Today is blog Action Day. In the organizers' own words:
Blog Action Day is an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. Blog Action Day 2009 will be the largest-ever social change event on the web. One day. One issue. Thousands of voices.
Although The Opportunity Agenda does not directly work on climate change, the problem is so pervasive that it impacts the issues we do work on. Climate change is not an abstract phenomenon when it comes the lives of everyday people in America. There is mounting evidence that greenhouse gases are increasing the potency of hurricanes, whose impact disproportionately affects those most vulnerable in our society. And as the climate does change, it will be the poorest among us that suffer in increased fuel costs. Finally, the polluting elements that cause climate change are also most common in low-income communities of color. As a result, the health of residents in these areas is worse than those in more affluent neighborhoods.
For these reasons, climate change isn't an issue simply to be addressed by environmental groups. Social activists, too, must see the connections and address this universal concern—a step in realizing the promise of opportunity for all.
President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize today for his accomplishments in international diplomacy, climate change and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation. The Nobel Committee praised Obama for his "constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting," but, Richard Kim of The Nation wonders if the award comes too soon, as Obama has not yet committed to attending the international climate summit at Copenhagen.
Last week, the Labor Department reported that youth unemployment stands at 18.2%, nearly twice the national average of 9.8%. The percentage of young people without a job is a staggering 53.4 percent, the highest figure since World War II. Looking deeper, the statistics for youth of color are terrible and telling.
According to the most recent data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40.7% of black youth between 16-19 are unemployed, almost double the amount of whites teenagers (23%). For Latinos the same age, the rate is nearly 30%. Get a little older and the gap grows wider. Unemployment for black Americans aged 20-24 is 27.1%, over twice that faced by white youth (13.1%) in the same age range.
The glaring differences indicate that unemployment is not only decidedly raced, but also that the current economic condition is wholly unforgiving for young people of color. Only a massive, well-funded set of green jobs programs explicitly designed to close those racial gaps can create a truly vital, full-employment economy.
Major utility corporations, like Exelon, California's Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (PG&E) and New Mexico's PNM have announced that they are leaving the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of the organization's controversial stance toward climate change and opposition to a clean energy bill. The Chamber represents business interests, and according to a New York Times editorial, "no organization has done more to undermine [climate change] legislation."
It's time, once again, to bring you the news that is not yet news.
For those not yet aware, there will be a climate change conference in New York City next week, conducted under the auspices of the United Nations.
The 100 world leaders who will be participating in the conference will be arriving on Monday, and if you're in New York City the same day, you have a chance to participate in a not-to-be-forgotten "welcome event" and pranking opportunity.
Follow along and I'll tell you how to get involved-and if you do, they'll even send you home with a lovely parting gift.
Hopes of passing climate change legislation before the climate summit in Copenhagen are quickly dissipating, as Rachel Morris reports in Mother Jones. It seems unlikely that any major action will be taken before the December meeting. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev) originally expected all six Senate committees to allocate cap-and-trade pollution permits by September 10, and later extended the deadline to September 28. But on Wednesday, Reid signaled that the legislation might be delayed until next year. Why is climate change taking the backseat? Simply, passing a health care bill and wrestling the economy back into shape have sapped lawmakers' energy for climate change.
California is on fire again. It's fitting that the state is in flames on the 4th anniversary of the Katrina Hurricane and destruction of New Orleans, but the truth is that California burns every year. Remember when all the snotty white folks blamed the poor black people from New Orleans for not leaving despite being warned? It happens all the time in any area where there are these types of disasters. We will inevitably see interviews of people explaining they didn't leave their burning neighborhood because they wanted to use the garden hose to save their home. So a group of firefighters have to risk their lives to save these people. Like what happened in New Orleans except, since these people are white property owners, nobody will say too much about them.
You'd think someone would get a clue, and stop building houses in the middle of the fire zones. Like they have flood zones, where no one can get permits to build new homes there for obvious reasons: it floods.
Why no fire zones? Because California real estate is valuable. And actually the yearly infernos generate money for the state which is not exactly chump change. First the insurance companies will pay a lot of money to re-build. Contractors, architects, engineers, fire "consultants" (who never seem to tell people that they should not build in a fire zone), interior decorators, floor guys, wallboard folks, roofers, pavers, home furniture sellers with "Gran Venta" signs going up as we speak, nurseries, landscape designers -- they all make money, millions and millions and millions of dollars every year when the houses in California built in the fire zone -- burn to the ground. The funny thing is that the laws require new construction to include smoke alarms, but they let the developers build the houses in the middle of the fireplace.
In Greek mythology, Zeus gave Prometheus the job of creating humans by using water and earth, plus we assume some chemical process that we have not yet reproduced. Prometheus was quite proud of his creation and wanted to even things up a bit, give humans some of the same powers that Zeus had. So Prometheus gave human beings fire. And look what they've done with it.
Every single year much of the state of California burns to the ground. Thank God, I can hear the local businesses saying. Thank God, I can hear the clean-up crews, the unemployed carpenters, the granite-tile-counter stores, the stainless-steel-appliance dealers, the developers, the kitchen cabinet-installers, the home improvement centers, the tile installers, the linoleum-layers, the painters, Thank God for the fires.
Schwarzenegger has been all over TV "announcing" that the state of California has been destroyed. Well, yes, Arnold -- and you did it. Congratulations. But he's out now hustling for federal bucks, and Obama will give it to him. The money will be used to re-build houses in areas where no houses should ever be built. You won't hear much about the victims not deserving the help. These are white people. It's different. And I seriously doubt the federal government will be trucking in the poisoned FEMA trailers and telling the white folks to live there and quit whining. Or bussing them down to Houston and giving them $2,000, telling them they are now residents of Texas. Good luck with that, folks.
So who suffers from the yearly fires? Every living four-legged creature in the state, many of whom are burned to death, or will starve to death this winter because their entire environment has been destroyed. Birds, bugs, bees, butterflies, worms. All the plants are destroyed. People with any kind of breathing or lung problems suffer. Sometimes you can actually see the ashes falling from the sky, far away from the fires, floating through the air, suffocating everything, coating the trees and leaves, absorbing any moisture, sometimes carrying a spark for miles to create a new fire, ensuring that future generations of young Californians will suffer from vague pulmonary illnesses, shortness of breath, of "unknown" origins. Without any health care, in many instances.
When I broke two bones recently, who came to my rescue, who literally carried me to transport to the ER, who put a big puffy brace around my leg so it would hurt less during the trip? The firefighters. I can't say enough about the firefighters. I've never seen a one of them who wasn't professional, helpful, terrific. And to think that they go out, year after year, and put their lives on the line to save a bunch of houses that should not have been built in the first place -- they deserve every penny they get. Two firefighters have already died in these current fires.
So, knowing that this irresponsible construction of homes in areas that are surrounded by fuel, often inaccessible and lacking in water, in hot, dry areas, why do communities allow this construction? Because they value money more than they value the lives of the firefighters.
When the firefighters talk about a "brotherhood," they usually means history, rituals, customs. But it is formalized by mutual-assistance agreements so that firefighters from all over, inside California and from other neighboring states, will come to fight these fires. And vice versa.
I think when the fires are out, there should be a moratorium on building homes. And sterilize everyone in the state of California. Too many people. Stop breeding. People really are not "better" than animals. We are destroying everything by our self-indulgent need to reproduce and then destroy everything in our path. Send everyone who is burned out to Montana, or Utah or Idaho. Maybe those states don't have as many fires. They for sure don't have as many people.
Overpopulation is destroying the entire earth. Is global warming causing more fires? Some say yes. But there is no question that the tens of millions of people who have moved to California in recent decades and bought houses inland -- where it's hot and dry, in fire zones -- have contributed to the destruction of much of the state, and will inevitably lead to the deaths of all the "other" animals that used to live in that area. Not just mountain lions and coyotes, which deserve their own land, but also deer, birds, butterflies, everything living, all now consumed and destroyed.
So I'm thinking maybe Prometheus should have minded his own business. Humans and fire are a bad mix.
Our throwaway economy is largely to blame for our environmental woes, as Lester Brown points out for Grist. First introduced after World War II to stimulate growth and create more jobs, throwaway products offered consumers convenience. Soon, disposable paper towels replaced hand towels, tissues replaced handkerchiefs, and plastic diapers replaced cloth ones, eventually building up an overwhelming amount of garbage. Throwaway products create a multitude of problems, including maxed-out landfills, air pollution and depletion of limited resources. Instead of hunting for new places to stash our trash, we should focus on consuming less altogether. But in the midst of an economic crisis, can we transition to a sustainable economy?
It's been a chaotic Congressional recess, what with birthers, doubters, and lobbyist-financed astroturf groups disrupting townhall events screaming about euthanasia, that's it's easy to forget how 5 weeks ago there was a whole lot of screaming over the House's courageous passage of The American Clean Energy and Security Act.
This is part 2 of a two-part diary on two new articles that provide insight into the newly visible weakness of Obama's politics. Although I have serious disagreements with some of their content, their main thrusts are both accurate, they complement one another, and though they reinforce arguments from the left, they both primarily grounded in pragmatist arguments. In part one, I examined "The Character of Barack Obama", by David Bromwich, which was really more about the process side of Obama's politics. In this part, I turn to Michael Lind's critique of Obama's cult-like faith in neoliberalim, asking, "Can Obama be deprogrammed?".
The main thrust of Lind's piece is unassailable: New Deal liberalism worked. Neoliberalism does not. New Deal liberalism produced the broadest prosperity, the largest and most affluent middle class in the history of humanity. Neoliberalism produced a bubble economy in the 1990s that briefly balanced our federal budget, but utterly failed to stop the erosion of our manufacturing base and our rising trade imbalances.
By neoliberalism I mean the ideology that replaced New Deal liberalism as the dominant force in the Democratic Party between the Carter and Clinton presidencies. In the Clinton years, this was called the "Third Way." The term was misleading, because New Deal liberalism between 1932 and 1968 and its equivalents in social democratic Europe were considered the original "third way" between democratic socialism and libertarian capitalism, whose failure had caused the Depression. According to New Deal liberals, the United States was not a "capitalist society" or a "market democracy" but rather a democratic republic with a "mixed economy," in which the state provided both social insurance and infrastructure like electric grids, hydropower and highways, while the private sector engaged in mass production....
The transition from New Deal liberalism to neoliberalism began with Carter, but it was not complete until the Clinton years. Clinton, like Carter, ran as a populist and was elected on the basis of his New Deal-ish "Putting People First" program, which emphasized public investment and a tough policy toward Japanese industrial mercantilism. But early in the first term, the Clinton administration was captured by neoliberals, of whom the most important was Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Under Rubin's influence, Clinton sacrificed public investment to the misguided goal of balancing the budget, a dubious accomplishment made possible only by the short-lived tech bubble. And Rubin helped to wreck American manufacturing, by pursuing a strong dollar policy that helped Wall Street but hurt American exporters and encouraged American companies to transfer production for the U.S. domestic market to China and other Asian countries that deliberately undervalued their currencies to help their exports.
Lind is also very astute in capturing how Obama's agenda seeks to elide the deeper economic problems that neoliberalism is not prepared to tackle, and how it seeks to rationalize doing so:
Instead of the updated Rooseveltonomics that America needs, Obama's team offers warmed-over Rubinomics from the 1990s. Consider the priorities of the Obama administration: the environment, healthcare and education. Why these priorities, as opposed to others, like employment, high wages and manufacturing? The answer is that these three goals co-opt the activist left while fitting neatly into a neoliberal narrative that could as easily have been told in 1999 as in 2009. The story is this: New Dealers and Keynesians are wrong to think that industrial capitalism is permanently and inherently prone to self-destruction, if left to itself. Except in hundred-year disasters, the market economy is basically sound and self-correcting. Government can, however, help the market indirectly, by providing these three public goods, which, thanks to "market failures," the private sector will not provide.
But there is another layer that Lind gets wrong-a layer dealing with race from the New Deal forward on the one hand, and the nature of post-50s progressive politics on the other. I'll first review what Lind gets right, and why it's important to advance this perspective, then I'll look at what he gets wrong, and what its significance is.
The government-sponsored Car Allowance Rebate System, commonly known as "Cash for Clunkers," burned through $1 billion of funding within a week. Last night, the Senate joined the House in a decision to inject an additional $2 billion into the program before leaving for August recess. But is the overwhelmingly popular program a success or a failure? That's open to interpretation.
The long, lazy days of summer are upon us, and it's time to have a little fun-but it's also a great opportunity to volunteer a bit of spare time for a good cause.
So imagine how cool it would be if you could combine the two...and even better, do it in a way that doesn't take a bite out of your wallet...and even better yet, if it was something you and the kids could do together.
Imagine no more, because it has been done; which is why today we are going to be talking about lead in the soil of New Orleans, Operation Paydirt...and Fundred Dollar Bills.
(Properly, this should be an instance of Open Left's "right of reply" given the earlier diary for Green Lantern. But it's more than that, so take a serious read, even if I do get a special "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer" thrill out of doing this. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In the New Organizing Institute's mock election, I endorsed Wonder Woman for her high-quality policy positions. This election is a fun exercise, but also illustrates a very serious issue in the way progressives interact with candidates and campaigns.
Government can be annoying. It makes you pay file complicated forms and pay money in the springtime, it sometimes closes your subway station or park for an investigation, and if you park in an illegal spot, it sometimes gives you a ticket.
The fact that government can be annoying is a big force fueling the ongoing anti-"big government" conservative movement. After all, more often the ways most people interact personally with government is of these annoying varieties, making the argument that we should just abolish it pretty appealing.
But we progressives know that government also plays an important role in making our society safer, better, freer, and more sustainable. (Besides, private sector companies can be just as annoying - just try scheduling a cable service call.) We know where we stand on health care or warrantless wiretapping, but how do we react when a new issue comes along, one we know nothing about, and where government is being a little annoying?
Do we automatically jump on a populist-sounding position if it works against broader social goals? More importantly, do we want our elected officials grabbing the easy sound bite, or do we want candidates who take the time to learn about issues and figure out a real progressive position?
This issue came to the forefront during the New Organizing Institute election, where organizers are learning to run campaigns by running mock campaigns for comic superheroes. An interest group called for the campaigns to take a seemingly populist position that's actually the opposite of a good environmental policy. Four of the campaigns jumped right on board, trying to outdo each other in how loudly they could call for this change.
Three others resisted the urge. And one, Wonder Woman, did the opposite: they took some serious time to contact local activists, and learn about this and other issues, and formulate their policy positions. Their platform isn't just based on a quick, cursory read of issues, but on real research. And, given that this is just a mock election, that's an impressive amount of policy outreach.
Senator Barbara Boxer, who chairs the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, announced this week that her committee won't mark up energy and climate legislation until after the August recess. That's a good thing. It means progressive groups and activists have more time to coordinate their efforts to support the emergence of a progressive bloc of senators on these issues.
New Orleans may sink into the sea by 2100. Much of Florida may also be underwater by then. Drought will likely become the norm out West, meaning California could no longer provide the food we depend upon. Las Vegas may become downright inhabitable.
No, I'm not fabricating any of this. These will be the consequences of inaction if we continue to delay implementing the solutions we need to solve the coming climate crisis. But for some reason, may of our supposedly wise lawmakers in Capitol Hill are either willfully ignorant of the facts or downright lying about our future.
Take a slo-mo aerial tour of Earth. Released on June 5th, over two and a half million people have already watched Home. The message is potent: it is too late for pessimism. We can redirect our use of energy, of farming, of transportation. We can and must live a different paradigm.
This morning on NPR there was a story on fracking (hydraulic fracturing, in which water and chemicals are pumped into the ground at extremely high pressures to force natural gas to the surface), interviewing one Texan, Steve Harris, who believes the practice contaminated his drinking water. Fracking is completely exempted from federal regulation due to a loophole inserted in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Steve Harris believes that pressure also ruined his well. He lives on 14 acres south of Dallas. Shortly after a driller fracked a nearby well, he and his neighbors noticed a change in water pressure.
"When you'd flush the toilet - in the back where the bowl is - water would shoot out the top of the bowl," says Harris.
When he took a shower, there was a foul odor, and the water left rashes on his grandson's skin. His horses stopped drinking from their trough, and there was an oily film on top of the water.
I was reading Paul Krugman's column the other day and was dismayed by his argument. According to the Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, a half-ass, half-hearted measure on curbing carbon emissions is better than doing nothing, but I'm unconvinced. As written in The Washington Post:
On paper, the Waxman-Markey bill puts a cost on carbon dioxide by imposing a ceiling, or cap, on greenhouse gas emissions and then setting up a market for regulated industries -- such as the electric power sector -- to buy and sell allowances to pollute under that cap. As the cap is reduced each year, market participants will exchange allowances in a complex auction market.
If you liked what credit default swaps did to our economy, you're going to love cap-and-trade. Just read Title VIII of the bill, which lets investment banks, hedge funds and other speculators participate in the cap-and-trade market. They don't have emissions to cut; they have commissions to make.
The real hidden catch of the cap-and-trade system, though, is that it will require consumers to pay twice: first for emission allowances and then for the construction of new low- and zero-carbon power plants.
That doesn't sound very good, and the bad news gets progressively worse.
Contrary to assurances from the bill's sponsors that utility customers wouldn't have to pay these costs for the first decade, some coal-dependent utilities would be forced to purchase more than half of their allowances when the program is scheduled to begin in 2012. Would these allowances reduce our greenhouse gas emissions? No; that would come when consumers footed a second bill - for the cost of their utilities either to retrofit coal and gas plants to capture carbon - something that cannot be done today on a commercial scale - or to shut them down and build non-carbon-producing nuclear plants and wind farms instead.
In adopting California's tough new 35.5 miles-per-gallon fuel emissions standards today, the President made a wise decision that will help the planet continue to exist. Almost more notable than the standards themselves, however, is the fact that Obama decided to abandon the lawsuit through which auto execs and the Bush Administration had sought to block California's right to implement the standards in the first place.
While auto execs are spinning this decision as a great example of the wisdom of enacting a unified set of federal standards instead of a “patchwork” of state rules, the truth of the matter is that this decision is a landmark example of states' power to set national policy by outpacing federal legislation. If it weren't for California pushing to set standards that outpaced the Bush Administration's pitifully low ones, there would be no new regulatory framework to enact today. This observation seems obvious, but it has gone unnoticed in the mainstream media accounts of today's announcement.
Nate Silver nabs an important poll finding: now that Barack Obama is President, large numbers of Democrats and Independents think that the environment is getting better, even though it totally is not:
This is very worrying, as it is a sign of how complacency can set in among grassroots supporters once their preferred political party takes power. Even though Obama has only been President for three months, even though his major environmental legislation largely remains bottled up in the Senate, many of Obama's supporters seem to think that the environment is improving simply because he is President now.
This is, of course, crap. The level of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gasses, in the atmosphere continues to increase. Water scarcity problems are getting worse. Soil contamination is getting worse. Mass extinctions are continuing apace. These problems are not going away, or even stabilizing. As Nate writes, at best, the "environment is getting worse less quickly, not that it's actually improving."
This is a problem that can also be seen in the audience for progressive media declining since the election. Once an individual's preferred political party takes power, oftentimes that individual seem to think that the problems that made them support that party are just solved. The truth is that taking political power just gives you an opportunity to finally work on those problems, and doesn't mean anything is actually solved.
While Obama's presence in office probably isn't the only factor in the newfound, unjustifiable Democratic and Independent optimism on sustainability and the environment, it is still disturbing to think about how "HOPE" can quickly turn into complacency. This is a fine line for politicians to walk, as they know both that they need their very presence in office to instill confidence (otherwise, why would people vote for them?), and that they need continuing grassroots pressure once in office to help pass their agenda. In this case, we need to do a much better job of continuing to rally the troops, because winning the election didn't solve anything. All it did is provide us an opportunity to solve the problems we face. On that front, a lot of work remains to be done.
