environment: climate change pakistan
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 18: Will Rupert Murdoch Give A Million Dollars To Pakistan?
Incredibly tired. The New York Daily News had an article about Pakistan’s misery, so I used my LTE template to save time.
Good night, all.
As devastating floods hammer Pakistan, it’s easy to dismiss both the extreme weather and the twenty million people whose lives have been shattered from our minds. After all, Pakistan is a long way off. But their extreme weather is a manifestation of the same complex set of phenomena that gave New York its most recent heat wave: anthropogenic global warming. If we as a nation are to undertake meaningful action on behalf of the planetary systems that sustain us, we must ensure that our citizenry is genuinely informed about these issues, no matter how complex or daunting they may seem. The fact that the phrase “climate change” does not appear at all in an article on Pakistan’s misery is a demonstration of how poorly our news media handle the most important threat humanity has ever faced.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Charlie Baker Deval Patrick Jill Stein Tim Cahill Worcester Telegram
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 17: Pronounced Wuh-stuh!
I didn’t feel very passionate today.
Our candidates for Governor had a debate. The Worcester Telegram had an article about it.
That the gubernatorial debate included questions on global warming is a positive reflection on the quality of electoral politics in Massachusetts. Too many politicians at both state and national levels are unable to take a clear position on a matter where public opinion polls reflect a distressing ignorance of unequivocal scientific evidence. Conversely, Cahill and Baker’s unwillingness to agree that humans are to blame for global climate change is a negative reflection on the Republican party, which has made climate denialism a central plank of its policy structure. But the facts are in: human activities are responsible for the changing climate, and our generation must begin paying the bill for the past century’s profligate waste of the planet’s fossil fuel resources. Massachusetts needs more mass transit; it needs more renewable energy; it needs more attention paid to conservation — and it needs politicians who are ready to recognize scientific reality.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: filibuster reform John Kerry
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 16: Filibusted
Figured I’d write to Kerry and whine about the filibuster.
Dear Senator Kerry,
On the assumption that the upcoming November elections will preserve the Democratic majority in the Senate, I am writing to ask you to speak as powerfully as possible on behalf of filibuster reform. The shelving of critical climate legislation has been a bitter pill to swallow for any of us who are concerned about the looming climate crisis. At the moment when it seemed we might possibly be able to make headway against Republican obstructionism, the problems involved in assembling the sixty votes required for cloture effectively doomed any hope for a meaningful bill. This is not how the Senate is supposed to work.
The behavior of Senate Republicans and a few conservative Democrats has left the United States in a deplorable position: as billions of people around the world face an uncertain future due to the ravages of climate change, a tiny group of rich and powerful men and women hold the power to stall any action. This is not how the Senate is supposed to work.
Even for bills that are broadly popular, a single senator from a state with a population less than that of Massachusetts’ capitol can effectively stymie forward motion — until special provisions, concessions or earmarks are inserted. A single senator can place an anonymous hold on legislation without giving any reason whatever, again halting forward motion. This is not how the Senate is supposed to work.
It should be no surprise that Congress’ approval ratings are low, for voters see that there is no political will to get things done; there is only a will to procrastinate….and procrastination is not a characteristic we expect in our leaders or our representatives. This is not how the Senate is supposed to work.
I am a lifelong Democrat and a fervent environmentalist. I believe deeply in the potential of our system of government. But right now, America’s Senate is completely dysfunctional. The Senate is supposed to work — and it doesn’t.
Please advocate forcefully for filibuster reform. The Senate needs to get to work. We cannot survive another legislative session of delaying tactics.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: climate change Middle East petroleum subsidies
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 15: Shhhhh! Don’t Mention The War!
Time Magazine runs an opinion piece by Michael Mandelbaum, stating that we must reduce the impact of the Middle East on our foreign and domestic policy. Duh. Naturally, the closest he comes to mentioning climate change is in these paragraphs:
Lower U.S. oil consumption would also weaken oil-dependent leaders outside the Middle East who pursue anti-American policies: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the world will not be able to do entirely without Middle Eastern oil for many decades, substantially lowering the amount of oil we use would reduce the region’s significance while shifting the balance of power between producers and consumers in favor of consumers — that is, in favor of the U.S. and its friends. (See what Barack Obama needs to do to improve five international areas.)
The best way to reduce oil use is to raise the price of gasoline. People would then use less of it. In the short term, they would drive less and make more use of public transportation. Over the long term, they would demand fuel-efficient vehicles. At the same time, higher gasoline prices would make renewable fuels like ethanol and electrically powered cars economically viable.
While West European countries and Japan impose high taxes on gasoline, the U.S., the world’s largest consumer, does not. Compared with what the U.S. national interest requires, gasoline is ruinously cheap for Americans. The refusal of the U.S. to charge itself as much for gasoline as is good for it (and for other countries) is the single greatest foreign policy failure of the past three decades.
So I wrote a letter trying to draw a connection.
Michael Mandelbaum has perfectly articulated almost all the reasons that America needs to transform its relationship with the Middle East. He notes correctly that US petroleum pricing polity is self-destructive — by subsidizing fossil-fuel consumption so heavily, we’ve created an economy in which waste is rewarded, with all-too-predictable results. Cleaning up after the past century’s profligacy isn’t going to come cheap, and coping with the effects of global warming (heatwaves, fires, floods, catastrophic storms, oceanic acidification, and drought, to name a few) is going to be very expensive indeed. We (and our children) will be paying the bill for the energy we (and our parents) thought was almost free. It’s too bad that Mandelbaum didn’t mention the looming climate crisis, for of all the consequences of our addiction to Middle-Eastern oil, global climate change is the one which will do the most damage in the long run.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change peat fires Russia
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 14: Peat Fires
Jeebus. This sounds really depressing:
Firefighters laid down a pipe to a nearby lake and pumped 100 gallons of water every minute, around the clock, until the surface of what is known as Fire No. 3 was a muddy expanse of charred stumps.
And still the fire burned on.
Under the surface, fire crept through a virtually impenetrable peat bog, spewing the smoke that — until the wind shifted on Thursday, providing what meteorologists said was likely to be temporary relief — had been choking the Russian capital this summer.
The peat bogs were drained up to ninety years ago, when Soviet electrical generators burned peat. Naturally, nobody thought to reflood them after they’d been harvested. Now they’re just sitting there up to fifteen feet deep. And when they catch on fire, the firefighters’ lives really really really suck:
Fighting peat fires is an exhausting, muddy job, taking weeks or months, in which hardly a flame is visible. Matted, rotting vegetation smolders and steams deep underground.
In my letter, I tried to make the peat fires a specific example of a broader trend of disregarding the long-term consequences of ecological destruction…consequences which are going to affect all of us, sooner rather than later.
Russia’s peat fires are the disastrous result of an earlier failure to respect an ecosystem’s integrity. The early Soviet engineers who drained the peat bogs to fuel their generators but never reflooded them couldn’t have anticipated a smoke-filled Moscow. The Russian crisis is emblematic of the global one; our fossil-fueled economy (so rewarding in the short run) has triggered unintended long-term consequences all over the globe. Smoke, fires, drought, flood, wind, rain, weirdness.
The first rule of getting out of a hole is to recognize that you are in one. Our information economy must recognize and address the connection between global climate change and local environmental crises like the one choking Russia. The second rule is to stop digging. Our energy economy must move off fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change heat wave LA Times
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 13: L.A. Heat Edition.
There’s a heat wave expected in LA this weekend, says the LA Times.
Not a standard boilerplate LTE.
A midsummer heat wave is not particularly remarkable. They happen all the time. But there are more and more of them happening these days, in the U.S. and around the world. As a consequence of climate change, we’re getting very extreme weather, and we’re getting it more often. While it’s impossible to say that global warming caused a specific weather event, climatologists have predicted for two decades that it will bring about ever more frequent extremes of temperature and precipitation. In the past, climate change was something that would happen in the future. But the past is gone and the future is now. Climate change is happening to us. News media must begin including this information as part of their print and online articles on weather conditions. People need to understand what’s going on so they can make informed decisions; ignorance is no longer an option.
Warren Senders
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I only became aware that there was a TV show by that name a few seconds before hitting “publish.”
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama Deficit reduction idiots Nancy Pelosi Renewable Energy
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 12: Common-Sense Deficit Syndrome? GAFB!
Sometimes I just want to bang my head against a wall.
Solar industry officials are pleading with President Obama to restore billions of dollars in renewable energy loan guarantees that Congress is at least temporarily cutting to pay for emergency education and Medicaid help to states and other policy priorities.
The loss of these loan guarantee funds could help “send solar development into a tailspin that will be difficult to reverse,” according to a letter to Obama sent Monday from Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).
House lawmakers Tuesday are slated to approve a $26.1 billion state education and Medicaid funding package the Senate passed last week that would be partially paid for by slashing $1.5 billion in renewable energy-loan guarantees approved in last year’s economic stimulus bill.
“These rescissions put into jeopardy the green jobs that the administration has touted as part of our clean-energy future and put us further behind the rest of the world,” Gore said on his website Monday afternoon.
I’m not a professional Leftist; I’m more of an amateur. But by Grabthar’s Hammer, I am pretty fucking pissed off about this.
My emotional state is concealed, however, by my erudition.
Dear President Obama and Speaker Pelosi —
It is of the utmost importance that the $3.5 billion which has been taken from the renewable energy and transmission loan-guarantee program be restored. While deficit reduction must be part of our thinking, there is no alternative to pursuing renewable energy with all our attention, enthusiasm and funding.
We cannot continue to burn oil and coal in the years to come. Not only is our national security complicated by our financial entanglements with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, our long-term survival is at stake. With atmospheric CO2 well on track to be over 400 ppm within a year or two, the fight against global warming has already been significantly compromised. In order to maintain a world climate suitable for human survival and prosperity, we must change our energy economy without delay.
If the United States is to maintain a role as a world leader, then we cannot afford to shrug off the problems of smaller states; we cannot afford to wait for India and China to reduce their carbon footprints before acting on our own. The laws of physics pay no heed to political exigencies; greenhouse gases know nothing of election-year strategies. The problem of global climate change is the defining one of our generation, and we must tackle it on all levels: as individuals, as communities, as regions, as states, as a country, and as part of a global society.
At this moment in the world’s history, cutting funding for renewable energy is a grotesque abdication of our responsibilities to one another and the planet as a whole. Please act with dispatch and resolve to ensure that financial resources are restored to renewable energy programs. Failing to spend that money is a foolishness we cannot afford.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Portugal Renewable Energy
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Month 8, Day 11: Paying The Piper By The Note
The New York Times ran an article on Portugal’s transition to renewable energy. It’s a good piece and well worth the read.
While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.
Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”
My letter to the Times (I’m hoping for a third time in print this year!):
If Portugal’s citizens pay twice as much for their energy as Americans do, it’s tempting to seize on this as compelling evidence that renewable energy sources are doomed to failure in the marketplace. But such an analysis leaves out the crucial fact that America’s citizens have only paid for a fraction of their fossil-fueled energy consumption over the last century. We have bought our “cheap energy” on credit, deferring the expenses of cleanup and restoration to some point in the future. Now the bill is due, and it’s bigger than most of us expected. When the costs of environmental destruction, public health crises and global warming are factored in, Portugal’s “pay-as-you-go” renewable energy economy looks more attractive every day. America needs to make the switch soon; our dependency on oil and coal is both environmentally and economically unsustainable.
Warren Senders
environment: Boston Herald idiots
by Warren
leave a comment
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
I Penetrate Shallowly Into Enemy Territory
I was ego-searching and discovered that the Boston Herald had run one of my letters. Notably, they’d done so without checking on my bona fides.
Here’s their edited version (the article which triggered the letter was about the current heat waves):
It’s revealing that the phrase “climate change” appears in this story exactly once – when mentioning a Maine-based research center (“Above-normal temperatures persist in Northeast,” Aug. 5).
The facts are unequivocal: The heat wave pummeling the Northeast is exactly what climatologists have predicted for decades (and what Republicans have been mocking and ignoring for just as long). This year is on track to be the hottest year on record.
How much worse will it have to get before our media decide the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced is more important than, say, celebrity prison experiences?
And here’s my original:
It’s revealing that the phrase “climate change” appears in this article exactly once: when mentioning a Maine-based research center. The facts are unequivocal: the heat wave pummeling the Northeast is exactly what climatologists have predicted for decades (and what Republicans have been mocking and ignoring for just as long). 2010 is on track to be the hottest year on record. According to scientists, even if we took dramatic and immediate action to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, we’d still be looking at worldwide crop failures, droughts, storms, and ecological collapses. How much worse will it have to get before our newspapers and broadcast media decide the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced is more important than, say, celebrity prison experiences? The Boston Herald’s treatment of climate change has long been a flagrant disregard of journalistic responsibility.
Warren Senders
I’m surprised they printed it, but not surprised that they left off the last sentence.
The comments in the online edition are worth a look.
I wonder if they’ve printed other letters without letting me know.
Education Personal: assessment epistemology learning teaching
by Warren
3 comments
Meta
SiteMeter
Brighter Planet
Things I Learned In School, Pt. II
More thoughts on things I learned about teaching and learning…from teachers.
High School:
As a student in a public high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts, I had some friends who were officially my teachers; we talked about life, learning, politics, culture…and if they had to give me a C or a D in class, I really didn’t care. It was obviously a game we all had to play for the benefit of…who?
There was one history teacher, Mr. M_______, who taught a single course: a comprehensive year-long survey of Russian history. A classroom virtuoso, his teaching was part lecture, part dance, part abstract painting (his hyperkinetic scribbling on the chalkboard served as an outlet for an incessant need to move), part arts and crafts. He conceived Russian History not as a body-of-material-to-be-mastered, but as a medium through which students found out about the world and about themselves. At the time I took his course, which was open only to juniors and seniors, he was employing a very unusual grading method:
“In this class,” he said on the first day, “you are granted the symbol A. Depending on your contributions and participation, you will either receive a Large A, for ‘amazing,’ or a small a, for ‘awful.’ In either case you will have the symbol A. I do not want any of you doing work in the class because you crave a symbol. I want you doing the work because you genuinely want to do the work.”
It was a wonderful course. And what I took away from it was a general gestalt understanding of the sweep of Russian history…and a huge practical insight about what effective teaching could and should be. It didn’t matter that in the first semester I got an A and in the second an a. That, if anything, served to reinforce my growing awareness that the grades I got had nothing at all to do with what I learned.
Lesson: The System may require grades, but there are many ways to skin a cat.
From my freshman year in high school, I knew that I wanted to be on the school newspaper. I joined the staff and began writing and participating in the marathon layout sessions. It was my ambition to be the editor of the paper in my senior year; I felt this strongly enough that when my parents got one-year faculty appointments in Toronto for the duration of my junior year, I argued that I had to stay behind, or I would lose my place in the queue. I lived with my grandmother that year, and I kept my place (as “Associate Editor”); when my senior year began, I was the Editor, and I did a hell of a job, if I do say so myself. The paper had a Faculty Adviser, who stayed out of our way and signed forms as required. He was responsible for giving us all grades; everyone got an A. The grade was required by the system, but it was irrelevant to my motivation, which was purely that I wanted to edit the newspaper.
Lesson: You can get a good grade for doing a good job, and it still doesn’t necessarily mean anything.