environment Politics: Barack Obama delusional paranoia Republicans
by Warren
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Month 2, Day 3: In The Wake Of The Crazy Comet
The Amazing Dkos/R2000 poll of self-identified Republicans came out today, and gosh-a-roonie! It certainly revealed a lot. If you haven’t read it, you owe yourself a few horrifying minutes. These are the people who control the Opposition Party in our government. They would be funny if this was a movie or a TV show, but because Republicans are making governance impossible, it’s essential that we take notice of them.
So I wrote to the President, who seems like he’s been getting a little mojo rising recently.
Dear President Obama,
By now you must have seen the results of the Research 2000/Daily Kos poll of self-identified Republicans. These statistics are horrifying and revealing. Sixty-three percent of Republicans believe you’re a socialist (although I suspect that less than one percent know what the word means). Thirty-nine percent think you should be impeached (although it’s unclear that you’ve committed an impeachable offense). A third think you’re a racist; half think Sarah Palin is more qualified to be President than you are. A quarter of self-identified Republicans think their states should secede from the Union. And on and on. As you correctly noted in your Q & A session with the House Republicans, they cannot compromise with you, even a little, because their base is so insanely paranoid that it will erupt at the slightest hint of collaboration with their enemy.
The Republicans represented in the R2000 poll are clutching their remote controls, desperately pushing buttons in the hope that somehow, somehow, somehow you’ll just go away. It’s easy to blame Fox News for a big part of this. But I think Fox is a symptom, not a cause. The larger problem is the erosion of the national attention span, which means that our ability to think carefully about long-term issues is essentially non-existent.
Global climate change is both a long-term and an extremely urgent issue; never has the threat to humanity’s continued survival been as serious as the routine reports of climatologists now reveal it to be. James Hansen’s “Venus” scenario is easy to dismiss as a worst-case example — until we stop to consider that almost every day the “worst-case” predictions of climate scientists turn out to be unrealistically optimistic.
The Research 2000 poll did not specifically ask its Republican respondents whether they believed the Earth was only 6000 years old, but given the other answers to related questions, it seems a safe bet that a sizable majority are Young Earth Creationists. Many are probably anxious for the Rapture, which I suppose qualifies them as pro-global-warming. How can you talk rationally about climate change to a group of people who are unable to conceptualize long spans of time, or who are eager for the Earth’s incineration?
While I applaud your adherence to an ideal of bi-partisanship, it is impossible to form agreements with an entire political demographic that is clearly delusionally paranoid. The delusional paranoids will think you’re out to get them even if you adopt the entire Republican platform. Why bother? Please, Mr. President! The time is now for you to get the Democratic majority in the Senate to pass your policy agenda through reconciliation. Healthcare, Jobs, Financial reform — all of these are essential. But my deepest area of concern is the terrible threat of climate change, for if we don’t get that one right, none of the rest will matter at all in the long run.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Business Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart Lindsey Graham
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Year 1, Month 2, Day 2: To Huckleberry Graham, The Distinguished Senator from South Carolina
I was looking for something else to do in today’s letter. It’s been getting tiring sending stuff out to the same media outlets and politicians, which is why I wound up writing Secretary Chu yesterday. This one goes out to the only Republican who has dared to say anything at all about climate change, Lindsey Graham. He’s pretty much an idiot in most other areas, but he’s taken quite a bit of heat from his tea-bagger constituents for daring to assert that climate change exists. He just issued a very tepid press release, so I used that as the theme for my letter, which falls into the category of Faint Praise for the Faint of Heart.
Dear Senator Graham,
As an outspoken Massachusetts liberal, I suspect that there are few areas where you and I would find agreement. But today I want to write in support of your willingness to buck the Republican Party’s denialist stance on global climate change. To deny that anthropogenic global warming exists is to embrace an anti-science agenda which will undercut America’s continued economic and technological advancement. To deny that global climate change poses a profound long-term threat to humanity as a whole is to ignore the words and projections of the scientists who have studied climatic phenomena in depth and who know more about the subject than anyone else. Make no mistake, denialism is a willful embrace of ignorance, and while ignorance sometimes makes for good politics, it always makes for bad policies.
By acknowledging the existence of global climate change, you have the potential to transform the debate from a “Democrats vs. Republicans” squabble to a genuine conversation between the informed and the ignorant.
In your press release of January 27, you state that, “The energy legislation that was passed by the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee is not strong enough to lead us to energy independence. The climate change legislation passed by the House of Representatives and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee is too onerous on business and does not enjoy bipartisan support.” The first sentence is absolutely correct. The proposed legislation needs to be several orders of magnitude stronger in order to make a real difference in the area of energy independence. Your second sentence, however, does American business an injustice.
I firmly believe that American industries are second to none in their potential for innovation. To suggest that our business sector would be hindered by stringent climate-change legislation is a vote of no confidence in the ability of American industry to compete successfully under any conditions.
Let us not forget that global climate change poses the most severe existential threat that humanity has ever faced. We cannot afford to flunk this test, for it will only be given once; there are no opportunities for re-takes, and failure is fatal for all of us. Dr. James Hansen notes that the “worst-case” scenario involves uncontrolled melting of Arctic methane, triggering a runaway greenhouse effect which could move Earth’s temperatures well above the “uncomfortable” level and up to the “Venus” level.
In which case American business won’t have anybody left to buy its goods.
Granted, this is a “worst-case” scenario. But to anyone who’s been paying attention, it is a shocking reality that climatologists’ “worst-case” scenarios have been coming true as often as not over the past few years. We owe it to the future of our economy, our country and the world as a whole to get this one right.
We should be giving strong tax breaks for businesses which demonstrate genuine engagement in the struggle to reduce their carbon footprints; we should enforce strong tax penalties for businesses which ignore scientific reality in favor of short-term profit. And we must do a better job of educating the public. A strong Republican voice acknowledging the reality of global climate change and the importance of integrating scientific research into environmental and energy policy is a huge component of such public education, and I hope you will continue to tell both your colleagues and constituents the truth, regardless of its political implications for you.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Department of Energy media scientific literacy Steven Chu
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Year 1, Month 2, Day 1: Energy Secretary Chu
Go and read this post from DK Greenroots’ A Siegel, all about how Business Week practices gross deception on their readership with misleading reporting on climate-change issues. It made me pretty mad. Tomorrow’s letter may go to Business Week itself; tonight I wanted to write to them, but I just couldn’t wrap my head around all the facts in Siegel’s piece sufficiently to compose a letter that would make any sense.
So instead I thought I’d write to Energy Secretary Chu, and tell him that he and his Department would have to find some ways to edumacate the media about how to do accurate reporting.
I swear, if we could harness the Idiot Wind, all our problems would be solved.
This letter was pretty long and kind of sprawling. I was too tired to write concisely.
Dear Secretary Chu,
I write as a concerned citizen. I want my daughter to grow up in a world where the threat of environmental devastation on a planetary scale no longer hangs over humanity’s head.
I am not a climatologist, or even any kind of scientist. But I am scientifically literate to the point where it is obvious to me that the difficult truths of global climate change are constantly overwhelmed by corporate-funded denialism and misdirection. The steady rise of atmospheric CO2, the acidification of our oceans, and the newest and most troubling trend of melting Arctic methane all suggest that the most profound existential crisis humanity has ever faced is at hand — and is being resolutely ignored.
Obviously we need concrete and practical solutions, and equally obviously they have to pass political muster. I do not envy your job, for it is self-evident that you (as an administrator) have had to approve initiatives which you (as a scientist) know are foolish and almost certainly a waste of time. So-called “Clean Coal” is one such notion; the idea that capture and sequestration of carbon emissions from burning coal could ever be cost-effective is absurd.
What can you and your colleagues in the Department of Energy do to promote scientific literacy in the media? Perhaps you could announce a regular series of awards from the DoE for the highest-quality scientific reporting in print and broadcast areas — with a special “bottom-of-the-bucket” category to highlight the worst deceptions perpetrated on an uninformed public by our corporatized media establishment. Awards announcements could be made with great fanfare, providing positive reinforcement for journalists and media figures who actually make the effort to explain complex subjects without lapsing into caricature.
I recognize that this type of action would normally fall outside your purview as a working scientist. Alas, by accepting a Cabinet position in the Obama Administration, you have also accepted responsibility for making your department’s work make sense to the general population — a task which is all but impossible in today’s corrupt informational environment. You and your Department need to take the initiative strongly, and give the media what it needs: a circus. If you can give our ADD-affected punditocracy a better circus than that provided by corporate flacks, your message will have a chance of changing the minds of Americans.
Right now, with an increasing number of my compatriots believing that global climate change is illusory, it seems the voices funded by Big Oil and Big Coal are winning the battle. If the Venusian worst-case projections of Dr. James Hansen are accurate, it will be a Pyrrhic victory for the energy companies, for within a few centuries there won’t be a human customer base for them to lie to.
Good luck.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment Politics: idiots New York Times osama bin laden
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Day 31: The Gray Lady Redux
There’s been quite a bit of buzz about Osama Bin Laden’s recent statements on global warming. The New York Times wrote something about it…so I took the opportunity to drop a little note in their mailbox.
It is a sad state of affairs when one of the world’s most notorious criminals speaks more accurately about global climate change than many of our own elected representatives. Now it is absolutely certain that climate-change denialists will use Bin Laden’s words to suggest that realistically confronting the largest existential threat humanity has ever faced is somehow un-American, a capitulation to Al-Qaeda. I remember how conservatives responded to Soviet criticism of the USA on civil rights issues in the fifties and sixties: by calling patriots like Martin Luther King “communists,” suggesting their actions were “controlled by Moscow.” The fact that Khrushchev was a murderous thug didn’t stop him from correctly assessing American racial hypocrisy; the fact that Bin Laden is a murderous thug doesn’t mean that his statements on global warming are invalid. It just means that American conservatives are easily swayed by irrelevant ad hominem arguments.
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Barack Obama conservation
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Day 30: POTUS
In the wake of President Obama’s fine SOTU speech and his epic spanking of the House Republicans, I thought I’d send him a fax/letter combo. Some diarists at Kos were pointing out, rather ruefully, that while he’d called for nuclear power, offshore drilling and “clean coal” in the SOTU address, he didn’t mention the “C” word. Which, of course, has been entirely stigmatized by its association with Jimmy Carter and his cardigan sweater in the attention-deficit-raddled minds of our punditocracy.
So I thought I’d bring it up.
Dear President Obama,
Congratulations on a brilliantly delivered State of the Union address, and on an equally brilliant exchange with the House Republicans. Your words on “tone” were entirely correct. Sadly, I have grave doubts that you will ever find the Republicans to be any more than a Disloyal Opposition; the habit of rhetorical posturing in the service of partisan political maneuvering is too deeply ingrained in them for your polite admonitions to have much effect. I sincerely hope I’m wrong, and I’m grateful to you for trying.
I write today, however, to urge you to use the Presidential “bully pulpit” to educate Americans about the importance of energy conservation as one of the most important ways of expanding our energy resources. While it’s a decidedly “unsexy” word, especially when compared with “drilling,” conservation will probably be the single biggest contributor to our nation’s energy reserves. The proper approach to this is to call on the nation to “eliminate waste.”
Just as you propose eliminating wasteful policies, programs and spending, so too should our citizenry be actively engaged in finding new ways to eliminate wasteful energy use. Local, regional, statewide and national competitions for energy-saving ideas could be incorporated into school science fairs and community events; citizen-generated proposals could be given prominence on a dedicated White House website. Let’s harness the vast ingenuity of the American people to make our energy usage leaner and more efficient. We could reduce our CO2 emissions, our particulate pollution, and our energy expenses — without affecting our lifestyles noticeably (granted, much in our lifestyles should probably be sacrificed for the greater good — but that’s for another letter).
Thank you for all you do.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
Have you written your president today?
environment Politics: Citizens United Ed Markey Saudi Arabia
by Warren
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Day 29: To Ed Markey
After reading this over at Dkos, I was moved to send a fax to Ed Markey’s offices. Maybe you should do something similar?
Dear Representative Markey,
Muhammed al-Sabban, a senior economic adviser to the Saudi oil ministry (and head of the Saudi delegation to U.N. talks on climate change) recently stated that international agreements to penalize carbon emissions are “one of the biggest threats” to Saudi Arabia’s economy. In light of the Supreme Court’s go-ahead to allow corporations unlimited access to the American electoral process, al-Sabban’s words are especially disturbing. How many nominally American corporations are at least partially owned by individuals or consortia aligned with the Saudi government? And can we have confidence that these companies will use their newly granted powers of monetized “speech” for the betterment of our nation and the global environment? At a time when the world desperately needs meaningful forward motion on climate change issues, the likelihood of OPEC countries interfering in American elections through American-owned shell companies is a virtual guarantee that no progress will take place. Please co-sponsor Rep. Alan Grayson’s “Save Our Democracy” legislative package, and please look into developing further legislation to block the consequences of the extremely damaging and misguided decision by the Bush-appointed majority of the Supreme Court.
Thank you for all you do.
Yours sincerely,
Warren Senders
And y’know, I think I’ll tweak that bit about Grayson’s legislation and send a version of it over to John Kerry as well. A double-header!
environment Politics: investments SEC
by Warren
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Day 28: Same Ol’, Same Ol’
Stimulated by the recently announced decision of the Securities and Exchange Commission that:
Companies must consider the effects of global warming and efforts to curb climate change when disclosing business risks to investors…
I thought I’d dash off a little missive to the Boston Globe saying what an excellent idea I thought it was.
Yesterday the business community got a good dose of realism when the SEC approved new guidelines requiring companies to include information on the impact of climate-change regulation in corporate filings. This is a message that the current administration is more serious about enforcing environmental-protection laws; under Bush, those laws were pretty universally ignored, leaving companies free to pollute. However, climate denialism is still very much a growth sector. Cynical and mendacious people eager to misrepresent an overwhelming scientific consensus are heavily funded by big oil and coal companies. It is time for the business sector to recognize the reality of global climate change and begin marshaling the resources of the private sector to help the world’s population prepare for the devastating effects of climaticide. Yesterday’s SEC ruling was a good step in the right direction, but we have a long way to go.
Warren Senders
environment: Belly of the Beast Business US News and World Report
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Day 27: Another Thrust to the Belly of the Beast
I’m going to send this one to US News and World Report. I’m writing this the night before; I’ve got a sore throat and body pain…and tomorrow I’ll be a parent-helper at Little Daughter’s preschool. Gotta get some sleep.
Slowly but surely, awareness of the reality of climate change is creeping into our national discourse. America’s Department of Defense has been developing contingency plans for how to deal with devastating droughts, food system failures, and the possibility of hundreds of millions of displaced climate refugees, many in the poorest and most politically unstable parts of the world. State Farm Insurance, citing rising sea levels and the increased threat of catastrophic storms, will no longer issue or renew policies for structures on North Carolina’s Barrier Islands. Other insurance companies are beginning to follow suit. It is long past time for the business community to recognize climatic reality, and find common cause with environmental advocates. The only world in which corporations can reasonably expect sustained profitability is one in which humans can live sustainably.
Warren Senders
environment: consumerism GDP trash
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Day 26: To the Belly of the Beast
I’m going to send some letters to the business community — hoping to carry the message of my Open Letter to Our Corporate Overlords directly to them. This one is going to Business Week Magazine.
America’s fate is linked with consumption. We have learned to buy things to soothe ourselves, to satisfy our transient urges, and to Support the National Economy. But a consumer’s lifestyle also creates ever-increasing amounts of trash. As the planet’s biggest per capita producer of trash, America leads the world in subtracting value from lives, systems and things. From our grotesque pop culture to the millions of plastic bottles we throw away every day, from the cynical culture of planned obsolescence to the terrifying increase in CO2 emissions in our atmosphere, the evidence is overwhelming: Consumer Culture is killing us. It’s killing our curiosity, it’s killing our common sense, it’s killing millions of species of life all across the world, and it’s ultimately going to kill our planet if we keep it up.
Humanity desperately needs a new kind of culture that’s based, not on taking value out, but on putting value in. One way forward is to adopt a new system for indicating the overall health of an economy; the notion that economic well-being is a function of ever-increasing consumption (as measured by the GDP, for example) is obviously absurd.
Yet it is a measure of how far we have strayed from simple common sense that stating the obvious (if we keep turning the world around us into trash, eventually there will be nothing left) is interpreted as being “anti-business” or “anti-capitalism.” No, it’s not; it’s the only way that Business and Capitalism will be able to survive in the long run. What good is maximizing profits over the next century if the result is a world so choked in toxic waste that no life can survive?
Warren Senders
environment Politics: Citizens United corporate personhood corporations pleading science-fiction SCOTUS
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An Open Letter to Our Corporate Overlords
Dear Masters,
Please excuse my presumption in writing to you directly. I don’t even know the correct term of address, and I fear “Dear Masters” does not express sufficient recognition of the vast differences in our status. My country’s Supreme Court has recently conferred upon you the powers you have sought for many years, and I congratulate you upon your victory in the Judicial Branch. I expect it will soon be followed by victories in other branches as well.
Let me be frank. I fear You greatly. It is only my relative insignificance to Your grand plans that gives me the courage to speak out at all, for I am sure that if I were ever to inconvenience You in any way, I would be crushed. Even mentioning the possibility that I could inconvenience You is a presumption, I know, given the vast difference in our power and influence. I may speak of my dignity and my rights, but I know that the only reason I have that dignity and those rights is that You allow it. Forgive me. I do not wish to offend You, for You hold in your hands (metaphorically speaking, of course, since You have no hands) the future of everything I hold dear.
I hold dear my family, my wife, my lovely and precocious five-year-old daughter. I hold dear my work; I am a teacher of song, and what more pleasant occupation could there be than sharing the music I love with those of like mind? I hold dear the beautiful woodlands near my house, for it calms my heart and slows my thoughts to walk through the tall trees. I hold dear the memories of my teachers and influences, and of those who’ve been my fellow travelers in this life. I hold dear the countless links in the human chain — how far we clever apes have come in just a few short tens of thousands of years!
Most of all I hold dear the web of life of which I am a part. When I contemplate my Death, I am comforted by the knowledge that my body is made of EarthStuff and SunStuff, and will eventually be food for other Lives.
What scares me about You, dear Masters, is that You cannot contemplate your Death, for You are immortal. And because You are not made of the same stuff as We, You have no bond of sympathy with Us.
So I cannot appeal to Your better natures, for by the standards of Earthly life, You have none. I can only appeal to Your predatory natures; those, You have in abundance.
In the past two centuries You have built economic systems that depend on Our willingness to turn Ourselves into trash; systems hinging on the requirement that We continue to consume at ever-increasing rates. Not to consume is to fail our duty to You, our Masters.
But dear Masters, We have recently begun to notice that the power of Your economic systems is killing the planet on which we live. Countless species are dying every day; in the years and decades to come millions will disappear from Earth at a rate faster than at any time in our planet’s history (except, of course, for the day the Big Meteor hit). We have consumed our planet’s SunStuff avidly, as You order Us…but recently We’ve discovered that the burning SunStuff is making our atmosphere heat up.
If it goes on, Dear Masters, there is a very good chance that all of Us will die.
Not “die,” as in “human beings die every day,” or “his dog died last week,” but “die” as in “the Earth will no longer be able to support any form of life at all, because it will be too hot.”
And then, Dear Masters, what would You do?
Lacking physical substance, not made of EarthStuff and SunStuff as We are, You cannot stand upright on the surface of a baking planet, wondering where everyone’s gone. You may be immortal, but even immortals have to eat, and we feed you. Although You are not made of the same stuff as We, if We die, so too shall You, and Your Deaths will be lonely ones.
I assume You don’t want that.
And so, Dear Masters, I timidly plead my case.
Adjust your Economic Systems just a tiny bit, so that You can maximize Your profits from Us in the long run rather than making a killing in the short. I will pay You what I earn and buy what I’m told to buy; in another decade I will show my little girl how to get her own credit card so She can enter your service as well. I don’t mind if I continue to be Your indentured labor; I don’t mind if my daughter and her child and her child’s child to the hundredth generation remain in Your servitude.
But You need to change things just a little, so that they can live. Otherwise nobody will get the chance, because the Earth will be dead and so will You.
Dear Corporations, You alone have the power to redirect sufficient resources in this world to fix the problems you’ve caused. You are our Masters. It is in Your interest to keep the Earth a good place to live, so that You may continue to consume Us for thousands of years to come.
If You do this, if You make these changes, then I can die well pleased, knowing that the links of our human chain will not end up as slag on the face of a Venusian landscape. And perhaps my hundred-times-great granddaughter and her fellow humans can find a way to overcome your Dominion and live freely and peacefully, without waste or war, on a good green and blue Earth filled with abundant life. That’s all I want: just to know they’ll have a chance, a few centuries from now.
Thank you for listening, if you are.
Your most humble and abject subject,
Warren
Crossposted at Daily Kos.