environment Politics: Barack Obama denialists Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 13: Invite the Republicans to Talk in Public About Their Climate Stupidity.
It’s Saturday. Time for another email/fax/letter to the President.
It’s late. I’m tired. This letter is kind of a mishmash. I like the “swollen belly of a starving child” analogy so much I’m using it for the third day in a row.
Dear President Obama,
It is crucial for our country that you continue highlighting the obstructionist tactics of the G.O.P. minority. Your upcoming bipartisan conference on health care will do a great deal to make it clear to the American people where their real allies are. We need more such events, each focusing on different critical issues for our country.
It is absolutely crucial that our nation’s citizens learn the truth: failure to pass meaningful climate legislation will lead to a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. Right now support for robust regulation of Greenhouse Gases is low; there are not enough Americans who are convinced of the reality of anthropogenic global warming. Recent events like Washington’s amazing blizzard have inflamed climate denialists, who are trumpeting the ludicrous notion that a snowfall somehow disproves global climate change. This is analogous to claiming that the swollen belly of a starving child disproves the existence of world hunger!
Please, Mr. President. Do a public bipartisan conference on climate issues. Bring expert climatologists to speak about the likely consequences of continuing our present level of Greenhouse emissions. Bring people from the Department of Defense to speak about the sociopolitical scenarios they envision as a result of catastrophic climate change. Bring people from the insurance industry to describe how they are refusing to insure properties in areas likely to be affected by rising sea levels. Bring economists to testify about the cost of action versus the cost of doing nothing. The American public is watching you more intently than any president has been watched in a long time; if you do something like this it will have a huge effect.
It is absolutely vital that we fight back against the climate-denial lobby and those members of our government who are in their thrall. This issue is too important. Waiting for the Rapture may be Senator Inhofe’s preferred environmental policy. For good and obvious reasons, it cannot be the policy of a rational Administration.
Your recent approach to dealing with the Republicans has been galvanizing. Please keep it up. Please intensify it. And please apply your keen focus to transforming our national understanding of the climate crisis. If ever there was an issue that calls for the Fierce Urgency of Now, this one is it.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Education environment Politics: gratitude intelligence Rachel Maddow
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 12: A Fan Letter to (Who Else?) Rachel Maddow
If you haven’t watched Rachel Maddow explaining why a day or two of heavy snow doesn’t mean that global warming is a lie, you owe it to yourself. Take ten minutes and savor her graceful, clear and funny exercise in truth-telling:
I get a little worn down from constantly chastising the denialist idiots in our media and politics, which made writing a letter of thanks to Rachel Maddow a huge pleasure. Note that I offer her the analogy I used in yesterday’s letter — perhaps she’ll use it sometime. That would be a moment to savor.
Dear Rachel Maddow — I write to thank you for your genuine journalistic integrity on the subject of climate change. The issue of global warming and the devastating consequences to Earth’s capacity to support humanity (and the web of life upon which we all depend) are obscured by highly paid denialists, and our media almost without exception refuse to address the subject with respect for scientific method and integrity. Instead, the professional pundits hew to a doctrine of false equivalency in which two contradictory statements are given “equal time,” regardless of their actual truth or falsehood.
Which makes your show of February 10 a landmark by any standards. Your ability to explain the sometimes counterintuitive concepts behind climate change is virtually unique in the world of broadcast journalism; while I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s a tragedy that you’re virtually the only person in broadcast journalism who’s doing it.
Thanks to an ADD-afflicted media and an utterly mendacious opposition party, the number of Americans who don’t believe climate change is happening has increased; fewer and fewer of our population are ready to address these problems head-on, and that’s making a terrifying and dystopian future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren in turn. Please keep highlighting climate issues. There is nothing more important for America and the world in the long run, for if we get this one wrong, there won’t be any chance for a “do-over.” You reach millions of people each day, and your calm and careful voice inspires confidence — while your readiness to skewer liars and hypocrites inspires trust.
At the beginning of 2010, I made a resolution to write a letter a day to politicians and/or media on climate-change issues. My daughter is five years old; I want her to grow up in a world rich in nature’s possibilities, a world where humanity’s accomplishments are not vitiated by our endless production of toxic trash. Most of my letters are scolding ones, for there is a lot of scolding that has to be done. Every so often, though, I get to write a letter like this one — thanking someone for doing the simple but difficult work of telling the truth. It is a pleasure to see you doing what you do. I hope you do it for a long time to come.
Let me close by offering you an analogy that I used in a recent letter addressing the same idiocy you discussed on your February 10th broadcast: the idea that heavy snow disproves global climate change. Perhaps you’ll be able to use it sometime. I wrote: “To say a freak snowstorm disproves the reality of global climate change is as misguided as saying the swollen belly of a starving child disproves the reality of world hunger.”
My daily letters often feel like shouting into a hurricane; your voice is a crucial one. Thank you again for your important work. Don’t give up!
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
P.S. – Thanks also for your devastating takedown of James Inhofe. That man gives dishonesty and hypocrisy a bad name.
environment Politics: corporate personhood Supreme Court USA Today
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 7: Dinosaurs, anyone?
USA Today gets a rambling, inarticulate screed that starts with the Supreme Court and ends with Dinosaurs. One day somebody’s going to publish something. It’s gotta happen.
The recent decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate spending in our elections will have far-reaching consequences on our lives. Nowhere will these be more profound than when corporations take on the complex issues of climate. Why? Because addressing the worst effects of global climate change demands genuine long-term thinking — and corporations, by the requirements of their charters, are only able to think in the short term.
The worst-case planetary scenarios suggested by scientists like Dr. James Hansen can be summed up in one word: Venus. More favorable climate projections have huge numbers of deaths and dislocations, with costs in the trillions of dollars. Needless to say, human extinction would be bad for business.
With gigatons of Arctic methane starting to melt and enter the atmosphere, and an increase in oceanic acidification beginning to threaten the food chain that supports over a billion people, there is no time to waste. We need strong and effective climate legislation, and we need it soon. But since forestalling these outcomes may require Big Energy to relinquish a few percentage points of profit in the next quarter, we can expect another type of pollution instead: corporate-funded disinformation touting the benefits of atmospheric CO2 levels last seen when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Male models Scott Brown Senate
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 6: The New (AAAAGH!!!) Senator from Massachusetts
Well, I may not have voted for him, but I’m sure as hell one of his constituents, and he’s sure as hell going to be hearing from me. This one goes directly to Scott Brown, but I’m cc’ing John Kerry.
Notice that I used two paragraphs’ worth of material from the letter I sent Hillary Clinton, back on January 13. I’m an environmentalist; I recycle whenever possible.
Dear Senator Brown,
Congratulations on your recent electoral triumph. I hope that you take the responsibilities of your office seriously, and recognize that while you may espouse a “conservative” political philosophy, that does not change the fact that you’re a senator representing one of the most liberal states in the country.
I’ve heard that you refer to yourself as a “Scott Brown Republican,” and that you’ve told the Senate Republican leadership that they should not count on you for a lockstep vote on every issue. Good for you. A lot of your constituents are in the “liberal/progressive” category, and you have a responsibility to them as well as to the people who voted for you.
Here’s a good way to start. Do some genuine research on the issue of global climate change. Contrary to what you may have heard on Sean Hannity’s program, global climate change is real; it’s a real threat, and the evidence is overwhelming that it has been caused by human activity. The fact that it’s snowing heavily in Washington, DC does not mean that the Earth isn’t heating up.
I understand that as a Republican and a conservative, you are interested in maintaining a healthy business sector, and consider it to be key to the continued growth of America’s economy. Oddly, as a liberal progressive, I believe the exact same thing. We differ, I suspect, in that I am interested in the long-term health of our economy (say, over the next two centuries) while you are more focused on the short term (businesses tend to measure success by the financial quarter, a three-month period).
If the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists come to pass, the Earth will no longer be able to support human life, which would surely be disadvantageous for the American business sector. I know, I know. They’re “worst-case” scenarios. But I ask you to consider two factors. First, the fact that when climatologists’ predictions have proven wrong, it’s almost always because they were too optimistic; every credible report on the state of the world’s climate comes out on the “worse than expected” side of the slate. Second, even if the Venusian “worst-case” scenarios don’t come true, the “almost-as-bad” scenarios are almost as bad for our economy and our business sector.
Projections of the sociopolitical effects of climate change include severe disturbances to farming economies caused by erratic weather, increased risk of near-apocalyptic fires in forested areas affected by severe heat, “water wars” triggered by drought and the elimination of glacial melt as a source for important rivers and aquifers, and, of course, the inevitability of millions of climate refugees, many in the world’s poorest nations. Definitely bad for business.
Add to this the increasing likelihood that oceanic acidification will profoundly affect the food chain of much of earth’s life, and the terrifying prospect of gigatons of arctic methane being released into our atmosphere and bringing a greenhouse effect of unimaginable magnitude, and the possibility of a planetary enactment of a Biblical apocalypse becomes disturbingly likely. While some Dominionists may view this as desirable, hoping for the Rapture is not a valid environmental policy.
So, Senator Brown, I hope that you can do some of your own research on this matter, and make a decision to vote rationally — in favor of strong and robust energy and climate-change legislation when it comes to the floor of the Senate. To fail to act in this matter is to leave our grandchildren a horrifying legacy: a planet burning and a population choking on its own waste.
Please, Senator Brown. Do the right thing, not the politically convenient thing.
Thank you,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: endangered species Obama Pika
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 5: A Little Brown Furry Letter
Late at night; desperately looking for a subject for tomorrow’s letter, which lead me to RL Miller’s sad article about the failure of the Obama Administration to apply Endangered Species Protection to the American Pika, a cute little mountaintop rodent.
Whew. I found a theme, and it’s one I haven’t used before. Below the letter, you can watch a Pika video.
Dear President Obama,
Your administration has done a great many things on the interlocking issues of energy independence, climate change and environmental protection during your first year in office. The enhanced powers of the EPA will prove to be an important component of the struggle against devastating climate change, while your advocacy of new rail initiatives will do an enormous amount to change Americans’ habits of petroleum use.
But there is more to do, and there are some areas in which your Administration has been curiously and unfortunately negligent. One of these is your seeming unwillingness to expand the protection provided by the Endangered Species Act. While it is easy to propose ESA protection for the charismatic megafauna which appear on posters, tee-shirts and tote-bags, it is just as important to ensure that small animals like the American Pika are properly considered. During the first year of your administration, only two new animals have been granted protection under the ESA, compared with eight (at a similar point in the Bush administration) and seventy-three (one year into Clinton’s first term). This is not a record to be proud of.
While an endangered animal’s habitat can in some cases be preserved (thus saving the species), climate change creates a far greater impact on temperature-sensitive species like the Pika. Classifying the American Pika as an Endangered Species would be a demonstration that your administration is serious about reducing the effects of catastrophic climate change, not just on the human population, but on all elements of the web of life on Earth.
Biodiversity is nature’s way of not putting all Her genetic eggs in one basket. The fact that human habits of consumption and waste is rapidly destroying these intricate interrelationships is one of the great tragedies of the age. An environmentally conscious President needs to be attentive not just to those members of the planetary community who have human rights, but to the billions of others whose lives will be blighted and destroyed by climatic devastation.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cap and trade crime against our grandchildren
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 4: The NYT Again…
A rec-listed post at Daily Kos led me to this article in the NYT. Here’s FishOutOfWater’s summary paragraph:
Democrats Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln have built an alliance, the dirty dozen, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions, to remove carbon caps and to give away huge sudsidies to the coal, nuclear, oil and gas industries.
I posted a long action diary at Kos; please go check it out if you haven’t already. But in addition to sending 50-60 faxes of an angry slogan in very large type (tomorrow’s plan), I wanted to fill my quota of erudition, and I wanted to spread a meme. I’ll need all the help I can get; please try and make this one go viral.
Defeating strong energy legislation is a crime against our grandchildren.
Here’s what I sent to the Times:
When so-called “moderate Democrats” in the Senate join Republicans in favor of passing an energy-only bill that ignores carbon emissions, their action deserves blunt language: it’s a crime against our grandchildren. With climatologists’ worst-case scenarios becoming more likely by the day, our elected representatives have chosen to fiddle while the planet starts to burn. There is no doubt who’s calling the tune: Big Oil and Big Coal.
Because the lag time between climate action and climate effect is several times longer than the elected term of a U.S. Senator, these “public servants” cannot find the courage to confront the deep pockets of the energy lobby. Who will have to cope with the effects of these Senators’ ignorant cupidity? Our grandchildren and theirs, living in a world made all but uninhabitable by the effects of catastrophic climate change. Good luck, kids. You’ll need it.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama delusional paranoia Republicans
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 2, Day 3: In The Wake Of The Crazy Comet
The Amazing Dkos/R2000 poll of self-identified Republicans came out today, and gosh-a-roonie! It certainly revealed a lot. If you haven’t read it, you owe yourself a few horrifying minutes. These are the people who control the Opposition Party in our government. They would be funny if this was a movie or a TV show, but because Republicans are making governance impossible, it’s essential that we take notice of them.
So I wrote to the President, who seems like he’s been getting a little mojo rising recently.
Dear President Obama,
By now you must have seen the results of the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll of self-identified Republicans. These statistics are horrifying and revealing. Sixty-three percent of Republicans believe you’re a socialist (although I suspect that less than one percent know what the word means). Thirty-nine percent think you should be impeached (although it’s unclear that you’ve committed an impeachable offense). A third think you’re a racist; half think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than you are. A quarter of self-identified Republicans think their states should secede from the Union. And on and on. As you correctly noted in your Q & A session with the House Republicans, they cannot compromise with you, even a little, because their base is so insanely paranoid that it will erupt at the slightest hint of collaboration with their enemy.
The Republicans represented in the R2000 poll are clutching their remote controls, desperately pushing buttons in the hope that somehow, somehow, somehow you’ll just go away. It’s easy to blame Fox News for a big part of this. But I think Fox is a symptom, not a cause. The larger problem is the erosion of the national attention span, which means that our ability to think carefully about long-term issues is essentially non-existent.
Global climate change is both a long-term and an extremely urgent issue; never has the threat to humanity’s continued survival been as serious as the routine reports of climatologists now reveal it to be. James Hansen’s “Venus” scenario is easy to dismiss as a worst-case example — until we stop to consider that almost every day the “worst-case” predictions of climate scientists turn out to be unrealistically optimistic.
The Research 2000 poll did not specifically ask its Republican respondents whether they believed the Earth was only 6000 years old, but given the other answers to related questions, it seems a safe bet that a sizable majority are Young Earth Creationists. Many are probably anxious for the Rapture, which I suppose qualifies them as pro-global-warming. How can you talk rationally about climate change to a group of people who are unable to conceptualize long spans of time, or who are eager for the Earth’s incineration?
While I applaud your adherence to an ideal of bi-partisanship, it is impossible to form agreements with an entire political demographic that is clearly delusionally paranoid. The delusional paranoids will think you’re out to get them even if you adopt the entire Republican platform. Why bother? Please, Mr. President! The time is now for you to get the Democratic majority in the Senate to pass your policy agenda through reconciliation. Healthcare, Jobs, Financial reform — all of these are essential. But my deepest area of concern is the terrible threat of climate change, for if we don’t get that one right, none of the rest will matter at all in the long run.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Business Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart Lindsey Graham
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 1, Month 2, Day 2: To Huckleberry Graham, The Distinguished Senator from South Carolina
I was looking for something else to do in today’s letter. It’s been getting tiring sending stuff out to the same media outlets and politicians, which is why I wound up writing Secretary Chu yesterday. This one goes out to the only Republican who has dared to say anything at all about climate change, Lindsey Graham. He’s pretty much an idiot in most other areas, but he’s taken quite a bit of heat from his tea-bagger constituents for daring to assert that climate change exists. He just issued a very tepid press release, so I used that as the theme for my letter, which falls into the category of Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart.
Dear Senator Graham,
As an outspoken Massachusetts liberal, I suspect that there are few areas where you and I would find agreement. But today I want to write in support of your willingness to buck the Republican Party’s denialist stance on global climate change. To deny that anthropogenic global warming exists is to embrace an anti-science agenda which will undercut America’s continued economic and technological advancement. To deny that global climate change poses a profound long-term threat to humanity as a whole is to ignore the words and projections of the scientists who have studied climatic phenomena in depth and who know more about the subject than anyone else. Make no mistake, denialism is a willful embrace of ignorance, and while ignorance sometimes makes for good politics, it always makes for bad policies.
By acknowledging the existence of global climate change, you have the potential to transform the debate from a “Democrats vs. Republicans” squabble to a genuine conversation between the informed and the ignorant.
In your press release of January 27, you state that, “The energy legislation that was passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is not strong enough to lead us to energy independence. The climate change legislation passed by the House of Representatives and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is too onerous on business and does not enjoy bipartisan support.” The first sentence is absolutely correct. The proposed legislation needs to be several orders of magnitude stronger in order to make a real difference in the area of energy independence. Your second sentence, however, does American business an injustice.
I firmly believe that American industries are second to none in their potential for innovation. To suggest that our business sector would be hindered by stringent climate-change legislation is a vote of no confidence in the ability of American industry to compete successfully under any conditions.
Let us not forget that global climate change poses the most severe existential threat that humanity has ever faced. We cannot afford to flunk this test, for it will only be given once; there are no opportunities for re-takes, and failure is fatal for all of us. Dr. James Hansen notes that the “worst-case” scenario involves uncontrolled melting of Arctic methane, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect which could move Earth’s temperatures well above the “uncomfortable” level and up to the “Venus” level.
In which case American business won’t have anybody left to buy its goods.
Granted, this is a “worst-case” scenario. But to anyone who’s been paying attention, it is a shocking reality that climatologists’ “worst-case” scenarios have been coming true as often as not over the past few years. We owe it to the future of our economy, our country and the world as a whole to get this one right.
We should be giving strong tax breaks for businesses which demonstrate genuine engagement in the struggle to reduce their carbon footprints; we should enforce strong tax penalties for businesses which ignore scientific reality in favor of short-term profit. And we must do a better job of educating the public. A strong Republican voice acknowledging the reality of global climate change and the importance of integrating scientific research into environmental and energy policy is a huge component of such public education, and I hope you will continue to tell both your colleagues and constituents the truth, regardless of its political implications for you.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Department of Energy media scientific literacy Steven Chu
by Warren
1 comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Year 1, Month 2, Day 1: Energy Secretary Chu
Go and read this post from DK Greenroots’ A Siegel, all about how Business Week practices gross deception on their readership with misleading reporting on climate-change issues. It made me pretty mad. Tomorrow’s letter may go to Business Week itself; tonight I wanted to write to them, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around all the facts in Siegel’s piece sufficiently to compose a letter that would make any sense.
So instead I thought I’d write to Energy Secretary Chu, and tell him that he and his Department would have to find some ways to edumacate the media about how to do accurate reporting.
I swear, if we could harness the Idiot Wind, all our problems would be solved.
This letter was pretty long and kind of sprawling. I was too tired to write concisely.
Dear Secretary Chu,
I write as a concerned citizen. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where the threat of environmental devastation on a planetary scale no longer hangs over humanity’s head.
I am not a climatologist, or even any kind of scientist. But I am scientifically literate to the point where it is obvious to me that the difficult truths of global climate change are constantly overwhelmed by corporate-funded denialism and misdirection. The steady rise of atmospheric CO2, the acidification of our oceans, and the newest and most troubling trend of melting Arctic methane all suggest that the most profound existential crisis humanity has ever faced is at hand — and is being resolutely ignored.
Obviously we need concrete and practical solutions, and equally obviously they have to pass political muster. I do not envy your job, for it is self-evident that you (as an administrator) have had to approve initiatives which you (as a scientist) know are foolish and almost certainly a waste of time. So-called “Clean Coal” is one such notion; the idea that capture and sequestration of carbon emissions from burning coal could ever be cost-effective is absurd.
What can you and your colleagues in the Department of Energy do to promote scientific literacy in the media? Perhaps you could announce a regular series of awards from the DoE for the highest-quality scientific reporting in print and broadcast areas — with a special “bottom-of-the-bucket” category to highlight the worst deceptions perpetrated on an uninformed public by our corporatized media establishment. Awards announcements could be made with great fanfare, providing positive reinforcement for journalists and media figures who actually make the effort to explain complex subjects without lapsing into caricature.
I recognize that this type of action would normally fall outside your purview as a working scientist. Alas, by accepting a Cabinet position in the Obama Administration, you have also accepted responsibility for making your department’s work make sense to the general population — a task which is all but impossible in today’s corrupt informational environment. You and your Department need to take the initiative strongly, and give the media what it needs: a circus. If you can give our ADD-affected punditocracy a better circus than that provided by corporate flacks, your message will have a chance of changing the minds of Americans.
Right now, with an increasing number of my compatriots believing that global climate change is illusory, it seems the voices funded by Big Oil and Big Coal are winning the battle. If the Venusian worst-case projections of Dr. James Hansen are accurate, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the energy companies, for within a few centuries there won’t be a human customer base for them to lie to.
Good luck.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots New York Times osama bin laden
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Day 31: The Gray Lady Redux
There’s been quite a bit of buzz about Osama Bin Laden’s recent statements on global warming. The New York Times wrote something about it…so I took the opportunity to drop a little note in their mailbox.
It is a sad state of affairs when one of the world’s most notorious criminals speaks more accurately about global climate change than many of our own elected representatives. Now it is absolutely certain that climate-change denialists will use Bin Laden’s words to suggest that realistically confronting the largest existential threat humanity has ever faced is somehow un-American, a capitulation to Al-Qaeda. I remember how conservatives responded to Soviet criticism of the USA on civil rights issues in the fifties and sixties: by calling patriots like Martin Luther King “communists,” suggesting their actions were “controlled by Moscow.” The fact that Khrushchev was a murderous thug didn’t stop him from correctly assessing American racial hypocrisy; the fact that Bin Laden is a murderous thug doesn’t mean that his statements on global warming are invalid. It just means that American conservatives are easily swayed by irrelevant ad hominem arguments.
Warren Senders