environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Mitt Romney Republicans
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 17: King of Hearts
Mitt Romney acknowledges the existence of climate change. Gosh. The NY Daily News is all a-flutter:
Mitt Romney, the newest Republican to declare himself a candidate for President, sounded suspiciously like a Democrat when he said Friday that global warming is real.
“I don’t speak for the scientific community, of course,” Romney said at a Town Hall-type meeting in New Hampshire. “But I believe the world’s getting warmer.”
Romney then added, “And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that.”
That’s heresy in many GOP circles – and a position the other Republican candidates have not taken in public.
Damned if I know what to think about this. I just used it as the hook for a standard Republicans-are-idiots screed. Sent June 3:
It’s testimony to the weirdness of American presidential politics that a perfectly reasonable statement from a Republican contender is viewed as an unforgivable deviation from the party line. The cries of outrage over Mitt Romney’s words on global climate change are coming from the GOP’s mainstream, which has now completely rejected actual science in favor of increasingly improbable conspiracy theories involving Al Gore and compulsory re-education camps for SUV drivers. The few remaining conservatives who are prepared to acknowledge the overwhelming scientific consensus on the human causes of global warming have been relegated to their party’s “lunatic fringe,” which must be an unusual experience for them. While Mr. Romney’s words confirm that he’s not completely off-the-wall, in an electoral environment which values wackiness over factuality, that won’t work in his favor. Someday Republicans will acknowledge the laws of physics — but it’s not going to happen before the 2012 election. Unfortunately.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism greed Republican obstructionism World Bank
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 16: True Crime Comics
The Gray Lady heralds the news that Paul Wolfowitz’ erstwhile stamping ground has decided to get involved. That’s good news, I suppose. The Big Dog certainly thinks so:
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — The World Bank signed an agreement on Wednesday with mayors from 40 of the world’s biggest cities to work on technical and financial assistance for projects to minimize the effects of climate change.
The deal, announced at the C40 large cities climate meeting here, will ease access to financing for climate-change-reduction projects. It was hailed by many of the mayors, including Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City, and by former President Bill Clinton, who attended the event as part of a new partnership with Mr. Bloomberg.
“The World Bank announcement is terrifically important,” Mr. Clinton said. “It will give credibility to these projects to get private capital.”
But there’s only one thing that can change a denialist’s mind.
Sent June 2:
The World Bank’s support of climate change mitigation projects cannot reverse the accelerating consequences of the greenhouse effect — despite the prodigious technical and intellectual resources of our civilization, we haven’t yet figured out ways to evade the laws of physics. Still, the Bank’s announcement is a positive development, both because it will spur much-needed investments in ecologically wise urban planning, and because it will make it that much harder for the climate denialists and oil profiteers in America’s dysfunctional political system to continue rationalizing their unwillingness to address the issue with spurious economic arguments. While environmental reasons will never spur Republican legislators to address climate change, once renewable energy and sustainable development are really where the money is, Willie Sutton’s oft-quoted motivation may just do the trick.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 12: Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain
The Austin Statesman runs an AP article on the sudden rash of Republican presidential wannabes jettisoning their previous “well, maybe” positions on climate change, the better to appeal to their knuckle-dragging base:
WASHINGTON — One thing that Tim Pawlenty, Jon Huntsman, Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have in common: These GOP presidential contenders are running away from their past positions on global warming .
All four have stepped back from previous stances on the issue, either apologizing outright or softening what they said earlier. And those who haven’t fully recanted are under pressure to do so.
It’s an indicator of a shift on the issue among conservative Republicans, who have an outsize influence in the party’s presidential primary elections. Over the past few years, Gallup polling has shown a decline in the share of Americans saying that global warming’s effects have already begun — from a high of 61 percent in 2008 to 49 percent in March. . In 2008, 50 percent of conservatives said they believed global warming already is having effects; that figure dropped to 30 percent this year. By contrast, among liberals and moderates there’s been little movement, and broad majorities say warming is having an impact now.
These people are a clear and present danger to all of us.
Sent May 30:
Republican readiness to abandon any vestige of fact-based policy on climate change is unsurprising; these politicians have without exception declared their preferential allegiance to the short-term profitability of their sponsors in the fossil fuel industry. It’s too bad, for the conservative “base” badly needs to hear some plain talk about the reality of global warming and its implications for this country and the world. While tea partiers eagerly imagine the existential terrors of Sharia law, gay marriage, and universal health care, the genuine threat posed by increasing greenhouse gases is ignored, misunderstood and ridiculed. The facts are in: if the evidence for Iraqi WMD’s was as robust as that for human-caused climate change, we’d have found loose nukes on sale in the bazaars of Baghdad. But no GOP primary candidate dares to acknowledge this inconvenient reality. Our descendants will have harsh words for these willfully ignorant hypocrites and their enablers.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Bill Clinton Michael Bloomberg
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 11: Bill and Mike’s Excellent Vacation
Clinton and Bloomberg are going to tackle climate change together. What fun!
WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton and Michael R. Bloomberg have circled each other warily for a decade, ever since Mr. Clinton landed in Harlem after leaving the White House and Mr. Bloomberg ascended from a hugely successful business career to become the mayor of New York City. They have appeared together at a few civic functions, dined out a couple of times a year and hacked at golf balls on the same course.
But until now they have never joined forces on a project with global reach that could advance both of their legacies. They are taking on an issue — climate change — that may well shape the world’s economic and social future for decades to come.
Good for them, I suppose. Sent May 29:
Bill Clinton understates things: climate change isn’t merely one of the world’s two or three biggest challenges, but the most significant problem we’ve faced in the history of our civilization. By far. All the agenda items commonly represented at meetings of the world’s movers and shakers: the endless wars, incessant bickerings over trade, and our violations of what have only recently been recognized as “human rights” — all deal with essentially short-term concerns, and all can at least potentially be solved with enough careful discussion and the gradual development of mutual understanding between tribes, cultures and nations. The greenhouse effect and the laws of physics, by contrast, will be indifferent to Mr. Clinton’s eloquence and to Mr. Bloomberg’s business acumen. All their fine words will amount to nothing unless we — all of us — can stop taking carbon out of the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cap and trade Chris Christie RGGI
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 9: Only Nixon Could Go To China?
Erstwhile climate zombie Chris Christie (NJ-GOV) has apparently seen the light. Or seen something, anyway. He’s simultaneously asserting that climate change is real (and anthropogenic!) while withdrawing New Jersey from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie announced plans yesterday to pull the Garden State out of the nation’s only operating cap-and-trade system, spurring environmental anger, conservative cheers and speculation about his national ambitions.
It also stirred confusion about the governor’s legal authority and what will happen to the carbon trading program, which caps utility carbon dioxide emissions in 10 Northeastern and mid-Atlantic states, at a time when national climate legislation appears dead on Capitol Hill.
At a news conference in Trenton, N.J., the Republican governor said he believed after months of study and meetings with scientists that humans were causing climate change and that his government needed to put policies in place to curb warming temperatures. That is a shift from last year, when Christie expressed doubts about the science behind global warming.
It’s a little like the joke about your mother-in-law driving off the cliff in your new Cadillac. Except that I love my mother-in-law, and Cadillacs (at least the ones I’ve driven) are overpriced and grotesque pieces of shit.
Sent May 27:
New Jersey’s Governor Christie’s sudden readiness to embrace climate facts while rejecting any climate action is a real headscratcher. The governor may be trying to appease environmentalists with a verbal gesture while mollifying his corporatist base with something more substantial. It’s barely possible that his withdrawal from the RGGI’s cap-and-trade policy will balance his acknowledgment of climate change with the paranoid and anti-science tea-partiers who hold the key to Republican primary success in 2012. It is a sad commentary on the state of our contemporary politics that a politician’s public recognition of a genuine threat to our civilization cannot be heard unless it’s couched in the cynical language of short-term political expediency. It would be splendid if Mr. Christie were able to convince the rabidly anti-science Republican base of the facts of climate change; even better would be the news that he’d succeeded in changing the minds of his corporate sponsors.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama corporate irresponsibility Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 6: Take A Deep Breath. Now Cough, Please.
The President was in England recently, and addressed Parliament — without, apparently, mentioning climate much at all:
“No country can hide from the dangers of carbon pollution, which is why we must build on what was achieved in Copenhagen and Cancun, to leave our children a planet that is safer and cleaner,” Obama said in one of only two references to climate change brought on by human activity.
In a reference to the ongoing struggle to emerge from economic recession, Obama added, “The successes and failures of our own past can serve as an example for emerging economies: that it’s possible to grow without polluting, that lasting prosperity comes not from what a nation consumes, but from what it produces and from the investments it makes in its people and its infrastructure.”
The latter comment appears to be directed in part at China and India, whose spectacular economic growth threatens to multiply emissions of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. The negotiations to renew a global climate pact, held in Copenhagen in 2009 and last year in Cancun, have been thwarted by tensions among developed and developing economies.
I had a version of this letter a while back in the Boston Globe. Sent May 25:
The Obama administration’s reluctance to address the problems of climate change is by now hardly a surprise. Given the vociferous nature of the denialist forces in Republican politics, and the pusillanimity of the media which should by rights be sounding the alarm, it is hardly surprising that the President has chosen to avoid the issue whenever possible. But this is not only because the GOP ranks are filled with “climate zombies,” ideologically fixated on absurd anti-science conspiracy theories, and it’s not only that the fourth estate has abdicated its responsibility to genuine journalism. Mr. Obama’s reluctance to use the phrase “climate change” must be understood diagnostically, as an indicator of the extent to which both political parties are controlled by the same corporate interests. Transforming our energy economy will be all but impossible until the fossil fuel industry can be persuaded that planetary survival is as profitable as species suicide.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialism idiots Republican obstructionism Rick Scott
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 3: Rick’s A Dick
The Miami Herald’s Fred Grimm has a column reprinted in the Kansas City Star, noting the ignorance of Rick Scott and the problems it presents:
Climate scientists are lending their computer modeling and data analysis and research findings and learned assumptions to the new governor’s first state hurricane conference this week. Gov. Rick Scott seems fine with that, as long as the brainy guys confine their theories to the short term.
In his short speech opening the conference Wednesday, for example, Scott didn’t object to warnings that Florida is statistically likely to absorb a big hit in 2011. He promised Florida would be ready. “We’re going to be very prepared.”
Scott, however, only accepts climate science devoted to the upcoming hurricane season. When it comes to the long-term stuff – the overwhelming research that warns of man-made global warming – he remains Florida’s denier in chief.
Idiot. Buffoon. Psychopath. Sociopath.
Sent May 22:
Of course Florida governor Rick Scott has seen nothing to persuade him that global climate change is real and dangerous. He’s a perfect specimen of the modern Republican politician: obsessed with short-term gain, oblivious to long-term consequences. For Governor Scott and others of his ilk, “future generations” exist only as a phrase to be used in public in order to manipulate low-information voters. Like the Rapturists whose vision of the future ended last Saturday, these politicians think no further than the next election cycle; their corporate sponsors, similarly, think no further than the next fiscal year’s profits.
When it comes to the dangers posed by climate change, we need genuinely far-sighted leadership — leaders who are ready to confront the scientifically confirmed bad news head on and help all of us understand what we as a country need to do in order to secure a sustainable future for our descendants.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes climate zombies florida idiots ocean levels Republican obstructionism Rick Scott
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 2: How Many Times Must A Man Turn His Head?
The Miami Herald runs a piece on how climate change has become a low priority for Florida’s government since the Scott takeover. Big surprise.
Four hundred scientists gathered in Copenhagen recently to talk about the warming temperatures in the Arctic. Their conclusion: The Arctic’s glaciers are melting faster than anyone expected due to man-made climate change.
As a result, the world’s sea level will rise faster than previously projected, rising at least two feet 11 inches and perhaps as high as five feet three inches by 2100, they said.
In low-lying Florida, where 95 percent of the population lives within 35 miles of its 1,200 miles of coastline, a swelling of the tides could cause serious problems. So what is Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection doing about dealing with climate change?
“DEP is not pursuing any programs or projects regarding climate change,” an agency spokeswoman said in an email to the Times earlier this month.
(snip)
Crist’s successor, Gov. Rick Scott, doesn’t think climate change is real, even though it’s accepted as fact by everyone from NASA to the Army to the Vatican.
“I’ve not been convinced that there’s any man-made climate change,” Scott said last week. “Nothing’s convinced me that there is.”
That guy is really a pustulent sore on the body politic. Sent May 21:
When Governor Scott pronounces himself unpersuaded about the reality of global climate change, saying that nothing’s convinced him of its existence, he reveals more about himself and the contemporary Republican party he represents than about the state of contemporary climate science. In the world of science, nobody needs convincing anymore; evidence for the human causes and catastrophic consequences of climate change is overwhelming and utterly unambiguous. In GOP-world, however, the laws of physics and natural phenomena are subordinate to popular preference; the disasters attendant to the greenhouse effect will be nullified by tea-party decree. Why isn’t Mr. Scott convinced? Hint: it’s not because he’s examined the evidence. Rather, it’s because he (along with his ideological allies throughout the country) is philosophically opposed to any policy that doesn’t generate higher profit margins for the fossil fuel industry. The Governor’s already made up his mind; don’t confuse him with the facts.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Army Conservatives denialists geopolitical strategy idiots military wars
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Year 2, Month 6, Day 1: I Wanna Go To Andorra
The Guardian (UK) notes that the US armed forces are actively preparing for the problems of climate change:
Federal legislation to combat climate change is quashed for the foreseeable future, scuttled by congressional climate cranks who allege the climate-science jury is still out. What’s become clear is that, for some, the jury will always be out. We can’t stack scientific facts high enough to hop over the fortified ideological walls they’ve erected around themselves. Fortunately, though, a four-star trump card waits in the wings: the US national security apparatus.
The comments are priceless. Sent May 20:
The cognitive dissonance involved in being a modern-day Republican is extreme, and it will no doubt be further exacerbated by the conclusions drawn by the United States military on the dangers posed by climate change. With a record that includes decades of posturing about “deferring to the generals” on defense issues, the GOP is now in a bit of a box when it comes to responding to the armed forces’ consensus on the strategic consequences of the greenhouse effect. Forced by the exigencies of Republican primary elections to deny simultaneously both scientific evidence and the advice of their military leaders, these anti-science legislators have an impossible needle to thread. Were the issues involved not ones of such great moment, the dilemma of contemporary conservatives would be irresistibly comical. Alas, this is no laughing matter — an assessment bolstered by every single strategic analysis of climate change and its epiphenomena.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: CO2 Great Britain greenhouse emissions
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Year 2, Month 5, Day 28: Great. Really Great.
Great Britain does the right thing:
BRUSSELS — Britain is poised to announce some of the world’s most ambitious goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions — a striking example of a government committing to big environmental initiatives while also pursuing austerity measures.
Chris Huhne, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, is expected to release a statement on Tuesday that the British government will set in law a goal to cut its greenhouse gas emissions about 50 percent by 2025.
That reduction, based on 1990 levels, would be far deeper than the European Union’s goal of cutting emissions 20 percent by 2020, and it would mean that Britain would make faster emissions cuts than other similar size countries, including Germany. The goal could require households to spend on new energy-saving devices for the home. It could also revive stalled government support for large projects, like those that capture power from tides and that bury carbon dioxide emissions.
Sent on May 16:
What a pleasure it is to read about a governmental response to climate change that takes the threat seriously enough, although it’s too bad that the government in question isn’t our own. Britain’s laudable program for phasing out greenhouse emissions shows that there are still a few places in the world where politicians don’t ignore scientific expertise as a matter of policy. In the US, alas, an anti-reality party controls half of Congress, effectively paralyzing us when it comes to climate issues. If global warming’s effects were simply props for the usual political theater, it wouldn’t really matter — but given that they’re increasingly likely to include what biologists delicately call an “evolutionary bottleneck” for our own species as well as countless others, isn’t it time for American politicians to emulate Britain, and get down to the serious work of changing our national energy economy once and for all?
Warren Senders