environment Politics: Barack Obama climate zombies
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Month 11, Day 24: Climate Zombie Apocalypse Warning
Struggled to find an article to use as a hook for tomorrow’s letter. Finally gave up and wrote POTUS.
Dear President Obama,
As the 111th Congress enters its lame-duck phase, Republican legislators are already telling their supporters to expect hearings and inquiries. I imagine they’d probably subpoena your dog, Bo, if they could find a pretext.
It is folly to imagine that compromise is possible with this group of nihilists. While I applaud your bipartisan instincts, they are useless against the incoming GOP caucus.
There is no area in which a willingness to compromise is more dangerous than that of climate change. With “climate zombies” like Joe Barton, John Shimkus and Darryl Issa all eagerly anticipating opportunities to subject climate scientists to hostile questioning and intimidation, we can look forward to a profoundly depressing couple of years — years in which one climatic “tipping point” after another will come and go, leaving us as a nation and a species with fewer options for our survival.
There can be no “middle way” between species extinction and survival. The actions of the United States in the upcoming Cancun conference are of critical importance — and yet we hear over and over again that we shouldn’t expect too much.
My daughter will be six this coming January. She expects to live happily in a world filled with life and beauty. Is that too much?
These destructive, thoughtless, anti-science, anti-reality forces have declared war on you, and on all of us — please fight them with all the strength and resources you have. We are depending on you, and we’re getting pretty worried.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama
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Month 11, Day 7: Sunday POTUS
The concert went off well; I’m back at home and decompressing from a fabulous evening of drumming. I’ll have photos online within a day and video/audio soon after that.
Meanwhile, my letter to President Obama:
Dear President Obama,
As a Massachusetts resident, I am proud of my own state’s results in the recent midterm election. I was a teenager when we were the only state to support George McGovern in 1972, and I’d like to think that we continue to recognize the value of progressive politics and policies (several Republican governors and the recently elected Scott Brown notwithstanding). About the rest of the country, I’m pretty depressed.
In particular, I find the election of so many “climate zombies” to be a terrible blow. In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, it refers to a politician whose ideologically driven rejection of the facts of global climate change remains impervious to any and all scientific evidence. These people got elected, and they are going to do their best to stop all progress on combating global warming over the next two years.
They must not succeed. While on a philosophical level I applaud your bipartisan instincts and your readiness to compromise, this is one issue where that can’t be allowed to happen. Because the ultimate conflict is not between Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals — it is between the forces of human ignorance and the terrifying facts of the greenhouse effect, and in this theater, there can be no bipartisanship.
I’m a progressive liberal, and I worked hard to get you elected. I’m one of those voters that makes up your “base.” It was pretty clear when I was phonebanking during this election that your base (all those liberals all over the country) weren’t happy about the way things were going in your administration. Over and over again, people said there had been too many compromises on the wrong sorts of issues, and too many missed opportunities to show strong leadership. Well, this is a chance to lead strongly.
Climate change is the defining issue of our time; our handling of this will determine whether our descendants praise us or revile us, or indeed whether our descendants remain alive on Earth at all. Mother Nature won’t compromise; it’s her way or the highway. There can be no bargaining with big oil and big coal; their moral credibility is in the negative numbers, and if you compromise with these forces, your moral credibility will be dragged down with them.
Don’t do it. Please. We need you.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Month 10, Day 24: Go Git’m, Tiger!
Couldn’t find a piece in a newspaper that spoke to me, so I wrote this little pre-election missive to POTUS instead. “Playing for the Planet,” by the way, was exactly a year ago.
Dear President Obama — I’m putting as much as I possibly can into this election. As the father of a little girl who’ll be six this January, I want to be sure my daughter inherits an Earth that will support and provide for humans — an Earth that has not been rendered uninhabitable by catastrophic global climate change.
George W. Bush didn’t just fail to act on climate change; he acted decisively to make it worse. Not only were his administration’s environmental policies consistently pro-pollution (although framed in distracting Orwellian doublespeak), but his suppression of scientists working on the problem contributed to the terrifying bloom of climate ignorance that has left a huge proportion of Americans unable to identify or discuss the issue.
And thus it is left to you. At the moment it must seem a thankless task, but this is one where failure cannot be an option. Regardless of the outcome of this election, we must accomplish policy action on climate change — action of a scale appropriate to the potential disaster.
It is not just the future of our republic that is endangered by the terrible miscarriage of jurisprudence that is the Citizens United ruling. It is the future of our human species, for if oil billionaires like the Koch brothers are able to buy our democracy, then we have no hope of moving towards an energy economy free of fossil fuels. They must be stopped.
If you can accomplish this it will be the single greatest achievement of your presidency, and future generations may owe their existence to your readiness to engage the foe. As I wrote above, it may seem a thankless task in today’s political environment — but the gratitude of the Earth’s people will be yours if you succeed.
That’s why I’m volunteering and donating and phonebanking this month. We’ve got a world to save. We’re counting on you — and you can count on us.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama solar power symbolism
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Month 10, Day 7: Weeeeeell, Alllllllll Riiiiiiiight!
Well. After the disappointing outcome of McKibben’s White House visit last month, I was all set to give up this particular facet of advocacy for a while. And then the President went ahead and said “yes!”
Here comes the sun: White House to go solar
By DINA CAPPIELLO – 1 day ago
WASHINGTON — Solar power is coming to President Barack Obama’s house.
The most famous residence in America plans to install solar panels for the first time atop the White House’s living quarters. The solar panels — which will be installed by spring 2011 — will heat water and supply some of the first family’s electricity.
It would be great to think that the letters, faxes and phone calls all of us sent and made actually had a difference.
Dear President Obama,
I’m deeply gratified to hear that you are moving forward with a solar installation on the White House. Such an application of technology is long overdue. While it’s true that this is a symbolic gesture, the simple truth is that in our celebrity-obsessed culture, any act by a public figure has a symbolic dimension.
Putting solar panels on your house sends a message to your countryfolk that you are serious about renewable energy, and about making the shift that we need to make, away from fossil fuels.
I’d like to tell you a very short story. Just before the 2008 Democratic Convention, I hosted a platform meeting, inviting about twelve other people (some of whom I’d never met) to my home to discuss ways for the Democratic Party to change its platform. One couple was in their eighties; I had known them thirty-five years earlier, when I was in high school and their son was a friend of mine.
All of us shared stories of what had brought us to this level of involvement in your historic presidential campaign. Mr. F_____, my friend’s father, said, “When Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof, I was inspired. I read up on how to do it, and built my own solar water heater. And it’s worked perfectly for the past thirty years, it’s still making hot water today, and it’s saved us thousands and thousands of dollars.” And then he said, “Mr. Obama seems like he’d be a president who’ll inspire people.”
I have been hoping for the past two years that America would start taking really serious action about global climate change. It is, after all, our nation’s population who are the world’s largest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases — and it is our nation, more than any other, which has institutionalized political and corporate opposition to genuine change in the interdependent spheres of environmental and economic policy.
I wrote to you earlier this year, urging you to put solar on the White House — and at the time, I said, “If you do it on your house, I’ll do it on mine.”
It’s going to take me a few months, but I will — and I’ll keep you posted.
Thank you for the inspiration.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama climate change idiots
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Month 10, Day 4: The President Says We’re Still Gonna Do It. How? I Dunno.
I wrote about my experiences in DC in this diary on Daily Kos.
And now…
The New York Times:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said revamping U.S. energy policy would be a top priority next year and may have to be done “in chunks” rather than through one piece of legislation, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
In an interview published on Tuesday, Obama lamented that more progress to fight climate change had not been made since he took office, and blamed the economy for that failure.
“One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our over-reliance on fossil fuels,” Obama told Rolling Stone.
My letter:
The fact that President Obama’s first two years in office were focused almost entirely on health care and financial reform rather than on climate change is a reflection of the damage that decades of Republican malfeasance and media collusion have done to our country. If we had a responsible “opposition party” instead of the aggregation of nihilists who’ve made progress impossible, the health care debate would have ended by June 2009; financial reform would have passed by September of the same year, and we’d be having a rational discussion about the pros and cons of regulating carbon emissions. If we had a responsible media, our national conversation would be just that — a conversation. Instead, we’ve heard delusions of “death panels,” blathering about “bailouts,” and a readiness to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding the most serious existential threat humanity has ever faced. President Obama’s task is a formidable one.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama filibuster reform
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Month 10, Day 3: I’m Back From DC, and Boy Are My Arms Tired
Which is why I wrote this letter the night of Thursday, September 30.
Dear President Obama,
The mid-term elections will be held in a month. Thanks to the terrifying incompetence of the Republicans, it seems relatively likely that Democrats will hold the Senate. I write begging you to use all the eloquence of which you are capable to back filibuster reform when the next session of Congress opens.
While the abuse of the filibuster by the opposition party is by now commonly recognized, it has had particularly tragic and telling effects on the fate of climate legislation. Even the meticulously crafted capitulations to the oil and coal industries which were included in the Kerry-Lieberman bill were not enough to motivate Republicans to vote for cloture.
The slow-motion disaster that is global climate change may not have an impact on the notoriously short attention span of an American citizen, but that doesn’t mean it can be safely ignored. Rather, global heating is nevertheless the most significant existential threat humanity has ever faced. While profoundly inadequate, Kerry-Lieberman was at least a start on addressing the problem. Instead, because of the malignant misuse of the filibuster, it was rendered irrelevant.
I hear that we may get a Renewable Energy Standard in the lame-duck session. Well, that’s something, even if it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. What we (America and humanity as a whole) really need is forceful environmental legislation that recognizes the scientific reality of climate change. What we’ll get is something different, I know. But at the very least we need a place to start. Please advocate to get climate legislation back on the Senate floor, and please advocate ending the abuse of the filibuster.
And (as a lifelong member of the Democratic “base”) I beg you: can you try and talk sense into the members of your party who seem determined to ensure that a Democratic majority will never again occur in our lifetimes? It’s very demoralizing.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama economics Elizabeth Warren
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Month 9, Day 19: POTUS
Everybody’s talking about the Elizabeth Warren appointment. As a Warren myself, I think it’s fine news. And it provided me with a hook for another “capitalizm iz teh suck”-type letter. Yippee.
Dear President Obama,
Your recent appointment of Elizabeth Warren is good news for all of us normal people who have been hoping against hope that your administration would follow through on its promises to help America’s suffering middle class citizens.
There is another promise which needs to be kept and built upon. The rescue of our middle class won’t amount to a hill of beans if the environmental wealth of our country and the world is so depleted and damaged that it can no longer sustain our population. Although it is not usually framed that way, climate change is as much an economic issue as an environmental one; it is obvious to anyone who’s paying attention that market capitalism is based on profoundly and fundamentally flawed assumptions. At first, the ethos of naked and unrestrained greed merely damaged our nation’s financial systems — but in the years to come we will increasingly see its effect on the natural world which makes our lives possible.
If greed is good, then short-term profits outweigh long-term sustainability; to hell with our grandchildren and their grandchildren, as long as we have a good quarterly profit! But contrary to the thinking of your economic advisor Mr. Summers, a finite planet cannot support infinite growth. We cannot continue to lay waste to the environment in the name of economic instant gratification!
This is why it was so terribly disappointing that your advisors turned away Bill McKibben and his small group of student activists when they tried to get you to reinstall solar panels on the White House roof. There are responsibilities that accompany citizenship in a world superpower — and your determination to turn the White House green would have helped all of us understand them. Instead…well, it’s just another opportunity lost in the name of a “deliberative process.”
Too bad. Especially since we don’t have another decade in which to procrastinate. We must act immediately if we are to have any impact. And not only must we stop burning coal and oil, we must rethink the economic models that have led us to this pass. Whether we like it or not, market capitalism has been a disaster for the planetary systems upon which all life depends. If we don’t end our reliance on this deeply flawed way of thinking, we may, instead, just end.Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama Bill McKibben timidity White House
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Month 9, Day 11: Inspiration or Expiration?
An email from Bill McKibben:
Dear friends,
I just walked out of a disappointing meeting with the White House: they refused to accept the Carter solar panel we came to Washington to deliver and said that they would continue their “deliberative process” to discuss putting solar panels back on the White House roof.
My 9/11 letter to POTUS:
Dear President Obama,
I just heard that your staff refused to accept the solar panel that Bill McKibben and his team brought back to the White House after thirty years. Apparently you are going to continue the “deliberative process,” rather than simply saying “yes” to an idea that is obviously a good one — an idea that has broad-based support all over America.
An idea that would motivate thousands of people to get moving and put solar panels on their homes.
An idea that would give a boost to American manufacturers of renewable energy technology — manufacturers who are being left in the dust by China’s advances in this area.
An idea that would demonstrate your genuine commitment to energy independence.
An idea that would help mobilize the nation around the battle against climate change.
Alas, what we get instead is a deliberative process.
A deliberative process that won’t motivate anyone. A deliberative process that does nothing for American manufacturers. A deliberative process that says nothing about energy independence or climate change.
How long will this deliberative process take? Perhaps until after the elections? I have news for you and your team: the Republicans don’t care whether or not you install solar panels; they’re insane, and they’ll pillory you over trivialities regardless.
How hard would it have been to say “yes”?
Yours Regretfully,
Warren Senders
environment: 350 Barack Obama Bill McKibben
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Month 9, Day 3: Striking While The Irony Is Hot
Since Bill McKibben is going to ask the President to put those damn solar panels up again, I figured I’d give him a little reinforcement.
Dear President Obama,
It’s been thirty years since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as President and set about undoing all the things that Jimmy Carter set in motion.
Looking back over the past three decades it is astonishing how much President Carter got right, and how much President Reagan got wrong. If we had taken energy independence seriously and devoted the necessary budgetary support to wind and solar energy, America would have stopped giving money to OPEC. Our share of worldwide carbon emissions would have dropped significantly — perhaps keeping the planetary atmosphere below the crucial 350 parts-per-million level (in which case there is increasing evidence to suggest that many of today’s climate catastrophes might never have happened).
America would be a world leader in green technology, rather than lagging behind Europe and China.
We would not have needed all those expensive wars to protect our oil supplies.
The Gulf of Mexico might not be a massive dead zone.
It appears that you’re reluctant to do anything that would excite controversy (although it should be obvious to you by now that the Republicans will gin up controversy over anything), a pusillanimity I am depressed to see in the President I donated, volunteered and voted for. But I digress. The time is now for a full bank of solar panels to be installed on the roof of the White House. Perhaps you should be out there with a hammer yourself on October 10, as part of 350.org’s International Work Party.
It would be a gracious gesture to invite President Carter to the White House roof to pound in a few nails. With the clarity of hindsight, it appears that the only thing he did wrong was to be right.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama climate change utopia
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Month 8, Day 24: Pulling Out All The Stops
I figured I’d make one last plug for world peace before I go back to chastising the news media for ignoring climate change.
Dear President Obama,
By substantially altering the nature of the world’s climate, humanity has created and entered the Anthropocene Epoch. Indications for the long-term survival of our species in this eponymous age are less and less favorable.
The short-term effect of global climate change is of course to create ever more chaotic and damaging weather patterns — leading to devastating events like Pakistan’s floods and Russia’s fires. While it’s impossible to say that a specific calamity was specifically triggered by climate change, the greenhouse effect is predicted to increase extreme weather exactly the way it’s happening today.
The short-term effect is disaster, deprivation, and misery. A longer-term effect is the likelihood of political instability. Resource wars brought about through weather-induced food shortages; water wars catalyzed by droughts; governments toppled because of a failure to respond appropriately to a climate catastrophe…these are among the “coming attractions” for our species.
Unless we act thoughtfully and carefully to head them off. The U.S.A. must set an example to the world by enacting strong climate legislation, rewarding organizations and individuals who make important contributions to reducing greenhouse gases, and investing heavily in renewable energy systems. If America is to be a world leader, we must lead, not wait for China and India to get their houses in order, as some of the procrastinators in the Senate would have us do.But this is only the beginning. We (and the rest of the world) must gaze unflinchingly at what’s going to be coming at us over the next centuries, and make plans for how we will cope with a global increase in droughts, fires, storms, blizzards, floods and famines. Can humanity unite in the face of a common enemy? If humanity is to survive climate chaos, we can no longer afford war.
Never has the case for world peace been of such urgency.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders