environment Politics: cap and trade Chris Christie RGGI
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 9: Only Nixon Could Go To China?
Erstwhile climate zombie Chris Christie (NJ-GOV) has apparently seen the light. Or seen something, anyway. He’s simultaneously asserting that climate change is real (and anthropogenic!) while withdrawing New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans yesterday to pull the Garden State out of the nation’s only operating cap-and-trade system, spurring environmental anger, conservative cheers and speculation about his national ambitions.
It also stirred confusion about the governor’s legal authority and what will happen to the carbon trading program, which caps utility carbon dioxide emissions in 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, at a time when national climate legislation appears dead on Capitol Hill.
At a news conference in Trenton, N.J., the Republican governor said he believed after months of study and meetings with scientists that humans were causing climate change and that his government needed to put policies in place to curb warming temperatures. That is a shift from last year, when Christie expressed doubts about the science behind global warming.
It’s a little like the joke about your mother-in-law driving off the cliff in your new Cadillac. Except that I love my mother-in-law, and Cadillacs (at least the ones I’ve driven) are overpriced and grotesque pieces of shit.
Sent May 27:
New Jersey’s Governor Christie’s sudden readiness to embrace climate facts while rejecting any climate action is a real headscratcher. The governor may be trying to appease environmentalists with a verbal gesture while mollifying his corporatist base with something more substantial. It’s barely possible that his withdrawal from the RGGI’s cap-and-trade policy will balance his acknowledgment of climate change with the paranoid and anti-science tea-partiers who hold the key to Republican primary success in 2012. It is a sad commentary on the state of our contemporary politics that a politician’s public recognition of a genuine threat to our civilization cannot be heard unless it’s couched in the cynical language of short-term political expediency. It would be splendid if Mr. Christie were able to convince the rabidly anti-science Republican base of the facts of climate change; even better would be the news that he’d succeeded in changing the minds of his corporate sponsors.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Chris Christie denialism idiots
by Warren
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Month 12, Day 8: Hey, “Right-Wing Jim!” You Reading This?
I just couldn’t resist this. Some climatologists from Rutgers are hoping to change Chris Christie’s mind on climate change. Heh heh heh.
Maybe I’ll get another piece of hatemail!
If Governor Christie were motivated by longer-term concerns than his own electoral survival in a Republican environment dominated by the anti-science zealots of the Tea Party, he might be able to pay attention to the advice he’s receiving from climatologists. After all, it should be apparent to anyone that catastrophic climate change will be bad for business in multiple ways. Rising sea levels could submerge large swaths of coastline; droughts could imperil agriculture and lead to food shortages; increasingly severe storms could destroy or degrade infrastructure, necessitating expensive repairs. Unfortunately, the Governor is motivated exclusively by short-term electoral exigency — he’s made his ideological bed and is unlikely to get up from it. He has become a “climate zombie,” unable to acknowledge scientific reality without alienating his base constituency, a group of voters united in their distrust of expertise in general and scientific expertise in particular.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Chris Christie idiots scientific consensus
by Warren
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Month 11, Day 12: Idiocracy, Here We Come
The Newark Star-Ledger runs an AP article about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s “skepticism” about climate change:
Asked by a man attending the event whether he thought mankind was responsible for global warming, Christie says he’s seen evidence on both sides of the argument but thinks it hasn’t been proven one way or another.
Christie says “more science” is needed to convince him.
Moron.
I figured I’d offer him a list of resources.
So Governor Christie needs “more science” before he’s convinced that human beings are causing global warming? Okay. Perhaps Mr. Christie didn’t know that the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Geophysical Union, the Geological Society of America, the American Meteorological Society, the International Union for Quaternary Research, the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and hundreds of other scientific societies and associations have issued position papers asserting that the evidence for anthropogenic global warming is indisputable. But wait! But wait! Perhaps the evidence the governor really wants is in the dissenting 2007 statement from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the only scientific body in the world to dispute human causes of global climate change, and, unsurprisingly, an organization heavily subsidized by the oil industry. Mr. Christie is no “skeptic.” Rather, he is a so-called “climate zombie” — a politician for whom denial of scientific fact is an article of faith.
Warren Senders