Gustav: Make the Conservatives Own Their Failure

by: Matt Stoller

Sun Aug 31, 2008 at 17:23


There's good news about the environmental movement.  Gustav is a golden opportunity to reclaim the debate over climate change, and at least one fairly conservative green group is taking advantage of it.

Now you might think that when a major hurricane strikes a city like New Orleans, environmental advocacy organizations would swing into action.  But that isn't how things tend to work.  In October, 2007, environmental groups did not respond to the wildfires and relate it to climate change.  In June, 2008, these same groups did not respond to the Iowa floods and relate them to climate change.  These groups - the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, NRDC, National Wildlife Federation - might have said that they are committed to carbon reduction, but their strategies were at the time organized around ensuring that they stay out of the fray when it gets heated.  

After a wide-spread debate among the green groups, this is changing, and we are beginning to see the change this week.

Matt Stoller :: Gustav: Make the Conservatives Own Their Failure
Symbols are important, and fighting for them matters.  It is why the right fights to own 9/11 and the flag, to associate their ideas with sacred concepts about the meaning of America.  Democrats don't fight for symbols because our leaders think it's inappropriate to do so.  My guess is that Democrats do not even fully own the Katrina symbol, and that the Republicans are going to try and turn that narrative away from Republican incompetence and offer a comparison between the looting that occurred under Democratic Governor Blanco and the Republican Governor Jindal.  Republicans do know how to prey on racial fears and praise the shooting terrified victims during a climate disaster, after all.

The Gustav narrative can be about climate change and the need for a progressive sustainable economy, and the first step is to make the case for why our politics can handle problems as big as these hurricanes.  So I'm quite heartened by this statement from Adam Kolton of the National Wildlife Federation.  Kolton actually says that these more intense storms are being fueled by man-made carbon emissions.  It is a significant departure from the traditional environmental response in the face of disaster, and a welcome one.

Pallin's home state of Alaska is, like Louisiana, seeing the dramatic effects of climate change, something she does not believe in.  I hope moving forward that we see more leaders step up in the face of a full-on propaganda campaign by conservatives to make this storm a comparison between Governor Jindal's and Governor Blanco's handling of looters.  This is a time when, as Obama puts it, we must make the conservatives own their failures.  

We don't know their path and we don't know their timing, but we know these storms are coming.  Progressives though believe we should prepare for them and mitigate the consequences by trying to return to a more healthy relationship with the world around us.  Conservatives are just looking for more rubble to stand on with bullhorns.

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Gustav: Make the Conservatives Own Their Failure | 14 comments
Three Points (4.00 / 2)
(1) As noted in the diary I just posted above, the GOP is scaling back their convention.  It's now on a day-to-day basis whether it will go on at all.  Even with all the messaging incompetence on our side--and I agree with you 100% on that, Matt--the GOP just knows that the hurricane is bad, BAD news for them.

(2) The Democrats failure to make an ongoing issue of this makes them as complicit, in their own way, as the GOP, and undermines their moral authority.

(3) The environmentalist have to revolutionize their organizations.  The need to talk about things like hurricanes and wildfires as they happen is clear.  And the way to talk about things like hurricanes and wildfires is clear as well.  You don't have to get bogged down in "well, we don't really know if or how much global warming contributed."

No! That's not it at all!  You say, this is just a small foretaste of the kind of world we'll be living in if global warming becomes a full-blown reality.  If we do nothing, there will be more of this than you can possibly imagine.  That's what you say.

Any environmental organization that can't talk like that simply has no reason for being.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

"just a small foretaste" (0.00 / 0)
Very well put.  That cuts through the problems I describe below.
[ Parent ]
Well, I've Written Two Major Stories In The Last Three Years (0.00 / 0)
As a biweekly, we don't get to linger on these things as long as I'd like. But I wrote one after Katrina and one after the wildfires here in SoCal last year.  And that's what I learned should be our focus--what does this tell us about what's to come?  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Science and Politics (4.00 / 1)
It's hard because any single event means little when it comes to the science of understanding climate change.  Those who live in the reality-based world find it difficult to tie single events this way.

But of course you are correct.  Just as a politician needs to talk of specific people met on the campaign trail who've told him or her stories about health care, jobs closing and so on, we need to tell the story of our changing environment anecdotally.

Pat Robertson changed his mind during a particularly hot summer.  Scientifically, that is a horrible reason to change one's mind, but it worked.

Two hurricanes in just over three years hitting New Orleans should make it clear to everyone.  Hopefully.

I'm sorry, but that's just sick. (0.00 / 0)
Anybody who would classify a natural disaster as a golden opportunity for anything is just sick and needs to see a therapist right away.
That's right (Warning: turn on your snark detector) (0.00 / 0)
We should only talk to the public about global warming when the public is not focused on hurricanes or global warming. When homes are destroyed and lives are lost from the third major hurricane in 4 years to hit the Gulf coast it's not an opportunity to talk about the human contribution to global warming, and it's also inappropriate to think about future disasters caused directly or indirectly by global warming. Wouldn't want to worry people. Finally, even though the whole country is watching this hurricane make landfall in Louisiana on the third anniversary of Katrina while Republicans are holding their convention at the heads of the Mississippi river, it's just wrong to discuss what the country should do to change our energy infrastructure, even though doing so is the best hope to reduce global warming, and we shouldn't bring up the topic of things like better urban planning and wetlands renewal which could help to mitigate hurricane damage in the future.

We should only talk about these things when everyone else is watching American Idol.

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
-Lawrence Summers

[ Parent ]
I Disagree Vociferously! (0.00 / 0)
We should only talk about these things when everyone else is watching American Idol. the Superbowl!


"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Environmental Groups Don't Swing Into Action (0.00 / 0)
Because using a natural disaster as an excuse for political campaigning is about as classless and tasteless as you can get, not to mention unpatriotic.  

After tragedies have passed, yes, then they can be and have been integrated into a larger narrative, but when our fellow countrymen are suffering, using their pain to tell a political story is just wrong.  

Not only that, but engaging in cheap political tricks like using a hurricane to oppose climate change is so blatantly and overly political that it threatens to jeopardize the very message one is trying to spread.  

Three points (4.00 / 3)
1) I understand what you are saying and yes this is a risk.    Dealing with the emergency at hand always comes first.  But...

2) This attitude fundamentally assumes that politics aren't real and don't matter.  Think of how normal people act outside of politics.  If a small child gets into something she shouldn't, you move it so it doesn't happen again.  You don't worry about "playing politics".

Our politics are how we decide what we are going to do.  It isn't a game, it is real.

3) Teaching moments happen outside of our control.  You have to take advantage of them when they occur.

Now, to get back to 1), how this is done is important.  You don't want to look overly political because regardless of my complaints, many will react the way you did.  But you can feed the reality of the situation into storyline.

For example, I wouldn't try to blame the Republicans for the hurricanes or fires while people were still threatened.  But I would bring up the greater context of how we can expect more of these problems if we continue down our current path.

[ Parent ]
That's the wrong way to look at it. (4.00 / 3)
Politics is about results, and the response to disasters is one of the most basic and fundamental functions of government. It's not just bad politics to ignore them, it's irresponsible.

For a major political party and environmental groups to sit by as we pump more carbon into the atmosphere and not help people draw the connection between that and worsening disasters is not "patriotic", it's completely negligent.

When bad things happen, we have to understand why, understand what if anything we can do to change them, and then present that argument forcefully to the public.

Republicans think basically there's nothing we can do, we should gut public capacity to respond to disasters, we should allow climate change to go on unchecked, and we should give as little reconstruction aid as is politically possible. Or at least that's what they showed after Katrina.

And what you're saying is that instead of presenting an alternative vision for how to deal with them, we should all hold hands and go along with that, because, heck, there's a disaster going on and we don't want to be 'unpatriotic.'

I'm sure the residents of Louisiana, Iowa, California, Mississippi and Texas will all be glad to know that their children will be facing even worse disasters because we're to timid to tell the truth.

I support John McCain because children are too healthy anyway.

[ Parent ]
What You're Saying Is True, In Theory (0.00 / 0)
In a reasonably normal, though imperfect world, what you're saying makes perfect sense.  But that's not remotely close to the world we actually live in.

We're confronted by a party of sociopaths, who would cheefully let all manner of disasters befall our country, so long as they and their cronies made out okay.  They are not merely indifferent to the common good, but, due to their ideology, actively hostile to it.  Add to that the control they have over the media, and it is simply irresponsible not to take advantage of tragic circumstances, which provide one of the few opportunities to break through the destructive stranglehold they have.

It's good of you to remind us of what ideally should be the case, because decades of living in world dominated by such thugs, saps the moral integrity of everyone, even the most vigilant, each in different ways.

But for now, failing to take advantage of tragedies is tantamount to ensuring that there will only be many more of them.  And there is nothing terribly moral or noble in that, either.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Let me clarify (0.00 / 0)
I'm not saying that the stories of tragedies shouldn't be important and that it isn't a political necessity to point out failures.  This isn't some sort of silly idealism.  

Rather, my beef is immediacy.  When some sort of natural disaster like this happens, the immediate aftermath is not the time to act.  There is a certain amount of time that one needs to wait just for the sake of common decency.  

If you recall, when Katrina happened, Democrats really didn't need to make too much noise at all, considering how compelling the images themselves were alone.  

I equated the initial post and the reference to Gustav as a call to arms in the immediate aftermath of a natural, rather than a later attempt to fit the events into a larger picture.  

Heavy-handed rapid responses that smack of politics are the actions of the right, just like their cultural demagoguery, imperialistic saber-rattling and their consistent failure to use military force appropriately.  

[ Parent ]
Palin's Polar Bear Pathos (0.00 / 0)
Sarah Palin could not be a worse choice as far as galvanizing environmentalists against McCain. The NRDC is already sending emails.
Defenders of Wildlife != NRDC (0.00 / 0)
Your link goes to Defenders of Wildlife, a different group than NRDC.
[ Parent ]
Gustav: Make the Conservatives Own Their Failure | 14 comments
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