Procrasti-nation Continued

I like this photo as a symbol of where we are on the Climate Crisis because it is at once a reality--those encroaching fires were real--and a metaphor for the national attitude towards the oncoming storm: the traffic of the usual while the fires burn the horizon. 

In those cars, people may well be listening to news of other crises.  They may be horrified by the killing of 12 in a movie theatre in Colorado, as are we all.  There are always other crises and shocking events, other problems looming, competing for our attention.  There are also the stories we mostly don't hear, like 37 people killed in a huge rainstorm in the capital city of China, or the scores that die in U.S. heat waves.  Update 7/23: Death toll across China is currently 100 from these rains.

To be fair, a lot of people in those cars are frightened by the climate crisis and worried about the future, and they want it to be addressed, and may well be frustrated by the paralysis and inaction, especially in our political system, and most especially in Washington.  They may even be the majority.  But the power of the fossil fuel industry, so deeply dependent not only on the flow of oil but the future of oil for the money that floats them now, grips our system tight.  And it's looking to grip it even more firmly in this year's elections.

But the climate crisis isn't waiting.   Much of the U.S. is in serious and protracted drought (as much as 80%), and by fall the Midwestern drought in particular will result in rising food prices.  This summer's record-breaking heat is likely to continue into fall. And so the drought is expected to worsen.  The effects continue to spread, already with economic costs.  This alone will become impossible to ignore very soon.

But drought is not the only cost now spreading nationally.  Fires, damage from rain, hail and floods in the U.S. There's simple misery and the effects of heat on the human brain and body.  Strains consequently on the electric power grid for air conditioned protection--a grid, by the way that is decaying rapidly.

In other parts of the world, hotter temperatures have brought mosquito-borne diseases to places where they haven't been before, and where public health is not equipped and people have no immunity.   Before this, the ignorable Native communities in the north have been the principal victims in North America.  But they are no longer alone.  Once again, scientists are looking at possible tipping points for abrupt climate change.

But what we know already is bad enough.  Bill McKibben, who wrote one of the first books on the climate crisis in 1989, said in an email to those on his 350.org mailing list that he regards his new article in Rolling Stone as the most important thing he's written since then.  In that article, he reviews this year's stark numbers and some of the more remote, less reported weather events, such as "Saudi authorities reported that it had rained in Mecca despite a temperature of 109 degrees, the hottest downpour in the planet's history."  (I am reminded all too often of the 'sensationalistic' early scenes in the 2004 climate crisis disaster film The Day After Tomorrow, many of which have since happened.)

In the fight to slow down global heating, McKibben writes, "I can say with some confidence that we're losing the fight, badly and quickly – losing it because, most of all, we remain in denial about the peril that human civilization is in."
McKibben reviews the attempts by environmentalists to slow down the death march on both the individual and political levels, and judges them obviously ineffective.  Change through the political system hasn't work so far and is unlikely to in time. He thinks action requires a global movement, centered on the real enemy: the fossil fuel industry.

"But what all these climate numbers make painfully, usefully clear is that the planet does indeed have an enemy – one far more committed to action than governments or individuals. Given this hard math, we need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth. It is Public Enemy Number One to the survival of our planetary civilization. "Lots of companies do rotten things in the course of their business – pay terrible wages, make people work in sweatshops – and we pressure them to change those practices," says veteran anti-corporate leader Naomi Klein, who is at work on a book about the climate crisis. "But these numbers make clear that with the fossil-fuel industry, wrecking the planet is their business model. It's what they do."

For a long time McKibben has been advocating that the climate crisis be approached as a moral issue, akin to the Civil Rights movement.  Now he believes that like Bull Connor and southern segregationists, this movement needs an immoral enemy--but this time it is an enemy that itself must be controlled in order for change to happen. 

What would success look like?  Maybe like a hefty carbon tax, with the proceeds devoted not only to addressing the causes of future global heating (financing green energy and a host of carbon-reducing strategies) but also to dealing with the effects of the climate crisis, now and likely in the future, everything from mobilizing for emergencies to a real public health system, and eventually much more.  There will be likely be huge engineering projects necessary.  In not so many decades, that really will be the choice: deal with the effects as a society while dealing with the causes, or fall into violent anarchy and international war over resources, or simply as the only way we know how to mobilize anymore.

Update 7/23: Add to the warning voices today economist Paul Krugman: "For large-scale damage from climate change is no longer a disaster waiting to happen. It’s happening now."

The Bets

The Obama campaign is betting heavily that they can define Romney now in a way that essentially disqualifies him in the minds of enough voters in the swing states to make the difference.  They've outspent the Romney campaign 2 to 1 so far trying to do this, and there is evidence that they are getting voter attention.  They are counting on voters who want to make up their minds now, and ignore the rest of an increasingly exhausting media campaign.   So far however the polls don't show Obama gaining advantage, although in truth the polls are all over the place--except the ones that are very close either way.

The Romney campaign is betting that as unemployment continues to be high, month after month, voters will be receptive to his negative ads, which distort the President's words shamelessly, but which could sew enough doubt or disgust to engender an "anybody but Obama" vote.  They are piling up money to do huge media after the Democratic convention.  They are betting on low information voters who make up their mind when they absolutely have to, close to election day.

I have to believe there is a second component to the Obama campaign, a positive one, with real action from the White House and an exciting vision for the second term.  It may not be enough to define Romney as the wrong solution (which of course he is, to a devastating extent) or to continue a general theme campaign.  Confronting the realities of this summer would also be helpful.  Let's hear Romney deny global heating.  But the Obama campaign, and President Obama himself, need to add something new.

The question for the Obama campaign will be whether there will be any air time left to buy, let alone money to buy it.  They need a strong convention and strong debates.   It's not clear that Romney has a second act to his campaign.  He's betting that he doesn't have to release his tax returns or state actual positions or make actual proposals on issues--he's betting on the power of millionaires to lie him into the White House.

Tragedy

The tragic shooting in Colorado late last night at once reveals two public policy needs.  The first is obvious: gun control and the control of ammunition.  The shooter got literally hundreds of rounds off the Internet, including for his assault rifle.  The NRA has dominated political decisionmaking on this and other issues for far too long. 

But the second public policy need is revealed by the positive outcome of this tragic event: the effective response by police, EMTs and other public agencies.  Police were so swift in responding that they caught the alleged shooter as he was returning to his car--judging from the extent of his armory and his garb, it seems likely he was about to drive to his next target location.

But there are many places in America right now where the police and other agencies are so understaffed that response like this is unlikely.  All kinds of situations that require the quick and effective intervention of public agencies--including public health agencies--are happening with increasing frequency now, and will happen on even greater scales in the future as the climate crisis causes more emergencies.

 Right now the Republican party and the Republican candidate for President are willing and eager to sacrifice the public good and the training, equiping and simply the livelihoods of public servants on the front line of trouble, all to further line the pockets of people who have more money already, and a greater percentage of shared resources, than makes any sense.  The Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to help the states keep their public employees, and those public employees--teachers, police, fire, emergency medical, etc.--are being fired by droves.  It's there in every monthly unemployment report.  It's hurting our national economy, and it's hurting communities.  It's scandalous.  And it will only get worse if Romney and Republicans are elected to federal and state office.  

Witness to the Procrastination

"Here’s what American exceptionalism means now: on a per-capita basis, we either lead or come close to leading the world in consumption of resources, production of pollutants and a profound unwillingness to do anything about it. We may look back upon this year as the one in which climate change began to wreak serious havoc, yet we hear almost no conversation about changing policy or behavior."

So begins an online opinion column by Mark Bittman of the New York Times.  Yes, and that exceptionalism has been quantified: again this year, Americans ranked last in the world in sustainable behavior, and they don't appear to be upset about it.

Meanwhile, new heat waves are embroiling the Midwest, teasing the East Coast and contributing to drought in many areas.  The impacts are starting to mount up.  Heat and drought is threatening the Midwest corn crop, with ripple effects through the food chain.  Even grass-fed cattle in Oregon are being deprived of their feed by fire.  And the heat has helped lower water levels in the Mississippi river, which is making barge shipping more difficult--thus a major threat to commerce-- and may be allowing pollution of the drinking water in New Orleans with seawater.

And oh yeah, another huge iceberg the size of Manhattan has broken off from a Greenland glacier and is sailing out to sea.

But it's what's happening in the U.S., and our national non-reaction to it so far, that is most remarkable.  Writes Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker:

"One of the most salient—but also, unfortunately, most counterintuitive—aspects of global warming is that it operates on what amounts to a time delay. Behind this summer’s heat are greenhouse gases emitted decades ago. Before many effects of today’s emissions are felt, it will be time for the Summer Olympics of 2048. (Scientists refer to this as the “commitment to warming.”) What’s at stake is where things go from there. It is quite possible that by the end of the century we could, without even really trying, engineer the return of the sort of climate that hasn’t been seen on earth since the Eocene, some fifty million years ago.

Along with the heat and the drought and the super derecho, the country this summer is also enduring a Presidential campaign. So far, the words “climate change” have barely been uttered. This is not an oversight. Both President Obama and Mitt Romney have chosen to remain silent on the issue, presumably because they see it as just too big a bummer.

And so, while farmers wait for rain and this season’s corn crop withers on the stalk, the familiar disconnect continues. There’s no discussion of what could be done to avert the worst effects of climate change, even as the insanity of doing nothing becomes increasingly obvious."

The Big Shoe

Of all the millions of dollars given to SuperPacs so far for this year's presidential candidates--the overwhelming majority going to support Romney--80% of it was provided by a total of 196 people.  Since much of this is given in secret, it is only an educated guess, but it is likely that the single person who has provided more millions than any other for Romney and other GOPer candidates--with an on the record boast that his giving could be "limitless"-- is multibillionaire Sheldon Adelson.

Known during the primary circus season as Newt's Vegas sugardaddy, Adelson's global casino business enables him to provide millions to the Romney campaign and to its SuperPacs.  He hasn't been shy about his intent to in effect buy the presidency.  But his motives seemed to be ideology and vanity.  Now another motive may have emerged.  A big shoe has dropped.  He may be buying the presidency to keep himself out of jail.

A PBS Frontline and ProPublica investigation suggests that Adelson and his gambling empire may have criminally violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by in effect bribing an official to pave the way for an extremely lucrative mega-casino in Macau, the only place in the whole wide country of China where gambling is legal.  Adelson's company is being investigated for just such possible crimes by federal officials. This may also have involved money going to the Chinese mob.

Violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is a federal crime, so it really really helps if you own the U.S. Justice Department.  Which might well be among Adelson's acquisitions should Romney be elected.

Romney may need to own the Justice Department for his own defense as well--against perjury, for instance.  But his needs would likely be secondary to Adelson's. 

Rachel has her usual sterling storytelling and analysis of the Adelson affair (though she takes awhile getting there in this clip) and here's more on the story from ProPublica.

This attempt at a get out of jail free card is precisely the kind of corruption that laws limiting campaign contributions and providing full disclosure and oversight were meant to limit if not stop.  It's why these laws were created and passed, even with opposition from those who benefit from these opportunities for corruption.  At least until the current Supreme Court decided that money is speech and corporations are people, and that there is no evidence that unlimited and unaccountable campaign money leads to corruption.  

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.  The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

Shelley
(a quote I copied in a notebook in 1966.)

Storms Fast and Slow

A solar storm, resulting from this huge solar flare, reached the Earth on Saturday.  So far no major effects reported, though some big time auroras seem likely this weekend in northern areas.  As for our comparatively slow motion climate crisis,  NOAA issued its comprehensive report on global weather patterns in 2011, and even with some cooling effects produced by double dip La Ninas, the categories highlighted in this excellent summary all are in line with what climatologists expect from  ongoing global heating.  Except for one statistic: with all this evidence over all this time, a rational being might expect that the rational beings in control of artificial CO2 emissions that in large part are creating this global threat would be busy reducing them.  That didn't happen. The level of  CO2 emissions increased in 2011.

Mittstorm

Mitt Romney's rationale for the presidency comes down to two propositions: he's not Obama, and as a successful business executive he knows how to create jobs and right the economy.  On that first proposition he's unassailable.  He is no Barack Obama.  But he's been relentlessly if gradually damaged on the second, as stories about his tenure at Bain feed Obama campaign ads in swing states to show that as a "vulture capitalist" (in the words of Cowboy Rick Perry) he made massive profits from the misfortune visited upon working class Americans.   His job was to make profit, which he did from companies that did well and companies that went bankrupt, fired workers and sent jobs overseas.  That's a fundamentally different job than being President (as illustrated in this handy Doonesbury narrative.)

Then the stories became more directly focused: on Bain as a pioneer in sending American jobs to workers in other countries, and on Romney's finances, the glimpses of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island funds, raising questions that Romney will not answer, in particular by releasing past tax returns.  The Obama campaign dutifully followed up each revelation with new ads.  Polls began showing that all of this was possibly having an effect.

But on Thursday the Mitt really hit the fan.  The Boston Globe added some original reporting to previous revelations by David Corn at Mother Jones and Josh Marshall at TPM, to show that Romney was officially listed on SEC filings as CEO, President, Chairman of the Board and sole stockholder of Bain in 2002--several years after he has been saying he left the company.  That's important because he's been denying responsibility for some of the bankruptcies and layoffs and outsourcing etc. that happened after 1999.  These filings also show that he was paid a minimum of $100,000 a year (and it could have been much, much more) in salary, in addition to profits of the company.  These were listed as his principal occupation.  Moreover, he didn't always claim that he'd "retired" in 1999.  He told Massachusetts officials in 2002 that he had taken a leave of absence (to run the Olympics) with the intention of returning.

There are serious legal implications as well as credibility questions in all of this, and so this story will continue for awhile.  But there was another story that also broke on Thursday--David Corn in Mother Jones found that in 1998, when Romney doesn't dispute he was in charge, Bain invested in a Chinese company that made money by taking American jobs to China.

The Romney campaign and allies quickly pushed back on the Globe story, offering other paper trails that don't name Romney as executive in charge.  The relevance of these claims was quickly disputed.   The Romney campaign employed two other tactics.  As they've done before, they demanded apologies and retractions.  None were forthcoming, so they seem to be counting on the news headline of demanding them to signal to some that there might be some merit in their demand.
 

The second technique was identified and named on this site some time ago: the schoolyard "That's what you are, what am I?" which has been taken up by others now, notably TPM and Lawrence O'Donnell.  To combat the outsourcing charge, they put out an ad that called Obama an outsourcer.  To combat both the Bain charges and the general charge that Romney lies with almost every breath, they made a big ad buy accusing President Obama of lying as a campaign tactic.

 But the Mittstorm on Thursday suggested to me the real possibility--though just the possibility---that Romney could be so defined that he's essentially disqualified as a presidential candidate even before the GOP convention.

He has two main hopes.  First that the economy suffers to the extent that the rising optimism expressed in polls severely sours, and the "I'm not Obama" proposition becomes persuasive.  Second, that if the economy simply doesn't improve, his Mittblitz of ads that his accumulating millions can buy will substitute his lies for any reality, and he will move perception away from President Obama to the figure that Romney will destructively create as President Obama, Vampire.

And then there's voter suppression, particularly now in Pennsylvania, which could become the new Florida if GOPers there have indeed successfully disenfranchised nearly 10% of the voters in the state, nearly all of them non-suburban non-Romney voters.  On this front, Attorney General Eric Holder told the NAACP that these voter ID laws constitute poll taxes, which are unconstitutional.  That may mean federal action.

Update: Another intent of the Romney strategy of demanding that President Obama apologize occurs to me--it deflects attention from the stories reported by news organizations and attempts to suggest that these are simply politically motivated charges by the Obama campaign.  (Of course, President Obama is no more responsible for these campaign ads--managed by other people--than Romney is for all the lives deformed when he was merely the CEO, President, Chairman of the Board and sole owner of Bain Capital.)

A further attempt at deflecting attention by the Romney campaign was the trial balloon stating that Condi Rice is being considered for v.p. nomination. But there is nothing to see here. That will never happen.  Even if the Dick himself showers praise on Romney as he did at his fundraiser.

                                           I still believe in global warming.  Do you?

                                            (John Tyndall, 19th century physicist)

Heat Front

In his Sunday report, Chris Hayes opined that the key figures needed to legitimize the climate crisis for the TV viewing public are the weather reporters.  It's true that especially at local stations the weather guy (it's usually a guy) is the best known TV celeb, and even the biggest celeb period.  Plus the network and Weather Channel reporters (many of whom are women) evoke the most positive recognition.  But partly because of the virulence of Rabid Right responses to any mention of global heating or the climate crisis,  local stations and even the networks aren't wild about the idea of their weather folk venturing the same opinion as 98% of climate scientists.  Plus weather celebs know where their bread is buttered--at the corporate speaking engagements and other corporate gigs where the real money is made.

But this June may have dented if not demolished that cold front.  Even Climate Progress is impressed with network coverage linking the summer heat and fires to global heating.   In addition to their examples, there's this NPR story about the lasting impact of the recent heat, and this CNN story  quoting scientists that the climate crisis means more of this kind of weather in the future.

Meanwhile, the hurricane season is starting to heat up.  Stay tuned.

Guess Who?

Guess who these two women are listening to.  Would you be surprised it's Mitt Romney addressing the NAACP convention?

Nobody would, least of all Romney.  While some in the media were giving him "credit" for showing up, it was clearly not some honest and courageous effort to win African American votes but a ploy to show the Grand Old White Peoples' Party that he's on their side.  He told them he would repeal "Obamacare," and let the boos go on, since reportedly he knew the term itself was going to be booed. Later referring to this audience he said that if they want more stuff from government they should vote for Obama.  This wasn't dog whistle race politics.  This was loud and clear.

Meanwhile, if you think things are bad now, catch Rachel's opening segment Wednesday on the Bush-Cheney years, as Romney tries to distance himself from them while preparing to attend a multi-milliondollar fundraiser at the home of, and hosted by, the Dick himself, v.p. Cheney.  It also concerns a scary bad Washington Post story.

Chill Out

And remember: the planet you save might be your own.

Teachable Moments

 Teachable moments are moments when the attention of a class or a nation is already on the subject--when the need for answers or at least discussion is already there.  The trick is to recognize them and use them.

President Obama had a teachable moment on Friday when a positive but disappointing jobs report was issued.  It was a moment he could have pointed out that had Congress passed his jobs bill, thousands if not millions of people would right now be repairing and restoring the infrastructure that the entire American public depends on, and not the least of all, its businesses.  And otherwise building--literally building--what the country needs for its future, to generate other new jobs as well as help its citizens be safer and more secure.  And more employed.

A lot of this was part of what he did say at several campaign events, and he said some of it in his remarks after signing the transportation bill, which at least keeps workers on infrastructure projects that have already started.  But he didn't relate this to the moment in a way that would get it excerpted in ways that reach people.

He spoke on Friday at one of my old haunts, the Carnegie Mellon campus in Pittsburgh (photo.)  It was very hot, and a number of people fainted.  He could have used this moment to talk about the climate crisis and the need for green energy.  This was a teachable moment, and he missed it.

Now President Obama is hardly alone in either having the opportunity for a teachable moment or in missing one.  But Bill McKibben did call him out for this one, and he was right to.  Still, this summer is a long teachable moment, and there will be other opportunities.

Someone who didn't miss this moment was MSNBC's Chris Hayes on his Sunday morning program, which he largely devoted to the climate crisis, and with more than the usual insight--much of it coming from Bill McKibben (it was on that show that he made the above observation.)

McKibben's entire interview is really worth watching.  Rather than embed part of it, I'll provide links because it's in several parts.  If you go to the Up with Chris Hayes site right now, chances are that all of these links will be in plain view.  But if not, here's the link to his introduction, to the first panel discussion, to the first part of the McKibben interview,  the second part of McK, the third part of McK.  

As Chris Hayes said, the summer's weather phenomena--this year's, or even the past few years'--demonstrate that "the climate change wolf is at the door."  McKibben is particularly cogent in interviews, and here are a few of his points.  Thanks in part to the very visible manifestations of climate change, about 2/3 of the American public now believes in the climate crisis and is willing to do something about it.  And even though the fossil fuel industry is the major funder of political denial (he said that the fossil fueled Chamber of Commerce poured more money into the 2010 election that the R and D parties combined), even within it, denial is crumbling. 

In terms of political action, he said that the next direct action campaign may be to deny government subsidies to fossil fuel industries.  Beyond that, divestment is another weapon, similar to global divestment that helped end apartheid in South Africa.  (By coincidence we just saw a film about that incredible moment, and it makes the point that the economic self-interest of at least one major company in South Africa materially helped bring the parties together to make agreements that seemed impossible before they actually happened.) 

McKibben also came up with a very neat formula for the cause/effect problem that I've gone on about many times--that we have to deal with the effects of the climate crisis at the same time as we deal with the causes, whereas denial is preventing us from dealing with either, at least at the necessary scale.

McKibben uses the "adaptation" buzzword, which I still think is a loser, but at least he places it in a more comprehensible context.  His two mottos are:

1. Adapt to that which you can't prevent.
2.  Prevent that to which you can't adapt.

It's still not clean enough verbally but there's a solid core there.  Until we admit that we're going to have real climate-caused problems for the forseeable future, we aren't going to invest the resources in addressing those effects.  But unless we also deal with the causes of the climate crisis, its effects in the farther future--yet within the lifetimes of people living now--will become so severe that our societies and our science may not be up to the tasks.  Life as we know it could be over--permanently.   
The Chris Hayes segments don't teach all they could.  Nobody got around to noting that there is no paradox about "global warming" causing it to snow more in some places.  It is one of the predictable effects of warming the atmosphere--warmer air is wetter, and warmer air in the winter makes for snow--simple weatherman facts that anybody can understand.  It's a little more complicated to explain extreme cold caused by global warming but we accept many things that are more counter-intuitive and bewildering. 

What teachable moments do more than anything is they allow issues to transcend political positions.  Prominent among the many real sins of the right is making the climate crisis political.  And the way that the Rabid Right operates on this issue as on most others is with violence against anyone not adhering to their dogma.  They don't do opposition politics--they deal in heresy and heretics,  the saved and the damned.

 What's necessary for many people to suddenly see that this is some false artificial arena of noise is to focus on the reality, the problems and the consequences.   After last winter and spring, this particular summer is such an opportunity.  This is real.  This can wreck us.  It causes pain and suffering and death.  This must be addressed as problems that need solutions. 

What Global Heating Looks--and Feels-- Like

Still don’t believe in climate change? Then you’re either deep in denial or delirious from the heat," wrote Pulitzer Prize columnist Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post on Tuesday. "As I write this, the nation’s capital and its suburbs are in post-apocalypse mode. About one-fourth of all households have no electricity, the legacy of an unprecedented assault by violent thunderstorms Friday night. Things are improving: At the height of the power outage, nearly half the region was dark. The line of storms, which killed at least 18 people as it raced from the Midwest to the sea, culminated a punishing day when the official temperature here reached 104 degrees, a record for June."  And so on, adding stats from climatologists, and noting that if GOPers weren't such foes of solar power, they might well have had air conditioning today from rooftop solar collectors.

I happened to learn of this column from a flash through the new MSNBC show, "The Cycle," which features four cohosts, including a resident winger, a young woman in scholarly glasses, who said she was not terribly impressed with what a political columnist had to say about climate--she'd preferred a real climatologist.

Like nearly all of them haven't been heard on the subject.  Well, okay--how about this, also from Tuesday?

"But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now.

So far this year, more than 2.1 million acres have burned in wildfires, more than 113 million people in the U.S. were in areas under extreme heat advisories last Friday, two-thirds of the country is experiencing drought, and earlier in June, deluges flooded Minnesota and Florida.

"This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level," said Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. "The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about."

Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in fire-charred Colorado, said these are the very record-breaking conditions he has said would happen, but many people wouldn't listen. So it's I told-you-so time, he said.

As recently as March, a special report an extreme events and disasters by the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of "unprecedented extreme weather and climate events." Its lead author, Chris Field of the Carnegie Institution and Stanford University, said Monday, "It's really dramatic how many of the patterns that we've talked about as the expression of the extremes are hitting the U.S. right now."

"What we're seeing really is a window into what global warming really looks like," said Princeton University geosciences and international affairs professor Michael Oppenheimer. "It looks like heat. It looks like fires. It looks like this kind of environmental disasters."

(Photo: one in a series of the Washington storms by Joel Holland.)

I learned from someone in the DC area a bit more about what "post-apocalyptic mode" looks like as well.  It's children and old people trapped in houses with no air conditioning or even refrigeration, or by now, even much food, since the contents of refrigerators in areas still without power have long since spoiled.  It's seniors and the disabled totally dependent on the Meals on Wheels deliverers huffing up 14 floors of stairs because of no power for the elevator.

 All of this in triple digit heat that gets down to 90 at night.  23 known deaths so far are attributed to the heat and storms in the DC area.  Thanks in part to denialists, preparation and response was in many cases valiant, but inadequate--and that's likely true across the country.

And this heat is widespread across the East Coast, Mid-Atlantic, South, Midwest and far West.  And the patterns look like they will continue through the month and well into next.

I remember that summer of 1988 when I got an inkling of what global heating would feel like.  But nearly a quarter century later we are still hearing well-paid, mediagenic and otherwise respectable deniers acting as if the scientific evidence isn't overwhelming, and the human costs of denial aren't obvious outside the studio door.  We're firmly in the political clutches of the paid and paid-off deniers with political and economic power, who are trying to increase and solidify that power for the foreseeable future, which, if they continue in this and even increase their stranglehold, may not actually be very long.

In a recent interview Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the vivid Science in the Capital trilogy, allows that people are tired of reading about the Climate Crisis, including him.  Because so far nothing changes.  At best, it's the moment before smoking "suddenly" slipped into being really unacceptable, and one municipality after another banned it from public places, which was actually after decades of battle and well-paid denial.  

What is supposed to overwhelm the denial and cauterize the denialists is feeling the reality of the Climate Crisis.  In the U.S. this summer may well test that theory, but a lot of innocent people will pay the price for those well-paid and paid off in our political and media capitals.

Independence Day?  Not yet.  And make no mistake: the science news of the day has nothing to do with God particles.  It's what the real world is doing to us thanks to what we have done, and it's about what we're not doing about it.       

Baseball Very Very Good

They gave a taste of this last year: the Pittsburgh Pirates went on an exciting winning streak just before the All-Star break, when they were above .500 for the first time in years, but collapsed after the teams returned.  This year they are again in first place at July 4th, with another impressive winning streak, but somehow this feels like it may be different.

It seems less freakish, for one thing.  There is solid pitching and pretty dependable hitters, especially Andrew McCutchen (pictured) who leads the National League in batting with a .360 average.  In any case, the Pirates have been rocking the excellent Pittsburgh ballpark.

The San Francisco Giants are also suddenly in first place, after a series in which they shut out the LA Dodgers completely, and won a home series with the Pirates' main division rival, the Cinncy Reds.  But they're now on a torturous road trip, in which Tim Lincecum wilted in the DC heat.  Earlier in the week, first place Washington's best pitcher had to leave the game with dehydration.  Baseball is not the only sport affected, though with temperatures this dangerously high, more events should have been cancelled.  It's another adjustment to global heating that will be eventually made, though probably after the danger becomes all too obvious.

Apart from that, baseball is a ritualized refuge from current madness, and with my teams doing this well, it's fun again.

Of Roberts' Ruling and the New Order

Two things happened last week that bode well for the U.S. economy and the chances for the less than wealthy to make a little economic progress.  First was the Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.  Had it been wounded or destroyed, the economic turmoil would have been immediate, injecting uncertainty (especially in the healthcare sector) into a fragile recovery.  Keeping it on track will benefit the economy--not to mention most Americans-- in the long run in a variety of ways.  The second event (in time) was the European Union deal that makes major economic turmoil in Europe less likely, at least in the short term.  Such turmoil would have immediately stifled U.S. growth and could have nudged the economy back into official recession.

There's been a lot of noise in Washington about the ACA ruling.  Predictably much of it is scandalously inaccurate, both in terms of the ruling and the facts of the law.  Predictably much of it is nervous and inflated political guessing.  A number of polls taken since the ruling on Thursday have concluded various things, but perhaps the most salient number is that almost half of respondents in one poll hadn't even heard of the ruling at all.

And all too predictably, some of the noise was scary.  The ruling upheld the law by a final 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice Roberts casting the deciding vote for the majority.  This fact sent the Rabid Right into fits, and Roberts--an erstwhile reliable ally--was castigated in the usual extreme terms as a traitor to the cause.

Then a CBS report, summarized here, made news first of all because it broke the Supreme's usual leakproof silence, indicating that high level clerks or actual Justices did the leaking (my money is on a "conservative" Justice or two, or at least a clerk acting on direct instructions from a Justice.)  It also made news for its assertion that Roberts initially sided with the conservatives in nullifying the law, but made a late switch.

The initial reaction to the article was divided between those expressing skepticism on this point, and general agreement with the implications: that the "conservatives" on this Court are indeed political before they are constitutional judges.  So this decision, as beneficial as it is, may well be the exception that proves the rule.

Though one of the CBS report's points has been questioned in terms of the sequence of the various opinions being written, it suggests that Anthony Kennedy (previously believed to be a swing vote) is strongly ideological, and that he and the other "conservatives" were so upset with Roberts' decision that they ignored his legal points in their opinions--that they essentially dissed him.  In other words, they acted exactly as the ideological Rabid Right are acting now. 

Congressional Republicans are busily misinterpreting the basis for Roberts' decision, and then lying about it.  All of this is further evidence that as the GOP becomes the apparatus of the Rabid Right, it is ceasing to be a political party in the American sense, and more like the Communist Party in the Soviet bloc--striving for one party rule in the Soviet sense: insisting on ideological purity internally, and seeking to dominate and deny rights and legitimacy to any external group.  The pattern of the GOP moving in that direction is pretty clear.  

So it isn't just that the Court is engaged in partisan politics over interpretation of the law, which is already a failing.  And it isn't even that they are ideological, which further distorts their judgments and renders the R5 injudicious and dangerous.  It is that their ideology is as dogmatic as if revealed by their God, in aid of a political party bent on as totalitarian a New Order as the U.S. has ever seen.   If indeed the ACA ruling was the exception that proves the rule (which recent history as well as a lot of evidence from within the opinions convinces me is likely) maybe even because there are a few shreds of integrity left, or if Roberts' example injects some sobriety about the Court's real responsibilities, will be known only by future decisions.  Meanwhile, this election becomes in part a referendum on the future of American democracy. 
 

Campaign Rhythms

Presidential politics continues: Romney, whose reputation as a liar grows internationally (Michael Cohen writes in the Guardian: "But Romney is doing something very different and far more pernicious. Quite simply, the United States has never been witness to a presidential candidate, in modern American history, who lies as frequently, as flagrantly and as brazenly as Mitt Romney,")
is caught in a pretty serious lie about his past--with implications that have something damning for everybody, left, center and far right.  Meanwhile the Obama campaign braces itself for the upcoming unemployment report and also the figures on political contributions for June, which may show the Romney campaign raking in a bunch more.

But except for the swing states where political messaging is already unavoidable, many if not most people aren't paying a lot of attention to the day to day (not to mention the hour to hour, minute to minute, tweet to tweet.)  A lot of people already know who they are voting for in November, and so they can save a lot of time by ignoring the campaign (which is why polls that measure interest in the campaign tell very little.)

President Obama is enjoying an unpredicted bump in the polls, especially in some swing states.  But the really big anti-Obama advertising effort in those states has not yet begun.  We'll see how effective the endlessly repeated Big Lies can be.

Meanwhile many won't be paying much attention until the real show starts at the conventions later in the summer and then in the debates in the fall.  It's probably true that campaigns can be won and lost in the spring, if a candidate is defined.  But that's learnable only after the votes are in.  As is everything else.  Bill Clinton went from unloved third place to a contender at his convention, and then to favorite in the debates.  On the other hand, John Kerry had a good convention and won all three debates against G.W. Bush, but didn't win the large majority required if a Democrat is permitted to win.  So nobody really knows.  But one thing is certain: it's barely July. 

Happy birthday, Martha.  (And Grace Ann, Bruce D., my other bday twins known and unknown.)  As you can see I'm the same old guy, just older and, of course, bluer.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“The more realistic life may be, the more it needs the stimulus of the imagination.”
Wallace Stevens

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

MSNBC Lean Forward - Chris Hayes from Joe Gabriel on Vimeo.

"Climate change is the biggest governing challenge we face. It's the biggest governing challenge I think we've ever faced. One way or another, we're going to have to dramatically reduce the amount of carbon we're putting in the atmosphere and the scale and scope of that undertaking is every bit as transformational as the industrial revolution or the transition to the digital age. And you can think about that as terrifying, or you can think about it as thrilling."

Chris Hayes
text of his MSNBC Lean Forward promo

A Rising Tide Drowns All Cities

The tremendous rain and flooding in Florida, the fires scorching across Colorado, all just...weather.  Although more Americans are making the connection to the Climate Crisis, there's still room for denial.

But sea level rise...That's a little different.  There are other ways to account for it, of course, but rising sea levels was probably the first predicted effect of the Climate Crisis that got lodged in the public memory.

So now it's not just the kind of weather the Climate Crisis models have predicted.  It's rising sea levels--and one place where they are rising much faster that the global average is the East Coast of the United States.

That's "are rising," according to a new study.  Sure, another new study, but this one is a little different:

   "Computer models long have projected higher levels along parts of the East Coast because of changes in ocean currents from global warming, but this is the first study to show that's already happened."

Of course it's a modest rise, and only one of many predicted global heating effects being observed and reported.  But models show that levels affecting  New York City, Boston and Washington, D.C.  will rise twice as much as elsewhere on the East Coast.

Here's the thing about sea levels rising that maybe everybody doesn't get (I certainly didn't fully appreciate it.)  A sea level rise of five feet does not mean that five feet of beach are going to get washed away.  It means that the sea is going to come into land and flood areas that are less than five feet above sea level, potentially for miles and miles inland, depending on how high the land gets--and even then the sea could tumble through low-lying valleys to form new rivers and lakes. 

That means that stuff that's five feet above current sea level will be totally underwater.  But engineers suggest that a sea level rise of only eight inches could cause millions of dollars of damage in New York.

Current models of how high the rises will be are imprecise, and usually conservative.  Some of the latest suggest 3-5 feet for parts of the East and West Coasts of the US by the end of the century.  Along the West Coast now, beach erosion (caused by a number of factors) is so severe that some communities are wondering whether to just relocate.   But--to use an ironic metaphor--that's probably just the tip of the iceberg.

In an interview Kim Stanley Robinson suggests that if global heating continues and the major ice sheets slide into the sea, sea levels could rise by 30 or 40 feet in a few hundred years.  (He sets his new novel--cleverly called 2312--three hundred years in the future, and posits a 30 foot rise, which transforms New York City into Venice.)   If methane under the ice is released, the planet is cooked, and if all the ice melts, the total rise could be 270 feet.   That's enough to put the state of Florida underwater.

The National Mall in Washington, D.C. is about ten feet above sea level.  The Central Valley of California, far from the coast, could be flooded by a 35 foot rise, creating an inland sea (which it was long ago.) 

It's even likely that with a significant sea level rise, most if not all of the world's beaches would be gone.  There would be no beach to walk on, for a million years or more.

The ramifications are huge, but maybe that one thing is enough to contemplate for now.   

The Message of Stonehenge

Stonehenge has tantalized and mystified generations.  These monumental stones were not only arrayed in some incomprehensible pattern--the stones came from many different locations, some of them very far away.  What was its purpose?

A ten year archaeological investigation has resulted in a conclusion: Stonehenge was "a monument to unify the peoples of Britain after a long period of conflict and regional differences."

When Stonehenge was built,” said Professor Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield, “there was a growing island-wide culture – the same styles of houses, pottery and other material forms were used from Orkney to the south coast. This was very different to the regionalism of previous centuries. Stonehenge itself was a massive undertaking, requiring the labour of thousands to move stones from as far away as west Wales, shaping them and erecting them. Just the work itself, requiring everyone literally to pull together, would have been an act of unification.”

This all happened some 5,000 years ago., at about the midpoint (so far) in the history of human civilization.

The people who built Stonehenge selected a site of particular importance--because like monuments thousands of miles away (in the U.S. for instance) it does align with solar and lunar events. Professor Parker Pearson said: “When we stumbled across this extraordinary natural arrangement of the sun’s path being marked in the land, we realized that prehistoric people selected this place to build Stonehenge because of its pre-ordained significance. This might explain why there are eight monuments in the Stonehenge area with solstitial alignments, a number unmatched anywhere else. Perhaps they saw this place as the centre of the world.”

The particulars of this history are so far lost to us.  Only so much can be inferred from surviving evidence.  In a way it is as mythical as the United Federation of Planets posited in the Star Trek future: another instance of peoples coming together after a self-destructive time. 

But it is the kind of myth we need.  We can guess that within us there is the possibility of coming together to solve our common problems.  It is worth something to suggest that even on this scale, humans have done so before.  That they may have done so by affirming the natural, the cosmic rightness of it, is perhaps the most heartening of all.

[The bottom photo is an official White House photo of President Obama with Nichelle Nichols, who not only played Uhura on Star Trek, but successfully recruited minority astronauts for NASA.  The photo was taken some months ago but posted recently by Nichelle.]

Judging the Court

In a decision announced Monday, the Supreme Court followed the law on federal responsibility for immigration, supporting a lower court ruling that most of the Arizona law is unconstitutional.  But the Court continued to undermine the very basis of representative democracy by its partisan and ideological doubling down on the Citizens United decision by denying Montana its historic right to regulate political contributions in state elections.

Just how wildly Rabid Right the majority of this Court is can be seen in the amazement of the reaction to their brave decision to forbid mandatory life sentences for children.  And yet Samuel Alito made a spectacle of himself in his angry dissent delivered from the bench.  Of course children should automatically be thrown into prison for life!  Rachel's take on the day's decision gets it right.

When Ruth Bader Ginsberg uttered her cryptic forecast of this week's decisions, she noted that dissents can be important in shaping later policy.  Presumably she wasn' talking about Alito or especially Scalia's demented rant on the Arizona decision.  But absent the Affordable Care Act decision, she may well have meant Justice Breyer's dissent on the Montana decision.  It does not display dazzling reasoning or appreciation for the nuances of the Constitution.  It merely points out that Montana cited actual historical evidence of big money donations leading to years of corruption in the state, whereas the Supreme 5 decided in Citizens United that this was so impossible that corporations must be permitted to spend as much as they wish.  That evidence was the very reason this law was passed--in 1912.  Again, Rachel points out the flaws in their argument that money is "speech."  Everybody has speech, not everybody has that kind of money.   A high school debater making this Court's argument would be laughed off the stage.

 Coupled with the decision last week to limit the "speech" of labor unions, it's a clear ideological and partisan power grab.  The Supremes, beginning with their entirely partisan Bush v. Gore decision that resulted in the Rabid Right almost solid 5 vote majority, are providing one of the major tools to create a one party system, GOPer rule forever: the mountains of cash from those who have it, overwhelmingly corporations supporting those who will vote and advocate the way the corporations want them to, and the billionaires who can throw around the equivalent of many lifetimes of income for most Americans on their pet causes and power grabs. 

The other half is restricting the right to vote. We'll see what contortions the Court 5 go into to help that along.  The partisan intent of those efforts were obvious even before some yahoo GOPer legislator in PA said it out loud.

In my lifetime, there have been worries about the political leanings of various justices, and while they had their points of view, most turned out to be judicious, justifying their opinions with legal argument.  But the wolf finally came. The ideological bent of this Court is so obvious that most legal experts polled agreed that the Affordable Care Act is Constitutional and should be upheld, but a majority also agreed that this Court was not likely to do so.  The judges have been judged as ideological and partisan hacks.

It matters a great deal to a great many people if they destroy health care reform on Thursday.  But even if they don't, it doesn't much matter to their long game.  They can even lose to an incumbent Democratic President, knowing that they can outspend anybody, and keep the bad demographics from voting just enough to never lose the White House again.   And it will take a lot for them to lose Congress and state legislatures, even with the very low approval ratings and the extreme measures they've pushed through.  They're establishing a feudal state in Michigan, and it's not a national scandal, it's not even a blip.

Demography may be destiny in the long run politically, but this Court may well have those 5 votes for a long time, too.  It's going to make the very difficult future unnecessarily more painful for all but a very few.

The Great Dithering: The Climate

The UN international sustainability conference held in Rio--twenty years after a similar meeting seemed to aim world efforts at addressing the Climate Crisis--has ended with nearly unanimous negative reviews.  The Executive Director of Greenpeace called the final report "the longest suicide note in history."

No real international or national commitments, no enforcement, nothing but platitudes--the Great Dithering.  The NY Times reporters suggest that non-governmental action and pledges to act were perhaps the only positive outcome.  None of this is new.  And that's the problem.

I try to take into account the natural sense of things ending, or not changing fast enough to avert catastrophe, that seems to come with age, especially as one's abilities to do anything about it have an expiration date that is fast approaching or probably has long since passed.  I take note of the efforts of young activists, and their point of view.  And while I am saddened by persistent but useless, unfair and counterproductive tarring of an entire Baby Boom generation, I know that the torch has passed and I wish the younger generations well.  But it seems increasingly likely that those being born now are going to be engaged in Civilization: the Reboot during their lifetimes.

For while political decisionmakers (including constituencies) dither, the climate keeps on its catastrophic path coming ever close to the point of no return.  Even if there is a sudden enormous change at the last minute--though another summer of devastating wildfires, heatwaves and storms doesn't seem to be turning the trick--it may be too late.  Right now I have to look for optimism to those who say that humanity could recover in a couple of hundred years, and that's mostly if we figure out how to live somewhere in space.  I console myself with the thought that in a thousand years, if humanity doesn't make the same mistake of deifying predatory capitalism as the god and measure of all things, it might be ready to take another step towards the fulfilment of its promise.  

The Great Dithering: The Economy

Paul Krugman has issued yet another warning about the U.S. and indeed the global economy, only this one is less about what we should do (and could easily do) to jumpstart growth than about the consequences of not doing that, which could be quickly severe in the extreme--not 1937, when FDR listened to the austerity hawks and lessened federal stimulus which reignited the Depression, but 1931, and a series of indecisions that led to the global economic collapse of the Great Depression.

The occasion for this is the Fed's decision last week to do the absolute minimum that prevents people from saying they did nothing (to paraphrase Krugman) when it could have done more to get the economy moving.  His conclusion:  

Why won’t the Fed act? My guess is that it’s intimidated by those Congressional Republicans, that’s it’s afraid to do anything that might be seen as providing political aid to President Obama, that is, anything that might help the economy. Maybe there’s some other explanation, but the fact is that the Fed, like the European Central Bank, like the U.S. Congress, like the government of Germany, has decided that avoiding economic disaster is somebody else’s responsibility.
      

None of this should be happening. As in 1931, Western nations have the resources they need to avoid catastrophe, and indeed to restore prosperity — and we have the added advantage of knowing much more than our great-grandparents did about how depressions happen and how to end them. But knowledge and resources do no good if those who possess them refuse to use them.

And that’s what seems to be happening. The fundamentals of the world economy aren’t, in themselves, all that scary; it’s the almost universal abdication of responsibility that fills me, and many other economists, with a growing sense of dread."

He's So Bain

Three stories in major U.S. newspapers over the past several days have examined Mitt Romney's experience running Bain Capital and they are all damning.

First was the Washington Post, which found that while Romney loudly laments the loss of American jobs to overseas and pledges to reverse the trend, he pretty much started it:

"During the nearly 15 years that Romney was actively involved in running Bain, a private equity firm that he founded, it owned companies that were pioneers in the practice of shipping work from the United States to overseas call centers and factories making computer components, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission."

The New York Times chimed in with an analysis of Bain's operations which showed that at least seven of the companies Bain took over failed, but that Bain still made money from them:

Mr. Romney’s experience at Bain is at the heart of his case for the presidency. He has repeatedly promoted his years working in the “real economy,” arguing that his success turning around troubled companies and helping to start new ones, producing jobs in the process, has prepared him to revive the country’s economy. He has fended off attacks about job losses at companies Bain owned, saying, “Sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful.” But an examination of what happened when companies Bain controlled wound up in bankruptcy highlights just how different Bain and other private equity firms are from typical denizens of the real economy, from mom-and-pop stores to bootstrapping entrepreneurial ventures.
      

Bain structured deals so that it was difficult for the firm and its executives to ever really lose, even if practically everyone else involved with the company that Bain owned did, including its employees, creditors and even, at times, investors in Bain’s funds."

The Boston Globe focused on one of Romney's big deals, which heavily involved him with junk bond king and felon Michael Milkin:

 "What transpired would become not just one of the most profitable leveraged buyouts of the era, but also one of the most revealing stories of Romney’s Bain Capital career. It showed how he pivoted from being a relatively cautious investor to risking his reputation for a big payoff. It is one that Romney has rarely, if ever, mentioned in his two bids for the presidency, perhaps because the Houston-based department store chain that Bain assembled later went into bankruptcy."

But what distinguishes this deal from the nearly 100 others that Romney did over a 15-year period was his close work with Milken’s firm, Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. At the time of the deal, it was widely known that Milken and his company were under federal investigation, yet Romney decided to go ahead with the deal because Drexel had a unique ability to sell high-risk, high-yield debt instruments, known as “junk bonds.”

 Romney, meanwhile, once referred to the deal as emanating from “the glorious days of Drexel Burnham,” saying, “it was fun while it lasted,” in a little-noticed interview with American Banker magazine."

(An additional irony for me when I linked to Boston.com for this story were the interpolated ads after the opening graph: the first was a solicitation to contribute to the Romney campaign, the second was an enticement to invest to get:  9.42% Annual Yield. 2 Year Term $1,000 Minimum. Not FDIC Insured.  [Emphasis added, of course.])

Rightists will snivel that these are libral lamestream media publications to invalidate the stories, but I'm afraid that isn't really enough.  The facts asserted will have to be challenged, such as mistakes or even deliberate misuse of Securities and Exchange Comission data--which wingers are intimately familiar with, since they--and the Romney campaign--regularly lie about quantifiable facts, let alone interpretations.   They've already attempted such with the Post story.  As of Sunday they have two more to deal with.

Planet of the Apes?

An AP story begins:

The more we study animals, the less special we seem.

Baboons can distinguish between written words and gibberish. Monkeys seem to be able to do multiplication. Apes can delay instant gratification longer than a human child can. They plan ahead. They make war and peace. They show empathy. They share.

"It's not a question of whether they think — it's how they think," says Duke University scientist Brian Hare. Now scientists wonder if apes are capable of thinking about what other apes are thinking.

"The evidence that animals are more intelligent and more social than we thought seems to grow each year, especially when it comes to primates," the piece continues.  Monkeys have amazing memories.  Apes may be setting goals and working towards them. But it's not just primates:

Dolphins, whose brains are 25 percent heavier than humans, recognize themselves in a mirror. So do elephants. A study in June finds that black bears can do primitive counting, something even pigeons have done, by putting two dots before five, or 10 before 20 in one experiment.

Even dogs and cats are getting more scientific respect. There's more evidence in a recent booklength collection of research. Still more research suggests that crows and even bees recognize individual people. Little birdbrains remember where scores of food caches are, even under snow cover.  Why all of a sudden are we figuring this out, as primate species particularly are on the brink of extinction?  Prejudice operates among scientists just like everywhere else, and if the conventional wisdom is that animals cannot have uniquely human abilities, then anybody who goes looking for them--or even sees them and reports them--risks being laughed out of their careers.  Primatologist Frans de Waal, a pioneer in this area, has suggested that scientists haven't seen such evidence because they simply weren't looking for it.

But now that it's okay, there's much more research money available for these studies, and so there is much more evidence.  Apart from the ethical implications of how these animals are treated by scientists and other humans using them for entertainment, there is of course the profound ethical implication of causing their extinction. 

We aren't so incredibly different and special.  But we do have the power to destroy and maybe the power to save.  At least it is our moral duty to try to save the world from the Climate Crisis and the other destructions we're wreaking on the life of this planet.  It's great that scientists are looking at other animals and finally asking, what are they thinking?  But we need a good look in the mirror, and ask on behalf of these animals, what are we thinking?