in a very aggressive way to the challenges of a changing climate.”
(snip)
Republican lawmakers and other critics criticized the president for unilaterally advancing a plan that they said would hurt the economy, cost jobs and hit consumers with higher energy costs.
They never change. June 28:
When Republicans criticize President Obama’s climate change initiatives, they tell us that plans to reduce CO2 emissions will “hurt the economy” and “raise energy costs” — utterly predictable tropes which collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
The notion that sane environmental policy is economically damaging ignores the fact that our prosperity ultimately hinges on environmental health; no amount of money will magically restore contaminated aquifers or repair a collapsed ecosystem. If our economy is “hurt” by reducing dangerous greenhouse emissions, the problem lies with how we define our economy, not with the notion that we — as individuals and as a nation — should be responsible for cleaning up the messes we’ve made.
And when it comes to increased energy costs, the facts are simple: our tax dollars have been subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for decades, enriching their corporate coffers while keeping prices at the pump artificially low. Furthermore our taxes pay to clean up oil spills, address the public health impacts of oil and coal, and fund the costly wars we wage to protect our sources.
Global climate change is the costliest threat our species has ever faced. Addressing it proactively is both environmentally and economically responsible.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 14: Absolute Immobility Is Apparently The Only Option
The Washington Times (Rev. Moon’s vanity project) runs an article by a denialist buffoon, one Chip Knappenberg. He doesn’t think much of President Obama’s climate policy proposals:
Scientific research suggests that global warming is proceeding, and will continue, at a slower pace, with fewer negative impacts than current projections indicate, including those underlying the president’s plan. On top of this, the U.S. relative contribution to climate change is declining year after year as greenhouse-gas emissions from developing nations, such as China, expand rapidly.
Together, this means that the president’s plan for reducing emissions in the United States effectively will have no impact on the local, regional or global climate. Domestic reductions will not produce any demonstrable change in the weather; there will be not be verifiably fewer tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves or any other manner of extreme weather. The rise in the number of billion-dollar weather disasters highlighted by the president will continue — driven by the fact that there are more people with more stuff in harm’s way, not by human-caused climate change.
The president recognizes that actions in the United States alone will be insufficient to change the course of the climate. A global effort is required. Therefore, what the president really hopes to achieve is not direct climate-change mitigation from reducing U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, but to gain bargaining power at international talks to address climate change and, ultimately, that low-emitting energy technologies will be developed and deployed rapidly and safely around the world.
Yet there is no guarantee of these outcomes.
There’s no guarantee Chip Knappenberger won’t get run over by a truck, either…but that doesn’t stop him from crossing the street. June 27:
Chip Knappenberger’s contemptuous response to President Obama’s climate-change proposals demonstrates a remarkable readiness to ignore our nation’s long-standing leadership role in the international community.
Mr. Knappenberger argues unpersuasively that since nations like China and India will continue to emit greenhouse gases, there is no reason to reduce our own — and dismisses the President’s proposals as attempts to “gain bargaining power” in future climate negotiations. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that since “there is no guarantee of these outcomes,” the US has no reason to strengthen its position in treaties and international agreements.
By pursuing unilateral action on carbon emissions on the basis of an overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming, our nation may regain some of the credibility we sacrificed a decade ago when we invaded another nation based on evidence which even our own intelligence agencies knew to be spurious.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 13: You Know, I Think I Really Like Vanilla.
The WaPo reported (June 26) on President Obama’s Big Climate Speech:
WASHINGTON — Appealing for courageous action “before it’s too late,” President Barack Obama launched a major second-term drive Tuesday to combat climate change and secure a safer planet, bypassing Congress as he sought to set a cornerstone of his legacy.
Abandoning his suit jacket under a sweltering sun at Georgetown University, Obama issued a dire warning about the environment: Temperatures are rising, sea level is climbing, the Arctic ice is melting and the world is doing far too little to stop it. Obama said the price for inaction includes lost lives and homes and hundreds of billions of dollars.
“As a president, as a father and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act,” Obama said. “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”
At the core of Obama’s plan are new controls on new and existing power plants that emit carbon dioxide — heat-trapping gases blamed for global warming. The program also will boost renewable energy production on federal lands, increase efficiency standards and prepare communities to deal with higher temperatures. Obama called for the U.S. to be a global leader in the search for solutions.
Same planet, different world. June 26:
Whether it’s the heat wave baking the Arctic, the wildfires raging in Colorado, or the rising sea levels that will soon eliminate island nations from the map altogether, the warning signals of runaway climate change are unequivocal. Naturally, environmentalists (and sensible people everywhere) are pleased with the President’s uninhibited use of the bully pulpit in his recent address on climate change. However, Mr. Obama’s unambiguous articulation of the crisis must be understood in two very different contexts.
Politically, the speech was a bold and dramatic warning shot to conservative lawmakers, and a recognition of the potentials of unilateral executive action.
From a climatological perspective, however, Mr. Obama’s address was an exercise in cautious incrementalism, understating both the magnitude and urgency of the danger.
And therein lies the problem. When the calm statement of undisputed scientific facts is too extreme to be politically palatable, our governance is clearly, perhaps fatally, broken.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 12: There Is No God But Albedo
The Christian Science Monitor speculates about what a climate change strategy would look like, but makes a bad analogy:
For a man with his hands tied, President Obama is offering a decent enough plan to fight climate change. In a speech today, he’s expected to announce federal regulation of greenhouse gases at existing coal-fired power plants, increased energy standards for buildings and appliances, and greater development of renewable energy on federal lands. These are moves that he can try without approval from Congress. And while they are halfway measures, they are better than no measures.
But imagine if his hands were not tied. Imagine if they were joined with lawmakers willing to tackle this issue with the urgency and breadth that the government devotes to fighting terrorism.
Americans don’t think about the threat of climate change in the same way as terrorism, but perhaps they should. Climate change has killed individuals through vicious storms, if not by bombs and planes, and the financial damage is just as real.
Sigh. If the war on climate works as well as the war on terror, we’re completely fucked. June 25:
As an abstract noun, “climate change” is amorphous, too large to grasp either intellectually or emotionally (unless you’re a climate scientist, of course). But up close and personal, the accelerating greenhouse effect can drown your city, reduce your house to kindling, dry up your wheatfields, introduce non-native pest species into regional ecosystems, trigger toxic algae blooms, set the stage for gigantic wildfires, and make our lives more miserable and fearful in countless separate but complementary ways.
Which is, of course, what terrorism does. Our national response to terrorism is anything but serious; rather than reducing the root causes of violent extremism, our “war on terror” has enriched corporations and increased secrecy, while treating protesters and whistleblowers like criminals, and making us more fearful, not less. We need a climate change policy that reduces corporate power, increases openness, treats environmentalists as responsible citizens, and offers us reasons for optimism, not despair.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 13: Don’t Just Do Something…DO SOMETHING!
The Louisville Courier-Journal runs an opinion column from Eugene Robinson, which originally appeared in the WaPo, if memory serves me well. It’s good stuff:
WASHINGTON — President Obama should spend his remaining years in office making the United States part of the solution to climate change, not part of the problem. If Congress sticks to its policy of obstruction and willful ignorance, Obama should use his executive powers to the fullest extent. We are out of time.
With each breath, every person alive today experiences something unique in human history: an atmosphere containing more than 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide. This makes us special, I suppose, but not in a good way.
The truth is that 400 is just one of those round-number milestones that can be useful for grabbing people’s attention. What’s really important is that atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by a stunning 43 percent since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
The only plausible cause of this rapid rise, from the scientific viewpoint, is the burning of fossil fuels to fill the energy needs of industrialized society. The only logical impact, according to those same scientists, is climate change. The only remaining question — depending on what humankind does right now — is whether the change ends up being manageable or catastrophic.
Yup. May 31:
Eugene Robinson has it precisely right in his opinion column of May 27. If our culture is to successfully address such pressing issues as human rights, economic justice, and the complex phenomena of terrorism, we require certain simple fundamentals: a resilient infrastructure, clean air to breathe, unpolluted and uninterrupted water, and food sufficient to our needs. The climate crisis threatens all of these things.
From the threads of a relatively stable and benign environment the great tapestry of our species’ achievement has been woven. Let the warp and woof of human civilization begin to crumble and the images carried on that tapestry will vanish utterly, with unimaginable speed. A resilient and interdependent ecology, the product of many thousands of years of evolution, can be destroyed in a few seconds by the uncaring blade of a bulldozer; a runaway greenhouse effect will work the same destruction on a planetary scale.
Climate change is not just AN issue. It’s THE issue.
Warren Senders
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Year 4, Month 5, Day 21: The Conservative Id, Yes, The Conservative Id
We have a minority vice-president. WaPo:
Environmentalists have seized on a comment Vice President Biden made while working a rope line in Columbia, S.C., on Friday, in which he told an activist he is “in the minority” within the administration when it comes to opposing the Keystone XL pipeline.
Elaine Cooper, who serves on the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s South Caroline chapter, said in an interview Wednesday that Biden shared his thoughts with her during Rep. James Clyburn’s (D-S.C.) annual fish fry.
Buzzfeed first reported the vice president’s remarks late Tuesday, based on an e-mail a colleague of Cooper had sent to fellow environmentalists.
Cooper, who was wearing a black-and-white leather hat, said she attracted the vice president’s attention and was able to ask him about the controversial proposal to ship heavy crude oil from Canada to U.S. refineries on the Gulf Coast.
” ‘Sir, do you support rejecting the Keystone pipeline?’ ” Cooper recalled asking Biden. “And he responded, ‘Yes, I do support rejecting the Keystone pipeline, but I’m in the minority.’ And he smiled back at me.”
Good for Joe. How about good for us? May 9:
It’s an enduring irony: in a corporatized political system, the only position in government offering almost complete freedom of expression is the one John Nance Garner so memorably characterized as “not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Vice-Presidents have for years expressed their constituents’ true sentiments in ways that chief executives cannot; think of Nixon under Eisenhower, and Spiro Agnew’s turn as “Nixon’s Nixon” a decade later, the voice of the conservative American id.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, channels our collective superego, as witness his emergence as an eloquent and compassionate advocate of marriage equality. Nowhere is Mr. Biden’s finely-honed moral sensibility more evident than in his recent outspoken opposition to that planetary disaster-in-the-making, the Keystone XL pipeline. Unlike some who’ve held his office, Joe Biden elevates the vice-presidency with an eloquent expression of the better angels of our nature. Let’s hope he has the president’s ear.
Warren Senders
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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