environment Politics: apocalypse assholes Barack Obama idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 21: Haters Gotta Hate
The New York Times notes that Republicans are, predictably, assholes:
When President Obama announced strong measures to combat climate change last week, environmentalists who felt he had long soft-pedaled the issue for political reasons rejoiced.
But many Republicans were just as gleeful — in the belief they had been handed a powerful issue to use against Democrats in the 2014 midterm elections in energy-rich states from Texas to Minnesota.
Elected officials and political analysts said the president’s crackdown on coal, the leading source of industrial greenhouse gases, could have consequences for Senate seats being vacated by retiring Democrats in West Virginia and South Dakota, for shaky Democratic incumbents like Mary L. Landrieu of energy-rich Louisiana, and for the Democratic challenger of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader.
In ordering limits for the first time on carbon dioxide emissions from up-and-running power plants, Mr. Obama jabbed that opponents belonged to “the Flat Earth Society.” But in coal country, it was Mr. Obama who was called out of touch, with predictions of job losses and spiking energy bills.
Republicans immediately went on the attack against Democratic House members in mining states, posting Web ads with a 2008 sound bite of Mr. Obama predicting regulating carbon emissions would cause electricity prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”
Asked about the impact of the president’s actions on his own re-election prospects next year, Representative Nick J. Rahall II, Democrat of West Virginia, said, “They don’t help.”
They never get any better; they only get worse. July 3.
Republican readiness to exploit President Obama’s climate initiatives in their quest for the electoral upper hand is politically savvy but morally reprehensible. It reflects a confluence of three significant and malign influences on American politics: the short-term profit motivation of fossil fuel barons and the legislators they control, the scorched-Earth politics of personal destruction pioneered by Newt Gingrich and brought to unprecedented heights by the current majority in the House of Representatives, and the theocratic Biblical literalists whose eagerness for a fiery Armageddon is only matched by the vehemence of their denials that our planet is warming.
Combine an inability to think in the long term, an ethically bankrupt propensity for fighting dirty, and a visceral desire for an apocalyptic conclusion to Earthly life, and you get the face of today’s GOP — a snarling visage more appropriate for a cartoon villain than the erstwhile party of Lincoln and Eisenhower.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots Republican obstructionism rising sea levels sustainability urban planning
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 20: Why Not Rent Out The Empty Space?
The Grand Island Independent (FL) notes the preparations underway in the Keys, arguably the communities most at risk for rising ocean levels:
Seasonal tidal flooding that was once a rare inconvenience is now so predictable that some businesses at the end of Key West’s famed Duval Street stock sandbags just inside their front doors, ready anytime.
“It’s really easy to see during our spring high tides that the sea level is coming up _ for whatever reason _ and we have to accommodate for that,” said Johnnie Yongue, the on-site technician at the fire station for Monroe County’s project management department.
While New York City’s mayor was announcing a dramatic multibillion-dollar plan for flood walls and levees to hold back rising water levels there, sea walls like those that encase the Netherlands wouldn’t help much in the Keys, as a lack of coastal barriers isn’t the island chain’s only problem.
“Our base is old coral reef, so it’s full of holes,” says Alison Higgins, the sustainability coordinator for the city of Key West. “You’ve got both the erosion and the fact that (water) just comes up naturally through the holes.”
The Keys’ plans for adapting to rising sea levels sound a lot like the way they prepare for hurricanes: track the incoming disturbance, adjust infrastructure accordingly and communicate potential risks to residents _ all, hopefully, without scaring off the tourists who treasure the islands for their fishing, Technicolor sunsets, eccentric characters and a come-as-you-are social scene that has attracted the likes of Ernest Hemingway, U.S. presidents and flamboyant female impersonators.
And who doesn’t relish an opportunity to dump on Rick Scott? July 2:
The challenges facing municipal officials in the Florida Keys are unique to their particular circumstances; very few cities anywhere in the world are built on thousands of years’ worth of accumulated coral, and very few are so profoundly vulnerable to the rising sea levels which are now considered inevitable consequences of the melting Arctic. These singular island communities are on the front lines of climate change; eventually all of humanity is going to contend with the impacts of a runaway greenhouse effect over the coming decades, and it’s not going to be pretty.
Key West’s readiness to face these dangers should be an example to those who use their political power to delay action and obscure the truth of global heating. For instance, Rick Scott, whose profit-driven anti-science ideology may enrich him and his cronies in the short term, while ensuring disastrous consequences for the state he purports to lead.
Mr. Scott is one of many conservative politicians who have made meaningful responses to the climate crisis all but impossible. This toxic mix of greed and folly is bad news for Key West, for Florida, and for us all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: analogies Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility denialists economics idiots
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 18: Tied To A Whippin’ Post
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel opines on the POTUS’ speech:
President Barack Obama’s speech last week on climate change was a welcome call to action on one of the great challenges of our time. If the science is right — and there is no reason to believe that it isn’t — climate change is here and could have severe consequences for human health, the environment and the economy. Meeting the challenge will be difficult and costly but also affords opportunities, especially for job growth in green industries.
As the president said Tuesday, “the question is not whether we need to act.”
The problem is that similar calls to action have been issued for decades and not much has been done to curb the belching of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Utilities such as We Energies, car manufacturers and some governments have taken important steps to reduce air pollution from a number of sources and have worked to reduce carbon emissions. They deserve credit for that.
But reductions of carbon dioxide significant enough to have an impact on climate change have remained elusive.
If Obama wants to change that pattern, his administration needs to follow through. The trick will be to do so without harming economic growth. New rules also need to be based on available cost-effective technologies that can actually reduce emissions. It can be done. And while the president’s plan may be light on details, he is at least pointing the country in the right direction.
Obama is directing his administration to launch the first-ever federal regulations on heat-trapping gases emitted by new and existing power plants, boost renewable energy production on federal lands, increase efficiency standards and prepare communities to deal with higher temperatures.
The ideology of the cancer cell. June 30:
It takes extraordinary intellectual insulation to continue rejecting the scientific evidence of global climate change. By analogy, imagine buying a house condemned as unsafe by 97 out of 100 home inspectors, eating in a restaurant that had failed 97 out of 100 health inspections, or the same proportion of oncologists when they tell you to start therapy immediately.
But even those who are prepared to argue forcefully for action on the climate crisis still observe powerful taboos against questioning the desirability of continued economic growth. To fetishize economic expansion ignores the fact that we live on a finite planet with finite resources; it’s like saying that gaining weight is healthy for infants, so it must be good for adults as well.
Infinite expansion is impossible in a bounded area; we can have sustainability or growth, but not both. If we wish a viable long-term future for humanity, this is a debate we need to have.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots Republican obstructionism sustainability
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 15: Until The Crowd Got Wise
The Des Moines Register notices that AgSec Tom Vilsack supports President Obama’s climate initiatives:
WASHINGTON — The White House stepped up its campaign for a sweeping new climate change plan Wednesday as Obama administration officials highlighted the effects of recent extreme weather on Iowa and other states.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack told reporters the 2012 drought, the worst to hit the United States since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, and the wet weather and flooding this year demonstrated the need to act. He also pointed to the recent uptick in forest fires, including one near Colorado Springs, Colo., that has burned hundreds of homes and forced residents to flee.
“This is a real issue and something that requires immediate attention,” Vilsack said. “It’s absolutely essential that we respond in a very aggressive way to the challenges of a changing climate.”
(snip)
Republican lawmakers and other critics criticized the president for unilaterally advancing a plan that they said would hurt the economy, cost jobs and hit consumers with higher energy costs.
They never change. June 28:
When Republicans criticize President Obama’s climate change initiatives, they tell us that plans to reduce CO2 emissions will “hurt the economy” and “raise energy costs” — utterly predictable tropes which collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
The notion that sane environmental policy is economically damaging ignores the fact that our prosperity ultimately hinges on environmental health; no amount of money will magically restore contaminated aquifers or repair a collapsed ecosystem. If our economy is “hurt” by reducing dangerous greenhouse emissions, the problem lies with how we define our economy, not with the notion that we — as individuals and as a nation — should be responsible for cleaning up the messes we’ve made.
And when it comes to increased energy costs, the facts are simple: our tax dollars have been subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for decades, enriching their corporate coffers while keeping prices at the pump artificially low. Furthermore our taxes pay to clean up oil spills, address the public health impacts of oil and coal, and fund the costly wars we wage to protect our sources.
Global climate change is the costliest threat our species has ever faced. Addressing it proactively is both environmentally and economically responsible.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 14: Absolute Immobility Is Apparently The Only Option
The Washington Times (Rev. Moon’s vanity project) runs an article by a denialist buffoon, one Chip Knappenberg. He doesn’t think much of President Obama’s climate policy proposals:
Scientific research suggests that global warming is proceeding, and will continue, at a slower pace, with fewer negative impacts than current projections indicate, including those underlying the president’s plan. On top of this, the U.S. relative contribution to climate change is declining year after year as greenhouse-gas emissions from developing nations, such as China, expand rapidly.
Together, this means that the president’s plan for reducing emissions in the United States effectively will have no impact on the local, regional or global climate. Domestic reductions will not produce any demonstrable change in the weather; there will be not be verifiably fewer tornadoes, hurricanes, droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves or any other manner of extreme weather. The rise in the number of billion-dollar weather disasters highlighted by the president will continue — driven by the fact that there are more people with more stuff in harm’s way, not by human-caused climate change.
The president recognizes that actions in the United States alone will be insufficient to change the course of the climate. A global effort is required. Therefore, what the president really hopes to achieve is not direct climate-change mitigation from reducing U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions, but to gain bargaining power at international talks to address climate change and, ultimately, that low-emitting energy technologies will be developed and deployed rapidly and safely around the world.
Yet there is no guarantee of these outcomes.
There’s no guarantee Chip Knappenberger won’t get run over by a truck, either…but that doesn’t stop him from crossing the street. June 27:
Chip Knappenberger’s contemptuous response to President Obama’s climate-change proposals demonstrates a remarkable readiness to ignore our nation’s long-standing leadership role in the international community.
Mr. Knappenberger argues unpersuasively that since nations like China and India will continue to emit greenhouse gases, there is no reason to reduce our own — and dismisses the President’s proposals as attempts to “gain bargaining power” in future climate negotiations. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone suggest that since “there is no guarantee of these outcomes,” the US has no reason to strengthen its position in treaties and international agreements.
By pursuing unilateral action on carbon emissions on the basis of an overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming, our nation may regain some of the credibility we sacrificed a decade ago when we invaded another nation based on evidence which even our own intelligence agencies knew to be spurious.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes carbon tax denialists idiots Republicans
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 8: Unfixable
They’re so cute when they dream. The San Jose Mercury-News features Bob Inglis and Eli Lehrer:
If conservatives don’t begin to engage on the important issue of climate change, we’ll cede the debate. The result will be a larger, more intrusive government that hurts business and job creation.
President Obama is readying a major push of administrative action on climate change. There will be new regulations on power plants, new subsidies for clean energy and a number of other big government programs in the name of solving climate change.
To conservatives like us, complicated new regulation is our worst nightmare. There is a conservative approach to dealing with climate change — one that can actually achieve conservative goals: the government-shrinking carbon tax.
Currently, United States tax law embodies everything that’s wrong with the federal government. It’s too big (about 17,000 pages), too burdensome (Americans spend nearly $50 billion a year complying with it), and too prone to manipulation. Working toward a simpler, fairer system with lower overall rates has long been a worthy conservative goal that deserves continued support from all liberty-loving Americans.
But amidst all the talk among conservatives about tax rates and tax compliance costs, activists should focus on what may be the most important flaw in the current system: it taxes the wrong things.
If conservatives want to inject new ideas into the political debate and win elections, they should look at what the government taxes as well as how the taxes get collected.
Over 90 percent of federal revenue comes from charges imposed on income, labor (payroll tax) and investments (capital gains tax). These taxes punish socially beneficial behavior; everyone agrees that society should have more income, jobs and investment. If there is any hope of moving the budget towards balance while cutting existing taxes, political leaders will have to find a better way to generate revenue.
Taxing the things we want less of and eliminating taxes on things we want more of is a common-sense solution. It’s hardly a new idea. The American founders funded the early federal government with sin taxes and a few import duties.
Dream on, suckers. June 21:
Taxing greenhouse emissions is an eminently sensible idea that would help America address the climate crisis responsibly — but the idea that conservatives would accept such a policy is predicated on the essentially preposterous notions that these lawmakers can be influenced by facts and are motivated by sincere desires to help their constituents, their nation, and their species.
Even before the McCarthy-era purges of China experts from the State Department, the Republican Party has been chary of experts, perhaps because people who know a great deal about their subject are less likely to accept ideologically-driven revisionism. But the GOP’s anti-intellectual faux populism has never been as extreme as it is today. When the House of Representatives features sideshow acts like Paul “cosmology and evolution are lies from the pit of hell” Broun and Michael “masturbating fetuses” Burgess, it’s hard to imagine Lehrer and Inglis’ science-based arguments making any headway.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialism idiots media irresponsibility sociopaths
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Year 4, Month 7, Day 1: Tyrannosaurus Rex
Breaking News: Rex Tillerson is still an asshole. The Cleveland Plain-Dealer:
It was the second time in 13 months that Tillerson articulated Exxon’s new acceptance that climate change appears to be a reality.
And it was the second time that Tillerson suggested the problem may not solvable. Previously Exxon did not acknowledge the possibility of climate changes, let alone how it might be dealt with.
“There are some things we know and understand about it,” Tillerson said of the forces behind the changes in average global temperatures. “There are a lot of things about it that we don’t know and don’t understand. “We’re not sure how this is going to turn out.”
If industrialized society is in fact changing the world’s climate, then steps can be taken to “mitigate” the risk, Tillerson said.
Exxon strongly supports energy efficiency, he said, referring to the tough automotive mileage standards the Obama administration issued a year ago as an example of mitigation. Those rules require automakers to achieve an average of 541/2 miles per gallon in 2025.
Better auto fuel economy and the decisions of electric companies to switch power plants from coal to natural gas are ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, while not crippling the economy, Tillerson said.
“But what am I going to do if it turns out that none of my mitigation steps make any difference?” he asked the crowd packed into the City Club. “What if it turns out that this is happening for a lot of reasons that I don’t understand? What’s Plan B?
“Plan B means you had better start thinking about what kind of adaptation measures are going to be necessary if the consequences that people are concerned about present themselves.”
Despite that sobering assessment, Tillerson said he does not support a “carbon tax,” referring to proposals advocated for years by environmentalists to have Uncle Sam tax the use of fossil fuels, basing the charges on the amount of carbon dioxide produced.
“We still have a lot of gains to be made through technology and other less intrusive policies on the economy,” Tillerson said. “And it is a global problem. We are not going to set the carbon tax policy for China.”
One upside to our imminent extinction-level evolutionary bottleneck is that our successors won’t have any fossil fuels left to extract. June 15:
Rex Tillerson may be breaking new ground for fossil fuel executives in his repeated admissions that climate change not only exists, but has the potential to cause profound damage to our civilization. But his pronouncements have the slightly desperate feeling of a man and an industry finally overtaken by inconvenient facts; the man is plainly grasping at straws.
Let’s review: for decades Exxon and the rest of the world’s oil industries denied the reality of global warming, co-opted our political system to their own ends, poured millions of dollars into pseudo-scientific attempts to rebut the overwhelming climatological consensus, and helped make the national discussion of a clear and present danger into a hotbed of conspiracy theories and anti-science nonsense. Just because Exxon’s CEO has reversed course on climate change’s existence doesn’t mean that the rest of his statements automatically gain credibility.
It’s like listening to a tobacco executive saying that even though his product is harmful, quitting is hard, so we’ll be fine if we just learn to live with emphysema, heart disease and lung cancer. When Mr. Tillerson speaks of people “adapting” to climate change, we must recognize that it’s a disingenuous euphemism for another, less reassuring word. Dying.
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 29: Polly Want A Cracker?
The Rutland Herald runs a column by one John McClaughry, who is a certifiable idiot. Read and enjoy:
For the past 20 years Vermonters have been fed a heavy diet of terrors originally labeled the Menace of Global Warming — then renamed “climate change” after the predicted warming failed to appear.
This diet also includes lots of urgent proposals for making Vermont the world leader in battling “climate change,” victory over which will presumably occur when the climate finally stops changing.
All of these proposals have called for new mandates, new bureaucracies, more subsidies to the renewable industrial complex, and of course more taxes.
The most ardent and determined Vermont proponent of this war — especially in advocating the handouts to the wind and solar investors — has been Gov. Peter Shumlin. Back in 2006 he was telling reporters that “I think [the number one issue] is global warming and keeping this planet from destroying itself and keeping us from destroying this planet in front of our own eyes.”
(snip)
There are four components to the Shumlin climate theology: First, the climate is doing terrible things; second, we irresponsible humans, addicted to carbon combustion, are producing these dangerous changes; third, government must force us to stop, through a broad array of taxes, mandates, regulations, and subsidies; and fourth, all of this is completely beyond debate: “The science is settled,” so shut up. This theology is impervious to facts.
Sheesh. June 13:
If “global warming alarmism” is a new “theology,” as John McClaughry argues, it’s a pretty strange one — a religion whose adherents desperately hope to be proven wrong.
A “gut check” can be very satisfying; our guts tend to favor the simple, linear and intuitive solutions that are most emotionally fulfilling. However, it is precisely because the real world is complex, non-linear, and counter-intuitive that the methods of scientific inquiry have been so powerful and useful in the progress and accomplishments of our civilization. And scientific method has brought us many conclusions which were at first rejected — a heliocentric solar system, the importance of antisepsis, the existence of deep time, evolution by natural selection, to name just four. None of these are obvious, even today.
The work of Roy Spencer and the other sources Mr. McClaughry cites have all been substantially debunked, as a few minutes’ research will reveal. And he leads off with the easily disproven assertion that global warming was “renamed” climate change, “after the predicted warming failed to appear.” Actually the phrase “climate change” was introduced by Republican strategist Frank Luntz during the Bush administration, as a “less-scary” substitute for “global warming.” It was purely accidental that the term is a more accurate description of what the world is now experiencing.
Mr. McClaughry is free to think with his guts, but most of us find that brains are better suited to the task.
Warren Senders
atheism environment Politics: apocalypse dominionists idiots
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 26: Wading In The Kiddie Pool
The Christian Post says that evangelicals need to address climate change if they want to bring their youth back into the fold. Sheesh:
A five-year study by the Barna Group, a leading research organization focused on faith and culture, found that three in five young Christians leave the church after reaching the age of 15. As a result, over the past five years the percent of young evangelicals fell 4 points to a mere 13 percent, while the percent of young agnostics/athiests grew by the same amount to 35 percent.
Most evangelical leaders point to the widening gap between traditional Christian views and those of a changing American culture – especially on issues like same-sex marriage, abortion, and pre-marital sex – as the primary cause of this problem. The reality is that for many of today’s young Christians, who are more immersed in mainstream culture than ever before through digital and social media, holding on to the church’s teachings amid such overwhelming opposition is often too difficult a task.
And there don’t appear to be any easy solutions. Evangelicals, whose social views are based primarily on Biblical teachings, cannot, and should not, change them just to better align with modern culture. And in today’s vastly interconnected world, young people can no more easily remove themselves from the conflicting influences.
However, there are issues on which we evangelicals can reengage our youth – without compromising our values.
Climate change is the perfect place to start. A large majority of young Americans view climate change as a serious problem facing their generation. And to date, American evangelicals have been among the slowest to recognize the problem. Far from compromising our values, helping to address the world’s changing climate – which the United Nations Development Program says “will reverse decades worth of human development gains” – would help us fulfill Christ’s command to care for the poor in a way that unites our faith tradition with America’s youth and the broader society.
Some kinds of stupid can’t be fixed. June 11:
If evangelicals want to prove they’re genuinely serious about addressing climate change, they’ll need a stronger rationale than simply needing to draw youth back into their faith communities. The climate crisis transcends the marketing and membership requirements of even the most fervent religious group. When agriculture collapses due to extreme weather and prolonged drought, the starving will include those of every creed; when rising seas submerge coastlines and remove island nations from the map entirely, issues of religious affiliation will be irrelevant.
Young people everywhere around the world can see that their elders have not only failed to solve the problem, but have all too often denied that a problem exists in the first place — scarcely a way to inspire confidence in those who are supposed to be examples of leadership, wisdom, and responsibility. Those who ardently anticipate the End Times cannot be credible advocates for long-term environmental sustainability.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialists idiots sustainability
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Year 4, Month 6, Day 23: Full Of That Yankee-Doodly-Dum
The Des Moines Register reports on Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s words:
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. farmers and ranchers must adapt or risk getting left behind as climate change becomes an increasingly influential part of the agricultural landscape, the head of the U.S. Agriculture Department said Wednesday.
During a speech in Washington, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said better technological advancements through products such as seed so far have been enough to maintain production levels despite more intense storms, forest fires and an increase in invasive species.
But Vilsack, who served two terms as Iowa’s governor, called the threat of a changing climate “much different than anything we’ve ever tackled” and warned that without more drastic changes the accelerating pace and intensity of global warming during the next few decades may soon begin to significantly affect agriculture.
“If we do not adapt and mitigate climate impacts, it could have an impact on yields, it could have an impact on where we grow, what we grow in the future,” Vilsack told reporters after a speech on the effects of climate change on agriculture. “This is not something that is a next week issue or a next year issue, but this is something that over the next several decades we’re going to continue to confront.”
Second letter today. June 7:
Climate-change deniers don’t have many options left. As the consequences of a runaway greenhouse effect become ever more evident, the old cliches are sounding increasingly tired. The science “isn’t settled”? Actually, the science of climate change is about as conclusive as it gets.
It’s a “liberal hoax”? Tell that to the millions of people whose lives have been disrupted by droughts, extreme weather, invasive species, and rising sea levels.
It’s “too expensive” to deal with it? Of all the absurd responses, this one surely takes the cake. Preparing our infrastructure now so that we’ll be able to cope with the ongoing climate crisis in coming decades is obviously more cost-effective than waiting for catastrophic events and then mounting a response.
Agricultural productivity is going to take a huge hit in the next few years, as our carbon dioxide chickens come home to roost. Our survival as a nation hinges on our ability to take this clear and present danger with the seriousness it demands.
Warren Senders