environment Politics: assholes idiots Iraq media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 2, Day 27: I Don’t Like You…
The Detroit Free Press reports on February 17th’s climate rally in DC:
WASHINGTON — In what was billed as the largest climate rally in U.S. history, thousands of people marched past the White House on Sunday to urge President Obama to reject a controversial pipeline and take other steps to fight climate change.
Organizers, including the Sierra Club, estimated that more than 35,000 people from 30-plus states — some dressed as polar bears — endured frigid temperatures to join the “Forward on Climate” rally, although the crowd size could not be confirmed. Their immediate target is Obama’s final decision, expected soon, on the Keystone XL oil pipeline that would carry tar sands from Canada through several U.S. states.
“This movement’s been building a long time. One of the things that’s built it is everybody’s desire to give the president the support he needs to block this Keystone pipeline,” Bill McKibben, founder of the environmental activist group, 350.org, said as protesters gathered on the National Mall.
Read the comments on the article to get your stomach churning. February 18:
In the aftermath of America’s largest-ever demonstration for environmental causes, it’s worth remembering what we were doing ten years ago.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, politicians and media outlets hammered relentlessly on the potential for a global conflagration ignited by Saddam’s WMDs, and the expression of doubt was considered a moral failing. Lost in the hullabaloo was the fact that credible intelligence about the purported threat was nonexistent; now that a decade has passed, we’re eager to forget our national credulity.
Climate change offers precisely the inverse situation. Here is a genuinely civilizational threat, backed up by mountains of credible intelligence from thousands of different sources. If our politicians and media cared about a real danger as much as they did about a spurious one, we’d see an entirely different set of stories on the daily news, and an entirely different set of policy responses from Capitol Hill.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama geopolitical strategy media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 30: Look! Look! A Mouse!
The headline reads “Speech Gives Climate Goals Center Stage.” The New York Times (which recently shut down its Environment desk entirely):
WASHINGTON — President Obama made addressing climate change the most prominent policy vow of his second Inaugural Address, setting in motion what Democrats say will be a deliberately paced but aggressive campaign built around the use of his executive powers to sidestep Congressional opposition.“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said on Monday at the start of eight sentences on the subject, more than he devoted to any other specific area. “Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.”
The central place he gave to the subject seemed to answer the question of whether he considered it a realistic second-term priority. He devoted scant attention to it in the campaign and has delivered a mixed message about its importance since the election.
I’m a literary dude, I guess. Sent January 23:
“Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow! / You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout.”
Climate change may have taken center stage in the President’s second inaugural address, but its primus inter pares position in Mr. Obama’s rhetoric is nothing compared with the scene-stealing we can expect from the accelerating greenhouse effect over the next four years. With profound and far-reaching geopolitical, humanitarian, economic, and environmental implications, our transforming climate will become the single most influential player in world affairs. Well before the end of this century, the human costs of extreme weather, droughts, heat waves, and rising sea levels will dwarf that of all planetary armed conflicts combined; include the impact on the rest of Earth’s biota, and it’s uncomfortably likely that “ingrateful man’s” fossil-fueled madness may well presage the final act of a Lear-like tragedy, leaving only a few survivors on a planet ravaged by “sulphurous and thought-executing fires.”Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility scientific consensus sustainability wildfires
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 24: Busted Flat In…. Boulder?
The Coloradoan notes a new study on climate change and wildfires:
Last year, 2012, the hottest year on record in both Colorado and the United States and the state’s worst wildfire year ever, may be just a taste of what climate change has in store for the West.
Colorado’s future under the influence of climate change will be significantly warmer and drier than recent years, and the impacts will affect the regions’ water, forests, wildfires, ecosystems and ability to grow crops.
That’s the conclusion of the draft of the federal government’s National Climate Assessment, which was released for public comment on Monday by the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
The water content of Colorado’s snowpack and the timing of the spring runoff are changing, which could pose major challenges for the state’s water supplies and farmers, said Reagan Waskom, director of the Colorado Water Institute at Colorado State University and co-author of the portion of the assessment addressing Colorado and the Southwest.
Reaching a bit for the metaphor, but what the hell. Sent January 17:
The unimaginable devastation wrought by 2012’s wildfires are “just a taste,” writes Bobby Magill, “of what climate change has in store for the West.” In the aftermath of the world’s hottest year on record, Americans may finally be waking up to the dangers posed by a rapidly accelerating greenhouse effect. The earlier phrase “global warming” was misleading, offering a picture of our planet as getting a little cuddlier and more comforting; after all, who doesn’t like being warm? The true picture as predicted by climatologists for several decades is now emerging: whatever climatic factors were already dangerous are going to be even more so. Did your region already suffer from occasional drought? Get ready for two or three years of water shortages. Occasional heavy rains? Be prepared for massive flooding. Hurricanes every now and then? Batten down the hatches and keep them battened down for the foreseeable future.
If last year’s wildfires were the appetizers, we can anticipate a multi-course banquet of climatic disaster.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: delay denialists media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 20: If Weather Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Weathered. What?
The Duluth Tribune runs an op-ed from George Erickson, advocating that we, um, pay attention and actually, you know, do something:
Some people might argue the distractions of the holidays and the fiscal cliff made the New Year a poor time to address climate change. But neither of those issues was as important as the shocking examples of climate change delivered by 2012 — one right after another.
While the fossil-fuel industries have spent millions on anything-for-a-buck campaigns to continue the status quo, nature has been shouting at us — and often has gone unheard.
In 2012, the U.S. set more than 4,000 daily high-temperate records, and that was just in July. Drought spread across 80 percent of the country, leaving Lake Meade so low the intakes for Hoover Dam’s generators may soon have to be lowered, which would reduce the dam’s generating capacity. Across the West, wildfires blackened 9 million acres of forest, while in the North, Lake Superior reached a record high temperature. Now add the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy and the abnormal onslaught of 39 late-season tornadoes that prowled the South on Christmas Day.
Sleepers, wake! Sent January 13:
Just as firearms advocates are always telling us not to discuss gun control in the aftermath of a shooting, politicians and media figures have been saying for years that while sometime in the future might be a good time to discuss climate change, we don’t have the political will to do it now. The NRA’s argument loses any moral authority it might have claimed once shootings start happening every day — and those who’ve been trying to delay discussion of the greenhouse effect and our future on a climate-transformed planet must abandon their position once it’s clear that such a future is here already. With superstorms, crippling droughts, devastating heat waves, and anomalous weather events happening every day around the world, ignorance is no longer a viable option.
If we fail to address climate change in a comprehensive and scientifically-grounded way, our children won’t get to address it at all.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes corporate irresponsibility denialists idiots media irresponsibility scientific consensus
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 17: Turn Off All Thought, Surrender To The Void
The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson weighs in on climate change, with an excellent column titled “Hot Enough For You?”:
All right, now can we talk about climate change? After a year when the lower 48 states suffered the warmest temperatures, and the second-craziest weather, since record-keeping began?
Apparently not. The climate-change denialists — especially those who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course — have been silent, as one might expect. Sensible people accept the fact of warming, but many doubt that our dysfunctional political system can respond in any meaningful way.
The thing is, though, that climate change has already put itself on the agenda — not the cause, but the effects. We’re dealing with human-induced warming of the atmosphere. It’s just that we’re doing so in a manner that is reactive, expensive and ultimately ineffectual.
A slap at George Will in my second paragraph. Ha ha ha ha. Sent January 11:
Climate change denialists have always had lots of excuses and diversionary tactics available for use in the face of Mother Nature’s stubbornness. The climate’s not changing — but if it is, it’s not dangerous — but if it is, humans aren’t responsible — but if they are, it’s too expensive to do anything — but if it’s more expensive to do nothing…well, repeat ad nauseum. Enabled by a complaisant media, anti-science politicians dance attendance on the fossil-fuel establishment, whose profits might be infinitesimally reduced if we took steps to address the accelerating greenhouse effect before it spins catastrophically out of control.
Whether they’re scientifically-ignorant tea-partiers or bow-tied faux-intellectuals, denialists have this in common: no amount of evidence or logic can shake their faith. In this respect, they’re like the NRA: enablers and excusers of a destructive technology, and avatars of ignorance at a time when our society desperately needs wisdom.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes idiots media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 15: Frankly, Gentlemen, I Wouldn’t Want Her To Marry ANY Of You Goyim.
The fiscal cliff is a tragic example of an all-too-common malady: managing by living crisis to crisis. In this case, it was almost entirely a self-created crisis, but the underlying financial problems, such as increasing healthcare costs and entitlement spending, have been building for some time. Waiting until things are really, really bad before acting not only does not to prevent crises, but makes them worse when they do happen (a truth my chiropractor has kindly but insistently pointed out to me when I wait until I can only hobble before getting care for my troublesome back).
But finances (and even to some degree, my bad back) can be repaired. We are in far more long-term danger for failing to address climate change.
Last year, temperatures in the continental United States were hotter than they had ever been in more than a century of record-keeping, government scientists found. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration described the results (temps last year were, on average, 3.2 degrees higher than the 20th century average) as part of a bigger and longer trend of hotter, drier and more extreme weather. Some of it is the result of weather patterns, but human activity—such as the burning of greenhouse gases—is also to blame, researchers found.
Everybody sucks, but some suck more than others. Sent January 10:
It’s easy to point out the myopia of our political class by contrasting their hair-on-fire handling of the “fiscal cliff” with their apathetic treatment of the far more genuine threat posed by runaway climate change. But this comparison, while accurate and convenient, overlooks a similarity between the two crises.
If Congressional Republicans really cared about fiscal rectitude, they wouldn’t have created a deficit crisis in the first place by running up two wars’ worth of debt at the behest of the Bush administration (despite liberal warnings that the bill would be enormous). While we all share responsibility for climate chaos, both lawmakers and media ignored, minimized, and misrepresented the problem during the decades when it could have been forestalled, thereby ensuring that we would ultimately face a crisis of civilizational significance. Both the fiscal cliff and the ongoing climate catastrophe are human-created disasters, exacerbated by human ideology, ignorance and irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate irresponsibility denialism media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 4: Because The Wind Is High…
The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel thinks there is No Denying Climate Change:
Earth is growing warmer; the records prove that. Some still doubt human activity has anything to do with it, but it’s past time for the rest of us to face reality.
We need, first, good leadership. The United States should provide it, as it has repeatedly promised but failed to do. And Florida should be a leader among the states, because it is among those most threatened with ecological problems and rising sea levels.
Tallahassee should take its cues from South Florida, where local governments have long recognized the dangers associated with climate change. Raising seawall heights, moving drinking-water wellfields farther inland and imposing tougher development regulations for particularly vulnerable areas — ideas once unthinkable — are now part of a regional climate-change plan designed to help local communities address a changing environment.
While the flooding and saltwater intrusion now seen in South Florida occur regularly, far more devastating effects are happening in other parts of the world. According to the Climate Vulnerable Forum, a 20-nation consortium of developing countries, failure to act will result in about 100 million deaths worldwide by 2030 from mega-droughts, floods, disease, crop failure and major water shortages. The forum puts the economic costs of climate change at $1.2 trillion a year now, and says it will double by 2030. Some nations could lose 11 percent of GDP. Oxfam, an anti-poverty group, puts potential agricultural and fishery losses alone at $500 billion a year by 2030.
Skeptics may pooh-pooh the climate forum’s report as commissioned by those nations most at risk, which makes them most in need of help. But its findings are consistent with those from the world’s most important climate-change organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
A generic let’s-get-our-shit-together-soon letter, sent December 29:
There would be no significant climate change denial in America were it not for the egregious irresponsibility of our news media and their financial co-conspirators. Over the past several decades, conservative “think tanks” heavily funded by the oil and coal industries have created a denialist cottage industry, supplying our broadcast and print media with authoritative pundits whose voices have stridently rejected the findings of climate scientists in favor of the convenience of continued consumption (which, by an odd coincidence, result in the highest corporate profit margins in history).
While geographical serendipity has kept the US off the “front lines” of our rapidly transforming climate for years, 2012’s massive storms and devastating droughts make it clear that we can no longer avoid the impacts of our century-long fossil-fuel binge. A drastically warming Earth is inevitable, but acknowledging climatic reality now may make a profound difference to the lives of our descendants.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: carbon tax media irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 3: Reality Bites.
The Saint-Louis Post Dispatch has a good idea:
If Congress and the president were more rational than political — admittedly, a very big if — they could kill a covey of birds with one stone. They could replace the payroll tax with a carbon tax.
Suddenly Social Security and Medicare funding would be secure, which means the rest of the fiscal crisis would be fixed. Plus, you might save the planet in the process.
Instead of paying combined Social Security and Medicare taxes of 7.65 percent through payroll deduction (assuming the Social Security tax portion of it goes back to 6.2 percent next year), workers would keep that money.
They’d need at least part of it to pay for the carbon taxes on gasoline, natural gas and electricity produced by coal or gas plants. For example, if oil companies were taxed $20 a ton for the carbon dioxide their products created, they’d pass along the cost to consumers. The price of gasoline would go up about 20 cents a gallon.
Fuck reality. December 28:
In a rational world, a rational government wouldn’t sound like such a fantastic proposition, and we would have acted long ago to make a carbon tax a reality. After all, the key to our species’ survival hangs on our ability to reduce a single ratio — the proportion of atmospheric CO2 in parts per million — back to pre-industrial levels.
But American politics is built on make-believe; on the symbolic power of names and labels; on a peculiar form of heavily financed magical thinking in which the solution for any problem is a sufficiently dazzling photo-op, or the invocation of conservatism’s patron saint, our fortieth president. How can rational thinkers operate inside this unreal environment? Here’s an irrational suggestion for Democrats who are (justifiably) concerned about climate change:
To accrue Republican support, a carbon tax must be called a “fee,” and it needs to be conspicuously dedicated to Ronald Reagan.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: extreme weather idiots media irresponsibility
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Year 4, Month 1, Day 1: She Said She Said
Delaware Online recycles the idiots-are-waking-up story:
Something rather cataclysmic has being happening among anti-global-warming enthusiasts. A growing number admit they’ve been wrong. An Associated Press poll found four of every five Americans said climate change will be a serious problem for the United States if nothing is done about it. That’s up from 73 percent three years ago.
Personal experience, not the complicated formula of science measurements is winning new converts. That includes extraordinary changes in the rise of sea levels as The New Journal has been tracking, accelerated patterns of wildfires that are destroying entire communities in the country’s western regions and shorter cold weather patterns during winter.
Debunkers of global warming usually target bad or imagined science by the environmental lobby and liberal Democrats. But “events are helping these people see what scientists thought they had been seeing all along,” explains Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University social psychologist and pollster.
Braindead media had nothing to do with this. Nothing, do you hear me? Nothing. Sent Dec. 26:
It’s good to learn that Americans are getting around to accepting the facts of global climate change, now that the consequences of an accelerating greenhouse effect are actually having an impact on their lives. Christmas day tornadoes, devastating superstorms, agriculture-crippling drought — all these and more have clobbered our nation over the past year, and it’s harder and harder for anyone to dismiss it as a temporary deviation from the norm.
But the fact remains that for decades the steadily more urgent warnings of scientists have been ignored, misrepresented, and often ridiculed. Climatologists have been predicting exactly this type of transforming weather since the 1970s, but our national news media have essentially abdicated their responsibility to the national conversation by choosing to “balance” scientific expertise with the dismissive rhetoric of oil-industry spokespeople. Unfortunately, the growing public awareness of the climate crisis may well be too late for effective policy action.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: media irresponsibility timescales winter winter sports
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Year 3, Month 12, Day 30: No Two Alike!
ASPEN — An opinion piece about climate change by the head of Vail Resorts has Aspen Skiing Co.’s point man on environmental issues scratching his head.
Rob Katz, chairman and CEO of Vail Resorts Inc., wrote an opinion piece on climate change that appeared Friday in The Denver Post.
Katz criticizes the efforts of some unnamed folks to use last winter’s lack of snow and this winter’s slow start as proof of global warming. The head of the country’s largest ski-resort operator said the ski industry must play its part in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions for the right reasons — to save the planet for future generations.
“When the effects of climate change really show up, no one will care about skiing at Aspen and Vail,” Katz wrote. “They will be rightly focused on the wildlife, natural habitat and people of our planet, about the sea levels, flooding and natural disasters like Hurricane Sandy.”
The opinion piece coincided with an advertisement Vail Resorts ran in The New York Times last week. The headline read, “The Climate HAS CHANGED.” It features shots of skiers and riders at the company’s various ski areas and trumpets the new snow they have received the prior week.
Auden Schendler, Aspen Skiing Co.’s vice president for sustainability, said Vail is playing with fire with the ad and sending a defeatist message with the opinion piece.
“The advertising piece struck me as taunting the gods. I’m not sure why they’d do that,” Schendler said. “I think it’s mocking the conversation” on climate change.
Everybody’s right. And Happy New Year. December 24:
For a seasonally-organized and essentially fashion-driven industry like a ski resort, it makes perfect sense to frame climate change in immediate terms. Winter sports enthusiasts are less likely to think in the long term, as advocated by Rob Katz in his recent op-ed, so making the case for an urgent response to the climate crisis may well be best accomplished by stating the obvious: no more skiing unless we act.
But Mr. Katz’ argument is just as powerful and just as correct. Our collective focus on the short term has been a major contributor to our present predicament. Our culture is fixated on instant consumer gratification, informed by hysterical news media on a 24-hour cycle of excitement and spectacle, and governed by politicians fixated on the next election cycle; only with a profound reorientation in our thinking towards multigenerational responsibility to the future can we accomplish the kind of thoughtful and reasoned planetary response demanded by an emergency of this magnitude.
Warren Senders