There are a lot of very good reasons to hope that this modern American “conservativism” will be rejected by a majority of voters for the next few elections. But climate change is the most important of them. Tough enough to get anything done with the power of business lobbyists influencing Dems in government but add in the anti-intellectualism of the modern right and we end up with just about the worst possible combination of factors blocking both perception and action.
But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists. full piece here
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world’s leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report’s scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.
In collaboration with the Danish government and others, we are launching a series of Google Earth layers and tours to allow you to explore the potential impacts of climate changeon our planet and the solutions for managing it. Working with data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we show on Google Earth the range of expected temperature and precipitation changes under different global emissions scenarios that could occur throughout the century.
Armey, Texas Republican and former House Majority Leader is now a big-time and very wealthy lobbyist at the hire of large corporate interests such as Exxon Mobile and he heads up the conservative activist Freedom Works front group (fronting those same corporate interests and the RNC). He’s a rather nasty piece of business. As the linked Think Progress piece notes, in recent testimony on Capitol Hill, Armey said the following:
Let me say I take it as an article of faith if the lord God almighty made the heavens and the Earth, and he made them to his satisfaction and it is quite pretentious of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation.
He might believe this idiotic formulation but there’s no reason at all to suspect he does. Lying is not at all unusual for the fellow. We’ll note that he doesn’t explain here how this omnipotent and good-intentioned God missed halting a few other unpleasant events like the murder of six million jews.
ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate sceptic groups, records show
Records show ExxonMobil gave hundreds of thousands of pounds to lobby groups that have published ‘misleading and inaccurate information’ about climate change
OK, so the wheels are only 12 inches (hold up a ruler to get a real idea of how small that is for a wheel) and an engine at 0.6 liters but the deluxx LX model (at $3,800 brand spanking new) has a cell phone charger and cup holders and air conditioning and gets 50 miles on a gallon. And, believe it or not, one tester from the NY Times found the Nano “agile and fun to hustle around the test track”.
Paul Krugman has just returned from China and writes his column today on the consequences for global warming arising from China’s industrial boom, a problem all of us have seen coming.
A significant part of this story relates to the last eight years and the Bush administration’s pro-industry policies. I’ve just now belatedly gotten around to reading Suskind’s “The Price of Loyalty”, an account of Paul O’Neill’s short tenure as Bush’s first Treasury Secretary. It’s an extremely good book and provides a unique view into the beginnings of the administration, it’s policies and the machinations of Cheney, Rove and others as they wrested power from the few moderates in the cabinet, particularly O’Neill, Powell and Whitman (in fact, it is O’Neill’s conclusion that those three were taken on merely as window-dressing to present a promise of moderate policy). The story details how O’Neill and Whitman understood that the science on GW had become irrefutable and that action, nationally and internationally, was critical. But they were out-maneuvered by the industry-friendly Cheney and the “keep the base onside” priorities of Rove.
Had Cheney and Rove (particularly) not been part of this administration, it’s near certain that the international moves towards dealing with greenhouse gases would not have suffered this long period of delay and obfuscation.
What more can one say about these people?
Update: As this Guardian UK piece details, energy industry money is ramping up to defeat Obama’s environmental policies. No surprise in this. This is just the most recent part of a long-running campaign.
America’s oil, gas and coal industry has increased its lobbying budget by 50%, with key players spending $44.5m in the first three months of this year in an intense effort to cut off support for Barack Obama’s plan to build a clean energy economy.
The spoiler campaign runs to hundreds of millions of dollars and involves industry front groups, lobbying firms, television, print and radio advertising, and donations to pivotal members of Congress. Its intention is to water down or kill off plans by the Democratic leadership to pass “cap and trade” legislation this year, which would place limits on greenhouse gas emissions.
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead toglobal warming.
“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil,coaland auto industries, among others.
As this article goes on to note, the information revealed in these court documents demonstrates what we’ve known for a long while now…that the related energy industry PR operations used front groups to forward a strategy which the tobacco industry had used previously – promote the notion that the relevant science was in doubt (in an internal memo, written in the 70s, a tobacco industry exec had written, “…our product is doubt.”)
Apparently dissatisfied with the poor results from recent attacks on the left’s patriotism – so clearly evident in their reluctance to grant America redemption from all sins and critical thought based on nationalist exceptionalism, now the wonderful folks at NRO have decided to try something else…the National Review
Over the last few hundred years in the West, the moral foundations of society were profoundly pro-human. Judeo-Christian moral philosophy and secular humanism both promoted human flourishing and the protection of individual rights as primary purposes of society. But in recent years we have witnessed a rebellion against “human exceptionalism”
As Tomasky noted in the earlier post below, and as numerous others who’ve studied the conservative movement for some decades now have also noted, the present set of circumstances (long term and systematic marginalization of moderates, demographic changes, an extremely popular Dem president, basement polling numbers for Republicans in congress, the past eight years, etc) have led the movement voices to a level of extremist nuttiness that’s breathtaking.
Because the dynamics above have left them with no alternative (presently visible to them) other than doubling down on the more extremist elements of ideology, rhetoric and political strategy. “This will define us as different”, they repeat, hopefully, to each other. “And it worked before. Remember the good old days!”
And that is how they have become a parody of themselves.
This last week we’ve seen a lot of turmoil in Washington and in the media as regards how well or how poorly the administration is handling the various aspects of the economic crisis. Viewpoints and statements are all over the map from opinionated but non-partisan to opinionated and deeply partisan.
It’s the job of those who are partisan to try and forward in the public’s mind some particular narrative which helps their political goals. That’s irrelevant except where those narratives take hold and become “the truth” in the noggins of many, thus influencing what people believe and how they will act and who they will support in elections and in activism.
The modern media is big on these narratives because they are simple and easy to communicate in small sound bites (eg “Bush showed himself to be resolute” or “The people love Obama” or “Obama’s popularity appears to be fading”, etc) These little stories are definitely not necessarily true or accurate. When constructed or told by highly partisan individuals, they can have no or almost no relationship to the truth of things. Far too often, the media act as stenographers for these claims, refraining from or refusing to analyize them critically or to sufficiently analyze them. That’s just the reality of things presently.
Those of us on the left who mostly agree with Obama’s emerging agenda and wish to see it carried through successfully have probably felt a few jolts in the last couple of weeks. There is confusion on what economic policies ought to be followed now and whether his team is doing this right or not. In large part, that is because of the immense complexity of the issues and the fact that even the ‘experts’ are not in concurrence on how to proceed. But another large factor here is that this confusion and uncertainty is being promoted full tilt by the Republicans and conservatives who function as their front men.
Another factor, predicted by all of us before the administration even began, is the pushback and obstruction of Obama’s goals that would arise from the many wealthy and powerful vested interests who benefit from the status quo (Wall Street, the corporate world, the arms industry, the lobbying industry, etc). Proposed changes to, for example, labor laws, healthcare and the defense budget would, everyone understood, be met with large and dedicated campaigns to bring about the failure of the proposed changes. And we’ve seen these gearing up and in operation now.
It would be foolish to assume that all of this is or will leave the Obama administration unscathed. This is a unique period in American history and a critical one. Frequent analogies are made, very reasonably, to Reagan’s readjustments of the political world, to Johnston’s tenure during the sixties and to FDR earlier. But if the economy continues to degrade, then possibly only the FDR period will be comparable.
It won’t be easy for the left as time goes on. But the alternative, America in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, religious barbarics, anti-intellectual wolf hunters and plumbers, homophobic bigots, weapons salesmen, global warming deniers, creationists, and a super-wealthy and mainly self-interested financial elite seems rather too dire to even imagine.
Several weeks ago, George Will wrote a global-warming debunk column in the WP. An immediate uproar followed including a letter from one scientific organization that will had misinterpreted telling him so. Will and the editorial staff held off even answering the many critics for some days then finally did so, but backtracked not an inch (pomposity is a fragile mental state and requires a large internal defense budget).
Today, in a WP column, Chris Mooney (author of “The Republican War on Science”) again takes Will to task. Now, we’ll wait to see whether the pompous pundit will have the integrity to respond in some manner which is not merely a defense of his reputation, such as it is.
…But within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.” refreshments available here
Governments are preparing to breach the worldwide whaling ban, legitimising commercial killing of the giant creatures for the first time in more than 20 years.
Key whaling and anti-whaling nations have thrashed out a plan at a series of unpublicised closed-door meetings to allow Japan to kill the leviathans for gain, after outlawing it for two decades. It is to be presented to a special meeting of the official International Whaling Commission (IWC) early next month.
Environmentalists say that the plan amounts to “waving the white flag” to Japan and they fear that it will usher in a new era of legal whaling around the world. Independent UK
The compromise version of the $787 billion economic stimulus plan passed the House and Senate Friday and is expected to be signed by President Obama tomorrow in Denver. Despite Democratic leaders’ efforts to reach out for Republican support by dropping various controversial provisions and beefing up tax cuts, the measure passed with no Republican votes in the House and only three Republican votes in the Senate.
Public opposition to the plan was led by a group called Americans for Prosperity, which delivered 400,000 signatures on a petition to the Senate opposing the measure. As the group says in a statement at its NoStimulus.com website:
We lost. But we put up a heckuva fight!
We turned what was supposed to sail through with 80 votes and no controversy into a bloody knock-down, drag-out fight.
We showed that Americans won’t passively sit by while our future is plundered. Just the fact that the bill shrank in conference committee — they almost always grow — showed that we had an impact.
Who is Americans for Prosperity? According to SourceWatch.org, the group was founded in 2003 with money from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, which is run by the billionaires behind Kansas-based Koch Industries — the national’s largest privately held oil and gas company. Media Transparency reports that the group gets substantial financial support from the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, another one of the Koch family foundations.
Why would an organization funded by oil and gas interests be hostile to the economic stimulus plan?
Could it be the $50 billion the bill offers for more sustainable energy alternatives?
Several days ago, George Will wrote a column on global warming (it ain’t happening) which gained an immediate response from the scientific body which he’d quoted to bolster his claims. The response said, effectively, Will is either stupid or lying and his claim that we said what he said we said is false.
Numerous sites and publications jumped on Will and the WP’s editor Fred Hiatt (as they should have) for insufficient fact-checking and, later, for the WP and Will’s failure to make a correction or even to address the fowarding of a falsehood.
Jonathan Schwarz has this awesome story about Will from Noam Chomsky. The persistent lying and lack of accountability may sound familiar to you. CHOMSKY: [A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.
George Will, writing this weekend as global-warming-denier-of-the-day for the WP, said:
According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.
Within hours, it seems, the center he quotes posted the following on its website:
We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.
It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.
CHICAGO, Feb. 14 — The pace of global warming is likely to be much faster than recent predictions, because industrial greenhouse gas emissions have increased more quickly than expected and higher temperatures are triggering self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms in global ecosystems, scientists said Saturday.
“We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations,” Christopher Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, said at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. get even more depressed right here
