environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots James Inhofe Republicans
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 30: And The Countdown Begins!
The Washington Post is moving slowly to atone for decades of George Will columns:
NEXT MONTH, the international arbiter of the scientific consensus on global warming will release its latest evaluation of the state of the research. A few will dismiss the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings as overwrought alarmism. But a draft leaked to reporters last week indicates that, for most people, the report will serve as another stern warning about the risks of continuing to pump carbon dioxide into the air.
The scientists are set to claim that the increasing amount of greenhouse gases that humans have emitted into the atmosphere has almost certainly been the chief driver of the warming of the planet over the past half-century, a finding to which they ascribe 95 percent confidence. That’s the level of likelihood researchers typically consider robust enough to justify drawing very strong conclusions.
Grim. August 27:
The question is not whether humanity’s complex industrial civilization has caused a radical reconfiguration of Earth’s climate. That was resolved long ago, and the answer was “Yes”; the IPCC’s new report is just statistical icing on a well-baked cake of certainty. The real question is how long it’s going to take for this new climatic reality to radically reconfigure the attitudes of those with deeply vested financial and political interests in denial.
It’d be nice to think that the encroaching realities of climate change — burgeoning wildfires, rising ocean levels, increasingly severe storms, historically unprecedented droughts — would be persuasive enough. But it is inherent in the nature of paranoid thinking that mere evidence is inadequate. The only way these politicians will change their entrenched anti-science attitudes is for their corporate sponsors to recognize that rejection of climatological evidence will negatively impact profit margins. Civilizational collapse is bad for business.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism Republicans
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 29: You’ve Just Got To Understand: What Is Its Motivation?
Former GOP Representative Bob Inglis keeps pounding his tocsin. This time it’s in New Jersey:
Gov. Chris Christie listened to the scientists at the National Hurricane Center when they said Hurricane Sandy was coming to New Jersey. It’s time to listen to the scientists warning of the longer-range risks of climate change.
New Jerseyans would have been alarmed had Christie said, “I don’t buy it. I think the National Hurricane Center is exaggerating the threat.” And perhaps he might have found an “expert” or two who might have said the odds of Sandy surging onto New Jersey were lower than the costs of preparing for her wrath.
But Christie did what good leaders do: He listened to the best advice available and then acted to protect New Jersey.
Likewise, folks alive today and folks yet to be born will be grateful for elected officials who listen and act on the science that indicates risk of climate change.
That doesn’t mean acting hysterically or exaggerating the threat. Leaders who would lead on climate change need to talk to us about reasonable risk avoidance, not apocalyptic visions.
Tire rims and anthrax. Tire rims and anthrax. Tire rims and anthrax. August 2:
Bob Inglis’ op-ed recommending that Republican politicians focus on addressing the climate crisis is well-conceived, articulate and factually correct. Indeed, the GOP’s legislators should indeed embrace strategies to mitigate our civilization’s emissions of greenhouse gases, to reinforce our infrastructure in preparation for the coming storms, and to educate the public about the causes and consequences of climate change.
They should. But they won’t. And the reason is simple: today’s Republican party is entirely driven by an ideologically-premised hatred of all things liberal, all things Democratic, and all things Obama. For example, a recent study showed that conservatives only bought compact fluorescent lights if they were marketed as money-saving products — but if the label used the word “environment”, there would be no sale.
When politicians reject responsibility to the greater good in favor of doctrinal rigidity, they no longer deserve the respect — or the votes — of their constituents.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility idiots media Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 23: Because It’s There
The Bloomington Pantagraph (IN) notes that one of their state’s own has spoken out:
BLOOMINGTON — McLean County farmers are fortunate to have high quality soils but their success – and ultimately the economic success of the broader community – relies on a favorable and stable climate.
That was the message McLean County Board member Carlo Robustelli offered as he joined several local and state leaders at the DoubleTree by Hilton Monday to urge the acceptance of the scientific consensus that human activity is causing climate change that, unmitigated, will have devastating effects.
“The consequences of climate change are real,” he said, noting the inability to transport farmers’ harvest last year due to low river levels caused by drought. “Taking action on climate change is good economic policy … It is also just the right thing to do for future generations.”
Aaaaand away we go. July 30:
While the grim realities of climate change are starting to hit home, the fact that there is still a vocal plurality of “denialists” speaks to the remarkable power of giant financial interests to influence public understanding. By sponsoring their own pseudo-scientists through “think tanks,” multinational fossil-fuel corporations have muddled the discussion of a rapidly metastasizing crisis while co-opting legislators and ensuring that meaningful policy initiatives are impossible to enact.
How many times have you seen “Senior Policy Analysts,” “Energy Research Consultants,” and “Energy Strategy Fellows” on your television? These generic talking heads are the creation of Big Oil and Big Coal, which have invested heavily in creating diversions and distractions in order to persuade a significant number of Americans that the international scientific community is a front for a liberal One-World conspiracy.
Yes, climate change is real. Unfortunately, so is the massively-funded denial industry, brought to you by the same people who fought tooth and nail to hide the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Of course we can trust them. What could possibly go wrong?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Koch Brothers
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 15: Moron Sacrifice
The Trenton Star-Ledger (NJ) notes a GOP doofus named Steve Lonegan:
Republican U.S. Senate candidate Steve Lonegan announced today that he signed a nationwide pledge to oppose any climate change legislation that would raise taxes.
The conservative activist also slammed Democratic candidate Rush Holt’s new web ad warning about the effects of global warming, calling it “silly hysteria.”
“Whether or not climate change is being caused by man is highly questionable,” Lonegan, the former mayor of Bogota, told The Star-Ledger in a phone interview this afternoon. “Whether New Jersey is being affected is highly suspect, to say the least. Certainly, America cannot sacrifice its economic prosperity on the alter of environmentalists.”
The “No Climate Tax Pledge” was organized by Americans for Prosperity, a conservative public policy organization co-founded by fossil fuel magnates Charles and David Koch. Lonegan was once the executive director of the group’s New Jersey branch.
It’s an endless game of whack-a-mole with these teaparty assholes. July 23:
If Steve Lonegan is really that serious about “hidden taxes” and their impact on Americans, perhaps he should look for genuine economic drains on our well-being, such as the billions of dollars each year that go in subsidies to oil and coal corporations, arguably the most profitable businesses on the planet. If having citizen dollars go to pay for CEO bonuses and the continued subornation of America’s lawmakers isn’t a “hidden tax,” then surely nothing else qualifies. And how about those oil spills cleaned up — by U.S. Government employees? Our taxes go to repairing the damages done by fossil fuel companies, while these multi-national miscreants continue to evade paying the court-determined penalties for their negligence.
Perhaps Mr. Lonegan could look at the extreme weather events, many of which have impacted New Jersey in the past year or so — and whose mounting costs are likewise borne by American taxpayers. Responsible governance can save money by planning for the future and anticipating the likely impacts of the actions and policies we put in place today. Signing the Koch brothers’ pledge to avoid addressing climate change is profoundly irresponsible, and solid evidence against Mr. Lonegan’s fitness for elected office.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: American Enterprise Institute assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 14: Who Are YOU? The Answer Is In The Video.
US News and World Report features a twerp named Benjamin Zycher, a “visiting scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute (q.v.):
This issue is about wealth redistribution from red states to blue, and not about carbon dioxide, which, in the Orwellian language of the left, is “carbon pollution.” It is not toxic to humans at many times current ambient concentrations. It protects plants from various environmental stresses. It is like no other effluent; for those, less is better. That is true as well for the coercion and government planning authority inherent in the Obama proposals.
Sheesh. Don’t bother reading the whole thing; it’s all predictable denialist bullshit. July 22:
Benjamin Zycher significantly misstates multiple facts about global climate change.
First, let’s agree: even if we stopped burning fossil fuels today, CO2’s lengthy atmospheric “residence time” has “baked in” significant planetary warming for decades to come. But using this fact to justify inaction is as absurd as arguing that heart patient should continue smoking because they won’t get better immediately.
To say that global temperatures haven’t risen in the past decade is either mendacious or ignorant. An NOAA spokesperson recently noted that 2010 “…tied with 2005 as the warmest year of the global surface temperature record, beginning in 1880,” and was “…the 34th consecutive year with global temperatures above the 20th-century average.”
Please note: the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank with which Mr. Zycher is affiliated, has received millions of dollars from fossil fuel corporations, who fear their unimaginable profit margins might shrink if our energy economy shifts to renewable sources.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes EPA Gina McCarthy idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 9: Just One Small Burp.
The Wall Street Journal notes Gina McCarthy’s confirmation, and includes some words from Yertle the Turtle:
Ms. McCarthy is generally well-respected by both environmental groups and industry leaders. Several senators, however, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) faulted Ms. McCarthy for her role in crafting greenhouse-gas standards. Ms. McCarthy has led the EPA’s clean-air office since 2009.
“I don’t blame Ms. McCarthy personally for all of the administration’s policies,” Mr. McConnell said Thursday. “But I believe the EPA needs an administrator who is ready to step up and challenge the idea that the livelihoods of particular groups of Americans can simply be sacrificed in pursuit of some Ivory Tower fantasy.”
Hey, Mitch? Fuck you. July 20:
When Mitch McConnell describes the science of climate change as an “ivory-tower fantasy,” he’s tapping into a long tradition of Republican anti-intellectualism, an epistemological faux populism that had its first contemporary triumph during the administration of President Truman. Those with long memories may recall the purge of “old China hands” from the State Department on suspicions of communist sympathies — a decimation of expertise that laid the groundwork for the USA’s most spectacular foreign policy debacle, our ignorance-propelled misadventure in Vietnam.
History offers plenty of examples of the GOP’s hostility to expertise, but the one which will have the profoundest consequences is undoubtedly the stubborn refusal of Republican lawmakers to recognize the validity of scientific findings on the climate crisis. Long after Vietnam and Iraq have been forgotten, our descendants will still be grappling with the appalling consequences of our refusal to act on a genuinely clear and present danger.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: economics idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 8: You Know What Your Problem Is? Your Problem Is That You’re Full Of Sh*t.
The LA Times notes that some Democrats are moving a little bit on climate, with predictable results from the wingnut caucus:
…some GOP members of the panel outlined what they said was a White House conspiracy designed to mislead the public on the threat of climate change. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) declared that Obama “believes that government can make better decisions than the people, and regulating carbon dioxide will give him all he needs to make nearly every decision for the American people.”
Liberals on the panel responded with fiery comments of their own. “To deny the fact that the overwhelming majority of scientists who have published peer review articles believe not only is global warming real, but it is man-made, and to continue discussion of ‘we are not sure, let’s look at something else’, is almost beyond intellectual comprehension,” said Sen. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.).
Experts from the think tanks Climate Central and Climate Solutions then testified about the devastating effects they said global warming is having on the environment, and the need for immediate action.
An executive from the Reinsurance Assn. of America spoke of how the insurance industry is alarmed by what its modeling shows is an increasing frequency of extreme weather events caused by global warming.
Representatives from the conservative Manhattan Institute and the Institute for Energy Research gave opposing testimony, warning the action sought by Democrats in Congress will hurt the economy and have limited effect on the climate.
All-too-believable, alas. July 19:
The prating of self-styled deficit hawks is an utterly predictable element of any attempt at meaningful policies to tackle the climate crisis. It’ll “damage the economy,” or “kill jobs” — a particularly rich accusation coming from legislators who’ve recoiled from job-creation bills like vampires from a cross.
But the point is that intensifying climate change will damage agriculture, creating food shortages. As insect vectors move northward, invasive tropical diseases will become more common. Wildfires and extreme weather are going to clobber communities all over America and the world. In other words, more people are going to die as we approach what biologists coyly call an “evolutionary bottleneck.” Forget “killing jobs.” Failure to address climate change is going to kill people.
If the preservation of a habitable Earth is somehow bad for the economy, that’s a strong argument for changing our economy — not for shirking our responsibilities to our posterity.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots tropical diseases
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 7: It’s Not A Bug, It’s A Feature!
Gee, whocoodaknowed? WaPo:
West Nile virus outbreaks are likely to flare up in the coming years, spurred on by warmer, longer mosquito seasons coupled with cuts in disease-control funding that leave authorities unprepared, according to two new studies.
After an all-time high in 2003 with nearly 10,000 cases and 264 dead, the virus backed off gradually for the remainder of the decade — until last year. In 2012, there were 5,674 cases and 286 deaths, almost twice the 2003 mortality rate.
This strong resurgence is suggestive of “unpredictable local and regional outbreaks” to come, according to a study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Even when the number of infections dies down, the virus remains in circulation with an ever-present danger of periodic recurrences.
“Every once in a while, you will have the right conditions to have it build up in the mosquito and bird populations, and spill over to humans,” said Stephen M. Ostroff, formerly of the CDC, who wrote an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that accompanied the studies.
Leaving aside the brain-eating viruses already occupying the House, of course…July 19:
The disease’s very name suggests a far-off locale well out of the awareness of most Americans. The likely increase in cases of West Nile virus is yet another complex epiphenomenon of global climate change: the relocation of disease vectors into areas previously inhospitable.
As climate change intensifies, America’s doctors are going to get a lot more experience treating tropical and exotic diseases, and if Congressional Republicans weren’t utterly fixated on denying the most basic realities of science, they would recognize that the insects carrying the sometimes deadly virus are “illegal immigrants” with the potential to damage our economy far more than the larger, human, kind. Mosquito surveillance is homeland security of a concrete and well-founded sort, unlike the reflexive xenophobia which characterizes the GOP’s approach to anything they don’t understand (“volcano monitoring,” anyone?).
It’s long past time for those obstructing our mechanisms of government to get out of the way.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots James Inhofe Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 8, Day 2: Who Cooda Knowed?
The Silicon Valley Mercury News (CA) reports on the bizarre fundraiser Google hosted for (gasp!) Jim Inhofe:
July 10
Mountain View-based Google is taking some heat for hosting a fundraiser for a U.S. senator who is an outspoken disbeliever in man-made climate change, despite the company’s green rhetoric.
Google’s Washington, D.C., office will host a lunch Thursday, at $250 to $2,500 per plate, to benefit Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., just a month after Google chairman Eric Schmidt said those who deny climate change and global warming are liars.
Climate change activists plan to picket outside in order to “remind people of Google’s professed culture of ethics, environmental stewardship, and respect for scientific truth which help make Google products so popular,” according to a news release. “They’ll also remind people of Sen. Jim Inhofe’s long record of unethical environmental destruction and promotion of anti-scientific conspiracy theories on behalf of the likes of Koch Industries, his biggest corporate funder.”
The protesters say they’ll deliver 10,000 signatures of people from across the nation, calling on Google CEO Larry Page to end his company’s support for politicians like Inhofe.
“We regularly host fundraisers for candidates, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn’t mean we endorse all of their positions,” a Google spokesperson replied to my email Wednesday. “And while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.”
This one was easy and fun to write. July 15:
We should be fair to the people who run the world’s most popular search engine.
Perhaps they just didn’t know how to find out about James Inhofe’s obsessive climate-change denialism (“inhofe climate denial” worked pretty well for me). Perhaps they couldn’t find the right search string that would have unearthed the Oklahoma Senator’s gleeful self-description as the number-one “Enemy of The Earth” (“inhofe enemy earth,” in case you’re wondering). Perhaps they’d never noticed that the Center for Biological Diversity last year awarded Inhofe the “Rubber Dodo” award in recognition of his relentless work pushing humanity and countless other species toward what biologists tactfully call an “evolutionary bottleneck” (try “inhofe rubber dodo”).
Or perhaps, given that the Senator’s entire legislative career has consisted of putting his vote up for sale to the highest bidder (“inhofe political corruption”), Google’s executives figured they might be able to simply buy him off. Who knows?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists economics idiots Republican obstructionism sustainability
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 22: Never Mud-Wrestle With A Pig
The San Antonio Express-News shares news about the looming fight in the Big Sky State:
Obama’s plan to fight climate change announced last week would include executive action to place limits on carbon pollution from new and existing power plants, while expanding development of renewable energy.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the president’s energy policy will still embrace traditional energy sources such as coal and oil.
Republican leaders in Montana are unconvinced. They predicted dire consequences for the state, calling the plan a war on energy and a job killer.
“This is a war on Montana energy, Montana families and small businesses and Montana jobs, and I will remain steadfast in the fight to stop the President’s job-killing agenda,” U.S. Rep. Steve Daines said in a statement.
Another Republican, Attorney General Tim Fox, warned the plan will blow a hole in the state’s budget.
“In attempting to rule by decree and legislate by regulation, President Obama has failed to take a balanced approach to energy policy and has failed to recognize the diverse interests and economies of 50 states,” Fox said.
The guy’s an idiot and a jerk. And a Republican…but I repeat myself. July 4:
Perhaps President Obama’s climate-change initiatives do indeed fail, in the words of Montana Attorney General Tim Fox, “to recognize the diverse interests and economies of 50 states.” But there is an important corollary to this criticism: by making legislative action impossible, the climate-change denialists in Congress have failed to act in the common interest of the USA.
Before “In God We Trust” was added to our currency in 1954, we had “E Pluribus Unum” — “Out of Many, One.” This historical motto of the United States calls on us to recognize that while the work of government must maintain a balance between the needs of individuals and those of the nation, our patriotic loyalty must ultimately be to the greater good. Such sentiments are absent in today’s GOP; these cynical anti-science zealots owe allegiance exclusively to their corporate paymasters, and not to the long-term well-being of our nation. Not to mention Earth.
Warren Senders