Patriot Games

Barack Obama spoke today about patriotism, mostly his. He's defending himself against the charges of being unpatriotic.

It's times like this that I truly despair of Americans ever growing up. What does patriotism mean to the people who make this absurd charge? Conformity to some stereotype? Acting white? What threatens them? We all know it's some bizarre emanation from the unconscious, a code concept for fears of difference, subversion, whatever. But that doesn't excuse it. Non-idiot adults should be able to figure that out and get serious.

We have this complex of problems that truly do threaten survival. That millions of Americans are left helpless without adequate health insurance, and increasingly aren't seeing doctors when they are ill, to the tune of nearly 60 million Americans, is not an abstraction to me. My next serious illness or injury will likely be my last. Period. We're supposed to put off a decent health care system again because of the exploitation of national idiocy?

Talk about clinging to guns. After more than two hundred years the Supreme Court decides the right to own guns is guaranteed by the Constitution when guns are among the biggest delusions and the most dangerous. Guns keep you safe? Are you kidding me? You need them for hunting? Killing animals for sport is barbaric. Meanwhile children are gunned down in petty disputes that a fistfight used to settle. And what are guns best at doing? Making sure your suicidal impulse successfully kills you. Half of all gun deaths are suicides.

We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them, and serious voters to make sure they do. We can't afford another election based on delusion, lies, corruption and idiocy. Or it may be the last one that will ever really matter.

I used to get those pitying looks when my interest in Star Trek was revealed, but Star Trek fascinates me precisely because, behind all the space opera and bumpy-forehead aliens, there's the premise that humanity is finally growing up. Finally entering adulthood. And not a moment too soon.

These days to call humanity an adolescent race may be a social promotion. Patriot games are for children, and it's not very healthy for them either.

Not Just Fog

This is smoke along the Big Sur coast, where the
big fire raging for days is 3% contained. But it
might as well be Trinidad or elsewhere along the
North Coast, as the smoke from fires on three sides
of us becomes part of our air.

Fires This Time

click to enlarge

California Burning

Saturday night update: It cleared a bit Saturday, but prospects for the coming week in the region don't look too good. "On Saturday, President Bush issued an emergency declaration for California and ordered federal agencies to assist in firefighting efforts in many areas. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger had made the request on Friday."

Saturday update: Smoke has reached us, mixed in with the high fog at the moment. We're under an air quality alert. But every place inland, both north and south, is in the National Weather Service's "Red Flag Warning" zone. Dangerous smoke in many areas, and the weather is primed for more dry lightning storms. Big fires in the central coast areas are still raging.

Friday night--
Wildfires moved closer to our North Coast enclave. Highway 299 is closed 60 miles east because of fire and smoke. There are fires to the south of us, too, maybe closer than that. But elsewhere in California, it's much worse. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote: As of Thursday afternoon, officials had identified 1,088 fires in Northern California that covered 159,000 acres and destroyed at least 18 homes. More than 12,500 state and federal firefighters were on the job, with 68 helicopters and 14 airplanes dropping water and retardant liquid. Closures were in place on Highways 32, 36, 70, 89 and 96 and 299." There are numerous fires as well in the Los Angeles area and in the rest of southern California.

But much more of the state is affected by smoke, and even the pollution that we can't necessarily see or smell. The Bay Area Air Quality Management District said it expects pollution levels to remain unhealthy today in portions of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, Solano and Sonoma counties. People who are very young or old, or suffer from lung or heart disease, are most at risk. Of particular concern, said agency spokesman Aaron Richardson, are smoke particles smaller than 1/20th of the diameter of a human hair that are not filtered out of the body by the nose or throat, and may pass into the bloodstream." Smoke and pollution are apt to affect us most directly here this summer, which is just getting started.

But this weekend, much of Northern CA area faces the same weather pattern--including dry lightning--that sparked 800 fires in one day. The Midwest is facing the same curse--the same pattern of more rain and storms in already flooded areas. Plus storms that moved farther west Friday into Nebraska, cutting power, and up into Michigan, dumping an inch and a half of rain on Detroit during rush hour.

More frequent and intense wildfires were predicted by climate scientists as effects of global heating. But as Dan Shapely points out at the Daily Green, it is the size of the fires that is most telling. Not only persistent patterns of intense weather as predicted by global heating models, but bigger fires--as we have now in California--as evidence of heating: dry and dead wood, dry brush so early in the summer in places that normally would not burn so readily and so fiercely.

This is no longer much disputed. Shapely points out: "Even the Bush Administration's science advisers recently endorsed these conclusions in a sweeping report that predicts more bouts of extreme weather in the United States and across North America."

Resources to fight fires, to deal with drought, to repair from floods and other disasters--and several of these at once, like now, happening more frequently-- must be recognized as national needs. At the very least, we've got to get our National Guard and their equipment back from Iraq.

But long term, we have to deal with the Climate Crisis. The state of California has taken another step in its process this week, when it "outlined for the first time the broadest U.S. attempt to regulate greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, calling for the creation of a new emissions-trading program and increased renewable-energy production."

The plan also outlines a cap-and-trade emissions program like those used in Europe that could generate an estimated $3.6 billion market, tougher energy-efficiency standards for appliances and buildings, incentives to grow trees that act as sponges for carbon and encouragement for local governments to develop cities in ways that provide shorter commutes."

"By 2050, the state plans to reduce emissions by 80 percent, the amount many scientists say is needed to avoid the most severe effects of climate change."

As the SF Chronicle said in an editorial, Now comes the hard part...[T]he first serious look at these challenges was presented this week by state policy makers. The answers are encouraging. ..The state Air Resources Board, charged with carrying out the climate-change mandates, believes it's found a balance that spreads the pain, injects incentives in the right spots and puts California on track to cut carbon emissions by 30 percent in 12 years.
Mary Nichols, who heads the board, is mindful of another critical factor: Getting it right in a way that convinces the region, nation and even the planet to follow. Global warming can't be solved by California alone, and mistakes here could set back efforts immeasurably.

The plan gets costed out in the next year, but preliminary figures show that the effect will be to slightly grow the California economy by 2020. And there are those who are much more optimistic. Who believe that dealing with the Climate Crisis is the key to economic growth, and although it will mean change in how we live, it may well mean we will live better. Less wasteful, more mindful, but in the end, better, healthier lives, engaged in our communities and taking more control of our lives, working with others in the adventure of creating a better present and a greater future.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The future is ours, not to predict, but to create."
Al Gore

Intelligence on the Climate Crisis

Morning newspapers will report Thursday on a new study by U.S. intelligence agencies linking the Climate Crisis and its potential to lead to armed conflict. The Los Angeles Times: "Global warming is likely to have a series of destabilizing effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to an assessment released Wednesday by U.S. intelligence agencies. Rising temperatures could weaken already fragile regimes around the world and create a new set of national security challenges for the United States over the next two decades, the report warns.

The report represents the U.S. intelligence community's most comprehensive assessment to date of the long-term security consequences of global warming. It also marks a reluctant foray into a politically charged topic. Democrats and environmental activists praised the assessment, calling it formal acknowledgment by a key part of the government that the threat of rising temperatures is real."

The AFP story is more specific: "Climate change will have sweeping consequences for US national security by 2030 aggravating global poverty and destabilizing fragile countries, a US intelligence report said Wednesday. "We judge global climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years," Thomas Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence for Analysis, told US lawmakers.

Fingar testified to the House of Representatives that in some countries, global warming and its impacts could affect stability and spark regional conflicts such as over access to water as it grows more scarce. He presented the findings of 16 US intelligence agencies gathered in a National Intelligence Assessment, based primarily on research done by the United Nations inter-governmental panel on climate change."

Though their story on this report opens with a false choice, it at least got the attention of the Wall Street Journal: One of the biggest conundrums facing lawmakers is that solutions to global warming often hurt another of their top priorities: ensuring the availability of affordable energy, for example. But on Wednesday, as the U.S. intelligence agencies weighed in, they heard about the cost of doing nothing: It may incubate terrorism and civil conflict.

Concluding that climate change will have wide-ranging impacts on U.S. security in the coming decades, a classified report complicates an already tangled debate by providing urgent new reasons to address the problem of global warming at a time when American voters are anxious about $4-a-gallon gas."

However, the reasons aren't really new, and this isn't the first time that a defense-oriented study commissioned by the Pentagon or other U.S. government agencies has recognized large-scale problems likely to be caused by a growing Climate Crisis. But this time, with Americans focused on energy issues, perhaps this one will make an impression.

8,000 Lightning Strikes, 800 Wildfires (with Updates)

Lightning is so rare on the North Coast that
when it struck here, the major Eureka daily's story about it that led the front page of its Sunday edition misspelled the word in the headline. And again in the first paragraph. Note to editors: though "lightening" of the sky is a physical phenomenon which happens every day (usually called "dawn") it doesn't normally cause fires. But lightning does and did, not only in Arcata but across Northern California over the weekend, and it was no laughing matter. Some 8,000 lightning strikes resulted in some 800 fires, adding to the wildfires already raging over the past week or so. That's more lightning-caused fires in a day than usually happen in a year.

The lightning was especially unusual because it was "dry lightning," without rain, a rare phenomenon at any time but especially this early in the summer. But since California is in the grip of a drought, dry woods fueled fires, scorching tens of thousands of acres. Another case of separate phenomena, at least partly caused or made worse by global heating, that operated to destroy, suddenly and extensively. Speaking of which, flooding continued in the Midwest, despite predictions, and another levee broke, while several governors of affected states "pleaded with the White House on Tuesday for more help to counter billions of dollars in damages from floods that drowned parts of the U.S. farm heartland and drove thousands from their homes."

Updates: Fires continued to spread and join up Tuesday(while some are under control) over a large area of California and in other western states. Smoke is causing serious breathing problems in a number of areas, including in parts of Oregon. Also Tuesday, "A new round of storms dumped a half foot or more of rain across parts of the U.S. Midwest on Wednesday, dealing fresh trouble to a region already struggling with billions of dollars in flood damage." Between new rain and the sheer volume of water, flood waters in some places which have crested are not receding.

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

...but it wasn't Sergeant Pepper asking the band to play---it was James E. Hansen telling the U.S. Congress to get serious about global heating, because he was 90% sure it was happening, and it threatened the future.

Dr. Hansen was a climate scientist at NASA. As anniversary stories today in the Washington Post and NY Times recall, June 23, 1988 was a very hot day in Washington--the Post says it was 98-- during a sweltering summer in the eastern half of the U.S. Counting that year, five of the previous 9 years broke records as the hottest years ever recorded for the planet. So people paid attention when Hansen said, “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”

Global heating wasn't a new idea among scientists and others. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it to Arthur Miller in the 1960s. But Hansen had more facts, more authority and a dramatic moment. And for awhile, it seemed that humanity might even be up to the challenge. By 1990, books were sounding a general alarm (Bill McKibben's The End of Nature, Dead Heat by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle among them) and released internationally was what remains for me the best television production with the widest context, James Burke's brilliant After the Warming.

That TV production, and books like Dead Heat, lamented that crucial time had been lost but that bold action on a large scale might avert the worst. But it was a long-term, slow motion crisis, and present changes were distant enough to ignore and incremental enough in the weather to be absorbed as the latest normal. Now global heating records are broken every month, every year, and it barely gets a mention.

Perhaps the science wasn't settled enough, the politics not easy enough, or the nature of the crisis just too challenging emotionally and conceptually. But mostly it was that dealing with it meant shifting power and money away from those who felt entitled to it, and who had the power and money to effectively oppose any threat to their dominion. And for 20 years there has been lots of hot air, and very little action.

So on June 23, 2008, twenty years later, James Hansen is a senior scientist at NASA and probably the most respected voice in the scientific community on the topic of global heating. And he's back before Congress, with the same damn message, only more so. Hansen summarized his message at Huffington Post, comparing that day 20 years ago and today:

"Again a wide gap has developed between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by policymakers and the public. Now, as then, frank assessment of scientific data yields conclusions that are shocking to the body politic. Now, as then, I can assert that these conclusions have a certainty exceeding 99 percent.

The difference is that now we have used up all slack in the schedule for actions needed to defuse the global warming time bomb. The next president and Congress must define a course next year in which the United States exerts leadership commensurate with our responsibility for the present dangerous situation.

Otherwise it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control.

Changes needed to preserve creation, the planet on which civilization developed, are clear. But the changes have been blocked by special interests, focused on short-term profits, who hold sway in Washington and other capitals.

I argue that a path yielding energy independence and a healthier environment is, barely, still possible.

It requires a transformative change of direction in Washington in the next year."

In twenty years, the science has become more precise, the effects of global heating more obvious, and political leaders as well as the public around the world understand the Climate Crisis better, and the urgency to address it.

But we don't have another twenty years to fool around. We have 2009. If the U.S. doesn't undertake the mission to lead a global effort, beginning with a national transformation, then the future of the planet is dire, perhaps beyond even our most active apocalyptic imaginings.

Though a few years ago I determined to make hope a moral position, and to enact that hope for the future by advocacy in the present, I wouldn't have bet on the likelihood of the necessary change. But now the economic constraints just beginning are clearly related even in the public mind to fossil fuels and the society centered on them. There's a recognition of the need to change.

We also have an emerging leader with a good chance of becoming President, who has the intelligence and the vision and the ability to inspire that could start us through this. Electing Barack Obama, and using the power of the people he insists is central to his vision to keep his attention on what needs to be done to address the Climate Crisis, seems like our last best hope. What's amazing is that at this late date, that hope is real.

NOAA and the Flood: Facing the Future

Update Saturday: The worst new flooding appeared to be over along the Mississippi but in some places the crest was higher than expected. The rainstorms and floods took at least 24 lives, left thousands homeless and will cost billions. All of this while wildfires scoured parts of northern California and New Mexico, and southern California temperatures top 100 for days, with little relief in sight. USA Today has a brief story on the extreme weather/climate crisis report referenced below.


As of late Thursday, the Mississippi has overtopped or breached 23 levees and threatens 25 more before its expected crest near St. Louis on Sunday. More Illinois and now Missouri areas have joined a big chunk of eastern Iowa in various degrees of destruction from waters that are often picking up toxins and pollution as they rise and sweep through neighborhoods, business districts, campuses and farm fields. Some 25,000 people are homeless in Cedar Rapids alone.

This collective disaster will cost billions directly and take years of recovery and rebuilding. And the effects will soon ripple through everybody's pocketbook, as lost corn and soy crops join high gas for transport costs in raising food prices across the country.

Of all the correlations between global heating and extreme weather in North America studied by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) and reported in "Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate," perhaps the strongest is between global heating and a lot more rain, if only because the science of the causes is fairly simple.

But flooding is only one result of extreme weather we are apt to see more of because of the Climate Crisis. The report's Executive Summary says:

"In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity, and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights."

Extreme weather can have extreme consequences, and lots of extreme weather can come to dominate the economy, governments and daily life. We need to face this most proximate aspect of the future. We have to accept at least the strong possibility that we're going to see a lot more extreme weather resulting in short-term disasters and long-term catastrophes, and prudently prepare to meet not only individual challenges, but the greater challenge of patterns and increased frequency.

Infrastructure, public health, responsiveness on appropriate local, state, regional and national levels, as well as economic and other mechanisms to deal in an anticipatory way with repairing damage and lessening impact and suffering. Heads in the sand, it's only the weather, and all the fear that masks itself as skepticism won't do anymore. The patterns are here and now.

At the same time, such "fix it" efforts should not deter or distract us from engaging in the long-term efforts to "stop it"--to save the far future from the ultimate destructions of the Climate Crisis, which means rapid species extinction and sea level threats to coastal cities, and moving on from there to a planet so extreme in heat and/or cold that most of the life we know will be impossible. To "stop it" we must drastically cut the emissions of greenhouse gases. Rising fossil fuel costs and dwindling supplies are encouraging a retooling of our economy and our mindsets towards clean energy, energy efficiency and a realistic appraisal of costs and benefits. But we're only close to starting--not even fully begun yet.

We will need to do both the fixing and the stopping, but before that, we need to acknowledge the reality of the Climate Crisis and what it means for the future, including the near-future which we may soon realize includes the present, and the near-past. Of course we can try to deal with each weather crisis as it occurs. But we will not deal with it adequately if we don't recognize that these crises may well be part of a pattern called the Climate Crisis, and it is real, and right now.

Flood Tides

Flooding like this in Clarksville, Missouri, is damaging homes, neighborhoods, businesses, campuses, especially as the waters carry toxic pollution. Some 25,000 people are homeless in Cedar Rapids, Iowa alone.

Floodwaters are destroying crops of corn and soybeans, as in the second photo of a farm in Quincy, Illinois. Food prices rising because of high gasoline transportation costs are only going to get higher. The waters will recede, but the costs and the impact will continue for a long time, rippling out well beyond these hard-hit places in the American Midwest.

Iowa Today: More Flooding, More to Come

It's far from over, especially in areas bordering the Missisippi, but these are some scenes from the current flooding in the Midwest, specifically in Iowa.

Flooding isn't unknown there--I lived in the area for about five years, going to Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois and the University of Iowa, and I recall going out to sandbag and repair levees in three of those years. But nothing, nothing like this.

The third photo down is Burlington, right on the Mississippi, just across the nearest bridge from Illinois. At the bottom is Iowa City, the university campus. These are places that were part of my life.

The top photo is a cornfield in Oakville. This flood has come at a bad time for the corn crops, and we'll all be paying for that.

The second photo is Cedar Rapids, which seems to have been hit hardest and longest.

Right now, much of the Mississippi is closed to barge traffic, several of the bridges across it are closed. Of most concern, some 27 levees are threatened and may not hold. One broke earlier today, flooding farmland, which actually saved Burlington from worse flooding. But there may well be much more devastation to come.

Dazzle in Detroit

The Green Deal

In a few hours, Al Gore will appear on stage in Detroit with Barack Obama, and he will endorse Obama for President. I'm hoping that in his speech Obama will do what he did when John Edwards endorsed him at a big event: use the endorsement to talk about the issues identified with the person who endorsed him. His speech after the Edwards appearance was largely about poverty. I'm hoping his speech tonight will be about the Climate Crisis and green energy.

It's true that Obama has not been saying as much lately about the Climate Crisis as he did earlier in the campaign, and that clear leadership on this is going to be necessary. Other issues come and go in immediate prominence. But the Climate Crisis is all its manifestations is going to dominate the foreseeable future.

What Obama has been talking about is green energy, in the more accessible terms of economics and high fossil fuel energy costs. But it's time that Obama integrates the realities of the Climate Crisis into the rationale. Addressing the Climate Crisis can be the key to peace, to social justice and even to a kind of evolutionary leap in global civilization. Not addressing it could mean catastrophe for most of the life forms on the planet, and the end of civilization as we know it.

Addressing the Climate Crisis will mean more than ramping up green energy, but that's an important and indispensable part. One of these days--and I hope it is today--Obama should describe his vision for the effort that will rival if not exceed the New Deal in its necessity and its sweeping transformation. The 21st century equivalent might be called the Green Deal. It is a vision of change but it is also eminently practical as well as exciting. Sustainable clean energy technologies are either ready to go or nearly there, and need commitment and resources to make them real on the appropriate and needed scales. The Green Deal, which needs to include the equivalent of the 1930s Civil Conservation Corps--what Bill McKibben calls the Green Corps.

But the Green Deal also has to address the problems we're going to face as a consequence of the global heating induced climate change already underway, which can't be stopped by cutting emissions because they are the inevitable result of past emissions. That means preparing for disasters and working to prevent predictable ones. It also means addressing the grave threats to many animal and plant species, because our survival depends on the whole earth.

It's odd that this is happening today. I've been planning to write precisely this post for at least a week, anticipating the Gore endorsement. I actually thought it would be closer to the convention. So this becomes a hope, rather than a bee in the bonnet.

Goodbye to All That?

"Aphrodite in the Shopping Mall" by Andree Tracey.

Gas and Gases

The impact of fast-rising gasoline prices is making news everywhere. Here on the North Coast of CA it's about $4.80 a gallon. The North Coast Journal has several articles on the impact this week. On my local beat--theatre--I'm hearing the impact is already being felt in smaller audiences for some theatres.
I knew this was going to be an issue, political and otherwise, when I visited western Pennsylvania about a year ago. One item of evidence: the major supermarket chain when I lived in Pittsburgh was apparently falling on hard times--until it revived its fortunes by giving credits towards gasoline with purchases. High gas prices was a topic of conversation last summer there, with keen interested in alternative fuels like biodiesel by people you wouldn't expect. And that of course was when prices were much lower than today.

But now those prices are rising so fast and so high that the economic effects are just starting. (Airline travel is also incredibly expensive, as well as awful. That's a big reason I didn't make it back to my family in western PA this summer.)
Prices of everything else are going up and will continue to do so, and even with that, some businesses are likely to fail, and jobs are likely to be lost. In past spikes, the spiral eventually stopped and gas prices stabilized. But that's no guarantee it's going to happen anytime soon, and with a leadership vacuum, it's possible it will keep spiraling to catastrophic levels.

There seem to be any number of culprits for this latest spiral upwards, though one factor that seems to be driving it is the weakening of the dollar, thanks to all the international debt accumulated by the Bushites in pursuit of their criminally wasteful war and determination to enrich the already rich at the expense of everyone else. Of course, everyone claims not to be making money on this, which could be classified as criminally laughable.

There is also the sense that though we've had warnings before, this time it's the crunch everyone knew was coming: the end of Easy Oil, cheap oil, the depleting of the oil supply. In past price spikes or gas shortages, people responded by driving less, using more public transportation, maybe buying a smaller and more fuel-efficient car, generally conserving. But before there were any structural changes--ramping up of clean energy alternatives principally-- the oil gods turned the spigots on again, while people got used to the new price levels, and the idea of changing was forgotten.

Maybe not this time. Just as the price rises are extreme, the responses are starting to look larger. Though Americans drove fewer miles this March than last for a decline of just over 4%, this still represents the steepest one year drop since 1942, as World War II took hold. And it's likely to be declining even more now. Here on the North Coast, gasoline demand is down 12 to 14%.

Mass transit is seeing the most riders since 1957. The often controversial federal support for Amtrak passed last week by veto-proof majorities in both houses. Of course, public transit still has a long way to go. It had its peak ridership in 1946, when there were half as many people in the U.S. as now.

High gas prices are causing hardships for the people least able to bear them, and Barack Obama is calling for targeted relief, as well as tax cuts to provide the middle class with more money to cope with this, the housing crisis and so on. But he is steadfast in saying we have to change our ways--beginning with more fuel efficient vehicles.

Also new this time is that the sudden interest in alternative energy systems comes at a time they're finally ready to respond. One of the great things about a lot of alternative clean energy systems (as well as more energy-efficient technology and habits) is that people can adopt them as individuals, families and communities. That's what especially interested those folks in PA, and of course that's been of special interest around here, particularly on the Humboldt State campus and in local businesses that have spun off from there and other institutions. People can help themselves and each other.

But clean energy on an even larger scale is definitely on the horizon, especially solar. Reuters quotes industry scientists as saying: "The tipping point at which the world's cleanest, most renewable resource is cost-competitive with other sources of energy on electricity grids could happen within two to five years in some U.S. regions and countries if the price of fossil fuels continues to rise at its current pace, they add." Futurist Ray Kurzweil predicts that solar will be cost competitive with fossil fuels in five years, and all energy will come from clean sources in a generation.

Of course, reducing fossil fuel use and ramping up clean energy are good news for slowing down emissions of greenhouse gases. Rising gasoline prices may provide the conceptual and practical link to greenhouse gases and real demand for action on the Climate Crisis. This is going to be a real challenge to the Consumer Society, the waste-all, want-all ethic. We've gone through something like this before, and we wound up with Reagan. But maybe not this time. Maybe the incremental changes and the generation of ideas, and a new sophistication, not only about clean energy technology but the role of community, etc.--maybe this time will be the time we really change.

Storm

Satellite image today of storm system over the
upper Midwestern U.S.

Disaster and Change

The tornado that hit a Boy Scout camp in western Iowa is only the latest weather-related disaster this week. At this hour, four people are known dead from this event, some 40 injured. It was a big tornado, destroying buildings and trees over some 1800 acres.

Meanwhile, eastern Iowa is bracing for the worst flooding in 15 years later this week, along with Missouri and places in other states. Serious flooding has been going on for days in Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, along with torrential rains. Tornadoes have touched down this week in Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas.

These disasters do more than immediately kill and injure. They throw communities into chaos, destroy homes, cut off power, flood crops, cause damage it can take years and major resources to repair.

Then there are the slow-motion disasters, like the heat waves that are roiling the northeast, from Pittsburgh to Boston and Washington. Seventeen people have quietly died because of these heatwaves just this past weekend.

Disasters like these have strange proportions. They dominate the reality of the people and places where they happen, and may have impact on their lives for a long time. But they are the subject of a few minutes on some newscasts (and if it's a heat wave, no more than that even in affected areas.) Many newspapers and cable glibfests ignore them. Even when media tries to cover them, their slovenly habits, poor training and experience result in reports that are even more inane than usual. And they really can't cover patterns of disasters. With rare exceptions, they don't seem to be smart enough.

There is always argument over whether this disaster or that one is related to the Climate Crisis. But global heating of the atmosphere is such a pervasive change, that even when it can't be established that they cause particular patterns of violent and extreme weather, it's unlikely that these patterns aren't related.

Lately I've become more persuaded that it will take major disasters for real action to be taken on the Climate Crisis. I'm a very reluctant convert to that view, though I hope to be pleasantly surprised. But if so, then the question becomes: what is major? And that's a matter of perception.

Right now, cumulative awareness is growing because there are more and more people who have been directly affected by one disaster or another. There are the long-term trends: drought here in the West, heat and storms in the East, with the two tendencies meeting violently in the Midwest. Plus these specific, awful instances and events.

These disasters aren't being ignored by everyone. Governments must deal with these disasters, and many businesses must pay attention to the effects. Both have to be smart enough to see patterns, and anticipate needs. Local and state governments in particular must be ready to respond. If they aren't, people will vote them out. So if there are patterns, they have to take them seriously. They have to be prepared. And if that takes regional coordination and eventually national networks, they work to organize those, even if these activities rarely make the news. And businesses that need to anticipate the future also may work quietly.

When there is destruction there must be rebuilding, and Climate Crisis awareness is already leading in some instances to design choices with it in mind. This can go beyond both "green buildings" and more attention to flood control, for instance. As Matthew Waxman wrote: " The planning policy would focus on finding sustainable solutions to broken or destroyed systems. Disaster in this way is used to jump-start changes in infrastructure and thus alter daily habits, patterns, and preferences on everything from energy consumption to transportation, housing and health, economic development, community and civic facilities, open space, food, and lifestyle."

And even if these separate disasters don't have the kind of single, focused impact that could spur policymakers to get serious and act, their cumulative effect may be that when leadership proposes, they will be ready to begin what will need to be a major shift in policy, action and daily life. Because if there is no action until disaster is so huge that it can't be ignored, there's a huge risk that by that time it will be too late. And a risk that the wrong decisions will be made in a climate of fear, as we learned all too well in the past decade.

Maybe it will happen like the Civil Rights revolution: years of writings, then single actions, grassroots leaders, demonstrations growing larger, until one President recognizes that America is paying attention and proposes the Voting Rights Act, and after his assassination the next President takes the lead. But in Congress it came down to a few heroes, to Everett Dirksen, the Republican Senate leader who famously said of it that it was an idea whose time had come, and to California Senator Clair Engle, remembered by Keith recently for casting a vote to break the filibuster, even though near death from brain cancer. He voted by pointing to his eye to indicate "Aye," because he could no longer speak.

I don't think we can really wait beyond 2009 for the change to begin in a big way. A lot of preparations have been made, but crucial years have been lost. Maybe people are ready. The media may not know how to talk about disaster, but perhaps under their increasingly blind radar, the change is underway.

Fiddling While the Icecaps Melt

imaging of Vatnajokull Glacier Icecap

Undressed Rehearsal (with UPDATE)

Not even World Environment Day could deter the partisan and corporate interest politics that destroyed the climate crisis bill in the U.S. Senate. In some ways all the posturing was a charade within a charade: the bill, too weak to do much good, was never in danger of being passed.

It was at best a dress rehearsal for a real bill and a real debate next year, with a real chance at doing something. But while the debate began to introduce the issues in Congress, it also undressed John McCain's pretend support for doing something about the Climate Crisis. He was for this bill before he was against it. McCain is all talk on the issue.

But this bill that was charitably described as a first step but not the actual solution by the head of the UN climate panel was deemed inadequate by other environmentalists." We're thankful the bill was introduced," said Kierán Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity,"but more thankful that it did not pass." Clearly it's going to take President Obama to get a good bill introduced and an overwhemingly Democratic Congress to even get it sincerely debated.

This debacle is in the context of extraordinary weather events continuing (such as the flooding rains in Indiana and tornadoes outside Chicago and the worst-in-50-years rain in China just on Saturday) punctuating larger climate shifts--in the U.S. a moister East and a much dryer West: last week Governor Schwarzenegger officially declared that the entire state of California is in a drought, which it has been unofficially for a couple of years.

These changes are happening much faster and on a bigger scale than many scientists expected, and that's especially the case in the Arctic, where new evidence emerged of the break-up of the Arctic ice cap.

The Climate Crisis is obscured by rising oil prices and a weakening U.S. economy, which are not only related to each other but to the Climate Crisis--both in causes and in solutions. But oil companies are the richest corporations on the planet, and with their political minions they continue to obscure this connection, and charge that confronting the Climate Crisis will damage the economy and ordinary life. Nobody says it will be easy, but the solution common to all three areas is precisely to deal with the Climate Crisis through clean energy industries.

Update: Senator Obama has issued a statement on the bill. In part:

“As this week’s debate on climate change has unfolded, the American people and those watching us around the world had every reason to hope that we would act. Every credible scientist and expert believes action is necessary. This is critical and long overdue legislation that represents a good first step in addressing one of the most serious problems facing our generation.

Like many of my Senate colleagues, I believe the legislation could have been made even better. Had there been a substantive Senate debate about some of the concerns with this bill, I believe the outcome could have generated broad support. It certainly would have received my support.

Unfortunately, the Republican leadership in the Senate has chosen to block progress, rather than work in a good faith manner to address this challenge. This is a failure of our politics and a failure of leadership — a President who for years denied the problem, and a Republican nominee, John McCain, who claims leadership on the issue but opposes this bipartisan bill.

We can’t afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake."

The Future Begins

"America, this is our moment. This is our time.
Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past.
Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face.
Our time to offer a new direction for the country we love."

Barack Obama in St. Paul on the night he became the Democratic
nominee for President of the United States. Transcript . Here's a
nice description of the event, with 17,000 in the arena and another
twelve to fifteen thousand outside.

Obamas in St. Paul Tuesday

photos: NY Times, Reuters

Let the Future Begin

Great Falls, Montana today. Hat
tip to Ambbogie for noting this photo.

Donna Braizle's Message on the Democratic Nomination

Donna Braizle, former campaign manager for Al Gore, is a super-delegate, Chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute, and a CNN commentator. She is also a member of the Democratic Rules Committee that meets Saturday to determine the Michigan and Florida delegations (the states she refers to towards the end of this excerpt.) This is part of a statment that appears on her web site. (Hat tip to Jena's diary at Kos. ) I've added emphasis and paragraphing.

"It's time to rally around the nominee as soon as the fourth day of June breaks upon the horizon. Why not? What would Democrats gain by taking this debate any further, especially when the party is now engaged in the kind of polarizing politics that we once denounced the GOP for using for partisan gain. What can be won by tainting the process, arguing the rules are now unfair, or worse, the Republican rule of winner-takes-all should have guided the Democrats as well?

All this fuss is simply about saving face and waiting to see whether some awful thing tarnishes the presumptive nominee. It's shameful, short-sighted, mean-spirited and morally unacceptable. Now, I said it. To my longstanding friends in the feminist community who have called out the media as being culturally sexist and misogynistic, it is time to help educate the American public about the corrosive impact of sexism in politics and elsewhere. But we can have this dialogue without using divisive language and political tactics that further threaten to divide our country and party. If another woman comes up to me in an airport and suggests Obama should wait his turn, I might scream, "Stop it!" This is not about who should be first, it's about who has the most delegates and who might make the best president of the United States.

The most tragic thing I have heard is this need to link the Obama camp to pundits inside the media who have used the "math" historically used to call an election with attempts to push Hillary out of the race. After all, when the senator held a lead in every national poll in 2007, the media described her groundbreaking campaign as being inevitable. No one called that sexist.

Obama will have earned the right to become the declared Democratic nominee once he has reached the 2,026 delegates he needs. If the party decides to amend the just and known penalty it swore to impose on states and those officials that put its voters in jeopardy of not having a voice at the convention by violating the rules, the adjusted number should not alter the race. Instead, the amendment should allow the presumptive nominee to help bring the party together."

Is There Life on Mars?

The Phoenix Mars Lander began its exploration of the Martian polar cap area, searching for "evidence of the building blocks of life."Of today's launch, project manager Barry Goldstein said: "In my dreams it couldn't have gone as perfectly as it went."Said the AP story: "It performed a choreographed dance that included unfurling its parachute, shedding its heat shield and backshell, and firing thrusters to slow to a 5 mph touchdown. The radio signal confirming the landing came at 4:53 p.m. PDT."

This is the first probe on the Mars surface to look for signs of life since Viking. But its 90 day mission drilling into the permafrost has limits, according to the AP story:

"The lander also will study whether the ice ever melted at some point in Mars' history when the planet had a warmer environment than the current harsh, cold one it currently has.Scientists do not expect to find water in its liquid form at the Phoenix landing site because it's too frigid. But they say that if raw ingredients of life exist anywhere on the planet, they likely would be preserved in the ice.Phoenix, however, cannot detect signs of alien life that may exist now or once existed."

Obama at Wesleyan

Barack Obama gave the commencement address at Wesleyan University today.

He spoke about how Ted Kennedy (who was scheduled to give the address and asked Obama to fill in) and all the Kennedys have changed American lives for the better, and he renewed their call to service. Among the 25,000 people there were graduate Caroline Raclin Kennedy, Ted's step-daughter (photo.) Thanks for 3 of these photos to Al Rodgers--with more here. Here is the
YouTube of this inspiring address, which
uniquely tells of Obama's own youthful
experiences and call to service, as well as
explaining how important service will be in the Obama administration. Here's a transcript.

The Climate Crisis and A Call to Service

"Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story.

There are so many ways to serve and so much need at this defining moment in our history... Because our individual salvation depends on collective salvation. Because thinking only about yourself, fulfilling your immediate wants and needs, betrays a poverty of ambition. Because it’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential and discover the role you’ll play in writing the next great chapter in America’s story

There are so many ways to serve and so much need at this defining moment in our history.

I ask you to seek these opportunities when you leave here, because the future of this country – your future – depends on it... At a time when our ice caps are melting and our oceans are rising, we need you to help lead a green revolution. We still have time to avoid the catastrophic consequences of climate change if we get serious about investing in renewable sources of energy, and if we get a generation of volunteers to work on renewable energy projects, and teach folks about conservation, and help clean up polluted areas; if we send talented engineers and scientists abroad to help developing countries promote clean energy."

Barack Obama at Wesleyan University today

The Obama Majority

With his 18 point victory in Oregon, Barack Obama achieved an absolute majority in elected delegates. He is less than 70 delegates short of the number needed to claim the nomination. Despite her victory in Kentucky and her recent statements, there is no way that Hillary Clinton can claim the nomination unless the will of the people expressed in all these contests is nullified.

The Rally the Size of a City

says the Washington Post about Obama's speech
in Portland, OR Sunday. If you were in the back
of this crowd, you were a half mile away from the
podium. 60,000 in the park, 15,000 outside the
gates, not counting folks in boats and elsewhere
there for the rally.

Obama before 75,000 in Portland OR