environment Politics: Barack Obama diesel fuel efficiency mileage trucks
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 28: We Suck! And We’re Big And Stupid! Yay, Us!
Last letter for a couple of weeks, from my side. As far as the public face of Running Gamak is concerned, letters will appear every day as usual. When this one shows up, I will have returned from India and will be recuperating from jet lag.
The August 10 LA Times runs an article on the Obama administration’s new mileage standards for heavy vehicles:
President Obama announced the first fuel-efficiency and greenhouse gas standards for long-haul rigs, work trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles Tuesday, the second mileage pact with manufacturers in less than a month.The regulations call for reductions on fuel consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions by 2018 of 9% to 23%, depending on the type of vehicle. Trucks and other heavy vehicles make up only 4% of the domestic vehicle fleet, but given the distance they travel, the time they spend idling and their low fuel efficiency, they end up consuming about 20% of all vehicle fuel, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The announcement comes less than two weeks after Obama and the country’s automakers unveiled new fuel economy rules for passenger vehicles that would boost fleet-wide average gas mileage to 54.5 mpg by 2025, from about 27.8 mpg now.
(snip)
At a time when nearly all major corporate lobbying groups and the Republican Party insist that the administration’s environmental regulations destroy jobs, the automakers, the United Auto Workers union and truck and large engine manufacturers are collaborating on rules they say could create jobs. Most environmental groups also praised the new truck standards.
I get to quote Spiro Agnew in my first paragraph! Ha ha ha ha ha. Sent August 10:
It is laughably predictable: whenever a new environmental regulation is announced, the same conservative choruses shout that any attempts to behave responsibly toward our planet are inherently “job-killing.” It would be laughable if these nattering nabobs of negativism were holding hand-lettered signs on street corners; knowing they’re in partial control of our government is profoundly disturbing.
Leave aside the “green” issues for a moment, and concentrate on the Republicans’ underlying message. They’re saying American manufacturers can’t meet high standards, and American workers won’t take pride in making high-quality products. They’re saying that America can’t be bothered to take responsibility for itself in the world community, or to plan for the future.
Their version of American exceptionalism is based on sloppiness, laziness, distractability, hubris and indifference to the rest of the world. Call me an idealist, but these hardly strike me as good candidates for our country’s core values.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama James Hansen Tar Sands
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Year 2, Month 8, Day 27: Please Don’t Let This Happen.
I’m writing this on August 9 — two days before I leave for India, and one day before I stop writing climate letters until I get back.
And this letter will see the light of the intertubes on August 27 — two days after I get back. I’m cool…and looking forward to my vacation!
This is about the potentially disastrous Tar Sands Pipeline project, which absolutely MUST NOT be allowed to happen.
Faxed to POTUS at 1 AM, August 10; mailed in an actual envelope with a stamp later that same day.
Dear President Obama,
In a sane universe, the notion of opening the Canadian tar sands to exploitation would never have arisen. The consequences of bringing this extraordinarily dirty form of energy into circulation would be catastrophic for North America and for our planet.
It would also, of course, pretty much doom any chance you would have to be remembered as an environmentally-conscious president. All the other advances you and your administration have made thus far would be nullified by the grotesque effects of the tar sands.
Tar sands will make impede our progress to a sustainable on many levels. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the greenhouse emissions from the tar sands oil is almost twice that of the average crude refined here in the USA. The yearly emissions from the Keystone XL project would be “roughly equivalent to annual CO2 emissions of seven coal-fired plants.”
It’s not just that tar sands oil is dirty at the point of extraction. The Keystone project necessitates significant deforestation, with an enormous loss of carbon sequestration function from the destroyed forests. Pipelines are highly vulnerable; leaks can have devastating effects on local ecosystems.
Climatologist James Hansen has warned us in very direct terms that putting the tar sands’ carbon into the atmosphere would be an irreversible tipping point to a runaway greenhouse effect. President Obama, your legacy should not include pulling this trigger on the planet. Please stop the tar sands pipeline.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility media irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 9: Squirrel!
The June 23 Boston Globe reports on the “Al Gore was mean to Obama” kerfuffle:
In a 7,000-word essay posted online yesterday by Rolling Stone magazine, Gore said the president hasn’t stood up for “bold action’’ on the problem and has done little to move the country forward since he replaced Republican George W. Bush.
Bush infuriated environmentalists by resisting mandatory controls on the pollution blamed for climate change, despite overwhelming scientific evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is at least partly responsible. The scientific case has only gotten stronger since, Gore argues, but Obama has not used it to force significant change.
“Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis,’’ Gore said. “He has not defended the science against the ongoing withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community . . . to bring the reality of the science before the public.’’
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sent June 23:
While it makes excellent headlines when one important Democrat says mean things about another, the real story in Al Gore’s words is deeper and far more important. The Obama administration’s regrettable timidity and incrementalism on environmental and energy issues is merely symptomatic of a more pervasive problem which Mr. Gore addressed directly in his recent article in Rolling Stone. As long as our news media treat science like political gamesmanship, reporting on climate change will continue to distort the facts and mislead the public. And as long as our politicians treat scientific ignorance and innumeracy as a virtue, our policies will reflect no reality beyond superficial electoral exigencies. While Mr. Obama and his team certainly need to be doing more to combat the gravest threat human civilization has faced in millennia, the blame for our inaction belongs to the corporate forces which control both our politicians and our communications.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama denialists idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 8: Like Asphyxiating Fish In A Barrel
More on Gore, from the June 22 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Al Gore has gone public with his complaints about President Barack Obama’s environmental record and leadership on climate change – legitimizing a groundswell of grumbling from the left and throwing open the door for more of the same.
(snip)
It’s bad news for the White House – especially coming on the heels of a new poll showing that only 30 percent of Americans say they definitely plan to vote for Obama in 2012.
“President Obama has never presented to the American people the magnitude of the climate crisis,” the former vice president wrote in a 7,000-word essay for Rolling Stone. “He has simply not made the case for action. He has not defended the science against the ongoing, withering and dishonest attacks. Nor has he provided a presidential venue for the scientific community – including our own National Academy – to bring the reality of the science before the public.”
Sent June 22:
While Al Gore’s critique of President Obama makes excellent headlines, the real problem lies elsewhere — in the irresponsibility of politicians and corporate forces which place the well-being of the world’s corporations above that of the world’s people. The readiness of our elected representatives to ignore actual scientific expertise in favor of bizarre conspiracy theories is a symptom of the extent to which the fossil-fuel sector exerts control over our government; the readiness of our media to play a specious game of false equivalency in which every worried climatologist is “balanced” by a paid shill for Big Oil is likewise a symptom of that industry’s influence on our print and broadcast outlets. With rapidly deteriorating oceans, melting icecaps, worldwide outbreaks of extreme weather and catastrophe looming on the horizon, it’s time for politicians, media and corporations to get to work on something more important than protecting profit margins. Protecting us.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility
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Year 2, Month 7, Day 7: There’ll Be One Guy Left, But He’ll Be VERY RICH.
The New York Times reports on Al Gore’s June 21 article in Rolling Stone, in which he criticizes Obama on climate:
In the 7,000-word article in Rolling Stone, Mr. Gore says that Mr. Obama clearly understands the threat to the planet posed by global warming and that he has appointed a number of qualified and committed advocates to key positions.But Mr. Gore charges that in the face of well-financed attacks from fossil fuel industries and denial and delay from Republicans in Congress, Mr. Obama has failed to act decisively to alter the nation’s policies on climate change and energy.
Sent June 22:
The contrast is striking: whereas his predecessor was an intellectually lazy faux cowboy, Mr. Obama is a thoughtful, scientifically literate incrementalist. But there are some areas in which incremental progress is inherently unsatisfactory, and our response to the deepening climate crisis is one of these. What with the shockingly rapid deterioration of our oceans (as detailed in the IPSO report), the continuing increase in greenhouse emissions, the collapse of regional ecosystems worldwide, and the dramatic increase in extreme weather events, it is self-evident that tiny steps in the right direction won’t get us out of trouble. We need to move fast, and we need to move dramatically.
However valid Mr. Gore’s criticisms of President Obama, the real story is that the corporate forces controlling the economy won’t abandon their profit margins, despite mounting evidence that this strategy will subject their customer base to what biologists euphemistically call an “evolutionary bottleneck.”
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 Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots nuclear power timidity
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 11: Tearing My Hair.
The April 2 issue of the Boston Globe has a column by Derrick Jackson noting the seeming inability of our president to actually, you know, do or say something that might have an effect on the climate change front:
PRESIDENT OBAMA seems increasingly drained of the juice needed to power up a modern vision on energy. Completely absent from his address this week at Georgetown University was his promise as a candidate to go after windfall profits of oil companies and reinvest the money into wind, solar, and biofuels. Instead, he promised to expedite new shallow and deepwater oil drilling permits, even as top environmentalists say many questions remain after the BP spill disaster.
More than ever, he is wedded to pursuing “clean coal’’ and nuclear power. Meanwhile, radiation from the Japan nuclear disaster was measured thousands of times above safety levels in seawater and groundwater near the plant and in soil 25 miles away, at levels double those found in areas declared inhabitable around Chernobyl.
Most important, there continues to be no direct message to the American people that we are living in an unsustainable fantasy, consuming a quarter of the world’s energy. There was no hint of things that would instantly make Americans rethink consumption, such as a gas tax. For the moment, the road-blocking Republicans are winning the day with an ethos symbolized by Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential presidential candidate. Last week Barbour told Iowa Republicans, “We need more oil. We need more gas. We need more coal. We need more nuclear. We need more American energy.”
Jackson is one of the best columnists writing today; I’m very glad he’s at the Globe. This was sent April 2, and has been published:
The timidity of the Obama administration when it comes to the transformation of America’s energy economy is profoundly disturbing. The facts of climate change are firmly established, with only a few petroleum-funded contrarians on the fringes of a global scientific consensus. The economics of renewable energy look more attractive every day, as are the geopolitical ramifications of getting more of our national energy requirements from within our own borders. The long-term costs of fossil fuels are harder and harder to hide, as we confront the health effects and environmental impacts of our profligate burning of oil and coal. Why, then, is the President so leery of taking a strong stand? The pusillanimity of the present administration only makes sense when viewed diagnostically: the extent to which our politics is paralyzed on this issue is a measure of the disproportionate influence of big oil and big coal in our nation’s governance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama China Hu Jintao
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Year 2, Month 1, Day 22: Good.
Presidents Obama & Hu agree that climate change is a big deal, and that it’s a good idea to do something about it.
Presidents Barack Obama and Hu Jintao of China, who is in Washington on an official state visit, said in a joint statement this afternoon that they “view climate change and energy security as two of the greatest challenges of our time.” In an open letter today, U.S. environmental leaders urged the presidents to adopt “a wartime-like mobilization” to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Haven’t written to POTUS for a while, so what the hell.
Dear President Obama — I was pleased to hear that your summit conference with President Hu of China dealt with the issue of climate change, which is without doubt the most pressing global security issue humanity has ever faced. The rapid acceleration of worldwide climate chaos has already wreaked havoc on millions of lives, and the coming decades will not see things calming down.
Rather, the weather’s only going to get worse. Predictions made by climate scientists a few years ago have now been shown to grossly underestimate both the magnitude of the world’s transformation and the speed with which it is occurring.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the United States (due largely but not entirely to Republican intransigence) has completely dropped the ball on clean energy research and development — and the ball is in China’s court. We’re not going to eliminate the advantages the Chinese now have in the creation of new and critical technologies; they’ve got a substantial head start, while we remain mired in the political quicksand that is GOP grandstanding.
It is imperative that the USA and China arrive at a robust and meaningful agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. The climatic changes we’re all going through are either going to trigger a new era of international cooperation against a common enemy — or they’re going to bring about a rapid and catastrophic deterioration of civilizational infrastructure. If we as a species are to survive the next millennium, we must have enlightened and forward-looking leadership that is capable of tackling this gravest of all challenges without faltering or capitulation to the political agendas of the ignorant and inattentive.
Congratulations to you and President Hu. Now the really hard work begins. Both countries must make deep cuts in carbon emissions, but the United States’ per capita rates are far higher than anywhere else in the world. If we don’t change our way of life voluntarily, it will be changed for us by terrifying force of circumstance.
We must rise to this challenge.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama
by Warren
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Month 12, Day 12: Grouchy Edition
Sunday POTUS, written in a bleak mood. What the hell happened to the guy we elected?
Dear President Obama —
I was one of your fervent supporters in 2008, in part because it seemed obvious to me that a man of your intellectual depth would understand that the long-term threat to our planetary environment posed by global warming would be the central issue for our survival as a nation, as a civilization, and as a species.
Now, after two years of your administration, I’m not so sure. I first ascribed the failure to reach a genuine agreement at Copenhagen to incompetence and intransigence; now it seems at least plausible that my own government colluded with that of China to ensure that no meaningful emissions control agreement would be reached. This is beyond disappointing; this is outrageous.
Now comes the news that your administration’s E.P.A. is reversing its commitment to new environmental regulations, saying it needs “more time to analyze” the effects of proposed rules on pollution. Forgive me for not taking this at face value; if it looks like a capitulation, walks like a capitulation and quacks like a capitulation, I say it’s a capitulation.
And what a capitulation it is! The past several years have offered ample evidence that the world’s fossil fuel industry is a hotbed of mendacity, cupidity, sociopathy and idiocy. From environmental destruction to the subornation of scientists, Big Oil has demonstrated that it can only be trusted to act in its own interests, and that those interests are emphatically not aligned with the people of this country and this planet.
These companies should be nationalized; their assets redistributed and their leaders jailed.
I voted for you because I had hoped for justice and environmental policy that would be based on science. Now, as I watch the criminals who destroyed so much reap the rewards of their corruption, I have abandoned hope for justice — and as I watch your administration’s E.P.A. kowtow to some of the world’s worst environmental criminals, I must abandon hope for science-based policy as well.
Please tell me: what (if anything) can I hope for in the months and years to come?
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama corporatism idiots
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Month 12, Day 11: It’ll Feel Better When It Stops Hurting. But When Will It Stop Hurting?
Well, this sucks:
The Obama administration is retreating on long-delayed environmental regulations — new rules governing smog and toxic emissions from industrial boilers — as it adjusts to a changed political dynamic in Washington with a more muscular Republican opposition.
The move to delay the rules, announced this week by the Environmental Protection Agency, will leave in place policies set by President George W. Bush. President Obama ran for office promising tougher standards, and the new rules were set to take effect over the next several weeks.
Beating my head against a wall would feel better.
President Obama’s reversal on EPA policy is a shameful capitulation to some of the most environmentally irresponsible elements in the global economy. The big oil companies, unsatisfied with year after year of record-breaking profits, are anxious to undermine the only remaining authority with the capacity to regulate pollution — and the President, incomprehensibly, seems to believe that acceding to their agenda will be a positive step for this country and the world. When accelerating climate change is endangering the world’s agricultural systems, when increased acidity is jeopardizing the ability of our oceans to sustain life, when the scientific evidence for human causes of global warming is irrefutable — it is not the time to bow to the desires of the fossil fuel industry for an even more unconstrained regulatory environment. Fossil fuel is the crack cocaine of the American economy. Why should we reward the dealers?
Warren Senders