A Change in the Wind

How far we have come on global warming -- not!

Yesterday Jason Margolis for The World had an absolutely first-class analysis of the presidential politics of global warming. He began with the GOP front-runner's silence on the issue, which Margolis contrasted against the GOP candidate of four years ago. Here's what John McCain said about climate change while running for President as a Republican:

“It’s real. It’s a danger to our planet, it’s a danger to the future of these young people who are in front of me and their children. And it’s got to be stopped.”

Amazing. Today Mitt Romney ignores climate change, while Newt Gingrinch describes his call for action on it "the stupidest thing he's ever done," and Rick Santorum calls global warming a hoax. 

Liberals and Democrats shouldn't self-congratulate, though, because President Obama is as silent on the issue as is Romney. He mentioned climate change in the State of the Union address only to say that nothing could pass Congress on the subject. That is, he blamed the GOP for the inaction.

And "we the people" are no better, as Margolis points out: 

Perhaps the president and the Republican candidates are simply following our lead. According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, Americans ranked global warming as the least important of 22 priorities, just behind campaign finance reform.

Campaign finance reform -- John McCain's other signature issue. No wonder he lost. 

For a shockingly entertaining explanation of the power of global warming, take a look at the National Center for Atmospheric Research's Jerry Meehl talking about climate change...and steroids in baseball.

Bumbling environmentalists, according to Carl Hiassen

The great newspaperman and comic/detective novelist discusses journalism, esp. environmental journalism, with Curtis Brainard: 

Newspaper cutbacks are a recurring theme in your novels. How do you see them affecting environmental journalism?

They’re a grave threat, because the first things that tend to go are investigative and explanatory journalists. Everything becomes shorter and more bite-sized. Environmental journalism can be complicated. It’s one of the most important things to do, yet it’s also one of the first things they start hacking at.

Amen. I've managed to place a few longer stories in recent months, but it ain't easy, and only a fool would do it for the money. Good to see a genial man like Hiassen find a way to make it work. 

Irony is that the interview with the journalist bemoaning cuts is too short!

Ormond beach: the beautiful problem

My cover story this week in the Reporter, on "the broken mirror" of Ormond Beach. This is about 1500 acores along about two miles of beach in South Oxnard, astonishingly rich in shorelife, somehow trying to hold its beauty and vigor amidst monocultural agriculture and heavy industry. 

And here's a picture I took, of a young biologist named Chris Kahler, of VC Shorebirds, and his friend and fellow volunteer Walter Fuller, in his beachside office. How Walter explaind his job to me:

“I’m the gatekeeper at one spot, and the property caretaker for the area, and it’s a big property!” he laughs, referring to the roughly two-mile stretch of white sand and dunes between Port Hueneme to the north and the Naval Base Ventura County, Point Mugu, to the south.

“It’s like I’m taking it on as my responsibility. When I’m out on the beach, I’m watching for injured birds or dead birds; and when the gate’s open I’m watching the parking lot, and if I see any break-ins I notify the appropriate authorities."

Great guys. 

Epic win for greens on Keystone XL: Dave Roberts

The Grist editor writes: 

For a year now, courageous activists, Midwestern farmers, unions, and indigenous groups have rallied in an unprecedented display of public opposition to the destructive Keystone XL pipeline proposal. That grassroots movement pushed us to the brink of victory — and today, it seems, the GOP has pushed us over the line. Thanks to their belligerent insistence that the pipeline decision be made within 60 days, it appears likely the State Dept. is going to be forced to reject it.

We environmentalists would hereby extend our most heartfelt thanks to the GOP. Their tantrums are doing our work for us!

Republicans reportedly believe that forcing Obama to reject the pipeline will give them an election-year issue to demagogue. All we can say to that is: Bring it on. If they campaign as poorly as they legislate, Obama has nothing to worry about.

And he's just getting started:

Greens thought they had won a massive, historic victory by delaying the pipeline decision. Now it looks like the thing will be blocked once and for all. Unless I’m missing something, that is an epic win in the green column.

But there's a catch: Dave Roberts posted this almost a month ago, on Dec. 20. Long before the decision came down. 

Can greens stand it to win one, for crying out loud? 

To the stars, through the thorns: Gov. Jerry Brown

Jerry Roberts knows more about California than you, and me, and probably most of the people in the state put together. He's edited major newspapers, for decades; written columns, for decades; launched websites, written books, taugth at university -- his rap sheet is as long as a cliche. He left teaching a year ago to concentrate on his writing, he said, and from the opening to his latest column in the Santa Barbara Independent, it's clear he made the right move. To wit:

Letting loose a little Latin lexicon, Jerry Brown offered up some context from the classics to describe the political challenges facing Sacramento in 2012.

“Ad Astra per Aspera,” the Jesuit-trained governor intoned in a look-ahead interview about the legislative session that began this week.

Chatting with public radio’s ace Capitol correspondent John Myers, the governor translated the expression as, “To the stars through the thorns.”

The whole column is worth reading, but that is beautiful. 

Sometimes it's so easy to see the Jesuit in Jerry Brown.  

Why does the White House disrespect Paul Krugman?

The great Steve Brodner wants to know why the White House ignores the left's most knowledgeable, effective, and lauded advocate.  

He writes: "Paul Krugman, locked out of Obama’s party with the 1%. Three years on, who had it right!!???"

Climate change denial at Drudge

The day after an excellent story by Justin Gillis in the Times lays out the impact of climate change denial in the GOP re: science, the popular right-wing Drudge site headlines theastonishing number of weather-related disasters that hit the U.S. this year -- 2011: The year in extreme weather.

Included was a NASA satellite picture of Hurricane Irene, about the size of western Europe. 

For decades respected climatologists have been warning that pumping gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere will result in more climactic extremes. Mentions of that fact in the Drudge-linked story?

None.

Of course not --that's why he chose it. Drudge is the site that believes that a cold wave disproves climate change. Nor should we forget that this summer he linked to a denier who claimed Hurricane Irene wasn't a hurricane. Nor should we overlook the endless hating of Al Gore. 

The amplified denial is making all the more likely that we will hit 400 ppm atmospheric concentrations of CO2...by 2015, if we continue on our heedless course.   

 

When will Matt Drudge face reality? 

Ron Paul is a racist paranoid homophobic crank...

...if what was published in his newletter for over ten years can be believed. 

As one smartie put it, there are three options for Paul supporters, when faced with the massive weight of evidence (just see the scans of his newletters, aforelinked)

...there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

An example? Sure:

From October, l992, entitled : Carjacking: A Hip-Hop Thing to Do:

"If you live in a major city, you've probably already heard about the newest threat to your life and limb, and your family: carjacking. It is the hip-hop thing to do among the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos. The youth simply walk up to a car they like, pull a gun, tell the family to get out, steal their jewelry and wallets, and take the car to wreck. Such actions have ballooned in the recent months. In the old days, average people could avoid such youth by staying out of bad neighborhoods. Empowered by media, police, and political complicity, however, the youth now roam everywhere looking for cars to steal and people to rob. What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example)."

Never in my lifetime have I seen a candidate for U.S. President endorse killing by gun.

Via Tim Dickinson. 

From Romney to Rome to murder: today in inequality news

The inequality news from just one day in December 2011:

The likely GOP contender is almost certainly a member of the 1% (from a great story in the Times): 

During his political career, Mr. Romney has promoted his experience as a businessman while deflecting criticism of layoffs caused by private equity deals by noting that he left Bain in 1999. But records and interviews show that in the years since, he has benefited from at least a few Bain deals that resulted in upheaval for companies, workers and communities.

One lucrative deal for Bain involved KB Toys, a company based in Pittsfield, Mass., which one of the firm’s partnerships bought in 2000. Three years later, when Mr. Romney was the governor of Massachusetts, the company began closing stores and laying off thousands of employees. More recently, Bain helped lead the private equity purchase of Clear Channel Communications, the nation’s largest radio station operator, which resulted in the loss of 2,500 jobs.

Much information about Mr. Romney’s wealth is not known publicly. Federal law does not obligate him to disclose the precise details of his investments. He has declined to release his tax returns, and his campaign last week refused to say what tax rate he paid on his Bain earnings.

But since Mr. Romney’s payouts from Bain have come partly from the firm’s share of profits on its customers’ investments, that income probably qualifies for the 15 percent tax rate reserved for capital gains, rather than the 35 percent that wealthy taxpayers pay on ordinary income. 

The U.S. economy today is significantly more unequal than Rome at its imperial height, if you judge from the amount of total wealth owned by those at the top. From ThinkProgress:

"In the United States, the top 1 percent controls roughly 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. According to the study, which examined Roman ledgers, previous estimates, imperial edicts, and Biblical passages, Rome’s top 1 percent controlled less than half that at the height of its economic power, as Tim De Chant notes at Per Square Mile:

Their target was the state of the economy when the empire was at its population zenith, around 150 C.E. Schiedel and Friesen estimate that the top 1 percent of Roman society controlled 16 percent of the wealth, less than half of what America’s top 1 percent control.

Of course, the millions of Romans at the bottom of the empire’s class structure — the conquered and enslaved, the poorest Romans, and the women who had little civic or economic empowerment — would probably disagree with the study’s conclusion. Still, it serves as yet another highlight of how large the income gap in the United States has become over the last three decades."

And, most startling of all, a great story in The Guardian about how in Ohio unemployed men were lured to their death by offers of $300 a week [corrected] and a trailer to live in.

[Ron] Sanson, 58, replied to a job advert on Craigslist in October looking for a watchman on an Ohio farm. The position paid just $300 a week but came with a trailer home to live in free. The applications flooded in from desperate men across the country willing to work for low pay just to have a little income.

Except there was no farm and no job.

Richard Beasley, a self-styled preacher with convictions for burglary, is alleged to have posted the advert to lure men to an isolated wood and shoot them.

Beasley and a 16-year-old schoolboy, Brogan Rafferty, are accused of shooting four men, killing three of them, who travelled from as far as Virginia and Florida as well as from Ohio. The police suspect there are more victims.

Here's a picture of Beasley's alleged co-conspirator:

 

"This most unusual career": Vaclav Havel

This has been a tumultuous year, and it continues with the loss of one of world's greatest civilians, Vaclav Havel. I miss him already.

For me this is perhaps his most essential quote: 

...you do not become a "dissident" just because one day you decide to take up this most unusual career. Your are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins with an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. 

And right on cue, from a truly spectacular piece on the rebellion in Russia by David Remnick, here comes a perfect example of what Havel was talking about, a civilian who discovers she is a dissident.

Or something:

...there are perfectly ordinary people in Putin’s Russia who find themselves wandering into a life of activism, as if by accident. In the summer of 2007, a diminutive businesswoman named Yevgenia Chirikova was walking with her husband in an oak wood near Sheremetyevo Airport called Khimki Forest. She saw that many of the trees were marked with red paint. When she returned home, she scanned various Web sites, and learned that the government had contracted to cut a huge swath through the forest’s swamps and floodplains, felling thousands of old oaks, to make way for a new highway between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Until then, Chirikova had been serenely upwardly mobile, concentrating on her small engineering company and her growing family. She enjoyed her walks in Khimki Forest, part of a greenbelt around the capital. “I didn’t know about the situation with Putin,” she said. “I wasn’t political. I was lazy.” Now she realized that if she didn’t raise her voice the trees in the forest would fall with barely a sound.

Chirikova, who looks like a homier Jean Seberg, turned out to be a charismatic civic leader, making effective speeches, keeping up active Web sites and Twitter feeds, and relentlessly drawing attention to the issue. As she organized demonstrations and acts of disobedience in Khimki Forest—members of her group set up a camp there and regularly thrust themselves in front of bulldozers, getting themselves arrested, and even beaten—she learned that the oligarch most closely connected to the project was Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s friend and judo coach. She also discovered that local officials and Vinci, the French construction firm that was doing much of the work, were supremely uninterested in her movement’s argument that the highway could easily be built without doing damage to the forest. “The letters I got back boiled down to this: If it’s a federal project, then it’s legal,” she said.

Below a portrait of Yevgenia Chirikova, in the hoodie, with her enviro activist friends: 

You know how proud Havel is of her, and all such protesters.