The Daily Babble: Oil, Water and Media

I was just watching Rachel Maddow reporting from the Gulf, in between peeks at the Boston-Cleveland playoff and going outside to work on my version of the NBA chi-chi shot of the year, the floater, dreaming of the day I get Medicare and can play maybe a pickup game without worrying about getting an injury I can't pay to have treated.

Apart from a pretty useless interview on a fishing boat--probably looked like a good idea when the producers thought of it--it was a reasonably decent look at the situation, with a very strong and articulate commentary from Rachel at the end. But basically she gets big points for being there and focusing on the oil gush story.

There was a failed car bombing attempt--or probably an attempt--in Times Square over the weekend, which was hard to miss if you passed through CNN. With MSNBC running its prisoner weekend shows and the networks doing sports and entertainment, and Fox News doing Fox News, this was not necessarily the most trusted name in news but the only news. And it was totally concentrated on Times Square for hours at a time. Twenty-four people died by official count from storm-related flooding in Tennessee and environs, but CNN's coverage reminded me of the way the networks used to cover a disaster in, say, India--with the same little bit of sensational footage. Because they didn't have correspondents and cameras in that part of India. And this is part and parcel of cable news becoming tabloid TV, either the entire channel that used to be Headline News now covering tawdry celebrity stories and child kidnappings 24/7, or the political tabloid coverage of the other cables.

It's not just that New York City is a big deal, or even that the cable networks are headquartered there. It's that it was the cheapest thing to cover, even though there was no news whatever for most of that time. The correspondents who live there were available, and news divisions spend far less than ever on covering the country let alone the world.

Today was better--the major networks and even CNN are in the Gulf and have at least fresh footage from Nashville, etc. But this is partly why we get such lax and often distorted coverage of real news events with real consequences. I've started reading the Katrina chapters of Rebecca Solnit's book, A Paradise Built in Hell, and so much of the coverage was just plain wrong, and has never been corrected. But more on that another time.

As for the Gulf now, winds and currents apparently are holding back the oil from shore but the amount of oil is growing larger. The inundation is only a matter of time, and also a matter of local efforts to keep it out. It sounds like a Dunkirk-like effort is underway, massing local boats and improvised resources, to hold back the oil. We can only hope it's successful.

Two more TV notes to end this babble session--VoteVets.org is running an ad linking oil dependence to Iran's making money to fund its development of explosives used against U.S. troops, using this to urge the switch to a clean domestic energy economy--it's one of the best ads of its kind I've seen it a long time. Worth paying to see it more. And I heard Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation, on Rachel, and there were a couple of words he pronounced ...well, I knew he was from Pittsburgh. And sure enough... (The tip0ff was Prince William Sound, which in Pittsburghese comes out Prince William Sawnd. Interesting that this was nearly the only clear instance of the Pittsburgh dialect though.)

"Catastrophic"

It keeps getting worse. Huge amounts of oil continue to gush into the Gulf--maybe tens of thousands of gallons a day--and the wells will not be contained for at least a week, and may not be successfully capped for three months. That's more than enough time and oil to spread the destruction beyond the Gulf and up the East Coast.

Interior Secretary Salazar called the situation "catastrophic." A catastrophe is a disaster with lasting effects, that spreads destructive effects beyond its local origin and for a long time. Homeland Security Chief Napalitano answered charges that the government hasn't responded quickly enough."The physical response on the ground has been from day one as if this could be a catastrophic failure," she said. "Every possible resource was being lined up on shore."

Viewing the situation on the ground, President Obama called it "a potentially unprecedented environmental disaster." He vowed to do "whatever it takes and as long as it takes" to contain the spill. But he warned: "BP is responsible for this leak. BP will be paying the bill."

The oil inundation threatens to play havoc with the Gulf region economy and the livelihoods of people there, as well as the destructive economic ripples through the country and the world. That normally takes attention away from the threats to the survival of other species, and below the photo of President Obama with Louisiana governor Jindal, are several more threatened species: the Pantropical spotted dolphin in Gulf waters, and the Great Blue Heron and Black Skimmer who nest in bird sanctuaries that could well be destroyed. These photos are from a Kos diary by Haole in Hawaii.

Worse Than Valdez?

What makes an oil spill really bad? the AP story asks, and answers: Most of the ingredients for it are now blending in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts tick off the essentials: A relentless flow of oil from under the sea; a type of crude that mixes easily with water; a resultant gooey mixture that is hard to burn and even harder to clean; water that's home to vulnerable spawning grounds for new life; and a coastline with difficult-to-scrub marshlands.

Gulf Coast experts have always talked about "the potential for a bad one," said Wes Tunnell, coastal ecology and oil spill expert at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. "And this is the bad one. This is just a biggie that finally happened."

And so Think Progress adds: The catastrophic gusher of oil unleashed by the explosion of BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig last week is on track to quickly exceed the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, an independent expert warns."

The story notes that the spill is already larger than 31 nations of the world. And the oil may continue gushing from these wells (apparently there are now two) into the sea for months. So far, no one knows how to stop it.

As the destructive effects begin to become obvious, the questions also begin: did the company involved use the correct safety mechanism to cap the well? Did the explosion happen because of a Halliburton operation? Did BP do enough to contain the oil? To the last question, the White House says no. (See this other Think Progress story on the reality behind BP's "Beyond Petroleum" green energy advertising campaign.)

But note this: the attempts to shift blame to the federal government have already begun--not just party politics, but in the service of the corporate giants who are actually responsible. Will the questions about them fade in the corporate media? (Though this Halliburton connection was made by the Wall Street Journal.)

The U.S. government is responding, including with troops. Several relevant cabinet secretaries are at command centers in the region, and President Obama may visit the area Sunday. Meanwhile, new offshore oil drilling is suspended.

Preview

All species of sea turtles are currently endangered. Several species are in direct danger from the Gulf oil disaster. But unusual numbers of one species have already been washing up on Texas shores, with most appearing to be victims of other human/industrial activities. These scenes however are likely to be repeated in the coming days and weeks, as victims of the oil disaster mount.

Arizxenophobia

Can you spell Arizxenophobia? The overtly racist "show me your papers" law--something that more than echoes Nazi profiling of Jews--is exposing and inflaming a racial divide, especially as several other states are clamoring to pass similar laws, and polls suggest the Arizona law is widely popular.

But let's parse this for a moment. First of all, racism by whites and by police against browns in Arizona is not in any way new. Writer Leslie Marmon Silko has been exposing harassment and terrorizing since the 1980s (it's a particular problem for Native Americans whose tribal lands are on both sides of the Mexican border--but then, a Native American with Spanish blood pretty much defines "Mexican.") So when they say they know an illegal immigrant when they see one, they mean brown and poor. This story corroborates that impression in the Phoenix area, where the Sheriff and most popular white political figure in the state has been employing it for years. (Whereas the strongest opposition to the law is coming from the Sheriff in the Tucson area, and law enforcement there.)

But it's not all racism, just as the racially tinged innuendo and outrageous charges leveled at President Obama is not because he's black, exactly. It's because black people are Democrats. If black people or Latinos were Republicans, most of the GOPers in national politics at least would accept them without batting an eye. But Republicans have made themselves into the White People's Party, and they need to limit the political power of non-whites, including the number of voters. This may be intuitively obvious, but here's a story specifically about Arizona with numbers.

Since sending black people back to Africa didn't work, the best they can do about keeping the numbers down is prevent efforts to register blacks (so they demonized and effectively destroyed Acorn) and keep the Census from counting them. They can do the same for Latinos, but they can also prevent more of them from becoming citizens and voters, by keeping them out or even sending them back.

Of course, they find a ready tool in the residual racism among whites, in using the grievances (real and imagined) of poorer whites, and stoking everybody's fears on every level--personal, neighborhood, city, nation, society. It's the fear that greeted and oppressed every immigrant group, except perhaps the first whites to arrive and take the place over. But in this obviously crowded and troubled country, it's worse now in a number of ways. So, in the end, it is the political use of racism, for whatever reason, and so it is racism after all.

It's there in the virulence of the opposition to health care reform: it's because some white people are persuaded that the beneficiaries are going to be black and brown; that, like government programs for the poor, they are going to be taxed to pay for the medical care of blacks and browns, violating their Freedom and Liberty to spend that money on what they want. They know this because the President is black, so he's engineering everything to take away from whites and give to fellow blacks, not to Americans. They know this because the biggest white mouths on radio, Fox News and in various legislatures and governor's mansions are telling them so.

But about those polls. While the answers to some questions are pretty troubling, some others indicate the general impatience with ineffective immigration policy and rules. Those involved in governing rather than political grandstanding for fun and profit pretty much know the current mixed bag of contradictory policies and rules don't work, even on the level of fairness.

Barack Obama talked a lot about bipartisan solutions to big problems, and in office he's tried to walk that talk, and here's yet another obvious reason: it's an issue so charged and so easy to exploit for political and monetary gain (ask Sarah) and yet so important to deal with for the health and basic functioning of this society that only responsible people of all political persuasions willing to work together sincerely to come to a real solution will be able to fix this.

It's hard to see the Republican strategy of inflaming this as working in the long term. It's a mid-term strategy, and then for as many elections as it proves successful. But the demographic trends are unlikely to change in favor of a white majority. Then throw the Climate Crisis into the mix--the permanent drought in Arizona to the point--and things get really roiled. One thing I'm willing to bet on--if Arizona registers a population gain in the 2010 Census, it will be the last Census it does so. I haven't yet seen anyone write about any possible connection between the ongoing drought and this resurgent racism. But there's been a connection elsewhere. In a place called Darfur.

"Of National Significance"

The importance of the oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico jumped during the day Thursday, as officials stared at possible consequences ranging from species extinctions(the reddish egret, pictured above) to massive killing of shrimp and other shellfish that supply the world. The danger is not only to the sea and shore but to the marshes, where oil may arrive as early as tonight. Once in the marshes, there is little that can be done to prevent severe damage. There is even some danger to the Mississippi River.

So earlier today, according to the LA Times:

"I have been receiving frequent briefings from my Cabinet and White House staff," Obama said. "While BP is ultimately responsible for funding the cost of response and cleanup operations, my administration will continue to use every single available resource at our disposal including potentially the Department of Defense to address the incident."

"This is a spill of national significance," Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters at an earlier White House briefing. The designation means that assets from around the country and especially from other coastal areas can be used to fight the spill.

Officials said the government would open a federal command center in Mobile, Ala., joining another center in Robert, La., to oversee the response to the spill.

The New York Times added: Cleanup efforts, however, suffered a setback on Thursday when sea and wind conditions prevented officials from executing a controlled burn of some of the floating oil, said Rear Adm. Sally Brice O’Hare of the Coast Guard, who also took part in the briefing.

“We are being very aggressive, and we are prepared for the worst case," Rear Adm. O’Hare said. The United States Navy sent equipment and several vessels on Thursday to lend a hand, according to The Associated Press.

The Pentagon said on Thursday that “there is a full-blown effort” to determine how it best can help the cleanup efforts, said spokesman Geoff Morrell, but that no conclusions have been made about what that help would be."

Among the many species threatened by the oil well disaster in the Gulf, gushing oil at five times the rate first estimated and still growing, are the sperm whale and the snowy plover. The deep ocean well is still not capped, and desperate clean-up efforts include oil burns on the water. What's clear by now is that the industry that claims to have everything under control, doesn't have a clue. Quote for the day comes from Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry:"It's premature to say this is catastrophic. I will say that this is very serious." The first oil could hit the Louisiana shore by Friday. Then it might not be premature anymore.

Hubble Hubble!

The official 20th birthday photo for the Hubble space telescope: the Eagle Nebula.

Look Ma, I'm Blogging!

The Unpronounceable Volcano of Iceland is quieter, at least for now, but its eruption inspired a couple of volcano-related web gems, one about the role of such ice-covered volcanoes in the study of climate change, and another about how a really big eruption is potentially as much a doomsday scenario as any wandering asteroid.

While the Senate climate bill has been dead, crappy anyway, alive, dead again and maybe not so dead, the effects of climate change that scientists predicted continue to accumulate, though noted in separate little stories. Apart from the weird weather, tornadoes and storms last week and this, the effects on the birds and the bees of spring coming early, not to mention the pollen count, and the spread of a fungal disease south of its usual range. Update: And this story about present and future loss of beaches on the U.S. East Coast, due mostly to climate change.

Meanwhile, Governor Ed Rendell of PA said on Rachel last week: " the Tea Parties get tremendous coverage. And think about it—week before the health care vote, they had a rally in Washington, got 1,000 people, maybe not even that. The tax day rally, the big rally to protest federal taxes got less than 1,500 people showing up, according to their own organizer. Other people thought it was in the 400 or 500 range...And yet, the media, including the so-called liberal and progressive media, have given the tea party-ites elevation in terms of the impact they‘re having on the national debate and discussion—way above what they deserve."

And as if the point needed proving, there is a rumor that there were between 100,000 and 200,000 people on the Washington mall Sunday demonstrating about something called Earth Day. If true, this would be a gathering of about a hundred times more people than the Tea Party tax rally which got endless coverage and discussion.

Sure, the Tea Parties are newer, whereas the first Earth Day crowds were forty years ago, and the wingnuts set off alarms the nice green tea-sipping enviros don't. They probably sat around singing you know what. I fault the environmental movement for part of the invisibility--this was no coalition effort, its political content was tepid, its form unimaginative. But the corporate media is also culpable. To cover the Tea Party people to such an extent, and ignore a much larger show of support for what the wingers deride, is inexcusably biased. Even, as Rendell notes, on the part of the so-called progressive media, just as locked into hot-button political issues of the moment over the ones that ultimately count so much more.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Call it preaching to the choir if you will, but I've always thought the choir a good place to direct one's efforts. Presumably they know something about music; and, whatever their doubts, they have at least made it to church."

--Jonathan Lear

And Happy Birthday to the Hubble telescope, author of the image above

Eaarth Day

Besides the deafening silence today versus the two million shouting voices forty years ago, this Earth Day has some significant differences from the first. For example, there is 40% less sea ice in the world, and much of what remains is melting. There are 8.5 million square miles more that must deal with a tropical climate; half of Australia and much of the American Southwest are in permanent drought. River water has shrunk by a volume equivalent to the Mississippi. Glaciers worldwide are shrinking, and some are virtually gone.

There are tens of thousands--probably hundreds of thousands--fewer species of life. There are fewer edible fish in the sea, and life there is dying out fast. There is less water in many places on land, and partly as a consequence the world produces 40 million fewer tons of wheat, corn and barley per year. There are more storms, more heat waves, more diseases in more lifeforms, more forest fires and other destruction, not only in the U.S. but in the Amazon. "We're seeing the end of some forests as we know them," says a U.S. forester.

At the foot of a melting glacier in northern Tibet, a young man from a small village there was asked to explain the reason for the change. His answer was neither ethereal nor complicated. "Global warming," he said. "Too many factories." A simple and much more than an inconvenient truth. The Climate Crisis is not some vision of the future--it's been with us these forty years, it's gotten worse, and now it's having effects that only the self-blinded and deluded can deny. But still...we can stop it, right? We may be able to prevent the very worst-- runaway climate change in the far future, although what governments around the world are so far willing to do won't be enough. In any case, for the foreseeable future, it's only going to get worse. And then at the very least it is going to stay that way, for thousands of years.

That was the message of David Orr's book, Down to the Wire, last year. This year it is no longer a new message-- not among climate scientists and those who follow their work. It is the starting point for Bill McKibben's new book (all the facts above are from it.) We no longer live on the same planet as existed on the first Earth Day. He gives the planet we will be living on from now on a new name: Eaarth. So in a sense, this is the first Eaarth Day.

McKibben's book, Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (Times Books) uses only about a quarter of its 200+ pages to describe the current situation and trend lines, but is no less devastating for that. "The vast inland glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, and the giant snowpack of the American West, are melting very fast, and within decades the supply of water to the billions of people living downstream may dwindle. The great rain forests of the Amazon is drying on its margins and threatened at its core. The great boreal forest of North America is dying in a matter of years. The great storehouses of oil beneath the earth's crust are now more empty than full. Every one of these things is completely unprecedented in the ten thousand years of human civilization."

He counters the assertion of some on Earth Day that it isn't the earth but humanity that's threatened. It's an understandable attempt to create urgency through self-interest, but it's deceptive and ultimately counterproductive. Yes, McKibben says, the planet will survive, "but it won't be anything like the planet we've known. We're hard at work transforming it--hard at work sabotaging its biology, draining its diversity, affecting every other kind of life that we were born onto this planet with. We're running Genesis backward, de-creating."

The rise in heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere is leading to a rise in global temperature unprecedented in millions of years. McKibben devotes another quarter of his book to explaining the inadequacy of the proposed responses to the Climate Crisis, and the extreme unlikelihood that large-scale changes in policy, energy generation etc. can be made in time to head off very major changes in how human life on this planet is to be lived. "And if our societies start to tank, we'll be in worse shape than those who came before. For one thing, our crisis is global, so there's no place to flee. For another, most of us don't know how to do very much--in your standard collapse scenario, it's nice to know how to grow wheat."

McKibben comes right up against the logical conclusions, the doomsday scenarios of nuclear wars over oil and water, mass migrations from islands going underwater, the world's coastal cities and increasing areas of unlivable heat; eventually a dieback of half or 3/4 or more of humanity, leading to the day-to-day life for the survivors imagined for us in a host of grim movies, from Mad Max to The Road. Instead he backs off, partly because (I imagine) it's as David Orr wrote--if this is indeed the future, there's not much point in writing a book about it. Instead, he writes: "The rest of this book will be devoted to another possibility--that we might choose instead to try to manage our descent. That we might aim for a relatively graceful decline." [Emphasis is his.]

So the second half of the book is about how to do that. It emphasizes local and small-scale solutions--living "lightly, carefully, gracefully." Locally generated clean power, focus on maintenance instead of growth, no more consumer culture or the world it represents. Except for the Internet. Because local utopias are likely to get stifling without contact. "Which is why, if I had my finger on the switch, I'd keep the juice flowing to the Internet even if I had to turn off everything else."

McKibben makes his case for all this being well within the possible, sometimes persuasively ( although I'm dubious about the Internet surviving.) He notes that part of the problem is that "We lack the vocabulary and the metaphors we need for life on a different scale." He offers his "candidates for words that may help us think usefully about the future." They are: durable, sturdy, stable, hardy, robust.
Good words, and useful for the kind of society he foresees. McKibben made a choice in both the language and content of this book: not much philosophy or generalizing, a lot of practical specifics and common sense. But I doubt that this vocabulary is going to be enough. For one thing, there are some slightly higher-order words that will be very important, like courage, compassion, attention, dedication, fairness. But even beyond that, people need a larger vision, to guide and inspire them. And if it's going to really work, it has to be the right vision.

There were good words and visions at the first Earth Day, that helped inspire the effort leading to most of the environmental progress that was institutionalized in the first decade of the environmental movement, and has continued on that momentum. But mostly, environmentalists have been terrible at vision, and especially at "good words." With the switch from the soft-sounding and not even accurate "greenhouse effect" to the vaguely pleasant sounding "global warming" and "climate change," the response to global heating has especially suffered. As for the titanic struggle ahead between those who want to use resources to stop the cause of global heating to those who insist we can only afford to fix the effects, what environmentalists offer us is the mind-numbing choice of mitigation versus adaptation. Which more or less guarantees that a sensible discussion of these issues won't occur in enough time to have clear policies before the panic and politics combine to drive the situation out of control.

But in the past thirty years there is one word, one concept and one vision that has the proven power to move human souls: Gaia. The sense of our planet as a living organism, prefigured in myth and science, proposed as a hypothesis by James Lovelock and refined by him and others into a real scientific theory, it has also proven to be an inspiration and a possible focus.

The breadth and depth of what Gaia can mean for the future is brilliantly suggested in the new compendium of essays, Gaia in Turmoil ( the MIT Press), edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinkler (with an introduction, by the way, by Bill McKibben.) This volume includes various views of the science (including its relationship to systems theory and cybernetics), the historical resonance of the ideas, the applications to policy and how people relate to their planet in their moment to moment lives. There are trenchant essays on Gaia and evolution, forest systems, water, biodiversity, and on its relationship to ethics, education and governance. Particularly striking are the essays by Martin Ogle on Gaia as model and metaphor, and David Abram on Gaia and the transformation of personal experience of the everyday world. I don't think I am exaggerating when I suggest that an entire curriculum could be built around this book, producing a very valuable education for the future.

I place this book at the top of my indispensable Eaarth Day books, along with
McKibben and Orr, and one other: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit (Viking). Solnit's book explores responses to recent disasters to pose the key questions "Who are you? Who are we? In times of crisis, these are life-and-death questions." This is another component of how we realistically face this tougher future. I'll probably be writing more here and elsewhere about these last two books.

The Quiet Crisis

Between last Earth Day and today--in fact, in March, during the final healthcare votes--Stewart Udall died. He was appointed by President Kennedy to serve as Secretary of Interior in 1961, and stayed under President Johnson until 1969, just before the first Earth Day. He was an environmental pioneer, part of the transition from conservation to environmental activism. The first environmental laws were passed, or were proposed (and passed soon after the first Earth Day, in the Nixon administration) on his watch.

Udall also wrote one of the pioneer books on the environment, though The Quiet Crisis is not much remembered. It followed by a year the first environmental classic and best-seller, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. Udall's book took a more historical view, chronicling American conservation efforts. But crucially it also took a wider view, beyond chemical pollution to the total environmental effects of the growth-at-any-cost economy: "In a great surge toward 'progress,' our congestion increasingly has befouled water and air and growth has created new problems on every hand. Schools, housing, and roads are inadequate and ill-planned; noise and confusion have mounted with the rising tempo of technology; and as our cities have sprawled outward, new forms of abundance and new forms of blight have oftentimes marched hand in hand."
Although it preserves signs of hasty writing, The Quiet Crisis remains remarkable in the appropriate breadth of its content. He dealt not only with facts but the underlying and overarching philosophy. He elevated the work of Aldo Leopold and his "land ethic", now acknowledged as a central figure in even contemporary environmentalism, into public policy discussion. He went after examples of air, water and soil pollution--and assembled the first official endangered species list--but he also looked to the historical and spiritual sources that support and sustain attention to the natural world. He could be eloquent on this topic. "To pursue his vision more intently, Emerson steeped himself in Plato, Goethe, and fresh air. The easiest way to develop Olympian insights was to turn the mind into an aeolian harp and attune it to the winds and sounds and rhythms of nature."

In this book, he also dealt with urban environments as well as wilderness, with needed legislation and individual action. That the book has an introduction by President Kennedy shows that the environment was on the agenda almost a decade before Earth Day.

Stewart Udall was also one of the voices heard throughout this year's American Experience documentary, Earth Days. He was part of the mass movement before and just after Earth Day in 1970 that led to the laws that saved the United States--from erasing more wilderness, from poisoning more water, earth and air and therefore poisoning itself. But as this documentary notes, expanding effective environmental change to the world, and applying it to the most deadly threat human civilization has ever faced, climate change (which, the documentary documents, was talked about in a national news broadcast on the first Earth Day) has failed.

Udall called it the Quiet Crisis in 1963. It became pretty noisy on Earth Day 1970, when 2 million Americans participated, and soon after, when the fledgling movement targeted and defeated anti-environment legislators. But on its 40th anniversary, it has gone quiet again. Seemingly because it is so accepted, but let's face it, there's an awful lot of denial involved. Earth Day was utterly invisible in the media today. We'll see if there's real coverage of the Sunday demo in Washington, and the climate bill scheduled to be introduced next week, but I wouldn't count on it. I get emails from several different enviro organization, and nobody is talking about the Sunday demo. There still is no collective, focused action by environmentalists. Too much separate noise can also add up to a quiet crisis.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"One of the penalties of an ecological education is

that one lives alone in a world of wounds."

Aldo Leopold

A Sand County Almanac

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature. And I think we are challenged as mankind has never been challenged before to prove our maturity and our mastery not of nature, but of ourselves."

Rachel Carson
quoted in Earth Days

Dunkirk II?

Update: From Tuesday morning's NY Times:"European transport ministers announced a plan to begin easing the six-day ban on aviation traffic around the Continent, but a new ash cloud spreading south from the erupting volcano in Iceland on Tuesday raised fresh concerns about arrangements to restore anything resembling normal schedules."

The UK government, said the Guardian, has "launched an unprecedented plan to bring home an estimated 200,000 people stranded abroad by the volcanic ash cloud – including possible deployment of the Royal Navy – as European airlines staged a series of successful test flights and urged governments to reassess flying restrictions."

Though airlines were pressuring governments to lift restrictions, they are expected to remain in force through midweek. Ryanair, Europe's largest short-haul carrier, cancelled all flights in northern Europe until Wednesday afternoon with BA and BMI scrapping schedules for tomorrow after Nats, the national air traffic controller, maintained a no-fly zone until at least 7pm [Monday]evening.

There are airlines that fear bankruptcy because of this, and the Prime Minister warned ground transportation and ferry companies not to profiteer. But with thousands of UK citizens stranded in Europe, including school children on holiday, the government is considering using Navy vessels to bring them home. If they do, it could be this generation's version of Dunkirk--the flotilla of boats that rescued what was left of British forces in France against the advancing German army early in World War II. But this time, it's not a mighty military force, but the atmosphere, and tiny particles in the air from a volcano in distant Iceland.

Meanwhile, the ripple effect continues--and it ripples out to the farm fields of Kenya.

It Takes a Volcano

This volcano in Iceland erupted, sending tons of smoke, steam and tiny particles into the air, which has paralyzed air travel in Europe for days. Almost two-thirds of all transatlantic flights into European airports were cancelled and authorities shut down airspace over France, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Slovakia, Croatia and Hungary. As the cloud moved east, flights were halted at Frankfurt, Europe's third-busiest airport, and at 10 other German airports.

There are expected to be few if any flights in the UK and western Europe over the weekend, "placing yet more strain on road, rail and ferry networks already struggling to cope with thousands of stranded passengers." The ripple effect is being felt in the U.S., causing delays and cancelled flights. European airlines are losing billions. And there is still some danger of new eruptions--perhaps even of a larger volcano nearby, which historically erupts soon after the current one does.

Update: A NY Times story on the volcano effects, calculating the problems and speculating on what happens if it goes on for weeks rather than days.

Update2: The volcanic ash over Europe has forced President Obama to cancel his planned trip to Poland to attend the funeral of the president of Poland, killed in an air crash along with his wife and many senior members of the Polish government.

All of this is an object lesson in systematic vulnerability: the vulnerability of interconnected vital systems to the cascading effects of relatively small disruptions. Given the likelihood that "natural disasters" like storms, floods and droughts are going to increase as the Climate Crisis phases into Climate Cataclysm, responsible parties--namely governments--need to be looking into these fragile systems we've come to depend on so completely, in so short a time.

Those who are thinking about dealing with such problems in the future--intense and local ones, but eventually several simultaneously--talk a lot about "resilience." But our infrastructures are not resilient. If they aren't too old, they are too new and without sufficient redundancy. And there is shrinking capacity in secondary systems to use as alternatives if the main systems fail.

Europe is actually in better shape that we are to cope with a crisis like this--they have a better rail system, in terms of capacity and reach, and also in speed: they have more high speed trains and routes than we even currently dream of. If air travel is curtailed for longer than a few days, they are in better position to cope.
This is an issue beyond climate-related emergencies. What happens if for some reason the Internet goes down, or communication with GPS satellites? At least we know our electrical grids are dangerously old and fragile, even if we haven't done much about it.

Through climate data, we are learning how vulnerable our planet is to certain changes (especially in the atmosphere), as resilient as it otherwise is. What will it take to convince us how vulnerable this civilization has become, when our food and even our water comes from far away? When our livelihoods, our economies depend on interconnected energy, transportation and information systems? Put these two areas of vulnerability together--in a crash in the ocean food chain, or the disappearance of honey bees--and face just how fragile this is, the life we take stupidly for granted. And maybe pay attention to doing something about it, before it becomes way too obvious.

Encouraging Terrorists by Calling Them Patriots

In some ways it's becoming an old story, but we can't approach it that way: the continuing escalation of violent language, along with systematic lying--of asserting pretty much the opposite of what's true--is becoming the most prominent feature of Republican rhetoric. The GOP is becoming little more than the party of of decadent and dangerous demagogues.

Republicans in Congress are flat-out lying about the financial reform bill, both in terms of process and in what it proposes to do. This kind of Nineteen Eighty-Four politics, besides being lethal to democratic decision-making, tends to lend credibility to the extreme rhetoric, which continues to escalate.

It was striking that for a few minutes today, two cable channels (CNN & MSNBC) were covering the explosion in extremism, while two others (FOX & CNBC) were providing living examples of it.

On CNN, Wolf Blitzer was interviewing President Clinton, who talked about parallels between now and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, which is the subject of a revealing documentary on Timothy McVeigh by Rachel Maddow that has been excerpted all week and airs in full on Monday. In terms of threats against President Obama specifically, the former President said "I worry about it." This is the most explicit statement at the highest level of experience indicating we should all be paying attention to it.

Of the anti-government Rabid Right Clinton said: "Some are serious, some are delirious. Some are connected and some are unhinged...We need to be intellectually honest about what some words might do to people who are unstable."

The systematic process now underway encourages domestic terrorists and potential assassins by suggesting they would be patriots--fighting for freedom, "taking out" the "gangsters" of the "totalitarian" federal government, using the guns they are encouraged to proudly carry and display.

The most decadent element of this is that nothing that happens is likely to change it. Even if there is a dramatic violent event--another Oklahoma City or an assassination attempt--this echo chamber of profit-making liars will turn it on its head, and will continue. They will never admit to their responsibility, but now is the time to mark it: if violence happens, they are responsible for fueling it and suggesting that people who engage in it are patriots, and will be praised. Turning terrorists into patriots, after all, is consistent with the GOPer policy of lying outrageously, and asserting the opposite of what is true.

Maybe the only thing that stops or slows it down is electoral rejection, or reflection in the polls. Unfortunately this extremist violent and often racist rhetoric and the systematic lying are apparently being rewarded by poll numbers. It's like the runup to the Iraq war. You know people are going to be sorry after it happens. But they get helplessly fooled, and they do get fooled again.

Those Were the Days

To Seek A Safer World

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and President of the United States Barack Obama took forceful and successful steps in the past week to control a major threat to human civilization: nuclear weapons.

These accomplishments, resulting from quiet diplomacy over the past months, were completed and announced in quick succession. Though any one of them would be of great importance, the combination is an amazing culmination, with more to come.

Momentous in itself, the signing of the arms reduction treaty with Russia that cut another third from both nuclear arsenals was a necessary prelude to actions on controlling nuclear weapons and the material needed to make them, worldwide.

As a result of an international meeting President Obama convened in Washington this week, today The leaders of almost 50 countries have pledged to secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years. Some other deals were announced, including an agreement by the United States, Canada and Mexico agreed to work to convert the fuel at Mexico's nuclear research reactor to a lower grade of uranium unsuitable for nuclear weapons...[this] would eliminate all highly enriched uranium in Mexico.

There are two goals of the Obama policy: to secure existing nuclear material and prevent it from being used by terrorists, and to move expeditiously towards a non-nuclear world. That second goal is addressed dramatically in an agreement between the U.S. and Russia to eliminate weapons-grade plutonium in their military, commiting each country to "irreversibly and transparently" dispose of at least 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium... enough for 17,000 nuclear weapons... the agreement prevents any future military use of the plutonium."

The dangers posed by nuclear weapons are still substantial. Apparently there is not yet a formal agreement by the U.S., Russia and China on how to deal with Iran's possible nuclear weapons program, although news stories the other day said that China had agreed to stronger sanctions. Besides the possibility of terrorists or rogue states obtaining and using such weapons, there is the always-present danger of states that have these weapons using them against their neighbors. This is particularly acute involving Pakistan, India and Israel. The simmering conflicts in those regions are only going to be pushed further by effects of the climate crisis.

But President Obama has provided the international leadership to get trends moving in the right direction, fulfilling the promise recognized by his Nobel Prize. Despite the domestic insanity that U.S. media prefers to emphasize, this is solid achievement towards a less dangerous world. This is change I believe in.

Emerson for the Day

"It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things, that beside his privacy of power as an individual man there is a great public power on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him; then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals."
Emerson (The Poet)
photo: Milky Way

What is the Future Worth?

This weekend's Climate Crisis reading is Paul Krugman in the New York Times Magazine writing on "the economics of lessening climate change." It's a long article, helpfully summarized at Climate Progress with additional links.

Environmentalists are generally applauding the piece for making the case that action to reduce heat-trapping gases is necessary (the consensus of climate scientists), that it can be done with minimal cost (the consensus of environmental economists) and that to not do it will have ruinous economic consequences. But some (like Alex Steffan at Worldchanging--not my favorite but worth hearing) think Krugman actually underestimates the economic costs of failing to severely reduce heat-trapping gases and shift to clean energy, by a lot.

Krugman starts off by discussing the arguments for cap & trade versus a pollution tax. While the pollution tax is simpler, cap & trade seemed politically more feasible, at least until recently. He points out that this exotic notion of cap & trade has already worked: "experience suggests that market-based emission controls work. Our recent history with acid rain shows as much. The Clean Air Act of 1990 introduced a cap-and-trade system in which power plants could buy and sell the right to emit sulfur dioxide, leaving it up to individual companies to manage their own business within the new limits. Sure enough, over time sulfur-dioxide emissions from power plants were cut almost in half, at a much lower cost than even optimists expected; electricity prices fell instead of rising. Acid rain did not disappear as a problem, but it was significantly mitigated."

He briefly notes three axioms concerning the climate science: "The first is that the planet is indeed warming... the upward trend is unmistakable: each successive decade since the 1970s has been warmer than the one before."

"Second, climate models predicted this well in advance, even getting the magnitude of the temperature rise roughly right... So the fact that climate modelers more than 20 years ago successfully predicted the subsequent global warming gives them enormous credibility...

...my third point: models based on this research indicate that if we continue adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere as we have, we will eventually face drastic changes in the climate. Let’s be clear. We’re not talking about a few more hot days in the summer and a bit less snow in the winter; we’re talking about massively disruptive events, like the transformation of the Southwestern United States into a permanent dust bowl over the next few decades."

Krugman then argues for a mixed approach, part market-based (like cap & trade) and part directed government action, like "direct controls" on burning coal. He suggests international cap & trade as well as other instruments such as carbon tariffs to tackle the problem of reducing global emissions.

He returns then to the reasons to do all this, and the urgency. "In public discussion, the climate-change skeptics have clearly been gaining ground over the past couple of years, even though the odds have been looking good lately that 2010 could be the warmest year on record. But climate modelers themselves have grown increasingly pessimistic. What were previously worst-case scenarios have become base-line projections, with a number of organizations doubling their predictions for temperature rise over the course of the 21st century. Underlying this new pessimism is increased concern about feedback effects..."

He notes predictions of a 9 degree F rise in average temperature from the start of this century to its end, with the accompanying storms, floods, droughts and other major disruptions. "And the troubles would not stop there: temperatures would continue to rise."

Krugman maintains his even and reasonable economics tone, but the climate facts are leading him into a different order of change. He writes: "The other is that while modern economies may be highly adaptable, the same may not be true of ecosystems. The last time the earth experienced warming at anything like the pace we now expect was during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 55 million years ago, when temperatures rose by about 11 degrees Fahrenheit over the course of around 20,000 years (which is a much slower rate than the current pace of warming). That increase was associated with mass extinctions, which, to put it mildly, probably would not be good for living standards."

And since he is still writing about the economics, he discusses the price tags, but notes that making economic decisions may depend on how they are applied to time, and what people making these decisions care about: the very near term, the near future, or the farther future.

He thinks that even in the near term the cost of inaction is probably higher than previously estimated, because "substantial global warming is already “baked in,” as a result of past emissions and because even with a strong climate-change policy the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is most likely to continue rising for many years. So even if the nations of the world do manage to take on climate change, we will still have to pay for earlier inaction." That's the Fix It function, as I used to call it, dealing with Effects, now and soon, and continuing for at least the next 40 years, and probably the next 400.

But if serious efforts are made now to reduce carbon and other heat-trapping gases, costs to do that will begin immediately. If those efforts aren't made, it will cost much, much more in 30 or 40 years to deal with the Effects of what those present emissions Cause, because there is something like a 30 year lag time between emissions Cause and Effect on climate. And the logic of that continues--if the Cause continues, the cumulative Effects will grow even stronger into the next century, with a much higher price.

Then Krugman looks at the economic rationale for action. He mentions the uncertainty of predictions, but notes that the risk is high enough to act--the operative economic model is not cost-benefit analysis, but risk assessment.

This is the economic language for a position many have held for awhile now, articulated especially by Greg Craven in his handy little book, What's the Worst That Could Happen: that given the strong scientific evidence and the consequences science predicts, the risks associated with responding to climate change even if it turns out to be not so bad are nowhere near as great as the risks of assuming it's not going to happen. Especially since there are plenty of other good reasons to cut heat-trapping pollution and convert to clean energy.

Krugman then looks at the arguments for a gradual approach to reducing carbon, and the "big bang" model of doing it bigger and sooner. "So what I end up with is basically Martin Weitzman’s argument: it’s the nonnegligible probability of utter disaster that should dominate our policy analysis. And that argues for aggressive moves to curb emissions, soon." He then assesses the Congressional mood as not very likely to act, and concludes: "We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will."

As time goes on, complicating all of this-- economically as well as in most other ways-- is the conflict I've been writing about for awhile, which is the collision between dealing with Cause and dealing with Effects. The debate is now being cast in the mind-numbing terminology of Mitigation vs. Adaptation, which is maybe why nobody much cares about it but policy wonks. But the need to do both--to cut heat-trapping pollution and switch to clean energy at the same time as we're dealing with long-term disasters (droughts, sea level rise, higher incidences of insect-borne diseases etc.) and an avalanche of short-term emergencies (storms, floods, killer heat waves, etc.)--is the economic as well as civilizational challenge of the future. Which is rapidly intruding on the present.

Like a lot of economics, and even science, this is fairly abstract. The reality won't be, and the possibilities aren't. Which will continue to be a topic here.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Who can think of the sun costuming clouds

When all people are shaken

Or of night endazzled, proud,

When people awaken

And cry and cry for help?

The warm antiquity of self,
Everyone, grows suddenly cold.
The tea is bad, bread sad.
How can the world be so old be so mad
That the people die?

If joy shall be without a book
It lies, themselves within themselves,
If they will look
Within themselves
And cry and cry for help,

Within as pillars of the sun,
Supports of night. The tea,
The wine is good. The bread,
The meat is sweet.
And they will not die.

--Wallace Stevens

Thoughts on the White Working Class

A few disorganized thoughts on the white working class, in the news in three diverse stories: the still- increasing virulence ostensibly over the healthcare bill and now a second arrest for death threats to a Member of Congress; the West Virginia mining disaster which killed at least 25 miners; and the return of talk about Barack Obama's problems attracting white working class support.

First of all, I grew up in the white working class (not all that far from those West Virginia mines, and with a grandfather who worked in western PA mines), although in a different time. But I've seen what has happened over time, and rather than rehash what others are saying, let me contribute a few thoughts of my own.

The working class--also known as the lower middle class--joined in the rising American prosperity after World War II, mostly due to three factors: lots of manufacturing jobs; strong unions, particularly in manufacturing; federal government programs, from Social Security and Medicare to FHA mortgages and the GI Bill of Rights that put college in play for veterans, and the various federal and federally guaranteed grants and loans that made college possible for children of the working class, like me.

Manufacturing jobs have been disappearing from America since the late 1970s. That's when the steel industry and Pittsburgh were hit hard, and that has spread, until the biggest product of the U.S. is waste. Real wages have declined, unemployment risen. This happened during the Reagan administration and onwards, with some progress made for working incomes in the Clinton years, but the trend towards lower income at the lower annual income percentiles reasserted itself in the Shrub years. Beginning with Reagan, union power diminished along with manufacturing.

The winners in these changes were Wall Street and the biggest corporations. They shipped jobs overseas where workers were paid much less, with appalling conditions and unsafe workplaces. They intimidated workers to reject unions, and were helped by Republican governments. So the rich got infinitely richer, and then got tax cuts on top of that. The white working class was competing with lower paid workers in other countries but in their daily lives seemed to be mostly in competition with minorities previously kept out, including immigrants.

Now the white working class is angry--that is, their anger is being encouraged and channelled in a particular direction. Cultural differences with "liberal elites" are emphasized. But these days what is mostly emphasized in the "white" in white working class. It's the usual sinister divide and conquer strategy, because the total working class is being destroyed economically, not racially, by corporations and the same Republicans who are whipping up racist frenzy, sometimes with their Confederate code words, and often these days, without even that pretense.

JFK and RFK could appeal to the white working class partly with their eloquence and policies, but partly because they were white, and even though wealthy they were not so far from their immigrant roots, as the white working class at that time was not so far from theirs--they might be second or third generation Americans at that point. And unions were strong.

Unions weren't ever perfect or without abuses, but they did keep the working class together and focused on their own interests, which included advocating for safe working conditions, like those that don't exist in that non-union mine. Also it is true that some whites have personally paid a price for the redress of past racial discrimination, that they personally had nothing to do with. That's also true of some men, when women benefited from preferential hiring, etc. There's really no point in denying that this has happened, and even if it didn't happen a lot, once was enough if it happened to you.

White males by some statistics have borne the brunt of the current unemployment. But that's part of this longer trend. The reason that white working class anger is being expressed now is that it is being exploited and given a vocabulary. Most of the cause behind it falls to the responsibility of the same corporations and Republican pols who are exploiting it.

But they are able to exploit it partly through the power of persuasion enabled by their funding, and their ownership of corporate media. But partly, they are using the still potent hot button of race. This has everything to do with a black President in the White House. There's no getting around it. It has pretty much nothing to do with President Obama's policies, which are exactly the kind of policies that benefit the working class, and that the working class applauded in the days of FDR, Truman, Kennedy and LBJ. It's all about diverting frustration and fomenting anger fueled by the incendiary reactions of race hatred.

This has become the frenzy of the Republican right in primary election season. The Governor of Virginia may have pushed it too far with his celebration today of the Civil War, praising the Confederacy and never mentioning slavery. But maybe not. Maybe there is worse to come.

President Obama in Portland, Maine, doing his best to move the country along (for example, with a health insurance system still less advanced than Europe for the past thirty years), but up against an apocalyptic madness, suggested in the post below.

Too Stupid to Live?

Are "humans too stupid to prevent climate change," as the Guardian says James Lovelock said? Ignore for a moment that he didn't actually say this--he knows the climate has already changed, and will keep changing for a long time to come, and what he actually did say was "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change," which is a little different.

The real question here isn't about human intelligence, or inventiveness, adaptability, ingenuity, etc. For me, the question concerning the Climate Crisis has for a long time been: has human civilization developed far enough to meet this challenge? It's more a question of whether we as a society--as various polities, organized in the fashions we are (however you describe how America is governed for example)--are ready, are up to the tasks.

For the past decade or so I've thought of this as an open question--the most important open question regarding the future. An affirmative answer would mean what seems the most desirable future: a continuous civilization that changes for the better, with the least destruction and trauma, preserving the hard-won best of its past.

These days it seems very unlikely that this will happen. It does seem that human civilization is flunking this test--that its most destructive and self-destructive aspects will overcome its best potential. Because this is the crisis of crises--and it can't be confronted by indirection or accidentally doing the right things for the wrong reasons. It's too big for that. The reality of it has to be understood and accepted, and efforts to address it comprehensively must be clear and sincere. Whatever saved civilization from its previous major test--thermonuclear war--won't alone work this time.

Reading the Lovelock interview, I found much to ponder and much to disagree with. So my reasons are perhaps different from his, but I have to agree with him on this point--that human civilization has not developed "to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change."

Apparently, as a society we aren't able to deal with the nature of the problem: of anticipating and preventing catastrophe this far in advance, or of understanding why this catastrophe is likely to happen, and why we must act now.

But it's more than not understanding lag times, feedback and tipping points. It's not just a matter of being clever, of coming up with ingenious technologies (which some folks are doing.) Partly it is the same problem that H.G. Wells identified more than a century ago--the inability to think comprehensively and act seriously as an entire civilization, as a human species.

Some of the reasons for that were identified by C.G. Jung, for example, and they reside more in the parts of the psyche outside what we regard as "thinking" (observing, conceptualizing, etc.) It's become clearer to me from the crude violence and willed ignorance of our politics, that our civilization is tipping towards psychosis--an apocalyptic madness.

Maybe it's an epidemic of denial, stoked by fear of what so many need to deny. Maybe it is the flowering of something deep in the culture, as Jungian Edward Edinger believed, that's more consciously promoted by certain fundamentalist Christians. Certainly it is the American refusal to take the psyche seriously, to use the conceptual tools that Jung identified to temper the unconscious with consciousness of its power and habits.

The fact that we have no one like Wells or Jung today--no one who speaks on this level, of civilization as a whole-- is further evidence that we're on a downward spiral, with no help in sight.

We don't seem to even have a prominent figure with the moral authority and moral courage of Martin Luther King--who stirred up such intense opposition with his Civil Rights stands, and later, even more with his opposition to the Vietnam War. Nobody seems to gets that response anymore, either for or against.

We're fortunate to have the best mind and heart in several generations in the White House now, but as President Obama pointed out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he is a head of state, and that has limitations as well as powers built into it. And even at that, look at the virulent hatred that confronts him, as well as the slipshod thought and cynical lying that dominates our establishment politics and public discourse. That his at times frustrating middle-of-the-road approach, his gentle nudging forward--is vilified as extreme socialism, is evidence of how far we haven't come, how we seem actually to be regressing.

This species, capable of such intelligence and imagination, may well turn out to collectively be too stupid to stop destroying itself. That seems to be the trajectory, though it may take many years for it to play out (and then again, it may not.) But that seems to be the logic of it now.

As for dealing with the near future--which can become the present at any minute--some thoughts on that another time.

The Drill

Catching up on President Obama's announcement last week that he was opening up new offshore areas to the possibility of exploration and drilling for oil and gas... This was variously interpreted as a political move to get support for climate change legislation (which it may in part be), a political flip-flop (which it wasn't, as the rest of this speech explained) and a blow to environmental allies and the Obama base, just feeling good for a change after the healthcare victory. It certainly was that.

It was also a risky move, not in the short term (because it changes nothing), but in setting a precedent. Another President, far less careful and demanding about environmental protection, could use this decision as political cover.

The fact is that it results in no immediate drilling, and it is more of a contingency for a bridge period to new energy forms: "given our energy needs, in order to sustain economic growth, produce jobs, and keep our businesses competitive, we're going to need to harness traditional sources of fuel even as we ramp up production of new sources of renewable, homegrown energy."

"And we'll be guided not by political ideology, but by scientific evidence"
in the final decisions to open these sites. He also emphasized that this is part of a long-term strategy emphasizing a clean energy future.

"And while our politics has remained entrenched along worn divides, the ground has shifted beneath our feet. Around the world, countries are seeking an edge in the global marketplace by investing in new ways of producing and saving energy. From China to Germany, these nations recognize that the country that leads the clean energy economy will be the country that leads the global economy. Meanwhile, here at home, as politicians in Washington debate endlessly whether to act, our own military has determined that we can't afford not to."

Moving toward clean energy is about our security. It's about our economy. And it's about the future of our planet. And what I hope is that the policies we've laid out - from hybrid fleets to offshore drilling, from nuclear energy to wind energy - underscore the seriousness with which my administration takes this challenge. It's a challenge that requires us to think and act anew."

Less covered or noticed last week, the EPA took a major step to enforcing the Clean Water Act to end mountaintop removal by the rapacious coal industry. (Here's the news release.)

The EPA also joined with the Department of Transportation to establish "historic new federal rules that set the first-ever national greenhouse gas emissions standards and will significantly increase the fuel economy of all new passenger cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules could potentially save the average buyer of a 2016 model year car $3,000 over the life of the vehicle and, nationally, will conserve about 1.8 billion barrels of oil and reduce nearly a billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the lives of the vehicles covered."

So in the short term, this announcement probably did deflate the euphoria in the Obama base, and it is risky, because the Obama agenda for energy and the environment is going to take more than eight years to accomplish. But so what? No risk, no reward. If it starts to work in that period, maybe reality will actually defeat the psychotic politics--who knows, anything's possible. And if it really starts to work--if clean energy takes off (and there are a number of scenarios by which that could happen), then the drilling thing becomes moot. Nobody will have the appetite for it.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Those lines on your palm they can be read

for a hidden part of your life that only

those links can say--nobody's voice

can find so tiny a message as comes

across your hand. Forbidden to complain,

you have tried to be like somebody else,

and only this fine record you examine

sometimes like this can remember where

you were going before that long

silent evasion that your life became."

William Stafford

No Quarter For Coral...Or Anything Else

At least corporations and governments usually promise to do good things for the environment, even when they don't follow through. But the recent 175-nation Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting in Doha, Qatar didn't even bother doing that. The nations attending just out and out refused to enact trade restrictions to protect from extinction the Atlantic bluefin tuna, six shark species and 31 types of coral (including red coral, pictured above), all of them crucial or keystone species in the waters that humans as well as other life depend on.

This group has protected thousands of species in the past. But this time..."This failure is not because negotiators weren't doing their job," says Andrew Rosenberg, an adviser to President Obama's ocean policy task force. "It's because short-term economic interests dominated this conference. Some nations just could not give up the last remaining money to be made on tuna and shark fin soup."

And the nations involved were hardly shy about it. In the forefront of blocking restrictions were the Japanese, who "hosted dinner at the Japanese embassy, and served blue tuna the night before the vote."

If any evidence were needed to support James Lovelock's just-published lament that "I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle as complex a situation as climate change."

The Roles of Gubment 2: Time After Time

In terms of time, government has two roles. One is to do what other parts of society can't or won't do to protect and make better the future.

Especially these days, corporations won't look beyond the quarterly report. And while government policymakers often won't look past the next election, it falls to them (and the unsung, often stereotyped career professionals within all branches of government, as well as citizen advocates) to transcend the nearest fears and opportunities to do what is in the best interests of the country and the planet long-term.

This is embedded in nearly every speech that President Obama makes, and is explicit in his epigrammatic statement from earlier this year: "Our future shouldn't be shaped by what's best for our politics; our politics should be shaped by what's best for our future." But the principle is stated most profoundly in the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee, the Iroquois: “In every deliberation we must consider the impact on the seventh generation to come.”

Though the Great Law is hundreds of years old, perhaps a thousand years old, it is still a novel concept among us. It is this future orientation that is our only hope for getting ahead of the curve of the Climate Crisis, or even responding in a timely way to its effects.

The second role of government in terms of time is to respond to the needs of the moment that no other entity can effectively address. For me, this function is summarized in something Harry Hopkins said to FDR about the need to address the Depression with policies of immediate effect: "People don't eat in the long-term. They eat every day."

Government must often respond to the needs of both kinds of time. The health insurance reform law, the last aspects of which will be signed today, responds to a need of now, and to the specific failure of insurance companies to meet the need. The effects of the law will occur over time, with some provisions beginning this year, and others in a few years.

It is perhaps evidence of the limitation of our thinking that we see this as addressing needs long-term. On the one hand, there is the somewhat laughable attempt to cost it out over decades, as if the world was economically and socially predictable. Such estimates are informed guesses, and if we were sane about time, we would admit that we need to respond to the unforeseen or to changes over time. But in this toxic political environment, everything is a political issue, especially when the rich suspect they might not get richer fast enough--this year.

And while the precise effects of global heating--its manifestations in event and in time--can't be predicted, at least using the tools we usually apply, the outlines of the long-range physical effects are about as certain as we ever get. So chances are that in the future--perhaps 10 or 20 years, perhaps 50, almost certainly in 70--the changes in the U.S. healthcare system so painfully made, and still so controversial, will seem puny and inadequate. And if we are in the full grip of Climate Cataclysm, pretty much irrelevant.

So I see this more as a response to the needs of the present, and for perhaps a generation, than really for the future. But that's okay. Because people need health care every day.

Which Testimony Would That Be?

The Hutaree, which is not a nebula or a folk group but the apocalyptic Michigan militia group busted by the FBI for seditious conspiracy, are “preparing for the end time battles to keep the testimony of Jesus Christ alive.”

That would be the Jesus Christ who "lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty." (Luke: 1:52-3.)

Or would it? Sounds like socialism, don't it, Glenn?