Education environment Politics: gratitude intelligence Rachel Maddow
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Month 2, Day 12: A Fan Letter to (Who Else?) Rachel Maddow
If you haven’t watched Rachel Maddow explaining why a day or two of heavy snow doesn’t mean that global warming is a lie, you owe it to yourself. Take ten minutes and savor her graceful, clear and funny exercise in truth-telling:
I get a little worn down from constantly chastising the denialist idiots in our media and politics, which made writing a letter of thanks to Rachel Maddow a huge pleasure. Note that I offer her the analogy I used in yesterday’s letter — perhaps she’ll use it sometime. That would be a moment to savor.
Dear Rachel Maddow — I write to thank you for your genuine journalistic integrity on the subject of climate change. The issue of global warming and the devastating consequences to Earth’s capacity to support humanity (and the web of life upon which we all depend) are obscured by highly paid denialists, and our media almost without exception refuse to address the subject with respect for scientific method and integrity. Instead, the professional pundits hew to a doctrine of false equivalency in which two contradictory statements are given “equal time,” regardless of their actual truth or falsehood.
Which makes your show of February 10 a landmark by any standards. Your ability to explain the sometimes counterintuitive concepts behind climate change is virtually unique in the world of broadcast journalism; while I’m glad you’re doing what you’re doing, it’s a tragedy that you’re virtually the only person in broadcast journalism who’s doing it.
Thanks to an ADD-afflicted media and an utterly mendacious opposition party, the number of Americans who don’t believe climate change is happening has increased; fewer and fewer of our population are ready to address these problems head-on, and that’s making a terrifying and dystopian future for our grandchildren and their grandchildren in turn. Please keep highlighting climate issues. There is nothing more important for America and the world in the long run, for if we get this one wrong, there won’t be any chance for a “do-over.” You reach millions of people each day, and your calm and careful voice inspires confidence — while your readiness to skewer liars and hypocrites inspires trust.
At the beginning of 2010, I made a resolution to write a letter a day to politicians and/or media on climate-change issues. My daughter is five years old; I want her to grow up in a world rich in nature’s possibilities, a world where humanity’s accomplishments are not vitiated by our endless production of toxic trash. Most of my letters are scolding ones, for there is a lot of scolding that has to be done. Every so often, though, I get to write a letter like this one — thanking someone for doing the simple but difficult work of telling the truth. It is a pleasure to see you doing what you do. I hope you do it for a long time to come.
Let me close by offering you an analogy that I used in a recent letter addressing the same idiocy you discussed on your February 10th broadcast: the idea that heavy snow disproves global climate change. Perhaps you’ll be able to use it sometime. I wrote: “To say a freak snowstorm disproves the reality of global climate change is as misguided as saying the swollen belly of a starving child disproves the reality of world hunger.”
My daily letters often feel like shouting into a hurricane; your voice is a crucial one. Thank you again for your important work. Don’t give up!
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
P.S. – Thanks also for your devastating takedown of James Inhofe. That man gives dishonesty and hypocrisy a bad name.
environment: igloo inhofe kwashiorkor Republicans stupidity subways
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Month 2, Day 11: Pure Essence of Moran
I picked up a copy of “Metro-Boston,” a local free-distribution subway & laundromat paper that’s part of a nationally syndicated chain. And when I found the Letters page, the Stupid was Strong.
Three letters…check ’em out. The first two are baffling: I lean towards thinking the Palin letter is actually from a Democrat, while the “Sex Ed for Congress” is completely ambiguous. But the third. Ahhh, the third. Enjoy it.
So I thought I’d write a letter to the METRO. Maybe thousands of subway-goers will read it. If you’re on a subway and you see my letter, please let me know. As usual, if nothing happens on this one after a couple of days, I’ll send it along to some other papers.
Republican lawmakers are pointing to Washington’s overwhelming snowfall as refutation of the science behind climate change. Oklahoma senator James Inhofe has built a crude igloo near the U.S. Capitol and labeled it “Al Gore’s home,” since any Republican discussion of climate issues must include mockery of the former VP. Climate denialism is a growth industry, heavily funded by the big oil and coal companies and playing on Americans’ contempt for competence and unwillingness to endure inconvenience. Actually, climatologists have been saying for years that global warming will make local weather both more unpredictable and more extreme. To say a freak snowstorm “disproves the reality of global climate change” is as misguided as saying the swollen belly of a starving child “disproves the reality of world hunger.”
Warren Senders
environment: denialists false equivalence IPCC New York Times outrage Rajendra Pachauri
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Month 2, Day 10: All the Specious Equivalence That’s Fit To Print
Thank goodness for Daily Kos. Today I saw two useful posts which provided me with the recipient of this letter (the New York Times) and a framing device which surfaces briefly in my 145 words.
The first, cleverly titled “NYT Soils Itself, AGAIN!” described an article about conflict of interest accusations against Dr. Rajendra Pachauri of the IPCC, and rebuked the Times for its “balanced” approach to the subject, which presents unsubstantiated allegations from AGW skeptics as somehow forming a valid counter-argument to the intensively documented and cross-checked work of the IPCC’s scientists.
The second was an article by David Brin (who’s a wonderful science-fiction novelist when he’s not writing at Dkos) noting that the climate-change denial business is a manifestation of the pervasive anti-intellectualism that saturates American culture. I strongly encourage you to read “The Real Struggle Behind Climate Change — A War on Expertise.” It rings very, very true.
So that’s the backstory for today’s letter. Off it goes to the Paper of Record, almost certainly to be filed and forgotten. Does that deter me? Not yet.
The climate-denial sector criticizes Dr. Rajendra Pachauri for supposed conflicts of interest, and generalizes to suggest that the conclusions of the I.P.C.C. are somehow compromised. These aspersions are a troubling confluence of two influences: entrenched corporate resistance to any change in business practices, and anti-intellectualism masquerading as common sense. Thousands of qualified climatologists are firmly convinced of anthropogenic global warming, yet professional denialists suggest they’re lying about it for the most venal of reasons — to increase their chances of grant funding! The evidence suggests otherwise: that Christopher Monckton and his ilk are the ones doing the lying — and receiving fat paychecks for doing so. The Times needs to report aggressively on the funding and control of the climate-denial industry, rather than adhere to a specious policy of false equivalence in which scientific facts are “balanced” by unsupported assertions from corporate shills.
Warren Senders
Education environment: inappropriate Nazi analogies stupidity superbowl
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Month 2, Day 9: A Luxury Sedan Letter
I understand nothing about professional football. As far as I can figure out, it is, in the words of Ashleigh Brilliant, “Violence punctuated by committee meetings.” So I was only peripherally aware that there was a major cultural event this past weekend featuring very large men hurling spheroids about a grassy field while wearing brightly colored costumes and colorful helmets. I gather that one of the commercial organizations involved in the activity “won,” while the other “lost.”
And yet, I find myself involved in the aftermath of the SuperBowl. Daily Kos diarist A Siegel noted an advertisement from Audi which he described as “The Most Environmentally Unfriendly Super Bowl Ad” in a lengthy post the other day. I read it because I read all of his work…and it provided me with the hook for today’s letter, which goes both to Audi of America and to their advertising agency, Venables Bell and Partners.
Dear Audi of America — I write to protest your recently aired advertisement, the “Green Police” Superbowl commercial. While I have no doubt your advertising agency meant the TV spot to be a tongue-in-cheek approach to environmental awareness and its increasing importance in society, the effect of the ad was to trivialize ecological concerns (on the one hand), and to stigmatize those who are trying to effect meaningful change in world environmental policy (on the other).
Your ad shows “green police” arresting and brutalizing people who are using plastic bags, failing to compost their food refuse, burning incandescent bulbs, and luxuriating in hot tubs — responding with grossly inappropriate force to real and imagined environmentally unfriendly actions. Thus the advertisement promulgates a view of ‘going green’ that suggests a totalitarian police state — not a positive and sustainable future.
It is a bizarre irony that ‘green police’ is a term for The Orpo, or Ordnungspolizei, the uniformed regular German police force in Nazi Germany, notably between 1936 and 1945. Owing to their green uniforms, they were also referred to as Grüne Polizei (green police). And, in a chapter of history that senior Audi personnel would probably rather not remember too vividly, the “Green Police” were well and thoroughly implicated in Hitler’s genocide, providing manpower for deportations, ghetto-clearings, and massacres.
It’s probably true that most Americans (especially those who are fixated on competitive football) have little sense of history. But that’s no excuse for evoking some of Hitler’s foot soldiers in a totally misleading way. Ordinary citizens and politicians with an interest in environmental protection might find it offensive to be equated with Nazi lackeys, don’t you think?
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk have already saturated the brains of American conservatives with phrases like “eco-Nazi.” The last thing we need is a well-respected auto manufacturer to fall into their camp; judging by the immediate reaction of conservative commentators, that’s exactly where you’ve landed.
Pull the ad immediately. It’s misleading, offensive, and as far from funny as you can get.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
Venables Bell & Partners
201 Post St., Ste. 200
San Francisco, CA 94108
United States
Phone: 415-288-3300
Fax: 415-421-3683
Education environment: consumerism corporatism sustainability
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Month 2, Day 8: Help! I am Trapped in a Consumerist Fortune Cookie Factory!
I just sat down and wrote this thing, and then spent the next hour wondering who to send it to. For the moment, faute de mieux, it’s going to my local newspaper. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along.
If humanity as a species is to survive, we must change the way we treat our environment. But for this to happen, we must recognize that the ongoing destruction of our planet’s biodiversity, atmosphere, and oceans is the result of a disastrously misguided conception of economic values. Americans have been told over and over again that our contribution to the common good is to consume. After September 11, then-President Bush famously instructed Americans to go shopping.
When we go shopping, what do we do? We buy thousands of dollars’ worth of plastic merchandise, manufactured in the Third World and packaged in vast quantities of plastic armor which is immediately torn off and thrown away. The products themselves are likely to get used up, destroyed and discarded before too many months have gone by; a trip through an American suburb on “garbage night” shows innumerable trinkets and appliances destined for the landfills. From this perspective, our economy appears to be entirely based on buying things and turning them into trash as quickly as possible.
And, obviously, this economic model is bad for the long-term health of our society. Aside from the fact that ultimately we’ll run out of resources to destroy (the most immediate of which is “peak oil,” the point where our store of hydrocarbon fractions begins to dwindle inexorably), a consumerist model is bad for our mental health. We exhort our children to give back as much as they take, but unless we exemplify these values in our own lives, it’s just moralistic prattle for the youngsters — another example of grownup hypocrisy.
The next few decades will determine whether we live in a world that offers our children and their children the hope of a meaningful future, or a blighted, poisoned landscape clogged beyond recognition with toxic trash. We can’t fix the climate unless we transform our economy. And the way to transform the economy is to focus all (that’s ALL) our power and attention on living in ways that give back more to the Earth than we take out. Americans are woefully ignorant of how to do this; I know I am. But for our grandchildren’s sake, we’d better start learning.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: corporate personhood Supreme Court USA Today
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Month 2, Day 7: Dinosaurs, anyone?
USA Today gets a rambling, inarticulate screed that starts with the Supreme Court and ends with Dinosaurs. One day somebody’s going to publish something. It’s gotta happen.
The recent decision by the Supreme Court to allow unlimited corporate spending in our elections will have far-reaching consequences on our lives. Nowhere will these be more profound than when corporations take on the complex issues of climate. Why? Because addressing the worst effects of global climate change demands genuine long-term thinking — and corporations, by the requirements of their charters, are only able to think in the short term.
The worst-case planetary scenarios suggested by scientists like Dr. James Hansen can be summed up in one word: Venus. More favorable climate projections have huge numbers of deaths and dislocations, with costs in the trillions of dollars. Needless to say, human extinction would be bad for business.
With gigatons of Arctic methane starting to melt and enter the atmosphere, and an increase in oceanic acidification beginning to threaten the food chain that supports over a billion people, there is no time to waste. We need strong and effective climate legislation, and we need it soon. But since forestalling these outcomes may require Big Energy to relinquish a few percentage points of profit in the next quarter, we can expect another type of pollution instead: corporate-funded disinformation touting the benefits of atmospheric CO2 levels last seen when dinosaurs walked the earth.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Male models Scott Brown Senate
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Month 2, Day 6: The New (AAAAGH!!!) Senator from Massachusetts
Well, I may not have voted for him, but I’m sure as hell one of his constituents, and he’s sure as hell going to be hearing from me. This one goes directly to Scott Brown, but I’m cc’ing John Kerry.
Notice that I used two paragraphs’ worth of material from the letter I sent Hillary Clinton, back on January 13. I’m an environmentalist; I recycle whenever possible.
Dear Senator Brown,
Congratulations on your recent electoral triumph. I hope that you take the responsibilities of your office seriously, and recognize that while you may espouse a “conservative” political philosophy, that does not change the fact that you’re a senator representing one of the most liberal states in the country.
I’ve heard that you refer to yourself as a “Scott Brown Republican,” and that you’ve told the Senate Republican leadership that they should not count on you for a lockstep vote on every issue. Good for you. A lot of your constituents are in the “liberal/progressive” category, and you have a responsibility to them as well as to the people who voted for you.
Here’s a good way to start. Do some genuine research on the issue of global climate change. Contrary to what you may have heard on Sean Hannity’s program, global climate change is real; it’s a real threat, and the evidence is overwhelming that it has been caused by human activity. The fact that it’s snowing heavily in Washington, DC does not mean that the Earth isn’t heating up.
I understand that as a Republican and a conservative, you are interested in maintaining a healthy business sector, and consider it to be key to the continued growth of America’s economy. Oddly, as a liberal progressive, I believe the exact same thing. We differ, I suspect, in that I am interested in the long-term health of our economy (say, over the next two centuries) while you are more focused on the short term (businesses tend to measure success by the financial quarter, a three-month period).
If the worst-case scenarios of climate scientists come to pass, the Earth will no longer be able to support human life, which would surely be disadvantageous for the American business sector. I know, I know. They’re “worst-case” scenarios. But I ask you to consider two factors. First, the fact that when climatologists’ predictions have proven wrong, it’s almost always because they were too optimistic; every credible report on the state of the world’s climate comes out on the “worse than expected” side of the slate. Second, even if the Venusian “worst-case” scenarios don’t come true, the “almost-as-bad” scenarios are almost as bad for our economy and our business sector.
Projections of the sociopolitical effects of climate change include severe disturbances to farming economies caused by erratic weather, increased risk of near-apocalyptic fires in forested areas affected by severe heat, “water wars” triggered by drought and the elimination of glacial melt as a source for important rivers and aquifers, and, of course, the inevitability of millions of climate refugees, many in the world’s poorest nations. Definitely bad for business.
Add to this the increasing likelihood that oceanic acidification will profoundly affect the food chain of much of earth’s life, and the terrifying prospect of gigatons of arctic methane being released into our atmosphere and bringing a greenhouse effect of unimaginable magnitude, and the possibility of a planetary enactment of a Biblical apocalypse becomes disturbingly likely. While some Dominionists may view this as desirable, hoping for the Rapture is not a valid environmental policy.
So, Senator Brown, I hope that you can do some of your own research on this matter, and make a decision to vote rationally — in favor of strong and robust energy and climate-change legislation when it comes to the floor of the Senate. To fail to act in this matter is to leave our grandchildren a horrifying legacy: a planet burning and a population choking on its own waste.
Please, Senator Brown. Do the right thing, not the politically convenient thing.
Thank you,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: endangered species Obama Pika
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Month 2, Day 5: A Little Brown Furry Letter
Late at night; desperately looking for a subject for tomorrow’s letter, which lead me to RL Miller’s sad article about the failure of the Obama Administration to apply Endangered Species Protection to the American Pika, a cute little mountaintop rodent.
Whew. I found a theme, and it’s one I haven’t used before. Below the letter, you can watch a Pika video.
Dear President Obama,
Your administration has done a great many things on the interlocking issues of energy independence, climate change and environmental protection during your first year in office. The enhanced powers of the EPA will prove to be an important component of the struggle against devastating climate change, while your advocacy of new rail initiatives will do an enormous amount to change Americans’ habits of petroleum use.
But there is more to do, and there are some areas in which your Administration has been curiously and unfortunately negligent. One of these is your seeming unwillingness to expand the protection provided by the Endangered Species Act. While it is easy to propose ESA protection for the charismatic megafauna which appear on posters, tee-shirts and tote-bags, it is just as important to ensure that small animals like the American Pika are properly considered. During the first year of your administration, only two new animals have been granted protection under the ESA, compared with eight (at a similar point in the Bush administration) and seventy-three (one year into Clinton’s first term). This is not a record to be proud of.
While an endangered animal’s habitat can in some cases be preserved (thus saving the species), climate change creates a far greater impact on temperature-sensitive species like the Pika. Classifying the American Pika as an Endangered Species would be a demonstration that your administration is serious about reducing the effects of catastrophic climate change, not just on the human population, but on all elements of the web of life on Earth.
Biodiversity is nature’s way of not putting all Her genetic eggs in one basket. The fact that human habits of consumption and waste is rapidly destroying these intricate interrelationships is one of the great tragedies of the age. An environmentally conscious President needs to be attentive not just to those members of the planetary community who have human rights, but to the billions of others whose lives will be blighted and destroyed by climatic devastation.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: cap and trade crime against our grandchildren
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Month 2, Day 4: The NYT Again…
A rec-listed post at Daily Kos led me to this article in the NYT. Here’s FishOutOfWater’s summary paragraph:
Democrats Jim Webb, Mary Landrieu, Evan Bayh, Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad, Byron Dorgan, Mark Pryor, and Blanche Lincoln have built an alliance, the dirty dozen, with Republicans Lisa Murkowski, Sam Brownback, Bob Corker, and Jeff Sessions, to remove carbon caps and to give away huge sudsidies to the coal, nuclear, oil and gas industries.
I posted a long action diary at Kos; please go check it out if you haven’t already. But in addition to sending 50-60 faxes of an angry slogan in very large type (tomorrow’s plan), I wanted to fill my quota of erudition, and I wanted to spread a meme. I’ll need all the help I can get; please try and make this one go viral.
Defeating strong energy legislation is a crime against our grandchildren.
Here’s what I sent to the Times:
When so-called “moderate Democrats” in the Senate join Republicans in favor of passing an energy-only bill that ignores carbon emissions, their action deserves blunt language: it’s a crime against our grandchildren. With climatologists’ worst-case scenarios becoming more likely by the day, our elected representatives have chosen to fiddle while the planet starts to burn. There is no doubt who’s calling the tune: Big Oil and Big Coal.
Because the lag time between climate action and climate effect is several times longer than the elected term of a U.S. Senator, these “public servants” cannot find the courage to confront the deep pockets of the energy lobby. Who will have to cope with the effects of these Senators’ ignorant cupidity? Our grandchildren and theirs, living in a world made all but uninhabitable by the effects of catastrophic climate change. Good luck, kids. You’ll need it.
Warren Senders
atheism Education environment: humor Roy Zimmerman
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Because Tom Lehrer Isn’t Performing Anymore…
We have Roy Zimmerman instead.
For which I am profoundly grateful.
Here’s “Creation Science.” He’s a heck of a guitarist, too.