environment: corporations EPA idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 9: The Immortal Billionaire Brats.
The Wall Street Journal notes that corporate groups are busy trying to sue the EPA to get its endangerment finding reversed or overturned, thereby making it even easier for them to go on polluting. These people are like bratty teenagers getting pissed off because their parents don’t want them sniffing glue.
In refusing to reconsider its endangerment finding on atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Environmental Protection Agency is acting entirely correctly. The bitter complaints and threats of legal action from corporate groups are reflective of a profound immaturity that pervades our nation’s private sector. It is immature to think and plan only for the short run, focusing entirely on profits while ignoring the deterioration of the infrastructure and environment. The whining of the business sector when faced with the fact that at some point they’ll have to clean up the messes they’ve helped create is disturbingly similar to that of a spoiled child refusing to pick up his room. Whether the corporate sector wants to recognize it or not, anthropogenic global warming carries a statistically significant probability of human extinction — which would definitely be bad for business. The E.P.A.’s policy of long-term responsibility is for the benefit of us all.
Warren Senders
environment: idiots Ken Cuccinelli Michael Mann
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 8: Scientist Versus Idiot.
The Washington Post editorializes on Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, whose vendetta against climatologist Michael Mann has now reached obsessive dimensions. Read it and weep.
Virginia’s Attorney General is indeed an embarrassment, both to the State he nominally serves and to the legal profession. His posturings are representative of a virulent strain of know-nothingism which is profoundly damaging to the nation as a whole, despite its appeal to those politicians and voters who embrace the notion that expertise is inherently suspect. The Attorney General’s readiness to assert that this respected research scientist is engaged in a multi-year campaign of intellectual chicanery tells us a great deal more about Mr. Cuccinelli than about Dr. Mann. Unfortunately, American anti-intellectualism has resurfaced at precisely the time when scientific expertise is most needed, and willful ignorance has a profound moral dimension. With overall global temperatures rising and weather extremes increasing, the experiential evidence for climate change is no longer deniable. Another thing we can’t deny: Dr. Mann is a bigger asset to this country than the man persecuting him.
Warren Senders
environment: Barack Obama solar power symbolism
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 7: Weeeeeell, Alllllllll Riiiiiiiight!
Well. After the disappointing outcome of McKibben’s White House visit last month, I was all set to give up this particular facet of advocacy for a while. And then the President went ahead and said “yes!”
Here comes the sun: White House to go solar
By DINA CAPPIELLO – 1 day ago
WASHINGTON — Solar power is coming to President Barack Obama’s house.
The most famous residence in America plans to install solar panels for the first time atop the White House’s living quarters. The solar panels — which will be installed by spring 2011 — will heat water and supply some of the first family’s electricity.
It would be great to think that the letters, faxes and phone calls all of us sent and made actually had a difference.
Dear President Obama,
I’m deeply gratified to hear that you are moving forward with a solar installation on the White House. Such an application of technology is long overdue. While it’s true that this is a symbolic gesture, the simple truth is that in our celebrity-obsessed culture, any act by a public figure has a symbolic dimension.
Putting solar panels on your house sends a message to your countryfolk that you are serious about renewable energy, and about making the shift that we need to make, away from fossil fuels.
I’d like to tell you a very short story. Just before the 2008 Democratic Convention, I hosted a platform meeting, inviting about twelve other people (some of whom I’d never met) to my home to discuss ways for the Democratic Party to change its platform. One couple was in their eighties; I had known them thirty-five years earlier, when I was in high school and their son was a friend of mine.
All of us shared stories of what had brought us to this level of involvement in your historic presidential campaign. Mr. F_____, my friend’s father, said, “When Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House roof, I was inspired. I read up on how to do it, and built my own solar water heater. And it’s worked perfectly for the past thirty years, it’s still making hot water today, and it’s saved us thousands and thousands of dollars.” And then he said, “Mr. Obama seems like he’d be a president who’ll inspire people.”
I have been hoping for the past two years that America would start taking really serious action about global climate change. It is, after all, our nation’s population who are the world’s largest per capita emitters of greenhouse gases — and it is our nation, more than any other, which has institutionalized political and corporate opposition to genuine change in the interdependent spheres of environmental and economic policy.
I wrote to you earlier this year, urging you to put solar on the White House — and at the time, I said, “If you do it on your house, I’ll do it on mine.”
It’s going to take me a few months, but I will — and I’ll keep you posted.
Thank you for the inspiration.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: coral oceanic acidification phytoplankton
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 6: Deep Blue Sea, Baby, Deep Blue Sea…
Last week’s Time Magazine had an article about Sylvia Earle, who’s trying to establish marine reserves — internationally protected parts of the ocean. It’s worth a read; she’s clearly one of the good guys. While it’s a little late now that the new issue of Time is out, I thought I’d write and cheer her on a bit.
Sylvia Earle’s proposal for Marine Protected Areas is essential. Whether our rationale for attempting to restore the health of our oceans is aesthetic (because a living sea is beautiful), moral (because it is wrong to use the ocean as a dump) or practical (because if the phytoplankton that provide much of our oxygen die, so will we), it makes sense to establish a precedent: this part of humanity’s common property is inviolate. Indeed, if we are really interested in our own long-term survival, it’s clear that Mission Blue’s plans don’t go far enough. It’s not just that we need to stop treating the oceans as supermarkets and sewers — we must recognize that an economic system which rewards environmental destruction and exploitation will bring severe and tragic consequences, not only for our species, but for all the others with whom we share our planet.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: climate bill false equivalence media irresponsibility
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
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
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
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
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
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
environment Politics: filibuster reform Harry Reid
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 2: I’m In Washington, La La La La
Note the clever paraphrasing job.
Dear Majority Leader Reid,
A month away from the mid-term elections, it seems likely that Democrats will hold the Senate — so it is in a hopeful mood that I write to urge you to use all the persuasiveness of which you are capable to back filibuster reform when the next session of Congress opens.
The sidelining of meaningful climate legislation by the threat of a Republican filibuster was and is an outrage. While climate change wreaks its havoc too slowly to have an impact on the notoriously short attention span of an American citizen, it is nevertheless the most significant existential threat humanity has ever faced. The legislation crafted by Senators Kerry and Lieberman, while inadequate in many ways, was at least a start. What an ignominy for it to be bluffed into irrelevance!
It is essential for our nation’s survival that the Senate pass a robust climate bill. While a Renewable Energy Standard may be all that we can get in the lame-duck session, I urge you to push as hard as possible to get climate legislation back on the Senate floor, and make sure it passes. Which will require two things: first, having some strong conversations with the Senate Democrats who are unwilling to vote for cloture on a bill that is part of their own party’s political platform (frankly, they seem determined to ensure that the nightmare represented by Democratic control of the Senate never occurs again). And second: ending the abuse of the filibuster.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: filibuster reform
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 10, Day 1: Strategic Redundancies
I am cheating a bit here. Wife, daughter and I are all headed for Washington, DC, tomorrow for the 10-2-10 rally. I wrote this long letter to John Kerry because I didn’t have time to write a short one. And the letter for Saturday is going to be a loose paraphrase of this one, sent to Harry Reid. And the letter for Sunday will be for POTUS…and I’m going to be writing them all tonight, so I won’t have to do it on the bus.
Dear Senator Kerry,
I write to urge you not only to back filibuster reform when the next session of Congress opens, but to urge your colleagues to do so as well.
One of the most devastating casualties of the present situation in the Senate has to have been the climate bill you were instrumental in developing. While that bill was insufficient for the dimensions of the task, it at least represented a start on tackling the most profound existential threat humanity has ever faced. What an ignominy for it to be bluffed into irrelevance by a Republican threat of filibuster (aided, of course, by some of your Democratic colleagues who are seemingly determined to ensure that the nightmare represented by a Democratic majority in the Senate never occur again).
We need to pass a climate bill. Ultimately it needs to be a lot stronger even than the bill you co-authored with Senators Lieberman and Graham. But we need a place to start.
And we’re not going to get it unless we reform the filibuster.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Italy Renewable Energy
by Warren
1 comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 9, Day 30: Bella, bella, bella!
The New York Times had a lovely article on a little Italian town that’s moved to wind energy and done itself a huge favor in the process. Go read the piece; it’s really inspiring.
At least, it inspired this letter:
The citizens of Tocco De Casauria have chosen wisely in moving their community to renewable energy sources. Perhaps a village that has existed for centuries is better-equipped to plan for an existence hundreds of years in the future. It is a measure of how far the United States has to go in this area that the concept of “sustainability” is still considered the province of tie-dyed back-to-the-landers, rather than a simple piece of common sense. Obviously we should be thinking in the long term rather than the short. But, alas, America is the home of the shortest attention spans on the planet, and sustainability isn’t shiny enough to engage the interest of the country that invented “planned obsolescence.” We need an energy economy that’s built to last…and we won’t find it in oil wells and coal mines. Tocco’s turbines are a lesson to all of us: “planned obsolescence” is obsolete.
Warren Senders