environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots James Inhofe Senate Republicans
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 16: Easy Target….
The Tulsa World writes about James Inhofe’s attempt to end the EPA.
Sent April 7:
James Inhofe’s ignorance of science would be hilarious if he were not in a position of significant influence. This self-proclaimed “enemy of the environment” long ago sold his political power to the highest bidder: the big oil industries who have the most to lose from any sort of meaningful climate change legislation. He and his acolytes are hostile to any information that does not fit their preconceptions. Our political process was originally intended to deal with actual verifiable reality, including the consequences of our actions and of our inaction. Political grandstanding unconnected from facts is a prescription for disaster. In reflexively obeying their corporate paymasters, Mr. Inhofe and other members of the GOP undermine their own party’s credibility; their cavalier dismissal of the entire climate science community is grossly irresponsible. With all due respect to the Senator’s fervently held beliefs, waiting for the Rapture cannot substitute for actual fact-based policy.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialists idiots James Inhofe Lindsey Graham Senate Republicans
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 15: Soon They’ll Write Legislation By Stirring Bird Entrails With A Stick.
The LA Times reports an extremely welcome piece of news:
WASHINGTON–The Obama administration and its Senate allies beat back a months-long effort by Congressional Republicans to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases, the heat-trapping emissions most scientists believe is the main contributor to global climate change.
The votes were the culmination of efforts in both chambers of Congress over the last few months to cut back on the EPA’s regulatory powers.
The efforts focus on limiting EPA’s program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles and more recently, stationary sources like power plants and oil refineries, the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
I’ll take what I can get, these days. Sent in a state of extreme exhaustion on April 6:
Most of this country’s citizens recognize that clean air, clean water and resilient regional ecosystems are important and essential components of our national well-being. Sadly, this appears lost on scientifically ignorant GOP legislators whose eagerness to undercut any and all environmental programs seems almost gleefully nihilistic. At a time when the incontrovertible facts of global climate change are accepted by the overwhelming majority of the world’s experts in climate science, Senator Inhofe’s opposition to meaningful action on the reduction of greenhouse emissions is petulant, not principled. Meanwhile, erstwhile climate action advocate Lindsey Graham renounced his principles when he faced the electoral consequences of the tea-party’s anti-reality stance. While the defeat of Republican efforts to gut the Environmental Protection Agency is good news for all Americans, the fact that our politics is massively populated by people who reject scientific evidence when it’s ideologically inconvenient bodes ill for our future.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republicans
by Warren
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 14: The Science Of Suspended Disbelief
T-Paw thinks there’s still some diversity of opinion on climate change, says the Iowa Independent, which is heavily festooned with tea-party advertisements. I doubt this will get printed. Sent April 5:
Tim Pawlenty’s got it right. The science on climate change is indeed divided. Let’s look more closely at this division of opinion among climate scientists — the people who’ve studied the subject in greatest depth. A whopping three percent of climatologists disagree with the rest of their profession about the human causes of climate change. Ninety-seven to three. In fairness to Governor Pawlenty, it’s likely that his only acquaintance with climate science is at the hands of Republican political consultants, who’ve determined through rigorous statistical analysis (there’s some science, right there!) that accepting the overwhelming expert consensus on anthropogenic global warming equates to an instant and overwhelming electoral loss at the hands of tea-partiers. The future of our country and our civilization be damned; what’s important to Mr. Pawlenty and the rest of the Republican Flat-Earth society is to continue enabling the profit margins of their corporate masters.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes Barack Obama denialists idiots nuclear power timidity
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 11: Tearing My Hair.
The April 2 issue of the Boston Globe has a column by Derrick Jackson noting the seeming inability of our president to actually, you know, do or say something that might have an effect on the climate change front:
PRESIDENT OBAMA seems increasingly drained of the juice needed to power up a modern vision on energy. Completely absent from his address this week at Georgetown University was his promise as a candidate to go after windfall profits of oil companies and reinvest the money into wind, solar, and biofuels. Instead, he promised to expedite new shallow and deepwater oil drilling permits, even as top environmentalists say many questions remain after the BP spill disaster.
More than ever, he is wedded to pursuing “clean coal’’ and nuclear power. Meanwhile, radiation from the Japan nuclear disaster was measured thousands of times above safety levels in seawater and groundwater near the plant and in soil 25 miles away, at levels double those found in areas declared inhabitable around Chernobyl.
Most important, there continues to be no direct message to the American people that we are living in an unsustainable fantasy, consuming a quarter of the world’s energy. There was no hint of things that would instantly make Americans rethink consumption, such as a gas tax. For the moment, the road-blocking Republicans are winning the day with an ethos symbolized by Governor Haley Barbour of Mississippi, a potential presidential candidate. Last week Barbour told Iowa Republicans, “We need more oil. We need more gas. We need more coal. We need more nuclear. We need more American energy.”
Jackson is one of the best columnists writing today; I’m very glad he’s at the Globe. This was sent April 2, and has been published:
The timidity of the Obama administration when it comes to the transformation of America’s energy economy is profoundly disturbing. The facts of climate change are firmly established, with only a few petroleum-funded contrarians on the fringes of a global scientific consensus. The economics of renewable energy look more attractive every day, as are the geopolitical ramifications of getting more of our national energy requirements from within our own borders. The long-term costs of fossil fuels are harder and harder to hide, as we confront the health effects and environmental impacts of our profligate burning of oil and coal. Why, then, is the President so leery of taking a strong stand? The pusillanimity of the present administration only makes sense when viewed diagnostically: the extent to which our politics is paralyzed on this issue is a measure of the disproportionate influence of big oil and big coal in our nation’s governance.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 10: Ignorance Is Very Expensive
The just-released Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study confirms what we all know:
Preliminary results from a controversial study of global temperature data confirm the overall warming trend long reported by government scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom, the study’s director told a House panel today.
The warming trend detected by scientists involved in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study — a rise of 0.7 degree Celsius since 1957 — “is very similar” to the findings of independent analyses by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.K. Hadley Centre, study Chairman Richard Muller said.
“The world temperature data has sufficient integrity to be used to determine temperature trends,” said Muller, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Published by the New York Times. One hopes they’ll get on board and stop equivocating about climate change.
This letter took a long time to write for a “Republicans are idiots” motif. The idea’s shape was tricky, and I’m still not 100% satisfied. Nevertheless, this went to the NYT on April 1:
While the Berkeley study is another piece of evidence added to an overwhelming consensus on climate change, it’s probably too much to ask Congress’ denialists to pay attention. These same politicians have a long history of ignoring evidence first, and saying “who could have known?” later. Who could have known the levees would break, that there weren’t any WMDs, that management was cutting corners on the Deepwater Horizon? The increasing flow of scientific reports confirming the serious reality of global climate change should make it a little harder for Republican legislators to plead ignorance of the climate threat; perhaps in future decades their apologists will try and excuse their malfeasance by asking, who could have known it was a bad idea to so politicize scientific evidence that expert witnesses became props in a cynical theater of ignorance, and policy was crafted in utter disregard of facts? Who could have known?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: assholes denialists idiots Republican obstructionism scientific consensus
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 9: Maybe They’re Just Waiting For The Rapture?
It’s March 31 as I write this; it’s supposed to snow heavily tomorrow, which is crazy. Boston weather is like that anyway, and as we enter the new Anthropocene Epoch it’s going to get more and more so.
There was an excellent article in the Miami Herald giving a good slam to climate change denialism. It’s well worth a read:
Recently, I went to Capitol Hill with members of Generation Hot (and the Sierra Club, our country’s largest grass-roots environmental organization) to confront the politicians whose denials and delay have done so much to land Generation Hot in this predicament. We wanted to know why my daughter and the other 2 billion members of Generation Hot have to suffer because Republicans in Congress refuse to accept what virtually every major scientific organization in the world, including our own National Academy of Sciences, has said: Man-made climate change is happening now and extremely dangerous.
Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who has famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” told our group that “the science is mixed” and his scientists know better than ours. Frank Maisano, a public-relations consultant for big energy companies, told us that “the science doesn’t matter”; what matters is what’s politically feasible.
“The science does matter,” Caroline Selle, a member of our group who works for the Energy Action Coalition, responded in a blog the following day. Selle added: “We face a climate catastrophe that will define our generation and the future of our country, and the solutions to this crisis will create jobs and improve public health. So why aren’t we acting? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: Capitol Hill is swarming with ‘climate cranks’ – politicians willing to trade our future for their own political gain.”
I’m very tired, sore and cranky today. Sent on March 31:
“Generation Hot” is a compelling phrase, and I’m indebted to Mark Hertsgaard for adding it to my lexicon. It is a sad commentary on the state of public discourse in America that the gravest threat our species has faced in millennia is treated as fodder for political grandstanding rather than informed discussion. The online comments on any article about climate change reveals the degree of emotional investment felt by climate denialists, who feel compelled to reject scientific expertise in favor of vague, implausible conspiracy theories (look out! Al Gore’s gonna take away your SUV!). In the 1950s and 60s, America’s positive attitude toward science led us to unimaginable heights of achievement; in the past few decades, ideological rejection of reality-based thinking has made us a nation of scientific illiterates — and led us to the brink of climatic disaster. “Generation Hot” will rightly curse us for our ignorance and irresponsibility.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: denialism scientific consensus scientific literacy
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Year 2, Month 4, Day 7: Down Under De Nile
The Sydney Morning Herald has an excellent piece on the problems faced by scientists when they try and talk to politicians:
But scepticism, and outright denialism, is in the ascendancy since last November’s mid-term elections. So it was perhaps unsurprising that the expert pleas fell on deaf ears. A Louisiana Republican accused scientists presenting evidence of human influence on climate of holding ”elitist, arrogant views”. Another insisted that ”we should not put the US economy into a straitjacket because of a theory that hasn’t been proven”.
The scientific champions were equally vehement. One Democrat equated the bill to an attempt to repeal gravity, while another hauled a tower of published climate investigations to the meeting and argued that if Copernicus, Galileo, Newton and Einstein were testifying, Republicans would still not accept the science until Antarctica had melted.
Californian heavyweight Henry Waxman called Republicans a ”party of science deniers” and declared that they ”can’t cure cancer by passing a bill that declares smoking safe. And they can’t stop climate change by declaring it a hoax.
Yup. Got that right.
This letter gave me the chance to use the word “apothegm,” which always makes me feel rather grand.
Sent March 29:
The relationship between science and politics has always been confused and problematic, for the quest for truth and the quest for power are two very different things. Scientific integrity is built upon the willingness of each practitioner to change his or her mind when carefully examined evidence demands it. Political integrity, contrariwise, is summed up by Simon Cameron’s apothegm: “An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.” And nowhere in modern life is the science/politics equation more fraught with consequences than in the non-debate over climate change, currently happening both in the United States and Australia. The scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming is overwhelming and universally accepted; a few contrarian voices are amplified by disproportionate media attention to create the impression that the “science isn’t settled.” And our petroleum-owned politicians can stay bought, maintaining their “integrity” by ignoring genuine evidence if it’s ideologically inconvenient.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: coal EPA mercury pollution
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 31: They DO Believe In “Free-Market Fairy Dust,” Though.
It’s gotta be pretty rare to find an anti-pollution editorial in a Coal State paper. The Lexington Herald-Leader gives us an example:
And after 20 years of hemming and hawing, it’s time to start controlling the 386,000 tons of toxins that rain down on this country each year from coal-fired power plants, the No. 1 source of air pollution.
It’s past time, really.
A bipartisan majority of Congress in 1990 ordered the EPA to get to work on nationwide standards for toxic emissions from power plants. If people should be alarmed about anything, it’s that it’s taken so long and that the health of so many has suffered during the delay.
As the crisis at the Fukushima reactors reminds us, invisible substances in the air can do grave harm to human health and lasting damage to the environment.
Although I didn’t mention Semmelweiss by name, he was very much present in my thinking as I composed this. Mailed March 22:
It is astonishing in this day and age that some people still deny the harmful potential of microscopic particulates in the atmosphere. By now, most of us agree that germs, bacteria and viruses are the principal media through which disease is propagated — a theory validated in the late 1800s in the face of vehement denial. Why can’t we accept that atmospheric mercury poses a danger to us, to our children, and to the environment in which we live? In large part it’s because the oil and coal industries devote significant resources to obscuring the truth and elevating falsehoods — for example, asserting that pollution regulations on coal plants are “job-killers,” while conveniently ignoring pollution’s catastrophic health and environmental impacts. Similar mendacity is at work denying the planetary impact of CO2 emissions. Why should we trust billionaires whose fortunes depend on our continued consumption of oil and coal?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: agriculture denialism USDA
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 30: How Ya Gonna Keep ’em Down On The Farm?
The Washington Post reports on a new initiative from the US Department of Agriculture:
MINNEAPOLIS — The federal government is investing $60 million in three major studies on the effects of climate change on crops and forests to help ensure farmers and foresters can continue producing food and timber while trying to limit the impact of a changing environment.
The three studies take a new approach to crop and climate research by bringing together researchers from a wide variety of fields and encouraging them to find solutions appropriate to specific geographic areas. One study will focus on Midwestern corn, another on wheat in the Northwest and a third on Southern pine forests.
Shifting weather patterns already have had a big effect on U.S. agriculture, and the country needs to prepare for even greater changes, said Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And since the changes are expected to vary from region to region, he said different areas will need different solutions. Some areas may gain longer growing seasons or suffer more frequent floods, while others may experience more droughts or shorter growing seasons.
Given that the WaPo has been climate-denial central in its OpEd pages for years (George Will primus inter pares), it’s always refreshing to see that its news division can still reprint an article from the AP.
Sent March 21:
It’s good news that the Department of Agriculture is putting some money towards preparation for the multivariate threats presented by runaway climate change. There is no doubt that the extreme weather events that accompany global warming present a grave danger to America’s agricultural productivity. Severe precipitation can erode farmland, destroy crop plants, or affect cultivation and harvesting. Furthermore, given the prevalence of monocultures on most large-scale farms, it is sobering to realize that regional temperature increases of only a few degrees can impact plant productivity significantly. But the USDA’s research isn’t enough. We must recognize throughout this country that denial of climatic facts is no longer an option; “tea-party” Republicans and timid coal-state Democrats both need to address scientific reality. There is no time to waste. If we fail to act decisively on the causes of anthropogenic global warming, a devastated agricultural system will be the least of our worries.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: conservation Dick Cheney energy policy Fukushima Japan
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Year 2, Month 3, Day 27: You Call THAT a Disaster? Hah! I’ll Show YOU a Disaster!
John Sanbonmatsu has a piece in the Christian Science Monitor that pulls no punches in its headline: “Japan’s nuclear crisis pales in comparison to destruction from global climate change.” It’s well worth a read.
Sent March 18:
The Fukushima disaster is sure to have extensive generational repercussions, although it’s essentially a short-lived phenomenon; an isolated failure of technology in response to an extreme seismic event. As John Sanbonmatsu makes clear, the ongoing crisis of climate change is a slow-motion catastrophe of much greater magnitude and significance. Japan’s agony provides an opportunity to realize how inadequately we’ve prepared for worst-case events, combining a touching faith in technological solutions with a blinkered inability to address problems before they become emergencies. We need increased investment in renewable energy; we need a “smart grid”; we need updated infrastructure. But more importantly, the national philosophy underlying our approach to energy must be completely transformed. American energy policy must be based first and foremost on principles of efficiency and reduced consumption; the petrocentric Cheneyism that snidely decreed conservation merely a “sign of personal virtue” is in its essence both anti-American and anti-human.
Warren Senders