Morons and Oxymorons: The Fruitless Search For A Moderate Republican

DonkeyHotey

The Republican Party has become such a far right party that a "Republican moderate" appears to refer to someone who occasionally gives lip service to reality, such as acknowledging the existence of climate change or accepting the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.  This is not moderate at all but, even so, it is hard to find a GOP candidate for president who can meet even this generous standard.

Ohio Governor John Kasich once conceded that climate change was a problem but has more recently hewed to the standard Republican canard that, notwithstanding the overwhelming consensus of the relevant scientific community, “we don’t want to destroy people’s jobs, based on some theory that is not proven.”  Virtually the entire field either denies outright that climate change is happening or refuses to believe that it is caused by human activity.  Jeb! takes the relatively more moderate position among the GOP candidates which is to admit that man-made climate change exists but insist that the government do nothing about it.  He believes that climate change will be solved miraculously by American ingenuity alone and, disregarding clear Supreme Court precedent, asserts that environmental regulations aimed at curbing carbon emissions are unconstitutional.  Doing nothing about climate change is not a moderate position.

All of the Republican candidates oppose abortion rights.  Several have staked out the extreme position that abortion should be prohibited even in cases of rape or incest or where the health of the mother is at stake.  This would include at least Rubio, Walker and Huckabee.  And so, the relatively more moderate position taken by the rest of the field is allowing for the aforementioned exceptions.  (Of course, they would all defund Planned Parenthood.) This may be a moderate position for the Republican Party, but not for a majority of Americans. 

Rick Santorum compares the Supreme Court's Obergefell ruling that the Constitution guarantees same sex couples the right to marry to the Dred Scott decision.  Mike Huckabee has urged people to "resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat."  The less extreme Republican position is accepting the principle that the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Constitution is the law of the land -- a view that, it should go without saying, should be a given for any public official.  This purportedly moderate stance on same sex marriage, however, also includes supporting a "religious liberty" bill that would prevent the federal government from penalizing businesses that discriminate against same-sex married couples.  John Kasich -- who as governor supported a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and supported appealing a ruling that found it unconstitutional -- is purportedly the outlier because he revealed a glimmer of humanity during the first GOP debate, admitting that although personally opposed to gay marriage, he went to a gay wedding and would still love his daughter if, hypothetically, she were a lesbian. That, I suppose, is the best they can do.

Donald Trump has gotten a lot of attention for his offensive, racist statements regarding immigrants and immigration.  His most recent proposals include building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, abolishing birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants, freezing green card applications and mass deportation.  Outrageous, you say?  Well, so-called serious candidate Scott Walker not only agrees but insists that he came up with these ideas first.  Governors Christie and Jindal like the idea of ending birthright citizenship too.  The more moderate position is to not support amending the Constitution to end birthright citizenship but to build a wall to keep immigrants out while, magnanimously, agreeing not to deport those law-abiding, God-fearing immigrants who are already here. 

On most other issues the Republican candidates pander to the extreme right wing of their party --  refusing to rule out torture for terrorism suspects, supporting the repeal of Obamacare, proposing block grants for entitlement programs, opposing federal minimum wage.  And on and on.

The more polished, less overtly wacko Republican candidates supported by the pragmatic, so-called establishment wing of the GOP are treated by the media as if they are well within the mainstream.  But none of them can be considered moderate unless you compare them to their utterly bat-shit crazy cohorts.  This will be important to keep in mind when the eventual Republican nominee begins moving towards the center during the general election campaign and the media's selective amnesia portrays him or her as sane, reasonable and, of course, moderate. 

A Little Audacity Goes A Long Way: Immigration Reform and the Folly of Bipartisanship

David Brooks and other delusional stalwarts of the pundit class continue to believe that the Republican Party cares about governing and is capable of compromise.  Ignoring GOP efforts since the dawn of the Obama Administration to thwart every moderate proposal supported by the White House, they are excoriating the President for finally eschewing attempts at illusory bipartisanship for the sake of having a direct, positive impact on millions of people.

President Obama's executive order will allow "four million undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for at least five years to apply for a program that protects them from deportation and allows those with no criminal record to work legally in the country."  Another "one million people will get protection from deportation through other parts of the president’s plan to overhaul the nation’s immigration enforcement system, including the expansion of an existing program for “Dreamers,” young immigrants who came to the United States as children."  (Of course, it wouldn't be an Obama plan without some compromise -- so, farm workers won't receive special protection and there will be no federal subsidies for health care.)

The predictable response, not just from the rabid right, but from the pointless middle, is outrage and disappointment that Obama won't give Republicans a chance to act decently.  According to Brooks, "White House officials are often misinformed on what Republicans are privately discussing, so they don’t understand that many in the Republican Party are trying to find a way to get immigration reform out of the way."  Sure.

Remarkably, neither he nor anyone else seems to recall that a bipartisan immigration bill overwhelmingly passed the Senate in the summer of 2013.  It was scuttled in the House, where the Speaker refused to bring it up for a vote, knowing that the nativists in his Party would reject it because of its provision of a path to citizenship.  Although, according to David Brooks, this was really because they were working on their own secret plan. 

Notwithstanding that prior presidents acted unilaterally on immigration (including Reagan and both Bushes), and that Obama's executive order has been sanctioned by conservative legal scholars, Republicans are now threatening to either shut down the government or initiate impeachment proceedings over Obama's move. At minimum, according to Brooks, "Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We’ll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor." 

Thus, the groundwork has been laid to further blame Obama and the Democrats for gridlock despite the unprecedented recalcitrance of the Republicans who -- according to Brooks and others -- are ready to make nice, roll up their sleeves and govern responsibly if only Obama would meet them half way.  So, in addition to that secret immigration plan that Republicans have been working on that surely would have helped millions of immigrants remain in this country, they are also working on a secret health care plan that could replace Obamacare after they repeal it and provide tens of millions with health care as Obamacare has done.  And, they must also have a secret plan to combat climate change all teed up, as soon as they approve the Keystone XL pipeline and thwart the historic pact over carbon emissions that Obama made with China.

President Obama is going to have to tamp down his instincts towards compromise and moderation these next two years while Republicans block judicial and administrative nominations, attempt to deregulate Wall Street and the EPA, and pass unconscionable bills aimed at gutting the safety net and getting the government out of the way of Big Business.  This will be increasingly difficult in the face of cries from the mainstream media (and moderate Democrats) who believe that bipartisanship is a worthy end in itself.  But what is worthy is ensuring that 5 million immigrants will not be deported and separated from their families and their homes; that at least 10 million people have health insurance that they did not have before; that carbon emissions are reduced.  Given the extremist state of the Republican Party none of this could happen by compromise -- it could only happen by exercising a little audacity.

Do Not Vote Republican

It is not true that all politics is local.  Voting for a Republican congressperson or senator means you are aiding and abetting a national party that is little more than a collection of far right wing lunatics who don't believe in man-made climate change (much less in mitigating it), the minimum wage (much less in increasing it), recklessness of Wall Street (much less in regulating it), immigration by people of color (much less in reforming it), gun control (much less in legislating it), or a woman's right to her own choice (not only to terminate a pregnancy but to use birth control).

The first one -- disbelief or even being agnostic on climate change -- should be enough to disqualify anyone from office.  It is the single most critical issue of our time and you can't find one Republican candidate who is willing to admit the problem even exists much less willing to proffer a solution.  A recent study found that 3% of current Republican members of  Congress accept that climate change is real and caused by human beings.  Think about that. Virtually every Republican in Congress and Republican hopeful refuse to accept the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community on climate change, often with the ridiculous refrain that they are not scientists themselves so how could they know.  It really shouldn't be controversial to insist that our leaders rely on expertise in determining government policy.  But I would venture that far more Republican members of Congress believe in the Biblical prophesy of End Times than they do in man-made climate change, and that's a big problem.

So what do they believe in?  They believe the unemployed are lazy. They believe that terrorists are around every corner.  They believe in deregulating Wall Street, and that all regulation is an anathema except when it comes to women's health.  They believe that corporations are people too.  They believe that advancing LGBT rights poses a threat to their way of life.

A sampling from a New York Times article on the rightward shift of GOP candidates is telling:

One nominee proposed reclassifying single parenthood as child abuse. Another suggested that four “blood moons” would herald “world-changing, shaking-type events” and said Islam was not a religion but a “complete geopolitical structure” unworthy of tax exemption. Still another labeled Hillary Rodham Clinton “the Antichrist.”

Worried yet?  Given demographics and gerrymandering, the House is sure to remain in Republican control for the foreseeable future.  And without a late get-out-the-vote surge, it looks like the Senate may be in Republican hands for at least the next two years.

What would a Republican majority actually mean?  Certainly we would have more gridlock, which if Republicans are passing bills would not be a bad thing.  Whatever disastrous legislation reached the President's desk would thankfully get vetoed.  On the other hand, Republicans would likely attach unacceptable riders to critical spending bills, creating even more chaos.  Ezra Klein speculates that one thing that might pass is the Keystone XL pipeline, given its support among some Democrats.  Not a problem, I suppose, if you don't believe in climate change.

With nothing better to do, we are sure to see more symbolic efforts to repeal Obamacare and, of course, the inevitable hearings on faux scandals.  Can you say "Benghazi"?

An area in which a Republican Senate would make a significant difference is with Presidential nominations.  While Obama in the past year has been successful in pushing through judicial nominations to fill vacancies and redress the imbalance in the judiciary caused by years of Republican intransigence, that would abruptly end.  Most importantly, if a Supreme Court vacancy opens, Republicans would have the power to block any nominee who didn't meet their litmus test, which would be anyone to the left of Antonin Scalia.

So, even if you are a registered Republican, don't do it.  Even if you aren't fond of your Democratic candidate, don't do it.  Even if you believe in limited government, don't do it.  Even if you oppose much of Obama's vision, don't do it.  Voting Republican means voting for a dystopian world of ever-worsening environmental degradation, widening inequality with no safety net, more scandalous behavior from Wall Street and the prioritizing of fundamentalist Christian values for everyone.  Don't do it.

What you must do, however is vote, and regardless of what the pundits say, this is a critical election.   David Dayen has much more on why.  And as he concludes:

The biggest stakes in this election concern what lessons will be drawn from it. It’s actually easy to call this a Seinfeldian election about nothing, because Democratic candidates have been so reluctant to stand for anything. They have offered little hope to a public made insecure by stagnant wages, soaring inequality and an economy insufficient to their needs. Implicit in this insecurity is the helplessness so many Americans feel about a political system that doesn’t seem within their grasp to affect, unless they have a spare billion dollars lying around.

When government fails for whatever reason, the perceived defenders of government suffer. And if those perceived defenders react by running away from any effort to use government levers to improve people’s lives, we will descend further into a Reagan-era miasma of market fundamentalism and corporate power.

The Wheel Turns, the Boat Rocks, the Sea Rises: Change in a Time of Climate Change

Guest post by Rebecca Solnit

There have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one, and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly -- from the role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and nightmarish ways.

Yet when we argue for change, notably changing our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who claim we’re disrupting a stable system. They insist that we’re rocking the boat unnecessarily.

I say: rock that boat. It’s a lifeboat; maybe the people in it will wake up and start rowing. Those who think they’re hanging onto a stable order are actually clinging to the wreckage of the old order, a ship already sinking, that we need to leave behind.

As you probably know, the actual oceans are rising -- almost eight inches since 1880, and that’s only going to accelerate. They’re also acidifying, because they’re absorbing significant amounts of the carbon we continue to pump into the atmosphere at record levels. The ice that covers the polar seas is shrinking, while the ice shields that cover Antarctica and Greenland are melting. The water locked up in all the polar ice, as it’s unlocked by heat, is going to raise sea levels staggeringly, possibly by as much as 200 feet at some point in the future, how distant we do not know. In the temperate latitudes, warming seas breed fiercer hurricanes.

The oceans are changing fast, and for the worse. Fish stocks are dying off, as are shellfish. In many acidified oceanic regions, their shells are actually dissolving or failing to form, which is one of the scariest, most nightmarish things I’ve ever heard. So don’t tell me that we’re rocking a stable boat on calm seas. The glorious 10,000-year period of stable climate in which humanity flourished and then exploded to overrun the Earth and all its ecosystems is over.

But responding to these current cataclysmic changes means taking on people who believe, or at least assert, that those of us who want to react and act are gratuitously disrupting a stable system that’s working fine. It isn’t stable. It is working fine -- in the short term and the most limited sense -- for oil companies and the people who profit from them and for some of us in the particularly cushy parts of the world who haven’t been impacted yet by weather events like, say, the recent torrential floods in Japan or southern Nevada and Arizona, or the monsoon versions of the same that have devastated parts of India and Pakistan, or the drought that has mummified my beloved California, or the wildfires of Australia.

The problem, of course, is that the people who most benefit from the current arrangements have effectively purchased a lot of politicians, and that a great many of the rest of them are either hopelessly dim or amazingly timid. Most of the Democrats recognize the reality of climate change but not the urgency of doing something about it. Many of the Republicans used to -- John McCain has done an amazing about-face from being a sane voice on climate to a shrill denier -- and they present a horrific obstacle to any international treaties.

Put it this way: in one country, one party holding 45 out of 100 seats in one legislative house, while serving a minority of the very rich, can basically block what quite a lot of the other seven billion people on Earth want and need, because a two-thirds majority in the Senate must consent to any international treaty the U.S. signs. Which is not to say much for the president, whose drill-baby-drill administration only looks good compared to the petroleum servants he faces, when he bothers to face them and isn’t just one of them. History will despise them all and much of the world does now, but as my mother would have said, they know which side their bread is buttered on.

As it happens, the butter is melting and the bread is getting more expensive. Global grain production is already down several percent thanks to climate change, says a terrifying new United Nations report. Declining crops cause food shortages and rising food prices, creating hunger and even famine for the poorest on Earth, and also sometimes cause massive unrest. Rising bread prices were one factor that helped spark the Arab Spring in 2011. Anyone who argues that doing something about global warming will be too expensive is dodging just how expensive unmitigated climate change is already proving to be.

It’s only a question of whether the very wealthy or the very poor will pay. Putting it that way, however, devalues all the nonmonetary things at stake, from the survival of myriad species to our confidence in the future. And yeah, climate change is here, now. We’ve already lost a lot and we’re going to lose more, but there’s a difference between terrible and apocalyptic. We still have some control over how extreme it gets. That’s not a great choice, but it’s the choice we have. There’s still a window open for action, but it’s closing. As the Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud, bluntly put it recently, "We are running out of time."
 New and Renewable Energies

The future is not yet written. Look at the world we’re in at this very moment. The Keystone XL tar sands pipeline was supposed to be built years ago, but activists catalyzed by the rural and indigenous communities across whose land it would go have stopped it so far, and made what was supposed to be a done deal a contentious issue. Activists changed the outcome.

Fracking has been challenged on the state level, and banned in townships and counties from upstate New York to central California. (It has also been banned in two Canadian provinces, France, and Bulgaria.) The fossil-fuel divestment movement has achieved a number of remarkable victories in its few bare years of existence and more are on the way. The actual divestments and commitments to divest fossil fuel stocks by various institutions ranging from the city of Seattle to the British Medical Association are striking. But the real power of the movement lies in the way it has called into question the wisdom of investing in fossil fuel corporations. Even mainstream voices like the British Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee and publications like Forbes are now beginning to question whether they are safe places to put money. That’s a sea change.

The Planet Wreckers

Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes -- But So Is the Planet

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from TomDispatch

It’s been a tough few weeks for the forces of climate-change denial.

First came the giant billboard with Unabomber Ted Kacynzki’s face plastered across it: “I Still Believe in Global Warming. Do You?” Sponsored by the Heartland Institute, the nerve-center of climate-change denial, it was supposed to draw attention to the fact that “the most prominent advocates of global warming aren’t scientists. They are murderers, tyrants, and madmen.” Instead it drew attention to the fact that these guys had over-reached, and with predictable consequences.

A hard-hitting campaign from a new group called Forecast the Facts persuaded many of the corporations backing Heartland to withdraw $825,000 in funding; an entire wing of the Institute, devoted to helping the insurance industry, calved off to form its own nonprofit. Normally friendly politicians like Wisconsin Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner announced that they would boycott the group’s annual conference unless the billboard campaign was ended.

Which it was, before the billboards with Charles Manson and Osama bin Laden could be unveiled, but not before the damage was done: Sensenbrenner spoke at last month’s conclave, but attendance was way down at the annual gathering, and Heartland leaders announced that there were no plans for another of the yearly fests. Heartland’s head, Joe Bast, complained that his side had been subjected to the most “uncivil name-calling and disparagement you can possibly imagine from climate alarmists,” which was both a little rich -- after all, he was the guy with the mass-murderer billboards -- but also a little pathetic.  A whimper had replaced the characteristically confident snarl of the American right.

That pugnaciousness may return: Mr. Bast said last week that he was finding new corporate sponsors, that he was building a new small-donor base that was “Greenpeace-proof,” and that in any event the billboard had been a fine idea anyway because it had “generated more than $5 million in earned media so far.” (That’s a bit like saying that for a successful White House bid John Edwards should have had more mistresses and babies because look at all the publicity!) Whatever the final outcome, it’s worth noting that, in a larger sense, Bast is correct: this tiny collection of deniers has actually been incredibly effective over the past years.

The best of them -- and that would be Marc Morano, proprietor of the website Climate Depot, and Anthony Watts, of the website Watts Up With That -- have fought with remarkable tenacity to stall and delay the inevitable recognition that we’re in serious trouble. They’ve never had much to work with.  Only one even remotely serious scientist remains in the denialist camp.  That’s MIT’s Richard Lindzen, who has been arguing for years that while global warming is real it won’t be as severe as almost all his colleagues believe. But as a long article in the New York Times detailed last month, the credibility of that sole dissenter is basically shot.  Even the peer reviewers he approved for his last paper told the National Academy of Sciences that it didn’t merit publication. (It ended up in a “little-known Korean journal.”)

Deprived of actual publishing scientists to work with, they’ve relied on a small troupe of vaudeville performers, featuring them endlessly on their websites. Lord Christopher Monckton, for instance, an English peer (who has been officially warned by the House of Lords to stop saying he’s a member) began his speech at Heartland’s annual conference by boasting that he had “no scientific qualification” to challenge the science of climate change.

The Biggest Climate Victory You Never Heard Of

The fight against coal in the U.S. has achieved great success due to activists' passion and commitment. 

By Mark Hertsgaard, originally published at Al Jazeera

Coal is going down in the United States, and that's good news for the Earth's climate. The US Energy Information Administration has announced that coal, the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive conventional fossil fuel, generated only 36 per cent of US electricity in the first quarter of 2012. That amounts to a staggering 20 per cent decline from one year earlier. And the EIA anticipates additional decline by year's end, suggesting a historic setback for coal, which has provided the majority of the US' electricity for many decades.

Even more encouraging, however, is the largely unknown story behind coal's retreat. Mainstream media coverage has credited low prices for natural gas - coal's chief competitor - and the Obama administration's March 27 announcement of stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from US power plants. And certainly both of those developments played a role.

But a third factor - a persistent grassroots citizens' rebellion that has blocked the construction of 166 (and counting) proposed coal-fired power plants - has been at least as important. At the very time when President Obama's "cap-and-trade" climate legislation was going down in flames in Washington, local activists across the United States were helping to impose "a de facto moratorium on new coal", in the words of Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, one of the first analysts to note the trend.

Another surprise: most of these coal plants were defeated in the politically red states of the South and Midwest. Victories were coming "in places like Oklahoma and South Dakota, not the usual liberal bastions where you'd expect environmental victories", recalls Mary Anne Hitt, the director of the Beyond Coal campaign, which provided national coordination for the local efforts. The victories in Oklahoma were particularly sweet, coming in the home state of Capitol Hill's leading climate denier, Senator James Inhofe.

Of course the activists had help: the falling cost of natural gas and a decline in electricity demand following the 2008 financial collapse made coal vulnerable. But it was grassroots activism that turned this vulnerability into outright defeat, argues Thomas Sanzillo, a former deputy comptroller for the New York state government who has collaborated with Beyond Coal. "If the activists hadn't been there talking to government regulators and newspaper editorial boards and making the case that coal was a bad bet," Sanzillo explains, "the plants would have gone forward, because the utility companies would say, ‘We can handle the costs,' and those [government] boards are often good ol' boy boards."

Connecting The Dots On Climate Change

Too Hot Not To Notice?

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

The Williams River was so languid and lovely last Saturday morning that it was almost impossible to imagine the violence with which it must have been running on August 28, 2011. And yet the evidence was all around: sand piled high on its banks, trees still scattered as if by a giant’s fist, and most obvious of all, a utilitarian temporary bridge where for 140 years a graceful covered bridge had spanned the water.

The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline.  Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic, and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

And I’m not the only one.

New data released last month by researchers at Yale and George Mason universities show that a lot of Americans are growing far more concerned about climate change, precisely because they’re drawing the links between freaky weather, a climate kicked off-kilter by a fossil-fuel guzzling civilization, and their own lives. After a year with a record number of multi-billion dollar weather disasters, seven in ten Americans now believe that “global warming is affecting the weather.” No less striking, 35% of the respondents reported that extreme weather had affected them personally in 2011.  As Yale’s Anthony Laiserowitz told the New York Times, “People are starting to connect the dots.”

Which is what we must do. As long as this remains one abstract problem in the long list of problems, we’ll never get to it.  There will always be something going on each day that’s more important, including, if you’re facing flood or drought, the immediate danger.

But in reality, climate change is actually the biggest thing that’s going on every single day.  If we could only see that pattern we’d have a fighting chance. It’s like one of those trompe l’oeil puzzles where you can only catch sight of the real picture by holding it a certain way. So this weekend we’ll be doing our best to hold our planet a certain way so that the most essential pattern is evident. At 350.org, we’re organizing a global day of action that’s all about dot-connecting; in fact, you can follow the action at climatedots.org.

The "Baseball Bat" Theory Of Climate Change

 A Fox TV commentator, midgame, links global warming to home runs, and fans on all sides of the climate debate call foul.

By Peter Dykstra, cross-posted from The Daily Climate

Fox baseball commentator Tim McCarver is a retired baseball catcher whose work as a TV analyst recently got him inducted into the announcers' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He occupies the top TV perch in the sport, and fans either love him or hate him.

If McCarver truly wants to be loved and hated more, there's no better way to accomplish that than to link climate change to America's pastime, on national TV, in the middle of a Cardinals-Brewers ballgame. Following two home runs that barely cleared the outfield wall Saturday afternoon, McCarver offered this:
"It has not been proven, but I think ultimately it will be proven that the air is thinner now, there have been climactic changes over the last 50 years in the world, and I think that's one of the reasons balls are carrying much better now than I remember." [video]

McCarver's on-air partner, Joe Buck, offered peer review in the form of a half-hearted Al Gore joke. The game went on. And the blogs went wild.

Could warmer temperatures and thinner air actually make more homers? Or is an old announcer pulling facts out of thin air?

A blogger for DeadSpin called McCarver's remark "one of the stupidest things ever spoken on a television broadcast today." Predictably, climate deniers' sites like Watts Up With That? lit up with comments. A search of dozens of web items found little support for McCarver, and Major League Baseball, which owns the broadcasts, appears to have quickly invoked its copyright privileges, yanking the video clip from numerous websites.

But could warmer temperatures and thinner air actually make more homers? Or is an old announcer pulling facts out of thin air?

Welcome To The 2012 Hunger Games

Sending Debt Peonage, Poverty, and Freaky Weather Into The Arena

By Rebecca Solnit, cross-posted from TomDispatch

When I was growing up, I ate books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and since I was constantly running out of reading material, I read everyone else’s -- which for a girl with older brothers meant science fiction. The books were supposed to be about the future, but they always turned out to be very much about this very moment.

Some of them -- Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land -- were comically of their time: that novel’s vision of the good life seemed to owe an awful lot to the Playboy Mansion in its prime, only with telepathy and being nice added in. Frank Herbert’s Dune had similarly sixties social mores, but its vision of an intergalactic world of disciplined desert jihadis and a great game for the substance that made all long-distance transit possible is even more relevant now.  Think: drug cartels meet the oil industry in the deep desert.

We now live in a world that is wilder than a lot of science fiction from my youth. My phone is 58 times faster than IBM’s fastest mainframe computer in 1964 (calculates my older brother Steve) and more powerful than the computers on the Apollo spaceship we landed on the moon in 1969 (adds my nephew Jason). Though we never got the promised jetpacks and the Martians were a bust, we do live in a time when genetic engineers use jellyfish genes to make mammals glow in the dark and nerds in southern Nevada kill people in Pakistan and Afghanistan with unmanned drones.  Anyone who time-traveled from the sixties would be astonished by our age, for its wonders and its horrors and its profound social changes. But science fiction is about the present more than the future, and we do have a new science fiction trilogy that’s perfect for this very moment.

Sacrificing the Young in the Arenas of Capital 

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins’s bestselling young-adult novel and top-grossing blockbuster movie, is all about this very moment in so many ways. For those of you hiding out deep in the woods, it’s set in a dystopian future North America, a continent divided into downtrodden, fearful districts ruled by a decadent, luxurious oligarchy in the Capitol. Supposedly to punish the districts for an uprising 74 years ago, but really to provide Roman-style blood and circuses to intimidate and distract, the Capitol requires each district to provide two adolescent Tributes, drawn by lottery each year, to compete in the gladiatorial Hunger Games broadcast across the nation.

That these 24 youths battle each other to the death with one lone victor allowed to survive makes it like -- and yet not exactly like -- high school, that concentration camp for angst and competition into which we force our young. After all, even such real-life situations can be fatal: witness the gay Iowa teen who took his life only a few weeks ago after being outed and taunted by his peers, not to speak of the epidemic of other suicides by queer teens that Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” website, film, and books aspire to reduce.

But really, in this moment, the cruelty of teens to teens is far from the most atrocious thing in the land. The Hunger Games reminds us of that.  Its Capitol is, of course, the land of the 1%, a sort of amalgamation of Fashion Week, Versailles, and the KGB/CIA. Collins’s timely trilogy makes it clear that the 1%, having created a system of deeply embedded cruelty, should go, something highlighted by the surly defiance of heroine Katniss Everdeen -- Annie Oakley, Tank Girl, and Robin Hood all rolled into one -- who refuses to be disposed of.

Now, in our world, gladiatorial entertainment and the disposability of the young are mostly separate things (except in football, boxing, hockey, and other contact sports that regularly result in brain damage, and sometimes even in death). But while the Capitol is portrayed as brutal for annually sacrificing 23 teenagers from the Districts, what about our own Capitol in the District of Columbia? It has a war or two on, if you hadn’t noticed.

In Iraq, 4,486 mostly young Americans died.  If you want to count Iraqis (which you should indeed want to do), the deaths of babies, children, grandmothers, young men, and others total more than 106,000 by the most conservative count, hundreds of thousands by others. Even the lowest numbers represent enough kill to fill nearly 5,000 years of Hunger Games.

Then, of course, there are thousands more Americans who were so grievously wounded they might have died in previous conflicts, but are now surviving with severe brain damage, multiple missing limbs, or other profound mutilations. And don’t forget the trauma and mental illness that mostly goes unacknowledged and untreated or the far more devastating Iraqi version of the same. And never mind Afghanistan, with its own grim numbers and horrific consequences.

Our wartime carnage has been on a grand scale, but it hasn’t been on television in any meaningful way; it’s generally been semi-hidden by most of the American media and the government, which censored images of returning coffins, corpses, civilian casualties, and anything else uncomfortable (though in our science-fiction era when every phone is potentially a video camera, the leakage has still been colossal). Most of us did a good job of being distracted by other things -- including reality TV, of course.  The US Ambassador and military commander in Afghanistan were furious not that our soldiers struck jokey poses with severed limbs, but that the Los Angeles Times dared to publish them last month. And those whistleblowers who took the effort to reveal the little men behind the throne are facing severe punishment.  Witness one Hunger-Games-style hero, Bradley Manning, the slight young soldier turned alleged leaker, long held in inhumane conditions and now facing a potential life sentence.

Hope And Climate Change

"Celebrated every April 22 for the past forty-two years, Earth Day is showing its (middle) age. Instead of rallying public pressure for far-reaching reforms, Earth Day is becoming, at least in the United States, a bland, tired ritual that polluters and politicians have learned to ignore or co-opt. . . . Frustrated by such cynicism, some environmentalists have called for abolishing Earth Day. But that would be throwing the baby out with the polluted bathwater. Instead, why not recall the real history of Earth Day and revive its original—and much more demanding—vision?"-- Mark Hertsgaard, "Save Earth Day," The Nation

 Mark Hertsgaard has covered politics, the media and the environment for 20 years for leading publications around the world.   He is The Nation's environment correspondent and the author of six books, including most recently, “HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth."  Hertsgaard is one of the leading voices on climate change and environmental justice, and he needs to be heard and his advice needs to be heeded.

Wen Stephenson at The Roost, a blog for The Thoreau Farm, interviewed Hertsgaard at length about the politics of hope, how parents can get active in the climate fight and why giving up is not an option.  (The interview is worth reading in its entirety, as are those Stephenson does with David Roberts, Bill McKibben, and others.) 

Hertsgaard talks about parents as "probably the single most under-organized constituency on climate change."  He and some colleagues are working on “Climate Parents,” to give a voice to parents who understand that climate is frightening but don't know what to do about it and so they practice "soft denial"

It’s a different kind of denial than the nonsensical, economically or ideologically based denial that we’re so familiar with. Soft denial is when people know perfectly well what’s going on — and are scared about what it means, both for them and especially for their children or grandchildren — and yet they continue to carry on with their lives as if it’s not this five-alarm fire that is about to burn down their kids’ house.

A National Day of Action will be coming soon:

The news hook is the new national science education standards for K-12 that are being promoted this year by the National Research Council, which is part of the National Academy of Sciences, and the pushback from the Heartland Institute types, who want their nonscientific curricula put forward. And we are going to try to get parents to support the national science standards, as a first step to get them moving on this issue.

Hertsgaard contends that the reality that we are already locked into a significant amount of climate change, does not mean we shouldn't be looking for ways to slow it down, particularly on the food side of the climate dilemma:

We have an enormous opportunity to extract carbon, and store it in plants, and especially the soil. That is one of the few, few tricks we still have up our sleeves, with things like bio char and ecological agriculture. And the irony is, there’s all this talk about carbon capture and sequestration in the coal and energy field, billions of dollars being promised or even invested in it, and we don’t know whether it will work. Compare that to the fact that in agriculture, we know perfectly well that it will work: it’s called photosynthesis. And we know it works, but we have to figure out ways to bring it to scale.

Clearly, this is not enough, and even under an optimistic scenario, there does not appear to be any way to avoid "at least three feet of sea-level rise."

But how soon that comes is going to be very, very important. If that doesn’t come for a hundred years, that’s something we can prepare for. If it comes in fifty years, which is a kind of, not worst-case but very plausible scenario, that’s a lot harder. 

While Hertsgaard understands the despair of those who believe it is too late to do anything, he fervently believes in the "politics of hope," which he learned from Vaclav Havel:  "Hope is not some silly, light-hearted feeling that you maintain just to keep going.  Hope is an active verb."

Hertsgaard has long understood that environmentalists need to "stop being a special-interest group and to start connecting with other people, and realize that their struggle is other peoples’ struggle."

I’ve said that environmentalists needed a jobs program, or I would go even further and say an antipoverty program. Because that’s the main thing I’ve learned from traveling around the world — most people want to save the environment. They understand, at an intuitive human level, that we can’t survive without the world around us. But because of the way that the world economy is structured, and other reasons, they’re faced with the more immediate task of putting food on the table that night for their kids.So if environmentalists wanted to make progress, they needed to have a jobs and antipoverty message, that could attract more supporters, because the people who are opposed to progress are the big corporations who make their money from the way things are.  

This is a lesson that environmentalists are beginning to learn as reflected in the recent victories of the Beyond Coal campaign and over the Keystone XL Pipeline.

In Hertsgaard's piece for The Nation, he  reminds us of real history of Earth Day -- that after 20 million people took to the streets, President Nixon, hardly a tree-hugger, felt politically compelled to pass what remains the most ambitious environmental legislation in the world.  And this is the key:  "America’s first and biggest environmental victories were won after mass grassroots activism persuaded an otherwise indifferent president that he had to deliver or risk losing his job."

So, let's get to work.

Paper Or Plastic? How About Neither?

Mel Brooks had a great bit as the 2013-Year-Old Man in which he declared that Liquid Prell Shampoo was the greatest invention of mankind (comparing it and its unbreakable tube favorably to the heart-lung machine which, of course, could break if it fell out of your medicine cabinet). 

In honor of Earth Day, I'm going to nominate Neato's, a reusable, machine-washable storage bag that comes in various sizes and easily replaces plastic bags and baggies.  We use them for sandwiches, snacks, veggies in the fridge, cosmetics on the plane, art supplies for the kids.  To paraphrase Brooks, I love this product.  (Disclaimer:  the creator of Neato's, Rachel Ostroy, is a dear friend).

Neat-os are made of FDA certified food-safe materials.  All materials have been certified as bisphenol-A (BPA) free, phthalate free, PVC free, lead free and non-toxic.  The fabric is a cotton canvas that was designed for chefs and is coated in food safe plastic, that can withstand high temperatures and is non-abrasive, making it easy to clean lots of different ways.

Reusing this durable product instead of disposable plastic bags is such an easy way to go a little greener.  One bag can replace hundreds of plastic baggies, not only from being thrown away, but from being produced.  Neat-os are also made in the USA eliminating the CO2 emitted by shipping baggies across the seas. And from your purchases they give to 1% for the Planet.  (Click here to check them out.)

Rachel reluctantly applied for the Sustainable Business Council of Los Angeles Achievement Award, and ended up being one of twenty-one finalists.  Although she didn't win, here is part of what she would have said in her acceptance speech:

This award is cool, not because I won, but because it exists. We are all working towards the same cause and the achievement is the collective effort and the impact of the collective effort. We have to work on all fronts, not only to switch from our disposable habit, but to change our building design, create new energy sources, change our farming practices, change our eating habits, change our dependency on oil, the list goes on and on. But it’s not the parts, but the whole that make this fight attainable.

Indeed.  

Climate Change Disappears From Keystone XL Pipeline Debate

Mining and using tar sands oil creates more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil. But that's rarely mentioned anymore. 




By Lisa Song, originally published at InsideClimate News

When President Obama traveled to Cushing, Okla. last week to declare his support for building the southern half of the Keystone XL pipeline, he stressed that the pipeline and other oil infrastructure projects would be done "in a way that protects the health and safety of the American people."

But missing from the speech—and from most recent discussions of the controversial project—was any mention of climate change or the greenhouse gas emissions associated with mining Canadian tar sands.
Climate change was once front and center in the pipeline debate, with federal agencies as well as environmentalists weighing in with their concerns.

In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency noted in its analysis of the State Department's draft environmental review of the Keystone XL that a comprehensive evaluation would have to consider the tar sands industry's greenhouse gas emissions, which the EPA calculated on a well-to-tank basis to be 82 percent greater than conventional crude oil.

"Alongside the national security benefits of importing crude oil from a stable trading partner, we believe the national security implications of expanding the nation's long-term commitment to a relatively high carbon source of oil should also be considered," the EPA wrote.

A year later, the EPA wrote in comments on the State Department's second draft that it was "concerned about levels of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions associated with the proposed project, and whether appropriate mitigation measures to reduce these emissions are being considered."

The EPA asked the State Department "to identify practicable mitigation measures" for the "entire suite" of greenhouse gases associated with operation of the Keystone XL.

In a statement issued in November, the State Department said that any decision on whether the pipeline is in the national interest should consider "all of the relevant issues," such as "environmental concerns (including climate change), energy security, economic impacts, and foreign policy."

Over the past year, the pipeline's opponents have focused their campaign on protecting the fragile Nebraska Sandhills, and climate change has taken a back seat in the debate. But environmentalists have long warned that the pipeline would lock in the United States to a particularly dirty form of oil that would further exacerbate global warming.

One of the most-quoted lines has come from climate scientist James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who calls the tar sands a "fuse to the biggest carbon bomb on the planet."
Bill McKibben, founder of the climate action group 350.org, said the Keystone protest has always been driven by "the fear that the tar sands will help destabilize the climate."

"Our colleagues in Nebraska did a great job of highlighting their concerns about the Ogallala aquifer and the Sandhills, but for those of us in the other 49 states, global warming was the single biggest reason for this fight," McKibben told InsideClimate News in an email on Friday. "Which is why it would have been nice for the president to say something about it [in Cushing], considering he was standing in the state that just went through the warmest summer any American state has ever recorded."

President Obama gave his speech against a backdrop of steel pipes at the Stillwater Pipe Yard, which is owned by TransCanada, the Alberta-based company that wants to build the pipeline. The president's stop in Cushing was part of a nationwide tour to publicize his administration's "all of the above" energy strategy.

Republished with permission of InsideClimate News, a non-profit, non-partisan news organization that covers energy and climate change—plus the territory in between where law, policy and public opinion are shaped.

The Great Carbon Bubble

Why The Fossil Fuel Industry Fights So Hard

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

If we could see the world with a particularly illuminating set of spectacles, one of its most prominent features at the moment would be a giant carbon bubble, whose bursting someday will make the housing bubble of 2007 look like a lark. As yet -- as we shall see -- it’s unfortunately largely invisible to us.

In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology.

Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

In fact, it’s likely that the week that photo was taken will prove “the driest first week in recorded U.S. history.” Indeed, it followed on 2011, which showed the greatest weather extremes in our history -- 56% of the country was either in drought or flood, which was no surprise since “climate change science predicts wet areas will tend to get wetter and dry areas will tend to get drier.” Indeed, the nation suffered 14 weather disasters each causing $1 billion or more in damage last year. (The old record was nine.) Masters again: “Watching the weather over the past two years has been like watching a famous baseball hitter on steroids.”

In the face of such data -- statistics that you can duplicate for almost every region of the planet -- you’d think we’d already be in an all-out effort to do something about climate change. Instead, we’re witnessing an all-out effort to... deny there’s a problem.

Our GOP presidential candidates are working hard to make sure no one thinks they’d appease chemistry and physics. At the last Republican debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted that he should be the nominee because he’d caught on earlier than Newt or Mitt to the global warming “hoax.”

Most of the media pays remarkably little attention to what’s happening. Coverage of global warming has dipped 40% over the last two years. When, say, there’s a rare outbreak of January tornadoes, TV anchors politely discuss “extreme weather,” but climate change is the disaster that dare not speak its name.

And when they do break their silence, some of our elite organs are happy to indulge in outright denial. Last month, for instance, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by “16 scientists and engineers” headlined “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.” The article was easily debunked. It was nothing but a mash-up of long-since-disproved arguments by people who turned out mostly not to be climate scientists at all, quoting other scientists who immediately said their actual work showed just the opposite.

It’s no secret where this denialism comes from: the fossil fuel industry pays for it. (Of the 16 authors of the Journal article, for instance, five had had ties to Exxon.) Writers from Ross Gelbspan to Naomi Oreskes have made this case with such overwhelming power that no one even really tries denying it any more. The open question is why the industry persists in denial in the face of an endless body of fact showing climate change is the greatest danger we’ve ever faced.

Why doesn’t it fold the way the tobacco industry eventually did? Why doesn’t it invest its riches in things like solar panels and so profit handsomely from the next generation of energy? As it happens, the answer is more interesting than you might think.

Part of it’s simple enough: the giant energy companies are making so much money right now that they can’t stop gorging themselves. ExxonMobil, year after year, pulls in more money than any company in history. Chevron’s not far behind. Everyone in the business is swimming in money.

Still, they could theoretically invest all that cash in new clean technology or research and development for the same. As it happens, though, they’ve got a deeper problem, one that’s become clear only in the last few years. Put briefly: their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won’t be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

Climate Cowards And Heroes

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

I spent the weekend glued to coverage of the high drama unfolding at the climate talks in Durban, South Africa. I watched closely because there is so much on the line affecting our and our children's future. In the final turbulent days, there were critical moments when a binding treaty with relatively ambitious and fair emissions cuts seemed almost possible. And then, well — the U.S. and our cronies played power politics behind closed doors, just as they have before.

I can barely contain my outrage at the U.S. government for doing everything in its power all week to stifle global progress in the battle against climate change. As allies have reported from the ground (here, here and here), continuous obstruction by the U.S. was a central factor undermining other countries' efforts to reach a decisive outcome. As a result, after 17 years of UN climate talks, we are now on course for a 3 (if not 4) degree Celsius increase in global temperatures over pre-industrial levels within the coming years. This is double the 1.5C limit urged by African nations and well beyond the 2C limit widely considered by scientists to be the maximum increase beyond which the effects of climate change will become catastrophic and irreversible.

The dire implications for our global food and farming system alone are direct and far-reaching, as I've explained here and here. Many small island nations will cease to exist, agriculture in Africa will become even more precarious, and here in the U.S. we too will witness more severe heat waves, torrential downpours and crop failures. As Wanjira Maathai has warned, we are in for unimaginable disasters, with massive loss of life — not only from the direct effects of climate change but from the increase in conflicts over water and arable land that will result. 

Debt dodging

The official outcome of the 17^th UN climate conference (“COP-17”) is known as the Durban Platform. While this agreement leaves open the possibility of a legally binding agreement in the future, what was actually specified (after U.S. arm-twisting) is much weaker: “an outcome with legal force” which means next to nothing.

The Platform simply says that over the next four years, governments are to agree on emissions reductions; but just how much and how fast those cuts should be remains up in the air. And the Durban agreement suggests that implementation wouldn't even have to start until 2020. That's much too late.

Also absent from the Platform was any agreement by rich nations to clean up the outsized share of the mess we created in the first place. Industrialized nations (especially the U.S.) are historically responsible for over 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions, despite composing only 20% of the world’s population. Meanwhile, the developing world — most of humanity — is on the front lines of climate change, enduring the harshest storms and most severe droughts. The Kyoto protocol recognizes this fact of “historical responsibility” by talking about “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Also known as "climate debt." In Durban we walked away from that debt in what Climate Justice Now! calls a "crime against humanity."

Durban Climate Talks aka "The Great Escape 3"

By Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, cross-posted from PAN's website

Not coming to movie theaters near you, but taking place right now in Durban, South Africa is “The Great Escape 3.” This is how Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s former lead climate negotiator, describes the scene at the UN climate talks.


“It’s the same movie — it happened in Copenhagen, in Cancun, and it will happen in Durban. The richest nations are trying to escape their responsibility to reduce greenhouse gas emissions now... It’s really a genocide and an ecocide.”

Not surprisingly, the U.S. delegation in Durban has been central to the looming failure of the talks.

For one thing, the U.S. has made clear that it’s unwilling to consider legally binding reductions in emissions until 2020. International reactions were swift:

•  “The present U.S. position of no new agreement until post- 2020 is really blowing negotiations apart,” said Papua New Guinea’s chief climate delegate, Kevin Conrad.

• “We can’t afford to wait that long!” warned Wanjira Maathai, daughter of the late Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai. “[In five years] we will surpass the 2 degree Celsius increase in global temperature that will bring about catastrophic effects…We will see people dying in numbers not ever seen before… The U.S. must shape up or get out!”

And a 21-year-old American college student, Abigail Borah, attending the conference as a representative of the International Youth Climate Movement, interrupted the U.S. lead negotiator’s presentation to the 190 nations assembled, stating:

•  “I am speaking on behalf of the United States of America because my negotiators cannot. The obstructionist Congress has shackled justice and delayed ambition for far too long. I am scared for my future. 2020 is too late to wait. We need an urgent path to a fair, ambitious and legally binding treaty.”

Borah received a sustained ovation from delegates before South African authorities removed her from the room. 

Super Committee Out Of The Way -- Now Back To Reality?

By Dave Johnson, cross-posted from Campaign for America's Future

Let's hope that the failure of the "super committee" quest to take money out of the economy clears the media mist for a minute, so people can focus on real issues that matter to real people. What are the chances of that? Will our government now focus on creating jobs, reducing inequality, fighting climate change, providing health care, increasing justice, balancing trade, increasing education, enabling small business to compete against the multinational?

Real Issues

People are in the streets across the country, demanding that the government start addressing real issues that matter to real people. But the increasingly irrelevant Congress has instead focused on things like blocking the government from making school lunches more nutritious.

Create Jobs

We have millions of people out of work. And we have millions of jobs that we have been putting off getting done.

And, guess what, as of today we can get the money to hire those millions of people to do those millions of need-to-get-done jobs for the lowest cost in history. That's right, the US government can borrow money at the lowest rates ever. Marketwatch: U.S. sells 5-year debt at record-low yield,

The Treasury Department sold $35 billion in 5-year notes on Tuesday at a yield of 0.937%, the lowest level on record and below where traders expected the sale to come.

That just puts the lie to any claim that the world is concerned about our deficits, and that we "don't have the money" to spend on maintaining and modernizing our infrastructure. "The markets" are so confident in the US that they are offering to lend money at the lowest rate ever.

Climate

Maybe it isn't in the news like it was, but the problem of global warming and resulting climate change is just getting worse and worse, and may be reaching the "tipping point." AP: Greenhouse gases soar; no signs warming is slowed,

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are building up so high, so fast, that some scientists now think the world can no longer limit global warming to the level world leaders have agreed upon as safe.
New figures from the U.N. weather agency Monday showed that the three biggest greenhouse gases not only reached record levels last year but were increasing at an ever-faster rate, despite efforts by many countries to reduce emissions.

Did you get that? It turns out that the worst-case scenarios we heard about, back when we were hearing about it, were not as bad as what it turns out is really happening. The operative words here: really happening.

That is reality. So where is the government? Where is the media?

Captured

Why can't we get anything done for the people of the country anymore? Because our Congress and government is almost completely "captured." Watch this segment of 60 Minutes, in which convicted Congress-briber Jack Abramoff explains how it's done, Jack Abramoff: The lobbyist's playbook - 60 Minutes - CBS News

You let a Congressional staffer, or agency regulator, or even a member of Congress know that there is a "job" waiting for them later, and you get what you want.

Regular people don't have this kind of money to dangle in front of government and elected officials. It isn't just campaign contributions, it's lucrative jobs after you leave government, that is corrupting our system. It is corporate money, being used to enrich the 1% at the expense of the rest of us. The solution is not just to ban corporate money from our politics, it is to ban the use of corporate money for any purpose other than running the corporation. Otherwise it will just leak out and be used to corrupt the system -- and us.

I'm sounding like a broken record.

Tar Sands Victory Shows That Climate Change May Be An Election Issue After All

In his introduction at Tom Dispatch to Bill McKibben's piece below, Tom Englehardt says that the movement McKibben and 350.org spearheaded to stop the Keystone XL pipeline "gained traction in our Occupy Wall Street moment" and is a harbinger:  "Sooner or later, Americans are going to wake up to climate change, just as they have this year on the issue of inequality, and when they do, watch out.  There will be political hell to pay."

Obama’s Positive Flip and Romney’s Negative Flop

By Bill McKibben, cross-posted from Tom Dispatch

Conventional wisdom has it that the next election will be fought exclusively on the topic of jobs. But President Obama’s announcement last week that he would postpone a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline until after the 2012 election, which may effectively kill the project, makes it clear that other issues will weigh in -- and that, oddly enough, one of them might even be climate change.

The pipeline decision was a true upset.  Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

Transcanada Pipeline, the company that was going to build the 1,700-mile pipeline from the tar-sands fields of Alberta, Canada, through a sensitive Midwestern aquifer to the Gulf of Mexico, certainly agreed.  After all, they’d already mowed the strip and prepositioned hundreds of millions of dollars worth of pipe, just waiting for the permit they thought they’d bought with millions in lobbying gifts and other maneuvers. Happily, activists across the country weren’t smart enough to know they’d been beaten, and so they staged the largest civil disobedience action in 35 years, not to mention ringing the White House with people, invading Obama campaign offices, and generally proving that they were willing to fight.

Climate Zombies On The Supreme Court

It is bad enough that the Republican Party is dominated by climate zombies.  It also appears that a majority of the Supreme Court is skeptical about the existence of global warming.

The American Constitution Society reported on a U.S. Supreme Court decision which blocked a lawsuit "aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions, holding that because the power to regulate emissions had been delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency under the Clean Air Act, federal common law did not apply."  ACS discussed some positive aspects of the opinion as well as more problematic ones.

Most disturbing is the "opinion’s overt skepticism about the science of climate change, which likely influenced their decision in this case."  Yale professor Douglas Kysar dissects the opinion, which suggests readers explore “views opposing the EPA” by reading a profile of Freeman Dyson, “the theoretical physicist whose controversial views on climate change have been widely promoted by the climate-skeptic community.”

Kysar also points out how "the court also repeated a prominent sceptical refrain about the ubiquity and supposed banality of greenhouse-gas emissions — 'after all, we each emit carbon dioxide merely by breathing' — that serves only to downplay the severity and significance of industrial emissions.'"

As Kysar concludes:  "That the nation's highest court would repeat this misleading refrain, and seemingly endorse Dyson's views as equal to those of the IPCC and the EPA, simply takes the breath away."