environment Politics: assholes Citizens United corporate personhood
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 28: How I Long For The Days Of “Enlightened Self-Interest”
The Washington Post runs an AP story on the corporate groups that are destroying our democracy:
Rove, who was President George W. Bush’s top political adviser, and the two Mayflower lunch partners – former GOP Chairman Ed Gillespie and Steven Law, a veteran of Capitol Hill and the Chamber of Commerce – worried that the Republican Party alone would be no match for President Barack Obama’s superb fundraising.
“Clearly there was a tremendous amount of grass-roots energy building – a grass-roots prairie fire that was building in intensity,” Law, now the Crossroads president, said in an interview. “We felt that one of the things we could do was pour gasoline on that.”
ad_iconIf voters seemed angry, so was corporate America. Obama led Congress into passing health care and financial regulation overhauls and pushed for climate legislation, all of which angered the business community.
Assholes.
The fact that corporate America was “angry” about President Obama’s calls for climate legislation reveals a lot about Corporate America (which deserves full capitalizations now that the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has affirmed its personhood). Specifically, Corporate America is mistrustful of expertise, incapable of long-term thought, lacks any conception of the common good, and is irrationally prone to anger.
A response to proposed climate-change legislation that was not distorted by these tendencies would look very different. For example, it would recognize the overwhelming scientific consensus on the reality of global warming, and acknowledge that the catastrophic consequences of unchecked climate chaos would be (to put it mildly) bad for business. If our corporate citizens were motivated by the common good rather than their quarterly profits, we ordinary human citizens would have no reason to fear them and their devastating impact on both the political and planetary atmospheres.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate zombie idiots Ken Buck
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 23: Election of the Living Dumb
Colorado senate candidate Ken Buck is a climate zombie, reports the Denver Post, although not quite in those terms. I figured I’d better insert the meme.
Ken Buck is a fine specimen of a “climate zombie,” a politician permanently possessed by the idea that climate change cannot be caused by humans. Buck’s mentor in this is, of course, the ur-Zombie, Oklahoma’s James Inhofe, whose mistrust of expertise has made him a worldwide laughingstock. With Colorado’s forests in grave danger from the side-effects of global warming (droughts, fires, beetles), one would hope that both parties’ Senate candidates could acknowledge the very sturdy relationship between scientific predictions and observable facts. While climatologists deliver warnings in the language of science (a phrase like “robust correlation” translates as “we’re facing a world of hurt unless things change PDQ”), politicians mock them in the language of ignorance (a freak snowstorm in Washington invalidates decades of research and analysis). As compelling evidence for anthropogenic global warming mounts, climate zombies like Ken Buck threaten to derail the action we desperately need.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots Tea Party
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 21: Idiocracy, Here We Come
The New York Times runs a scary scary scary article on Tea Partiers and their “Skepticism” on climate change. Misleading word, that. These people aren’t skeptics. Skeptics look at evidence. These people are dogmatic, cocksure idiots. Big difference.
The Tea Partiers and their Republican enablers are of one mind when it comes to denying the impact of climate change on our country and the world. And what a mind it is. Joining a reflexive American distrust of intellectuals with an incoherent Biblical literalism into a word salad of libertarian tropes, their opinions on global warming don’t need no stinkin’ logic. Meanwhile, of course, they are thinking and doing exactly what their corporate funders want them to do: elect Republicans who will put the kibosh on any attempt to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. These frightened men and women have been suckered. The Koch brothers and other greedy and short-sighted oil barons are manipulating them into voting against everyone’s best interests — even that of the oil companies, which will surely experience a sharp drop in profits, should our species fail to survive the coming centuries of climate chaos.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Koch Brothers Proposition 23
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Month 10, Day 20: Small-Town Paper Makes Good?
A column in the Marysville, California Appeal-Democrat outlines the issues facing Californians and includes a paragraph on Proposition 23. The Appeal-Democrat is a small paper with a daily circulation of 23,000. Maybe they’ll print this. If anyone is in their circulation area, please keep an eye open.
It’s harrowing, watching corporate groups spend millions of dollars to pass Proposition 23 and neutralize California’s powerful emissions law. The strongest such law in the country, AB 32 is a model for other states to emulate. The arguments made by Proposition 23’s proponents are full of fear-mongering and faulty logic, but that hardly matters — they’re backed by the unlimited financial resources of oil billionaires who are unwilling to sacrifice a few points of profit in the interests of the planet. Yes, this election is an important one, all right. As a Massachusetts resident, I have no voice in California’s politics — but as an environmentally aware citizen, I am watching this election with considerable apprehension. To end AB 32’s effectiveness with a spurious economic argument would be a devastating blow to hopes for similar legislation elsewhere in the country. That’s what the Koch brothers believe, too.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Dave Reichert Gene Karpinski Joe Lieberman League of Conservation Voters
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Month 10, Day 18: Idiots In High Places Rewarding One Another
The League Of Conservation Voters endorses a Republican, Dave Reichert (WA-08).
The LCV Press Release includes these words:
“We are proud to endorse Congressman Reichert for re-election because he supports policies that will not only build a clean energy economy that gets Washington’s workers back on the job, but will also reduce our dependence on foreign oil and curb harmful pollution,” said LCV Action Fund President Gene Karpinski.
You may recall that the League of Conservation Voters also endorsed Joe Lieberman in the 2006 election. Granted, Lieberman has been better on climate than he was on healthcare…but fact remains that he helped legitimate huge chunks of the Cheney administration’s acts of destruction — which surely should count against him on the environmental-good-guy-o-meter.
I go into this every time one of the LCV people call me. They sigh; it is my hope that I’m not the only one telling them this.
After I heard about the Reichert announcement, I was moved to send the following to Gene Karpinski, le grande fromage du LCV.
Gene Karpinski
League of Conservation Voters
1920 L Street, NW Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036Dear Mr. Karpinski — I’ve been wanting to get this letter off my chest for a long time — since 2006, to be exact. I’ve repeated its words fairly often; I do so every time I speak to a fundraiser from the League of Conservation Voters (at least once every three months).
I want to explain to you, just as I explain to them, why I have chosen not to give any money to the LCV. I was bitterly disappointed when your organization chose to endorse Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Connecticut Senate race. I now see you’ve done something similar in your endorsement of Washington congressman Dave Reichert.
That is to say, you’ve shot yourselves in the foot. I imagine that there are more such instances, but I don’t want to look for them; I feel soiled enough already.
There are profound flaws in your procedure for candidate endorsements, which is based on tallying the number of “pro-environment” and “anti-environment” votes by a particular legislator. But how on earth could you miss the fact that by 2006, Joe Lieberman’s panderings to the Bush Administration had allowed them to claim the blessings of bipartisanship upon their wars, their financial chicanery, their ineptitude, their environmental irresponsibility (nay, criminality)? And how on earth could you miss the fact that Dave Reichert, at a May gathering of Republican strategists, bragged that his “pro-environment” votes were just cynical gamesmanship?
To be fair, Mr. Reichert could actually be a secret environmentalist double-agent lying to his own party’s strategists. But I think it’s more likely that (as he admitted to the “Mainstream Republicans” group in 2006, speaking of his “pro-environment” votes), “…when the leadership comes to me and says, ‘Dave we need you to take a vote over here, because we want to protect you and keep this majority,’ I do it.”
By short-sightedly structuring your endorsement policy around the sole criterion of counted votes, you enable cynical politicians to manipulate the system. The mechanism is obvious; waiting until the majority of votes have been counted on a bill often allows an unscrupulous legislator to cast a politically expedient vote (one that, perhaps, makes him likelier to get endorsed by a leading environmental group) which appears to run counter to his party’s platform. Thus Dave Reichert gets your endorsement, despite the fact that his 90/10 Republican voting record has been part and parcel of the “Party of No” strategy (a strategy that has now fostered a whole Republican subculture of anti-science denialists who threaten to derail progress on climate completely). And thus Joe Lieberman got your approval.
And that’s what I tell your fund-raisers, and it’s what I’m telling you.
I’ll give you a pass on Lieberman and start donating again — if you repudiate Dave Reichert, and make a significant change in the LCV’s endorsement process.
I’d love to give you some money. I don’t have much, but you’re welcome to some of it. But I’m damned I’ll give a dime to an organization that — when it comes to the environment — can’t tell the difference between Democrats and Republicans.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
If anyone wants to contact the League of Conservation Voters to tell them something similar, here’s their contact info.
environment Politics: cap and trade Dana Milbank geo-engineering media irresponsibility
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 17: If Only You Could Geo-Engineer Stupidity Out Of The Atmosphere
Dana Milbank at the Washington Post writes an obituary for cap-and-trade, and instead recommends that Democrats try and interest their Republican colleagues in geo-engineering as a coping strategy for the coming climate apocalypse.
The Post has been instrumental in creating and fostering a level of scientific ignorance in our political class that is directly responsible for much of our current predicament (see: Will, George). And, as usual, the comments on Milbank’s article are a demonstration of the prevalence of dumb.
Cap-and-trade, originally a Republican idea, may indeed be dead in the water due to inflexible opposition in the Senate. And, as Milbank suggests, a huge geo-engineering program may be more attractive. The image of huge cannons firing sulfur into the atmosphere will appeal to politicians of both parties who are enthusiastic about big guns. But the central question is simply this: how can we as a nation accomplish any necessary actions on climate when conservatives wholeheartedly embrace a vehemently anti-science position? Of the current crop of Republican candidates, those accepting the scientific factuality of global climate change can be numbered on the fingers of one hand. What gave rise to this intransigence? Alas, our print and broadcast media, ever reluctant to undertake difficult explanations (when facile misrepresentations are easier and cheaper) must bear much of the blame for the nation’s appalling ignorance of the gravest threat humanity has ever faced.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Art Robinson climate zombie idiots
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 16: Nyte Ov De Livveng Dedd
Recently I have just typed the phrase “climate change news” into my search bar to find topics. There’s a limit to how much you can find in the Times.
So I found a column in the Eugene, Oregon newspaper, the Register-Guard. The columnist concerns noted loony and Congressional candidate Art Robinson, whose spectacular flameout on Rachel Maddow’s program is worth a watch. Bob Doppelt notes Bjorn Lomborg’s reversal on climate change, then asks Robinson if this shift by an authority he’d previously cited would make him change his mind.
Ha.
Fortunately Robinson is very unlikely to prevail in this district. But it seemed like a good theme for a letter addressing the general rise of climate zombies.
Art Robinson is distinctive among the current crop of climate denialists running for public office only in that his academic background arms him with a repertoire of useful scientific phrases, the better to misrepresent and misinterpret the work of actual professional climatologists (who agree overwhelmingly on the human causes of global climate change). Other Republican candidates, for the most part, do their misrepresenting and misinterpreting without the benefit of advanced degrees in unrelated scientific fields. Robinson is an extreme example of an increasingly prominent national phenomenon, the “climate zombie” — a politician with an ideological commitment to ignore scientific evidence and expertise when it’s inconvenient. The number of such “zombies” running for office around the country is a disturbing reminder of how far the G.O.P. has fallen; Republican candidates now are unable to address an inconvenient reality: anthropogenic global warming is settled science, and we ignore it at our peril.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate bill false equivalence media irresponsibility
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Month 10, Day 5: Pulling Out All The Stops
The New Yorker ran a beautifully written and profoundly depressing piece by Ryan Lizza outlining all the contributing factors to the failure of climate change legislation in this Congress. It’s a must-read…but if you give a shit, it’ll make you furious and depressed.
I employed maximum possible erudition in my letter, the better to tickle their editorial fancy. As far as I could ascertain, they have no length limit, so I ran well over my usual 150 words. Let’s see; maybe I’ll get lucky!
Ryan Lizza’s exposition of our politicians’ failure to address climate change is gutwrenching. Responsibility for this potentially species-fatal incapacity can be assigned to many factors, including the ludicrously attenuated attention span of the average American consumer, the profit-fixated corporate entities which seek ever-greater control over all aspects of our distorted version of market capitalism, the pathologically negative response patterns of Republican politicians, the Big Lies peddled every day by Fox News, and the readiness of politicians of all ideological stripes to embrace what the liberal blogger “Digby” once pithily summed up as “Irrational Fear of Hippies.”
We have never encountered anything like this before in human history. In the past, existential threats to our nation, our allies or our species were effectively immediate: a civil war, an epidemic, a crazed dictator, a nuclear Armageddon. Now, confronting a danger which many respected scientists predict could end in a vast planetary die-off, we are stymied — because our politics is incompetent, structurally unable to respond to events which move on time-scales grander than those underlying our elections.
Our media establishment’s handling of this issue, by contrast, is perfectly competent, but shamefully disingenuous. By hewing to a specious doctrine of false equivalence, in which evidence compiled and correlated by hundreds of working scientists must be “balanced” by the dismissive pronunciamenti of a paid corporate shill, print and broadcast outlets have buried the threats we face from global climate chaos under a pile of irrelevancies, statistical misinterpretations, ad hominem attacks, strawmen and flat-out lies. “Those who can make you believe absurdities,” goes Voltaire’s apothegm, “can make you commit atrocities.” It seems, alas, that those who can make us disbelieve reason and evidence are making inevitable an atrocity of planetary dimensions.
Our descendants, if descendants there be, will not be kind in their assessments of our politicians, our media, and ourselves. On the other hand, given the likelihood of increasingly hostile climatic conditions in the new Anthropocene Epoch, they’ll probably be far too preoccupied with the daily struggle to survive to spend much time assigning blame. That is comfort, I suppose, of a sort.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama climate change idiots
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 4: The President Says We’re Still Gonna Do It. How? I Dunno.
I wrote about my experiences in DC in this diary on Daily Kos.
And now…
The New York Times:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama said revamping U.S. energy policy would be a top priority next year and may have to be done “in chunks” rather than through one piece of legislation, according to Rolling Stone magazine.
In an interview published on Tuesday, Obama lamented that more progress to fight climate change had not been made since he took office, and blamed the economy for that failure.
“One of my top priorities next year is to have an energy policy that begins to address all facets of our over-reliance on fossil fuels,” Obama told Rolling Stone.
My letter:
The fact that President Obama’s first two years in office were focused almost entirely on health care and financial reform rather than on climate change is a reflection of the damage that decades of Republican malfeasance and media collusion have done to our country. If we had a responsible “opposition party” instead of the aggregation of nihilists who’ve made progress impossible, the health care debate would have ended by June 2009; financial reform would have passed by September of the same year, and we’d be having a rational discussion about the pros and cons of regulating carbon emissions. If we had a responsible media, our national conversation would be just that — a conversation. Instead, we’ve heard delusions of “death panels,” blathering about “bailouts,” and a readiness to deny the overwhelming scientific evidence regarding the most serious existential threat humanity has ever faced. President Obama’s task is a formidable one.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama filibuster reform
by Warren
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Month 10, Day 3: I’m Back From DC, and Boy Are My Arms Tired
Which is why I wrote this letter the night of Thursday, September 30.
Dear President Obama,
The mid-term elections will be held in a month. Thanks to the terrifying incompetence of the Republicans, it seems relatively likely that Democrats will hold the Senate. I write begging you to use all the eloquence of which you are capable to back filibuster reform when the next session of Congress opens.
While the abuse of the filibuster by the opposition party is by now commonly recognized, it has had particularly tragic and telling effects on the fate of climate legislation. Even the meticulously crafted capitulations to the oil and coal industries which were included in the Kerry-Lieberman bill were not enough to motivate Republicans to vote for cloture.
The slow-motion disaster that is global climate change may not have an impact on the notoriously short attention span of an American citizen, but that doesn’t mean it can be safely ignored. Rather, global heating is nevertheless the most significant existential threat humanity has ever faced. While profoundly inadequate, Kerry-Lieberman was at least a start on addressing the problem. Instead, because of the malignant misuse of the filibuster, it was rendered irrelevant.
I hear that we may get a Renewable Energy Standard in the lame-duck session. Well, that’s something, even if it is like trying to put out a forest fire with a squirt gun. What we (America and humanity as a whole) really need is forceful environmental legislation that recognizes the scientific reality of climate change. What we’ll get is something different, I know. But at the very least we need a place to start. Please advocate to get climate legislation back on the Senate floor, and please advocate ending the abuse of the filibuster.
And (as a lifelong member of the Democratic “base”) I beg you: can you try and talk sense into the members of your party who seem determined to ensure that a Democratic majority will never again occur in our lifetimes? It’s very demoralizing.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders