environment Politics: 350 Barack Obama CO2 crisis
by Warren
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Month 6, Day 26: It’s going to be hot.
Please read this. Make sure everyone you know reads it.
This one is short enough that I’m going to write it by hand and send it to him. Why don’t you do something, too?
I’m going to Revere Beach mid-morning for “Hands Across The Sand.” How about you?
Dear President Obama,
I write to emphasize the urgency of the crisis. According to recently released NOAA data, atmospheric CO2 is now at 393 parts per million. That number by itself is bad news, for it’s well above the safe maximum for a climate suitable for humans. But it’s not the worst news. The worst news is the increase in atmospheric CO2 is getting faster and faster.
Americans need to relearn a lot of habits of conservation and frugality with respect to nature’s resources. The BP disaster and the hundreds of other oil spills around the world are a sad testimony to the pervasiveness of waste. At this crucial moment in history, we cannot continue our profligate ways — for we are turning our beautiful blue planet into a greenhouse gas chamber.
The problem of carbon emissions must be tackled with all the resources available. Of all the things we cannot afford to waste, the most precious is time.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate legislation Democrats Harry Reid HIgh-stakes
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Month 6, Day 25: Okay, I’m In.
Well, I just read this story by RL Miller at DK. She shows signs of optimism that Harry Reid will be able to pull something off. I sure hope so. Friday and this weekend I’m going to try to send this as a fax to every senator. All 100 of ’em. If Harry’s ready to gamble, so am I.
UPDATE, FRIDAY 3 PM: I’ve faxed forty (40) senators so far. Looks like I’ll be done by tomorrow. Yay me.
Dear Senator — I sent a fax earlier this week, urging your support for a genuinely robust bill that addresses the terrible threat of climate change. This fax is going both to members of the Democratic and Republican caucus. I will address each party separately.
Republicans: Now is not the time to play politics. Now is the time to be attentive to a genuine threat to our nation’s security. The U.S. Military and the C.I.A. both recognize the potential dangers of a world transformed by catastrophic global warming — why doesn’t the Republican Party? I know Rush Limbaugh doesn’t believe it, and I know James Inhofe doesn’t believe it. The thing is, they’re wrong. Climate change is real, it is caused by human behavior, and the question our country faces is whether to address it now, or wait for it to reach horrifying extremes. Do we deal with it when it shows, or when it blows? Please support a strong climate bill.
Democrats: A climate bill is a jobs bill. The technologies needed to get the American people and the world off fossil fuels once and for all can be developed here in the U.S.A. Where is our faith in American initiative, innovation and inspiration? When did we go from being a “can do” society to being one that complains, “it’s too hard”? A powerful climate bill will effect an economic transformation. Please support such a bill.
Whether we pass this bill or not, “Business As Usual” is no longer an option. Our ways of energy consumption are going to change. The only question is whether we change them voluntarily, with enthusiasm and a spirit of national unity and optimism — or whether they’re changed for us, by an out-of-control climate and a poisoned ocean. The choice is yours.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corruption Martin Feldman offshore drilling
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Month 6, Day 23: The Dolphins Are Full Of Oil. Why Should Federal Judges Be Any Different?
So the judge who overturned the drilling moratorium turns out to own a bunch of stock in oil and drilling companies. Gosh! Who could have expected it?
Time Magazine ran an AP story on the injunction, but didn’t mention the Judge’s questionable investing practices, so I sent them the following:
It should come as no surprise that Judge Martin Feldman, who just blocked the administration’s proposed moratorium on deepwater drilling, appears have substantial investments in companies involved in the offshore oil industry. Judge Feldman, according to 2008 reports, even owns stock in Transocean, the owners of the ill-fated Deepwater Horizon platform. That Mr. Feldman did not immediately recuse himself from the case is revealing; it suggests that such a level of financial intimacy between the oil industry and the judiciary is not particularly remarkable. Oil kills pelicans, dolphins, fish and whales. It ruins ecosystems and local economies. It is destroying the atmosphere. It sullies everything it touches — including, apparently, the administration of justice in America. Even leaving aside the threat of catastrophic climate change, that alone should be reason to shift our consumption patterns — why continue giving money to the corrupt and undeserving?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate bill Senators urgency
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Month 6, Day 22: Passing the word along…
The National Resources Defense Committee is requesting people to contact the Senators who’ll be going to the Wednesday meeting at the White house (they’re all listed at the bottom of this post) and deliver something akin to the following message:
Dear Senator,
As you go to the White House on Wednesday for the Climate and Clean Energy Meeting with the President, please keep some of these things in mind.
The American people want comprehensive energy and climate legislation. A recent Pew poll on June 14 indicated overwhelming support for measures like limits on greenhouse gases, higher efficiency standards, and a requirement that utilities produce more energy from renewable sources. This is one of the rare times when the popular thing to do is also the right thing.
There is no time to lose, and no time to waste. The polar ice caps are melting and nearly every day registers record-setting high temperatures all over the world. Our addiction to oil is crippling both our national security and and our economy — and every day the Gulf of Mexico reminds us that this is a substance of extraordinary toxicity. Our elected representatives have been unable to develop a serious, long-term, sustainable national energy plan for many decades, and now is the time. Failure cannot be an option.
With a billion dollars a day going to buy foreign oil, with our trade rivals investing heavily in clean energy industries, our economy is under assault from within; our century-long addiction to oil has finally reached the point where its unsustainability is obvious to all but a few oblivious deniers. Add catastrophic climate change to the picture and it is self-evident that we cannot afford to procrastinate; inaction, as the President said, is not an option.
Senator, we are hoping against hope that you will come out of Wednesday’s meeting with an agreement that gives us some reason for optimism. Don’t let us down.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Harry Reid: 202-224-7327
John Kerry: (202) 224-8525
Joe Lieberman: 202.224.9750
Lindsey Graham: (202) 228-5143
Richard Lugar: 202-228-0360
Barbara Boxer: 202-224-0454
Lisa Murkowski: 202-224-5301
Susan Collins: 202-224-2693
Debbie Stabenow: 202-228-0325
Judd Gregg: 202-224-4952
Sherrod Brown: 202-228-6321
Maria Cantwell: 202-228-0514
Jay Rockefeller: (202) 224-7665
environment Politics: 350 Barack Obama British Petroleum James Hansen
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Month 6, Day 19: Saturday POTUS
I had finished writing this last night, but hadn’t had time to tag it. Then my wife and daughter called from India and I put it away for the morrow. In this letter I’m combining current events with some old exhortations. How I wish James Hansen was wrong. How I fear that he’s right.
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on securing British Petroleum’s commitment to set aside twenty billion dollars in escrow. Given how long it usually takes the victims of corporate negligence to have their day in court, this is a tremendous accomplishment.
The behavior of BP and its contract partners has been appallingly irresponsible. But while it’s easy to blame the oil companies, we need to do more. As you correctly pointed out in your oval office address, our nation (and, indeed, the world) needs to end our addiction to fossil fuels.
We’re going to run out of them, sooner rather than later. Often the money we spend on them goes to countries that regard us as enemies. These are good enough reasons. But the real reason for us to stop burning oil and coal is the enormous damage inflicted on the planetary biosphere by increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It is crucial for humanity’s survival and well-being in the centuries to come that our levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide be brought below 350 parts per million, as noted by Dr. James Hansen, the climatologist whose work was silenced by the Bush administration (surely a piece of irresponsibility that can rank with British Petroleum).
Your administration will be remembered with gratitude by generations yet unborn if you can start this process. The window of opportunity is rapidly closing; the environment is going through an increasing cascade of “tipping points,” each one of which makes recovery to a hospitable climate more difficult.
Right now Dr. Hansen is on record as saying “Obama doesn’t get it.” He thinks you don’t take the likelihood of a climate catastrophe seriously.
I think it’s time for you to prove him wrong.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama inappropriately moderate approaches
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Month 6, Day 16: No Teeth in this Tea…
The President gave his big Oval Office Speech today. I was teaching, so I didn’t see it. I gather it was, alas, pretty weak tea. Newsweek ran a story on it…so I sent them a letter, trying to be evenhanded.
The President is correct: our nation must end its dependence on fossil fuels — and it must do so sooner rather than later. If we keep demanding oil to fuel our lives, we’re going to see more drilling rig disasters, more contaminated seas, more destroyed ecosystems — because oil is dirty, and there’s no way to make it clean. Furthermore, as the President pointed out, there is a finite supply of oil, and we’ve already gotten the stuff that’s easy to get; extracting what’s left is guaranteed to yield catastrophe after catastrophe. And, as oil company executives revealed in hearings on Capitol Hill, their plans for disaster cleanup are pathetically inadequate, amounting in essence to hoping for the best. What President Obama unfortunately chose not to emphasize was the single most important reason to get off oil: the slow-motion catastrophe of global warming caused by carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: British Petroleum criminal irresponsibility criminality Deepwater Horizon Ed Markey Henry Waxman offshore oil sociopathy
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Month 6, Day 15: Don’t Get Mad, Get Madder!
I have a houseguest & I’m really tired. I just opened up this piece on Daily Kos, read it, got outraged, and wrote Ed Markey and Henry Waxman a letter asking them to get a little tougher on the gang of criminals who are obviously in charge of British Petroleum.
You should read that piece, too. It’ll make you mad. Maybe you should get mad — and write a letter to someone!
Dear Representatives Markey and Waxman,
We need to understand a few things about what’s going on in the Gulf of Mexico right now. It is absolutely crucial that congressional hearings bring up some of the following questions:
1. Why is British Petroleum apparently giving orders to the Coast Guard — and why is the Coast Guard taking orders from BP? A recent CBS News clip documented an incident of local television journalists being turned away from taking photographs of dead and dying sea life, saying: “A boat of BP Contractors, with 2 Coast Guard officials on board, told us turn around under threat of arrest — explaining ‘This is BP’s rules — it’s not ours’ ” In my naivete, I had the impression that the Coast Guard worked for the people of this country, not a British-owned oil company.
2. Why is BP failing to do genuine cleanup work in threatened areas? Booms have been put in place in wildlife protection areas, but no follow-up or monitoring has been instituted. The result? The only thing actually being contained is bad publicity for BP. The oil, meanwhile, is killing birds, sea turtles, fish and dolphins, and it’s only going to get worse. Frankly, we need more bad publicity for British Petroleum.
3. Why is BP making cleanup contractors sign agreements not to talk to the media? This company blatantly ignored safety regulations, gamed the system to its benefit for decades, and now (through its own negligence and carelessness) poised to wipe out both unique local ecologies and unique local economies. They should not be in a position to dictate terms to their contract employees.
Reporters from the New York Daily News interviewed BP contractors, who took them to locations where dolphin carcasses were dead and rotting. The contractor interviewed said, “When we found this dolphin it was filled with oil. Oil was just pouring out of it. It was the saddest darn thing to look at. There is a lot of cover-up for BP. They specifically informed us that they don’t want these pictures of the dead animals. They know the ocean will wipe away most of the evidence. It’s important to me that people know the truth about what’s going on here. The things I’ve seen… They just aren’t right. All the life out here is just full of oil.”
4. Why is BP unable to handle calls from Gulf area residents? Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon disaster happened, BP set up call centers to handle questions and concerns. But according to a Houston television station, they’ve over 200,000 phone calls have been received…but they go nowhere. People whose lives and communities are under terrible threat are made to think their messages are being formally documented when in fact they are not even written down by call center operators.
The overall impression of BP is one of a malicious and often criminal incompetence made possible by a feeble regulatory environment. While congressional hearings cannot get the oil back into the earth, they can be a big step towards ensuring that such a disastrous failure of regulation never happens again.
I’m hoping to see British Petroleum executives testifying under oath, with jail sentences available for any who are in contempt or who are proven to have perjured themselves. There is no need to be nice to these people; they’ve destroyed one of our country’s most important natural resources, and the full extent of the damage they’ve caused won’t be understood for years.
Their incompetence and criminality are yet another set of very good reasons to end our national dependence on oil; it makes these people wealthy and powerful, and they don’t deserve wealth or power — they deserve jail time.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots Ken Salazar minerals management service offshore drilling
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Month 6, Day 13: I’m Told That Fish Rot From The Head.
Crooks and Liars had a very depressing piece about our Interior Secretary and his continued enabling of a Bush-style culture of corruption. Grrrrrr.
Their piece links to Rolling Stone magazine, which is the original source. I haven’t read the full RS piece yet, because I’ve been dealing with the benefit concert (which went fabulously, by the way).
Anyway, this goes off to the President tomorrow.
Dear President Obama,
When you announced a “moratorium” on offshore drilling, I was delighted. But as the details emerged, it began to look less and less like a really robust piece of environmental policy. What we need is a way to prevent future disasters; what we get is a halt of exploratory drilling at thirty-three deepwater rigs. Total number of deepwater rigs in the Gulf of Mexico? Five hundred and ninety-one. Total offshore drilling rigs? Over fifty-one hundred. Thirty-three is a very small number — less than one percent. It should be the job of the Interior Secretary to regulate and control the oil industry, but Secretary Salazar is on record that the moratorium won’t affect production.
The culture of corruption at the Minerals Management Service has continued; Secretary Salazar has long been an advocate of offshore drilling (going back to his time as a senator), and he is abusing his position in multiple ways. The BP Atlantis rig is located in waters 2,000 feet deeper than the Deepwater Horizon, only 150 miles from the Louisiana coastline. Congressional documents reveal that the Atlantis lacks required engineering certification for almost every one of its underwater components; British Petroleum’s own internal documents suggest that this failure of certification could lead to “catastrophic” errors. Why has the Atlantis not been shut down? Why has the MMS failed to address the safety risks of this platform since the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe?
According to the executive director of PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility), workers in many agencies inside the Department of the Interior (not just the Minerals Management Service) describe the culture as the “third Bush term.” The same managers are implementing the same policies. Is that the environmental legacy we need from the Obama Administration?
I recognize that much of this is not, strictly speaking, your fault. President Bush and his cronies have planted many of their ideological allies in key bureaucratic positions throughout the government, and it is difficult to root these people out and to transform the bureaucratic culture appropriately. But it is increasingly clear that Ken Salazar isn’t interested in effecting this transformation at all.
At a time when we urgently need a genuine climate and energy policy that builds the infrastructure of the future, the last thing we need is a relentless advocate of big oil, a proponent of offshore drilling, an ethically challenged enabler of corruption. Ken Salazar needs to go, and the Minerals Management Service needs to be dissolved.
This is no time or place for compromise.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: EPA Howie Carr idiots Lisa Murkowski Scott Brown
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Month 6, Day 12: Upper-Class Twit of the Year!
My junior Senator is an idiot. The Boston Herald had a piece about the efforts of us Liberals to convince him to vote No on the Murkowski abomination. I used that as a hook for this letter, which is largely based on the Think Progress piece.
Well, despite the efforts of thousands of Massachusetts citizens (including this writer) to persuade him to move away from Republican lockstep, Scott Brown voted for Lisa Murkowski’s resolution to strip power from the Environmental Protection Agency. His reasons for voting against the wishes of his constituents became clear when he appeared on Howie Carr’s radio program and called the EPA a “non-governmental agency.” Now, the EPA can be called many things, but “non-governmental” is not one of them. Brown further claimed the Agency has the ability to “regulate churches and restaurants…the very smallest emitters…,” ignoring the fact that the EPA has so-called “tailoring rules” that limit regulations to amounts over 75,000 tons of greenhouse gases a year. Churches generally emit quite a bit less — about 100 tons. Fortunately, the Murkowski resolution failed. Unfortunately, Scott Brown is an embarrassment to the Senate and to the Commonwealth.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots Lisa Murkowski Scott Brown
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Month 6, Day 10: Our Descendants Will Be Too Busy Ducking Catastrophic Storms To Spit On Our Graves…But They Would If They Could, You Betcha!
Lisa Murkowski’s appalling amendment is coming up for a vote on the Senate floor tomorrow. John Kerry is leading the charge against this breathtakingly stupid piece of legislation. Scott Brown?
Dear Senator Brown,
I write to urge you to vote against the “petition of disapproval” introduced by Senator Lisa Murkowski. Despite what the voices of Fox News say, the climate crisis is very real and very dangerous. At this point in our nation’s history, do we really need head-in-the-sand denial of something that’s been overwhelmingly affirmed by scientific research, over and over again?
The proposal to reverse the EPA’s Endangerment Finding with
respect to greenhouse gases would essentially bar further EPA
regulation on climate change. What we need is stronger climate legislation; what we need is to transform our economy so that we’re no longer burning fossil fuels and pumping carbon into the atmosphere. Senator Murkowski’s amendment is a cynical piece of short-term political self-gratification that serves the needs of no one save the energy industry.Senator Brown, I am not a corporation. I am a human being. Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, there is a difference. I am a human being and one of your constituents; although I know that many Republican politicians feel responsible only to those who agree with their positions, the fact remains that you are my Senator.
Let’s say you’re buying a house, and ninety-seven home inspectors tell you it’s a dangerous property, while three tell you that they’re not quite sure. Would you buy? Let’s say you’re choosing a restaurant, and ninety-seven food inspectors tell you it’s unsafe, while three tell you they’re not quite sure. Would you eat there? Let’s say you find a lump, and ninety-seven oncologists advise you to start chemotherapy immediately, while three think you should wait and do some more tests. Would you wait?
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s dangerous, and it’s caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases. Three percent of climate scientists aren’t quite sure yet. Somehow it doesn’t strike me as a coincidence that the smaller group includes scientists who are on the payroll of the American Petroleum Institute.
The last thing we need is to eliminate one of our last remaining regulatory authorities in the face of a planetary crisis. Vote against the Murkowski amendment — for all our sakes.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders