During the State of the Union address earlier this week, President Barack Obama spoke at length about clean energy, with nary a mention of climate change. This is the new environment in which America's energy policy is being made.
Just two years ago, Democrats were rallying to combat climate change, one of the most worrying challenges the country faces. But now, Obama has apparently given up his plan to openly fight climate changeduring his presidency. It's hard to imagine how, even in a second term, he would choose to re-fight the lost battle to create a cap-and-trade system.
The Obama Administration has instead resorted to a sort of insurgent strategy. Instead of waging an all-out battle against energy interests, the U.S. government will try to chip away at the edges of the industry's power and rally citizens' allegiances to a new flag, that of "clean energy."
Climate bill's absence is smothering clean energy
Since Washington hasn't succeeded at tackling climate change head on, Obama's new strategy is to attack the problem obliquely by promoting innovation in clean energy and setting goals for the use of technologies like electric cars. But can clean energy efforts and innovations thrive in the absence of a wholesale climate policy? When a climate bill was still a possibility, clean energy entrepreneurs were promising substantial investments in the sector, if only Congress could give them a framework. And as Monica Potts explains at The American Prospect, in the absence of a climate bill, clean energy has flagged:
What's been problematic about the president's approach up to now is that, despite his efforts to pump funding into the clean-energy sector, as he did with about $90 billion of the stimulus, renewable energy hasn't taken off. Obama had a line in his speech that summed up why this is so: "Now, clean-energy breakthroughs will only translate into clean-energy jobs if businesses know there will be a market for what they're selling."
Short on influence
It's possible that clean energy investors will take the President's new promise as incentive enough to push forward. But, they will also have to consider the influence of the newly empowered Republicans. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard isn't convinced that the president's new tactic will stick:
"There are plenty of people-and most of them happen to be Republicans-who don't think that policies to support clean energy are worthwhile and who will oppose any attempt to move away from them," she wrote. "Meanwhile, this latest iteration of the Obama climate and energy plan includes few of the driving forces that would actually make renewables cost-competitive in the near future and allow renewables to compete (the big one being, of course, a price on carbon pollution)."
When "clean" energy includes coal
Another weak point in the President's new strategy is his reliance on the vague idea of clean energy, which becomes dirtier the more it is used. As Sheppard writes, "Environmental groups weren't all that excited about the inclusion of "clean coal" and nuclear in that mix, but that's pretty broadly expected as the price one must pay to draw broader support for a clean energy standard."
Another key source of clean energy is natural gas. In Washington, it's become a given that natural gas, which releases less carbon when burned than coal or oil, will help the country transition away from its high-carbon diet and be phased out as energy sources like solar and wind become more viable. (The natural gas industry, of course, doesn't see its role as transitional. It's playing for keeps.)
And while some places are rightly celebrating the freedom that natural gas gives them from coal-as Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Penn State is investing $35 million to convert its coal-fired power plant to natural gas over the next three years-other places are bearing the environmental toll of this new, clean fuel. In North Carolina, for instance, hydrofracking, the controversial technique that natural gas companies have been using to extract the gas from shale, is not even legal, but already environmental groups are having to fight efforts from energy companies to buy up potentially gas-rich properties, Public News Service reports.
A poverty of political capital
The president's new strategy on clean energy will surely succeed at turning current energy economy slowly towards a new path. In the absence of any overarching strategy to fix the country's energy problems, it's going to have to be good enough. But ultimately, this sort of tactic, born out of a poverty of political capital, cannot move fast enough to keep energy companies from scouring the earth for more profits doing what they've been doing.
That means that there will be more scenes like the one in Kern County, California, where companies are dredging up the last resources of oils from the tar sands. In Orion Magazine, Jeremy Miller writes:
The land also reveals the Frankensteinian scars and machinery necessary to keep up that level of production. Gas flares glow on hillsides. Nodding donkeys lever over thousands of wells, some of which are spaced fewer than a hundred feet apart. Between the wells and imposing cogeneration power plants-which supply energy and steam to the senescent fields-run wild tangles of pipe. These are the conduits of an elaborate industrial life-support system, breathing in steam and carrying away oil.
Will the president's new strategy prevent the creation of more landscapes like this one? It seems overly optimistic to hope so.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao touched on energy issues in the bilateral summit between the two countries this week.
"I believe that as the two largest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouses gases, the United States and China have a responsibility to combat climate change by building on the progress at Copenhagen and Cancun, and showing the way to a clean energy future. And President Hu indicated that he agrees with me on this issue," President Obama said during a Wednesday press conference.
But can the United States step up as a leader on clean energy? The proliferation of politicians whom The Nation's Mark Hertsgaard calls "climate cranks" suggests otherwise.
The biggest consumers
In international climate negotiations, the United State and China are the two key players, and if the world as a whole is to move forward on combating climate change, agreement between Presidents Obama and Hu would be a huge breakthrough. Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard notes that Hu also said the United States and China would work together on climate changes, but, she writes, "I can imagine, though, that the conversation on this subject wasn't entirely as chummy as the remarks would imply, however. The US last month lodged a complaint with the World Trade Organization about China's subsidies for clean energy, arguing that the country is unfairly stacking the deck in favor of their products."
At AlterNet, Tina Gerhardt and Lucia Green-Weiskel explain the background to those tensions and to the U.S.'s protectionist bent on clean energy projects. They write, "Energy Secretary Chu recently framed the new relationship between the U.S. and China as a 'Sputnik Moment.' Referencing the first satellite launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, which demonstrated its technological advantage and led to the Cold War-era space race, Chu warned that the U.S. risks falling behind China in the clean technology race."
Stumbling blocks
China's motivations for growing its clean energy sector may not be leafy green; new energy sources feed the country's rapidly growing economy. But at least the country is committed to green energy sources, unlike our climate change-denying Congress. As Mark Hertsgaard argues at The Nation, this brand of American has become so pernicious, it's time to stop adhering to the protocol that dubs them "climate deniers" and start calling them "climate cranks." He explains:
True skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method, but an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts, if they are sound. The cranks are impervious to facts, at least facts that contradict their wacky worldview. When virtually every national science academy in the developed world, including our own, and every major scientific organization (e.g., the American Geophysical Union, the American Physics Society) has affirmed that climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank continues to insist that it's all a left-wing plot.
Climate cranks attack
Unfortunately, climate cranks continue to interfere with both climate scientists and forward-thinking energy policy. At Change.org, Nikki Gloudeman writes about the ongoing saga of climate scientist Michael Mann, one of the climatologists embroiled in the Climategate brouhaha, who is still being attacked by climate-denying groups for his work. Gloudeman reports that although Mann has been investigated and found innocent of any misdeeds several times over, a group with a bias against climate change, the American Tradition Institute, is trying to obtain access to his work.
And in New Mexico, the state's new conservative governor, Susana Martinez, "has attempted to subvert her own state constitution in order to stop [a] plan to begin reducing her state's carbon emissions," reports Dahr Jamail for Truthout. The plan, executed through state rules, would have reduced the state's greenhouse gas emissions by 3%, from 2010 levels, each year. The rules should have been made public, but Gov. Martinez kept them from being published, according to Truthout's report. A local group, New Energy Economy, is fighting to implement them.
Bright spots
In some states, however, the clean energy economy is moving forward. As Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, Clean Edge, a clean-tech advisory group, has identified the top ten states for clean energy leadership. They include California, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois.
"Rankings were derived from over 80 metrics including total electricity produced by clean-energy sources, hybrid vehicles on the road, and clean-energy venture and patent activity," Buczynski reports.
And, as David Roberts writes at Grist, there is important work to be done at the local and regional level to both prepare for and prevent climate change. His preferred term for this challenge is "ruggedizing"-strengthening a community's ability to respond to challenges brought on by climate change, such as flooding, droughts, or food shortages. The solutions to these problem, Roberts writes, often have the welcome side effect of decreasing carbon emissions, as well:
For instance, the residents of Brisbane are discovering that when disaster strikes, it's not very handy to have everyone spread out all over the place and utterly dependent on cars to get anywhere. It's more resilient to have people closer together, more able to walk or take shared transportation. It just so happens that also reduces vehicle emissions.
The advantage of this type of work-building the clean energy economy, ruggedizing communities-is that leaders don't necessarily have to agree on the reality of climate change to move forward. But these are only partial solutions, and to address climate change on an international scale, the cranks will need to be quieted.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Editor's Note: We're posting the Weekly Mulch on Thursday this week because of the holidays. It'll return to its regular Friday morning posting next week. Until then, Happy New Year!
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
2010 was a disappointing year for environmentalists.
This was the year Congress was supposed to pass climate change legislation, but each and every time Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed on the verge of pushing the bill forward, the effort fell short. In April, off the coast of Louisiana, the Deepwater Horizon explosion led to one of the worst environmental disasters in the country's history, and in the aftermath, neither President Barack Obama nor Congress has pushed for the sort of strong regulations that would rein in the oil industry and the risk it poses to coastal ecosystems.
Meanwhile, a newly invigorated natural gas industry has been plowing forward with a controversial drilling technique called hydrofracking. Although the Environmental Protection Agency has committed to studying the environmental impacts of the practice, it's unclear at this point how much leeway the industry will be given to use techniques that have contaminated water and air across the country. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben had trouble convincing the president to take the small symbolic act of reinstalling a solar panel on the White House roof. And in November, the country elected a group of lawmakers who are skeptical that climate change even exists.
Hope springs eternal
But the news was not all bad, as Change.org's Jess Leber reports. In California, green-minded voters defeated a proposition that would have rolled back the state's ambitious climate law. Coal-fired power plants are closing in states like Oregon and Colorado, and mountaintop removal coal mining is losing its funding. And cities like New York, Washington D.C., Denver and Minneapolis made it easier for their inhabitants to use bikes as a primary mode of transportation.
"All over the world, activists are fighting in their states, towns and cities to do right by the environment," Leber writes. "They are also moving to pressure the corporate world. So while, given the results of Election Day in the U.S., progress in Congress will be an uphill battle, I'm confident there will be even more victories to report this time next year."
A year can be a long time. Consider, for instance, Steph Larsen's reflections on her farm's first year. "I feel like I've lived a decade in the last 12 months," Larsen writes in Grist. Last year, her pasture did not exist, and the farm buildings on her land had sat unused for years. But in the past 12 months, she's grown cherries and tomatoes and squash, kept chickens and hunted for their eggs, and raised livestock that later became her dinner.
Larsen's goals for her farm are modest: "to grow food for her household and community." It can be hard sometimes to see how individual choices like hers can make a difference while global leaders cannot agree on how to reduce carbon emissions and industry continues to exploit and pollute the environment. But as Winslow Myers, the author of Living Beyond War, writes at Truthout, "the cause-and-effect relationship between what I do personally in my daily life and those planet-wide challenges has become infinitely clearer" over the past 50 years:
Now we can see how the two are connected - between my diet and the effect of industrial agriculture on the land, between my energy consumption and global climate change, between the chemicals in my laundry detergent and the health of the oceans - and between my political commitments and the world-destroying weapons built with my tax dollars....the reality is that I am so deeply connected to the whole entity that I am responsible for it, answerable to it.
Local leaders step into the breach
It's true that individual decisions to turn down the heat, or eat local food, or bike instead of drive cannot turn back global warming. But in aggregate, they do make an impact. And although nationally and internationally, politicians are finding it difficult to create strong policies on climate change, that would reduce emissions, not all lawmakers are avoiding the issues. Franke James' visual essay on climate change at Yes! Magazine puts it like this: "Don't be fooled by the global leaders loafing. Local leaders and cities are making plans to adapt to climate change (because it's affecting them NOW!) "
And ultimately, these sorts of decisions on local and individual levels do send a signal to leaders that their constituents care about keeping the planet healthy, care about preserving our environmental resources. To that end, check out these ideas for individual action from the staff and readers of Mother Jones.
And next year? Leaders like Bill McKibben are working to create a global movement around climate change, a people-driven movement that will convince legislators and negotiators that it is incumbent upon them to act. Look for them to start making lots of noise in 2011.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
(With so much else going on, I'm afraid I've dropped the ball in writing about the Cancun summit. Fortunately, this diary does a good job of filling in. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium Blogger
This year's round of the United Nations-led climate change negotiations, ongoing in Cancun, Mexico, for the past two weeks, end today. No matter what the official outcome, the progress made on dealing with global climate change and carbon emissions will be incremental.
The problem, at base, lies with the incentives, or lack thereof, for the most powerful negotiators at the table. Morally, there are plenty of reasons for every country in the world to commit to drawing down carbon pollution. But economically? Politically? It's easier to take small steps, make half-hearted commitments.
Going all-in
What would a brave policy stance look like? Something like the position the Maldives-an island archipelago-has taken: "We do not have to wait for everyone else to do this," as the country's environment minister, Mohamed Aslam said at the conference this week. As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports:
Right now the country relies heavily on diesel fuel for much of its energy needs. The government has already conducted an audit of their emissions, much of which comes from the shipping sector, a fact of life in island nations. But Aslam envisions solar, wind, tidal power, and renewable transportation fuels driving the nation in the near future-even if islanders don't have all the solutions now.
Aslam notes, Sheppard writes, that it's in the country's economic favor to take up these policies. So for the Maldives, at least, it's not a tough sell.
Bribery?
The real dilemma for island countries like the Maldives, though, is how much wiggle room they should give larger countries, who are bigger emitters, in international agreements. Larger countries have more to lose, economically, so they're less willing to commit to, say, legally binding goals for reduced carbon emissions.
But these larger countries also tend to have more money. And that's where the problem for countries like the Maldives comes in: they're going to need financial support to deal with creeping sea level rise and other consequences of climate change. Some of the WikiLeaks diplomatic cables, as The Guardian reported, revealed how countries like the United States use those needs to their diplomatic advantage. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman asked U.S. Climate Envoy Todd Stern to respond to these revelations, but didn't get much of a response.
I've got the power
Ultimately, though, a country like the Maldives is always going to have a weaker negotiating position than bigger countries. Take, for instance, this account from Inter Press Service's Darryl D'Monte on how to identify an important player at Cancun:
A rough yardstick for identifying which Asian countries make the biggest ripples in Cancun is the number of journalists who crowd around the spokesperson immediately after a press conference. ... Indian Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has certainly come into his own on this score. As the spokesperson for the BASIC group of countries, which includes Brazil, South Africa and China, he is articulate, well-informed and witty. Journalists swarm around him after a press conference, eager to get him make a scathing remark about another country or group of countries.
This profile of Ramesh is a fascinating window into how one negotiator manages to navigate these complicated talks. But, as D'Monte points out, even for India, financing is a key question: one of the "non-negotiables" for India, Brazil, South Africa and China is speedier delivery of promised mitigation monies.
Moral Highground
There's one group at Cancun whose incentives line up impeccably with a faultless moral position: young people. They're the ones most likely to suffer the consequences of a warming world, and they're advocating for a draw-down of carbon-heavy industries. At Change.org, Jess Leber reports that about 1,000 young people are participating in some way in the conference this year. (Official attendance tallies, for participants inside and outside the building, estimate 22,000 people in total.)
Leber reports that young people did make some progress this year: "The negotiators agreed to ramp up support for climate education and training programs worldwide, but especially in developing countries, and agreed to give the youth delegation are larger official voice in the negotiating process," she writes.
That's good news for adults, as well. As the UN's chief negotiator, Christiana Figueres, demonstrates in this video at Care2, it's tough to face down the people who are actually going to suffer from your generation's waffling. "Figueres tears up when speaking of why the talks are important; she also describes the inspiration that keeps her working toward a global agreement," writes Nancy Roberts.
Figueres' inspiration? "It's you," she tells young activists. "It's not our planet. It's yours...You will all take it over very soon...Nothing is going to be perfect...Everything here is going to be one step. But it is the best that this group of people under these circumstances...can do for the time being."
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
(I meant to blog about this more this week, but it got too crazy. Here's a bit of catch-up. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
by Sarah Laskow, Media Consortium blogger
The most recent round of United Nations-led climate change negotiations began this week in Cancun, and although international expectations are muted this year, the stakes are still high. As Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard explains,"The 2010 meeting could make or break the future of global negotiations."
This is the sixteenth Conference of the Parties, convened by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). After the tepid results of last year's conference in Copenhagen, when a last-minute, backroom deal produced a non-binding accord, participants and observers of the negotiations are beginning to question whether it is the best forum for these sorts of conversations. Central to the progress, or lack thereof, on international climate change policy is the United States' intransigence. As one of the world most proliferate carbon spewers, it's essential for the United States to commit to dramatic reductions in its carbon emissions.
But if American negotiators have always been reluctant to make those promises, even if they did this year, their promises would ring empty. The results of the 2010 midterms mean there's little chance Congress would ratify a treaty. Republicans just eliminated a special House committee on global warming. They certainly aren't interested in making the sorts of concessions that international negotiators want and need to convince their own governments to move forward.
Signing off
It's unclear, at this point, if the UNFCCC framework will ever produce a worthwhile results. Inter Press Service's Kanya D'Almeida reports that "the meeting in Cancún is foreshadowed by a deep pessimism." D'Almedia offers, for instance, this take from Nigel Purvis, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States:
"Global climate talks have begun to resemble a bad soap opera," Purvis wrote in an essay entitled 'Cancún and the End of Climate Diplomacy. "They seem to never end, yet seldom change and at times bear little resemblance to reality. This is why climate diplomacy as we know it has lost its relevance."
The last landmark climate treaty-the Kyoto Protocol, which the United States never signed onto-will expire in 2012. The Copenhagen Accord, the agreement that came out of last year's negotiations, does not bind countries to their commitments, as Kyoto did.
The next major step in tackling climate change could be for countries across the world to re-up their commitments to reducing carbon emissions through a Kyoto-like (i.e. legally enforceable) pact. The alternative is to base global action on an agreement along the lines of the one produced at Copenhagen, with less stringent standards for accountability.
A year ago, it seemed possible-likely, even-that President Barack Obama would sweep into the international negotiations on climate change at Copenhagen and make serious progress on the tangle of issues at stake. The reality was quite different. This year, the expectations for the United Nations Climate Conference in Cancun are less wild.
The conference will be held from Nov 29 to Dec 10 and the same issues from 2009 are up for debate. Countries like the United States, Britain, and Germany are still contributing an outsize share of carbon to the atmosphere. Countries like India and China are still rapidly increasing their own carbon output. And countries like Bangladesh, Tuvalu, and Bolivia are still bearing an unfair share of the environmental impacts brought on by climate change.
A very different set of expectations are building in the climate movement this year. If last year was about moving forward as fast as possible, this year, climate activists seem resigned to the idea that politicians just aren't getting it. Change, when it comes, will have to be be built on a popular movement, not a political negotiation.
Climate change from the bottom up
Last year, climate activists put their faith in international leaders to make progress. This year, they believe that it's up to them, as outside actors, to marshal a grassroots movement and pressure their leaders towards decreased carbon emissions.
"There's a recognition that the insider strategy to push from inside the Beltway to impact what will happen in DC, or what will happen in Cancun has really not succeeded," Rose Braz, climate campaign director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Making Contact's Andrew Stelzer. "What we're doing in conjunction with a number of groups across the country and across the world is really build the type of movement that will change what happens in Cancun, what changes what happens in DC from the bottom up." (This entire episode of Making Contact is dedicated to new approaches to climate change, at Cancun and beyond, and is worth a listen.)
Fighting the indolence of capitalists
Here's one example of this new strategy. As Zachary Shahan writes at Change.org, La Via Campesina, an international peasant movement, is coordinating a march that will begin in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Acapulco, Oaxaca, and Chiapas, then converge on Cancun. The march will include "thousands of farmers, indigenous people, rural villagers, urbanites, and more," Shahan reports.
After they arrive in Cancun, the organizers are planning an "Alternative Global Forum for Life and Environmental and Social Justice" for the final days of the negotiations, which they say will be a mass mobilisation of peasants, indigenous and social movements. The action extends far beyond Cancun, though. Actually, they are organizing thousands of Cancuns around the world on this day to denounce what they see as false climate solutions.
These actions echo the strategy that environmentalist and author Bill McKibben and other climate leaders are promoting to push for climate change policies in the U.S. All this talk about building momentum from the bottom up, from populations, means that anyone looking for change is now looking years into the future.
The U.S. is not leading the way
Of course, ultimately, politicians will need to agree on a couple of standards. In particular, how much carbon each country should be emitting and how fast each country should power down its current emission levels. The U.S. is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to agreement on these questions, especially due to the recent mid-term elections. As Claudia Salerno, Venezuela's lead climate change negotiator wrote at AlterNet:
Unlike what many suggest, China is not the problem. China, along with India and others, have made considerable commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and are already working to realize them. Other developing countries have done the same, although we only generate a virtual drop in the bucket of global carbon emissions. The key player missing here is the U.S.
China, the U.S. and Clean Coal
The most interesting collaborations on clean energy, however, aren't happening around the negotiating table. This week, The Atlantic's James Fallows wrote a long piece about the work that the U.S. and China are doing together on clean coal technology, the magic cure-all to the world's energy ills.
In the piece, Fallows recognizes what environmentalists have long argued: coal is bad for the environment and for coal-mining communities. But, unlike clean energy advocates who want to phase coal out of the energy equation, Fallows argues that coal must play a part in the world's energy future. Therefore, we must find a way to burn it without releasing clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. That's where clean coal technology comes in. So far, however, researchers have had little luck minimizing coal's carbon output.
A few progressive writers weighed in on Fallows' piece: Grist's David Roberts thought Fallows was too hard on the anti-coal camp, while Campus Progress' Sara Rubin argued that the piece did a good job of grappling with the reality of clean energy economics. And Mother Jones' Kevin Drum had one very clear criticism-that the piece skated over the question of progress on carbon capture, the one real way to dramatically reduce carbon pollution from coal. He wrote:
All the collaboration sounds wonderful, and even a 20% or 30% improvement in coal technology would be welcome. But that said, sequestration is the holy grail and I still don't know if the Chinese are doing anything more on that front than the rest of us.
On every front, then, the view on climate change is now a long one.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Mulch for a complete list of articles on environmental issues, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Pulse, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.
Lots of pundits are trying to read into the different results in the House and Senate. Why did Republicans take over the House but not the Senate? Did Pelosi do too much? Is it redistricting? Do bigger Senate races make for more moderate results?
No one seems to bother to pay attention to actual results. Only a third of the Senate was up for election. These are the results so far:
Senate: 38 seats up for election
Democrats: 11 seats won for 29%
Republicans: 24 seats won (including Alaska) for 63%
TBD: 3
House: 435 seats up for election
Democrats: 180 for 41%
Republicans: 233 for 54%
TBD: 22
So Republicans actually did better in the Senate races then in the House races. Near as I can tell, not one single pundit has noticed this. You'd think the fact 2/3 of the Senate wasn't up for reelection would be obvious.
This inability to do basic math is extremely telling. At the group level, we remain a story-based species, and given how deeply wired this reality is, we almost certainly always will be. We're never going to be Vulcans. All the more reason, then, that those who are the most influential story-tellers should be educated in other modes of thinking as well, particularly math and science, but also visual imagery (h/t BagNewsNotes), music, dance/movement, etc. Half a century ago, C.P. Snow wrote a much-discussed book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (an article that became a lecture that became a book). As Wikipedia explains:
The Two Cultures is the title of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. Its thesis was that the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society - the sciences and the humanities - was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. As a trained scientist who was also a successful novelist, Snow was well placed to articulate this thesis....
Snow's original thesis was actually somewhat limited, focused on the British educational system, with its over-focus on the humanities (especially Latin and Greek) and relative neglect of scientific education, despite the importance of scientific achievements in winning WWII. This narrower focus was quickly lost, however, and for good reason, as Mark's comment underscores. It's not just that pundits can't do basic arithmetic. It's that it never even occurs to them to do it. More importantly, that's utterly typical of everything about how our politics is run.
Since the very beginning of Obama's time in office (months before, in fact), it was obvious to anyone with a basic knowledge of history and a layman's knowledge of macro-economics that we needed a massive dose of fiscal stimulus--much like that supplied by WWII--in order to get us out of the Great Recession. But such knowledge was severely hindered by Snowe's gap. The grasp of the basic economic reality--that demand had to come from somewhere, and if private demand had failed, then government demand was absolutely necessary--was ephemeral at best, since it was not grounded in a scientific/mathematical understanding of the world. Rather, it was filtered through a rhetorical, narrative understanding, and it was no match for any number of other narratives that were far more popular with influential people and institutions that had been dominating political/economic discourse for decades, as we drifted soporifically toward the catastrophe we experienced shortly before the 2008 election.
The same dominance of narrative (story-telling) also applied to the other great challenges we faced, most notably the unprecedented ecological threat of global warming, but also the challenge of health care reform, in which our dreadful international standing stood in sharp contrast with a heavily promoted narrative tradition in which we have, "the best health care system in the world." In all these cases, a dispassionate scientific understanding pointed to a clear need for a drastic change in policy. This did not follow from any sort of radical analysis, but simply from the most sober consideration of all the facts at hand, from a clear-headed scientific point of view.
But, of course, such a viewpoint is utterly alien to us, as the broader version of Snowe's thesis makes clear. And so it was that a "stimulus package" that couldn't possibly do the job was fixed on as the answer, and readily mis-portrayed as mammoth. From which the bloodbath in the House last night flowed inevitably as a direct result. Likewise, anything remotely approaching the needed action to counter global climate change was excluded from consideration from the very beginning.
It goes without saying that Republicans have no answers for any of the problems we face. Indeed, they are almost constitutionally incapable of even recognizing the problems we face. They are perfect in opposition, since any wild fantasy that pops into their heads (death panels, anyone?) will do just fine for their purposes. But when you are actually trying to impliment wild fantasies as policy? Needless to say, there will be problems galore.
But the biggest problem is the one Snowe identified half a century ago. If we don't somehow find a way to crack it, America will never recover economically, and the entire planet will plunge into a new climate regime that is utterly unfit for the level of human population and civilization that we have known in all our history and prehistory as well.
That is a much, much bigger problem than all the pundits in Versailles can even begin to imagine.
Alaska's election could, plausibly, be a determining factor on the nation's (and the globe's) path forward toward (or away from) a clean-energy future.
"Questioning growth is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries. But question it we must."
"the only thing that has actually remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last two to three decades is recession."
-- Tim Jackson
British Economist Tim Jackson studies the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment to question the primacy of economic growth.
He currently serves as the economics commissioner on the UK government's Sustainable Development Commission and is director of RESOLVE - a Research group on Lifestyles, Values and Environment. After five years as Senior Researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute, Jackson became Professor of Sustainable Development at University of Surrey, and was the first person to hold that title at a UK university.
He founded RESOLVE in May 2006 as an inter-disciplinary collaboration across four areas - CES, psychology, sociology and economics - aiming to develop an understanding of the links between lifestyle, societal values and the environment.
I want you to imagine a world, in 2050, of around nine billion people, all aspiring to Western incomes, Western lifestyles. And I want to ask the question -- and we'll give them that two percent hike in income, in salary each years as well, because we believe in growth. And I want to ask the question: how far and how fast would be have to move? How clever would we have to be? How much technology would we need in this world to deliver our carbon targets? And here in my chart. On the left-hand side is where we are now. This is the carbon intensity of economic growth in the economy at the moment. It's around about 770 grams of carbon. In the world I describe to you, we have to be right over here at the right-hand side at six grams of carbon. It's a 130-fold improvement, and that is 10 times further and faster than anything we've ever achieved in industrial history. Maybe we can do it, maybe it's possible -- who knows? Maybe we can even go further and get an economy that pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, which is what we're going to need to be doing by the end of the century. But shouldn't we just check first that the economic system that we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement?
Ed. Note: The Mulch is participating in Blog Action Day 2010, an initiative led by Media Consortium member Change.org that asks bloggers around the world to publish posts on the same issue on the same day. This year's topic is water.
Last week, rivers in Hungary ran red with toxic sludge, creating the perhaps most powerful image of water contamination possible. Imagine, for a second, if every chemical leaching into waterways in this country had such a brilliant hue. What color would our water be?
Less than crystal clear, certainly. We still don't know, for instance, what chemicals the government and BP poured into the Gulf Coast after the Deepwater Horizon spill, as Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard reports. Beyond one time dumps, American industries and consumers are steadily polluting our water system. Energy companies contaminate waterways. So do massive, industrial farms. Sewer systems overflow, and landfills leach waste. Even household chemicals - pesticides applied to suburban lawns, for instance - contribute to the problem.
Flouting the Clean Water Act
After the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969, politicians finally took note of the country's polluted and within a few years had passed the Clean Water Act. In theory, the Clean Water Act should limit contamination, but as The New York Times reported last year, violations have been increasing. Just this month, in Kentucky, environmental advocates brought a case against two coal companies that allegedly violated the Clean Water Act more than 20,000 times, as Public News Service's Renee Shaw reports.
The violations "include doctoring water pollution reports, failing to conduct tests, and exceeding permit pollution limits," Shaw reports.
With the death of the Senate energy bill, efforts to combat global climate change have reached a standstill. It does not appear that a cap-and-trade scheme is anywhere in the near future.
A number of factors killed the energy bill. Democrats from states dependent upon traditional energy, such as West Virginia, did not support the bill. Neither did previous cooperative Republicans, such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. Perhaps most importantly - and least mentioned - was the economic recession, which shifted the public's concern from the environment to the pocketbook.
There was also another factor, a factor which should not have - but did - increase skepticism.
Reversing an earlier decision, the Obama Administration is now going to install solar panels on the White House, and Bill McKibben of 350.org, who first tried to make it happen last month is making the most of it in the run-up to 350.org's Global Work Party this weekend--as any good actvitist would. (See his email announcement's full text on the flip.)
But the sumbling, fumbling nature of how Obama has handled this is just another sign that can't be ignored. At Salon, Andrew Leonard's story "Obama's White House solar panel stumble", with the sub-head, "The administration initially rejected the idea of following in Jimmy Carter's footsteps. Why the change of heart?" starts off as follows:
So Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel is out of the White House, and suddenly, solar panels are back in. This is either a welcome change of tone, prefiguring a new push on climate change and renewable energy, or yet another example of how a too-cautious administration keeps stepping on its feet.
Or both.
In September, the writer and climate change crusader Bill McKibben sent a jolt of dismay through the environmental community after recounting a distressing trip to the White House. McKibben and some young activists had come up with what they thought was a great idea. They had located one of the solar panels that President Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House (later removed by Ronald Reagan) and they decided to bring it back to Washington for a a triumphant reinstallation.
They made it into the White House, but then got stone-walled. When the college-age activists accompanying McKibben asked why the administration wouldn't do the "obvious thing" and put solar panels on the White House, they couldn't get a straight answer.
The decision to reverse course is a welcome one, but it's no more clear what the reasoning is now than it was before. A "fierce advocate" that fights you every step of the way--whether on gay rights or climate change--is a hard thing to understand. A "fierce advocate" that everyone once in a while does the right thing when you least expect it is not a whole heck of a lot better. It certainly doesn't provide anything reliable that you can build on. For all you know, the token of support is meant to balance out or even totally obscure some far more substantive, dastardly backroom deal.
Most important, in a case like this the value is almost entirely symbolic. No one thinks that the amount of energy saved at the White House is going to tip the balance in any realworld scales. It's mean to send a message. And what the Obama White House has done is to send the message, "This is a political calculation, not a matter of principles, values, genuine leadership. It's fricken game, goddamn it!"
Which of course, produces the astonishing result of lowering the Obama Administration to the level of the climate change denying frauds and charlatans in the Senate like James Inhofe and John (All My Principles Are Really Interests) McCain.
Now that takes a truly rare sort of political talent, I must admit.
The real leadership comes from the activist base, which McKibben has managed to expand across the globe like never before. His email is on the flip.
This is the nineteenth article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
From the Scotch-Irish who settled there starting in the 1760s to today's residents, the people of southwestern Virginia are fiercely independent. The 9th Congressional District, which covers all of southern Virginia west of Roanoke, has been known as the "Fighting Ninth," because of its raucous politics. The district was first dominated by farmers, later coal miners (though the coal industry has been in decline for more than twenty years there), and now by workers in high-tech industries. Bill Clinton carried the district twice, however George W. Bush won in 2000 and 2004 by wider margins than Clinton ever did, and John McCain won the district 59-40% in 2008.
Democrat Rick Boucher is in his 14th term representing the district in the U.S. House. Boucher's family is steeped in southwest Virginia politics - his mother was Washington County's Democratic Party chairwoman, and his grandfather and great-grandfather were Democratic members of the state House of Delegates. He hasn't faced a particularly close race since his first re-election bid in 1984. This fall he will be challenged by Republican Delegate and House Majority Leader, Morgan Griffith.
During his long Congressional career, Boucher has voted as a moderate, making his greatest mark on telecommunication and technology issues. He's been a reliable vote on clean energy and environmental issues, earning a c from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) last year. Boucher played an influential role in shaping the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), the first global warming bill ever to pass a chamber of Congress, as the leading voice for coal-state representatives on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. On the House floor during debate on ACES, Boucher said the bill:
...achieves broad reductions in greenhouse gases, enhances America's energy security, and by placing a price on carbon dioxide emissions will unleash investments in clean energy technologies that will create millions of new jobs. These energy technologies will evolve from America's laboratories. They will be deployed at home. They will be exported around the world. They will be the foundation for our next technology revolution...
This is a responsible measure. It is carefully balanced. It reduces greenhouse gases by 83 percent by 2050 as compared to 2005 levels. It keeps electricity rates affordable. It enables coal usage to grow as the demand for electricity increases. And it opens the door to a more secure energy future and the creation of millions of new jobs innovating, deploying and exporting to the world the new low CO2 emitting technologies that will power our energy future."
Boucher backs up his claims in that speech with facts from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and experts at the Environmental Protection Agency. But that hasn't stopped Morgan Griffith from asserting, without any persuasive evidence, that ACES will "result in massive job cuts in Southwest Virginia's coal industry while raising electricity, gasoline, and heating prices for all consumers." Though, as someone who also says that "many scientists do not even believe [global warming] is happening," Griffith doesn't seem bound by the facts.
The truth, according to our top experts at the National Academy of Sciences is that "Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities." As to Griffith's loss of jobs argument, according to collaborative research by the University of Illinois, Yale University and the University of California, ACES could lead to as many as 1.9 million new jobs nationally; 50,000 in Virginia alone.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
This is the eighteenth article in a continuing series by the NRDC Action Fund on the environmental stances of candidates in key races around the country.
Tucson, Arizona has quite an environmental legacy. For 40 years it was the political base of the Udall brothers -- Stewart, a U.S. Representative in the 1950s and Interior Secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and Morris, a U.S. Representative for 30 years and a pioneering environmentalist. Most of Tucson, along with Arizona's southeastern desert, make up the state's 8th Congressional District. Politically this district leans Republican, but only slightly. John McCain carried the district in the 2008 election, and for more than 20 years moderate Republican Jim Kolbe represented the district in the U.S. House. Since Kolbe's retirement in 2007, the 8th district has been represented by Tucson native and former state Senator Gabrielle Giffords (D). This November, Giffords is being challenged by Republican Jesse Kelly, an Iraq War veteran and "Tea Party" favorite, who won the August 24 primary in an upset victory over former State Senator Jonathan Paton.
Giffords has built on the Udall brothers' environmental legacy, making solar energy one of her top legislative priorities, saying that she wants Arizona to be "the Silicon Valley of solar energy." During her first three years in Congress, Giffords has voted the right way on just about every environmental issue, earning a career rating of over 90% from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV). Last June, she supported the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), our nation's first climate bill and an important step forward in creating green jobs. Her vote for ACES was supported by many Arizona community and business leaders. In a statement following the vote, Giffords said that ACES will "help jumpstart our economy. We've seen that right here in Arizona, where a small but vibrant solar energy industry is taking root. Arizona can be a world leader in solar energy production and use. The American Clean Energy and Security Act will help us achieve this goal."
Kelly's position on clean energy and climate couldn't be further from Giffords. He believes we should "toss cap and trade," which he calls a "massive tax increase & jobs killer." The truth, according to according to collaborative research by the University of Illinois, Yale University and the University of California, is that ACES could lead to as many as 1.9 new jobs nationally; 24,000 in Arizona alone. And according to experts at the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, the bill would cost the average household $175 a year, or less than 50 cents a day.
Kelly doesn't just stop at attacking ACES, he also takes issue with the overwhelming evidence of global warming, calling it "junk-science." The experts at the National Academy of Sciences, our most authoritative scientific body, strongly disagree with Kelly's claims, saying, "Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities."
Kelly's stance on climate is unsurprising given that he has signed Americans for Prosperity's "No Climate Tax Pledge." Americans for Prosperity is the big oil funded think tank behind the tea party movementwhose campaign is being supported by ultra-conservative Koch Industries.
The NRDC Action Fund believes that it is important for the public in general, and the voters of specific Congressional districts, be aware of this information as they weigh their choices for November.
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