Hot Air Drama

Not to interrupt campaign lying or media stupidity which is already in progress, but...

Eight square miles of ice from the Ward Hunt shelf in the Arctic has split away, the largest mass of ice to detach in three years. This shelf has been solid for at least 3,000 years. And scientists expect more, as they discern major changes, happening much faster than predicted, due of course to global heating.

Yet in Washington, the current Bushite director of the Environmental Protection Agency has been so influenced by political directives from the White House that four Democratic Senators today called for his resignation. They also sent a letter to Attorney General Mukasey asking him to investigate possible lying to their committee.

According to the Washington Post: "The senators, all members of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said Johnson -- the first career scientist to head up the agency -- had repeatedly succumbed to political pressure on decisions vital to protecting health and the environment.
The senators also allege in the letter to Mukasey that Johnson made false statements before the committee in January when he said that he alone had decided California should not regulate the gases blamed for global warming from motor vehicles. A former top EPA official told the committee this month that Johnson initially had decided to grant a partial waiver to the state but changed his mind under pressure from the White House."

Meanwhile, the state of California announces today that it is once again suing the federal government for "wantonly" ignoring its duty to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from ships, aircraft, and construction and agricultural equipment. CA previously sued, along with other states, concerning the fed's failure to regulate car and truck emissions, and ozone pollution.

If that isn't dramatic enough for you, a BBC two-part dramatic series on climate crisis politics is getting good reviews in the UK. Burn Up folds a sex and murder story into what one participant in real world climate crisis negotiations wrote is a credible representation of such discussions, and outlines a credible scenario of the world racing to avoid its own self-destruction.

Of this particular plot point, Jeremy Leggett wrote in the Guardian: Now, such warnings have entered the mainstream, for those with the eyes to see and ears to listen. Last week at a meeting in London, for example, a top German climate scientist told an audience of 150 captains of industry that climate scientists couldn't guarantee that a runaway greenhouse effect wouldn't happen, if emissions continue apace. He and the majority of his fellows now believe that we face a race to save civilisation of the kind Burn Up portrays."

I don't know if or when we're going to get a chance to see this in the U.S., but already available in paperback are Kim Stanley Robinson's climate crisis trilogy of novels: Forty Signs of Rain, Fifty Degrees Below and Sixty Days and Counting. I read them one after the other this summer, and they are excellent. The characters are fascinating in a mostly low-key way, which is what absorbed me the first time through. But reading them together, and knowing the characters already, I was most impressed by the science and politics--both the problems (which could well be in our immediate future) and the solutions.

Hint: the solutions get real traction with the election of a new President who runs on this issue.

In the meantime, this is highly recommended summer reading.