environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialists
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 15: Time For A Declaration of Independence?
The Toledo (OH) Blade is shrill:
Searing heat, violent thunderstorms, wildfires, smog, power blackouts, crop losses. These things aren’t new, yet their recent magnitude raises new questions about human influence on climate.
Climate change is real, despite the stubbornness of a denial movement that shrugs off both the problem and the science that documents it. Although such change is partially inevitable, the question of human influence and how to mitigate it demands a central role in this year’s political debate.
Recent heat waves, in Ohio and Michigan and elsewhere, point to greater warming of the Earth. As this part of the country basked in an unusually warm March, northern Michigan’s cherry crop was devastated by early growth followed by frost. Now comes word that 90 percent of that state’s apple crop is destroyed.
Problems associated with climate change are not limited to extreme events. There are more subtle signs. Growth of toxic algae begins earlier, stays later, and becomes more dominant in the western Lake Erie region.
An additional month of dredging is scheduled for the second straight year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, to keep the Toledo shipping channel navigable despite excessive silt that enters waterways after storms.
Ozone-induced smog, allergies, and diseases transmitted by mosquitoes also drive up costs. Much of northwest Ohio remains abnormally dry or in a drought, even after hail and heavy thunderstorms swept across the region this week.
Lobbyists have convinced lawmakers — at least, those who want to be convinced — that much of the evidence of man-made climate change is merely anecdotal. They have blocked cap-and-trade legislation that would provide incentives to industry to reduce emissions related to warming.
Always good to quote Upton Sinclair. Sent July 4:
Almost a century ago, Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” His words perfectly describe the politicians who, bankrolled by powerful corporate interests, have been consistently obstructing our progress towards rational energy and environmental policies.
Coal, oil and gas are the energy sources of the past — privileged by tradition and by a false pricing system that ignores externalities: pollution cleanup, health impacts, resource wars, and global climate change. Even if the deniers were right, getting our country onto renewables is the right thing to do, for countless reasons.
But the deniers are wrong, as this incendiary summer confirms to all but the most avariciously self-deluding. It’s time for our politicians to start refusing paychecks from those who would let us burn rather than surrender even the tiniest fraction of their astronomical profit margins.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: alarmism denialists idiots media irresponsibility wildfires
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 14: Liberals Have A Reality-Bias…
The Portland (ME) Press-Herald runs a WaPo article on climate change and the hell-on-earth that is Colorado:
WASHINGTON — Snow hardly fell during winter in snowy Colorado. On top of that, the state’s soaking spring rains did not come. So it was no wonder that normally emerald landscapes were parched as summer approached, tan as a pair of worn khakis.
All the earth needed was a spark.
Colorado and U.S. Forest Service firefighters are battling the state’s most destructive wildfires ever. Lightning and suspected arson ignited them four weeks ago, but scientists and federal officials say the table was set by a culprit that will probably contribute to bigger and more frequent wildfires for years to come: climate change.
In the past two years, record-breaking wildfires have burned in the West — New Mexico experienced its worst-ever wildfire, Arizona suffered its largest burn and Texas last year fought the most fires in recorded history. From Mississippi to the Ohio Valley, temperatures are topping record highs and the land is thirsty.
“We’ve had record fires in 10 states in the last decade, most of them in the West,” said U.S. Agriculture Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service.
A revision and extension of the letter from two days ago. Sent July 3:
Not too long ago, any public figure who pointed out that a runaway greenhouse effect would have significant negative consequences for humanity could look forward to insults and mockery from conservatives. Anyone who suggested that it would probably be a good idea to stop pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere would be called a “climate alarmist,” an “environazi,” or a “watermelon” (green on the outside, red on the inside — get it?).
The name-calling’s still going on, but some of the climate-change denialists are beginning to wake up. Even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson publicly acknowledged the fact of human-caused global warming in a recent speech, although his assertion that humanity will “adapt” blithely glosses over the enormous human cost involved. More generally, the fact that America is undergoing a nationwide heat wave has rendered the denialist position harder to sustain.
More than three decades ago, climatologists started predicting that global warming would bring about this type of erratic and unpredictable weather, but politicians and the media have consistently ignored or derided their emergency signals. Such dismissals can now be understood as a grave abdication of the responsibilities of leadership.
“Alarmism” is just a sensible response to an alarming situation; as planetary temperatures rise and smoke billows above a burning Colorado, it’s obvious and inescapable: global climate change is as alarming as it gets.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 13: Zippadee Doo Dah, Zippadee Day!
The New York Times fails at journamalism:
HILL CITY, Kan. — This town on the parched plains, best known for its bountiful pheasant hunting and museum of oil history, recently earned a new, if unwelcome, distinction — the center of America’s summer inferno.
For five days last week, a brutal heat wave here crested at 115 degrees. Crops wilted. Streets emptied. Farmers fainted in the fields. Air-conditioners gave up. Children even temporarily abandoned the municipal swimming pool. Hill City was, for a spell, in the ranks of the hottest spots in the country.
“Hell, it’s the hottest place on earth,” Allen Trexler, an 81-year-old farmer who introduced himself as Old Man Trexler. He spoke while standing in the shade of a tree on Saturday morning, the temperature already sneaking toward 100.
Gotta love Old Man Trexler. Sent July 2:
When Kansas is reeling from a blistering heat wave, it’s a human interest story, complete with a picturesque old gentleman standing in the shade of a tree. When several states are hammered with extreme high temperatures, it’s a genuine emergency.
And when the whole country is experiencing either higher temperatures or extreme weather (like the massive thunderstorms that left millions of people without electricity in Virginia and Washington, D.C.), and hundreds of nations all over the globe are going through the same kinds of troubles, what is it then?
It’s a symptom of global warming — confirming predictions made as far back as the 1970s that an accelerating greenhouse effect would lead both to higher temperatures and weirder, uglier weather.
And what’s a good way to describe a feature article on Kansas’ disastrous weather that never once mentions planetary climate change?
“Irresponsible journalism” springs to mind.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism invasive species media irresponsibility pine beetles Republicans rising sea levels
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 12: The Snooze Button Lasts For Twenty Thousand Years
The local “Metro-West” paper runs a piece by Rick Holmes, who’s clearly just another DFH:
Mountain pine beetles are tiny critters, the size of a grain of rice. They bore under the bark of Western pine trees, infecting them with a fatal fungus that turns their trunks blue, dries their needles to a rusty red, and then they fall.
Cold winters kill off the beetle larvae and keep populations in check, but over the last 20 years, cold winters have become fewer and farther between. The beetles have taken full advantage of changes in the climate. They are thriving at higher altitudes and have expanded their range. They now reproduce twice a year instead of once.
In the last few years, the beetles have ravaged Rocky Mountain forests from upper Canada to New Mexico. The blight has deadened 3.3 million acres of forest in Colorado alone.
A long-running drought has left those dead pines extra crispy, and Colorado has been seeing record heat. Denver hit 105 degrees this week, and Colorado Springs has had a string of 100 degree days.
Add a spark and what to you get? Colorado is in flames. The Waldo Canyon fire near Colorado Springs, having burned thousands of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes, is the most destructive fire in state history. It broke the record set the week before by the High Park fire outside Fort Collins.
It’s still early in the wildfire season, but everything seems to be coming early this year. Hurricane season is young, but we’re already up to E for named storms. It was a warm winter here in New England as well, and the flowers seem to be blooming about three weeks ahead of schedule.
Watch the mockery begin! Sent July 1:
For a long time, the word “alarmist” appeared regularly in the arsenal of right-wing pejoratives. Anyone pointing out some of the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect would be labeled a “climate alarmist” and mocked for presumed fealty to Al Gore (or, in Rush Limbaugh’s vernacular, “algore”). Watch what happens to Rick Holmes, who has the temerity to continue talking about the slow-motion emergency that is global climate change.
Climate scientists are the diagnostic physicians of our planet, and their increasingly urgent emergency signals have been ignored for decades by politicians and the media. Fortunately, more Americans are gradually accepting reality (even Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson, who acknowledged climate change recently while blithely asserting that humanity will “adapt” to its new environment).
As the world sets high-temperature records, as Colorado burns, and the seas rise far faster than experts had anticipated, “climate alarmism” is looking increasingly like simple common sense.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots sociopathy
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 11: Everything’s All Pacified, Just As You Ordered, Sir.
More on this a$$hole, this time from the Detroit Free Press:
NEW YORK — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday to the Council on Foreign Relations, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. Dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public he called illiterate in science and math, a lazy press, and advocacy groups that “manufacture fear.”
The oil executive questioned the ability of climate models to predict the magnitude of the impact, and said that people would adapt to rising sea levels and changing climates that may force agricultural production to shift.
“We have spent our entire existence adapting. We’ll adapt,” he said. “It’s an engineering problem and there will be an engineering solution.”
Just collateral damage, folks. Nothin’ to worry about. Sent June 30:
Given that his company has been a generous funder of climate-change denialism over the past several decades, Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson’s recent claim that the public is “scientifically illiterate” sets a new standard in chutzpah. And given that his company has reaped enormous profits while abdicating its responsibility for hundreds of disastrous oil spills all over the world, his glib statement that the risks of drilling are “well-understood and can be mitigated” is breathtakingly arrogant.
But it is his insouciant assertion that humanity will “adapt” to climate change that is the most horrifying of all, as a moment’s consideration of the consequences of an “adaptation” transpiring in a geological instant rather than over many millennia will make clear. Breezily glossing over megadeaths and incalculable misery, Mr. Tillerson’s seemingly benign verb conceals a self-centered immorality that makes the robber barons of the gilded age seem like great humanitarians in comparison.
Evil.
Warren Senders
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 10: Would I Lie To You?
Rex Tillerson is very sad. Nobody believes his reassurances. Poor baby.
NEW YORK (AP) — ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson says fears about climate change, drilling, and energy dependence are overblown.
In a speech Wednesday, Tillerson acknowledged that burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, but said society will be able to adapt. The risks of oil and gas drilling are well understood and can be mitigated, he said. And dependence on other nations for oil is not a concern as long as access to supply is certain, he said.
Tillerson blamed a public that is ‘‘illiterate’’ in science and math, a ‘‘lazy’’ press, and advocacy groups that ‘‘manufacture fear’’ for energy misconceptions in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
He highlighted that huge discoveries of oil and gas in North America have reversed a 20-year decline in U.S. oil production in recent years. He also trumpeted the global oil industry’s ability to deliver fuels during a two-year period of dramatic uncertainty in the Middle East, the world’s most important oil and gas-producing region.
It’s tough being one of the most powerful people on the planet. Sent June 29:
Poor Rex Tillerson. He’s the CEO of a fossil-fuel corporation that has reaped unimaginable profits from the exploitation of planetary resources over the past half-century, one of the most powerful economic agents in the world — and yet he just can’t seem to persuade his customers that he’s really got their best interests at heart. Given that Exxon has done its utmost to confuse the national discussion of energy and environmental policy by providing lavish funding to climate-change denialist organizations, Mr. Tillerson’s criticism of a science-ignorant public is disingenuous, to put it very mildly.
But why shouldn’t the American people trust Exxon’s word? Let us count the ways. This corporate leviathan has a long rap sheet ranging from disastrous spills and long-delayed compensation, to illegal extraction of oil from state and federal lands, to human-rights abuses in Indonesia and Columbia. In this context, Mr. Tillerson’s attempt to persuade us that climate change isn’t something to be worried about sounds anything but reassuring.
Warren Senders
India Indian music music vocalists: genius
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Mogubai Kurdikar
One of the greatest singers of the 20th century. A disciple of Ustad Alladiya Khan, she represented the Jaipur-Atrauli gharana. Her daughter, Kishori Amonkar, is perhaps the best-known female khyal singer of today.
Raga Bageshri Bahar
environment: assholes corporate irresponsibility EPA idiots
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 9: IT’S NOT FAIR!!!!!!
The Detroit News reports that the National Association of Manufacturers HAZ A MAJOR SAD about the EPA ruling:
The National Association of Manufacturers – which filed suit to block the rules, as did the Michigan Manufacturers Association, expressed disappointment with the ruling.
“The EPA’s decision to move forward with these regulations is one of the most costly, complex and burdensome regulations facing manufacturers. These regulations will harm their ability to hire, invest and grow,” said NAM president and CEO Jay Timmons. “By moving forward, the EPA is adding to the mounting uncertainty facing manufacturers of all sizes.”
Coming from the Party of Individual Responsibility, this should be a surprise. But Individual Responsibility only applies to Individuals, don’cha know. Corporate Responsibility is a Blow Against Freedom! Sent June 28:
The National Association of Manufacturers’ response to the Appeals Court ruling upholding EPA authority to regulate greenhouse emissions demonstrates an extraordinary lack of confidence in American initiative and ingenuity. Repetitively claiming that regulations hurt industry’s ability to “hire, invest, and grow,” they sound like a child whining about having to clean up his room.
The core of the ruling is extremely simple: the Environmental Protection Agency has the right to, well, protect the environment. And at the moment, one of the biggest threats to the planetary environment is climate change, a very slow natural process that’s been accelerated drastically by human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. To be sure, EPA regulation of GHGs will make it harder for industries to be wasteful polluters. Good. I’m pretty sure American manufacturers can figure out how to be clean and efficient; those which cannot should be allowed to fail.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes EPA greenhouse emissions Republicans
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 8: Gonna Build A Big Fence Around Texas….
The Nashua Telegraph (Nashua, NH) is one of many papers reporting on the decision of the Federal Appeals Court’s decision upholding the EPA’s authority to regulate GHG emissions. Note the huge floater left in the bowl by Texas’ AG Greg Abbott:
WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court here ruled unanimously to uphold the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions, dealing a setback to fossil-fuel industries, states and lobbying groups that have fought for years to delay action on climate change.
(snip)
Led by the conservative Chief Judge David B. Sentelle, the three-member appeals panel found that the EPA’s approach to regulating greenhouse gases has been “unambiguously correct.”
Continually facing litigation from environmentalists and industry alike on a multitude of issues, the EPA welcomed the court’s decision. “I am pleased that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the EPA followed both the science and the law in taking common-sense, reasonable actions to address the very real threat of climate change by limiting greenhouse gas pollution from the largest sources,” said agency Administrator Lisa Jackson.
Plaintiffs decried the decision and warned the economy could be hurt if the EPA continued to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott said the ruling “failed to rein in the unelected bureaucrats at the agency who are holding our country’s energy independence and fragile economy hostage to a radical environmental agenda.”
Of course, if it was a Republican administration’s EPA, they’d be given free rein to regulate environmentalists, don’cha know. Sent June 27:
It’s as predictable as a disco hit: any legal victory for environmentalists cues a chorus of faux outrage from Republican officials. Today, it’s the US Court of Appeals upholding the EPA’s authority to regulate greenhouse emissions, followed by some righteous trumpeting from Texas’ Attorney General Greg Abbott about a “radical environmental agenda.”
Only in Conservastan is a sensible legal decision aimed at holding back the accelerating catastrophe of global climate change “radical” in any sense of the word. The real radicals are the corporate “persons” whose profits depend on a consumer economy entirely dependent on fossil fuels, who continue to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in clear disregard of the overwhelming consensus of climatologists everywhere around the world. No, there is nothing radical about protecting the environment, despite the steady drumbeat of derision from politicians and pundits whose allegiance to their paymasters trumps their responsibility to the common good.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots rising sea levels timescale US Geological Survey
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Year 3, Month 7, Day 7: History Is A Bunk Bed
More on rising East coast seas, from the Andover (MA) Eagle-Tribune:
If you think there are flooding problems in the region now, just wait — it’s going to get a whole lot worse, according to a study released Sunday by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Scientists have found that our coastline is part of a unique, 600-mile-long “hot spot” along the Atlantic Coast where sea levels are rising at a significantly faster rate than the world as a whole — three to four times faster. The hot spot stretches down the Atlantic Coast from north of Boston to North Carolina.
“Flooding right now is an annoyance, but it will be more of an annoyance and bad enough that you’ll think twice about parking your car in the driveway if there’s a storm coming and it’s the spring tide,” said Peter Howd, a co-author on the study and a contracted oceanographer with the U.S. Geological Survey.
This letter was inspired by the comments (q.v.). Sent June 26:
When human society pays attention to time spans larger than an individual lifetime, that’s called “civilization.”
For a quick and dirty education in the problems inherent in short-term thinking, watch climate-change denialists’ reactions to the U.S. Geological Survey’s study showing drastic sea-level rises along the East coast. While a few may stubbornly cling to their repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theories (Al Gore’s gonna confiscate your SUV!), the majority will loudly assert that since the problems are predicted to happen over the next hundred years, it’s pointless to worry about them.
Climate change is a significant threat already, and it’s projected to get a lot worse within our lifetimes. Those who use cheap faux-populist rhetoric against the dedicated work of climate scientists undermine the civility essential to public discourse; those who would bequeath our posterity a ruined and inhospitable planet are choosing to opt out of the multi-millennium project of human civilization.
Warren Senders