Weather Report

It's hot here.

Of course nothing like much of the rest of the West.  According to the LA Times, on Saturday it hit 122F in Palm Springs, 126 in Death Valley, 113 in Las Vegas, and at least 119 in Phoenix, where airport officials were monitoring temperatures because it would soon be too hot to allow airplanes to fly.

CNN even screamed in a headline that the temperature was approaching "the highest ever recorded on Earth."  The key word would be recorded, but it's an assertion the BBC reported, too.  Later Saturday CNN was concentrating on the death toll.

This huge expanse of heat wave, which began last week, is expected to extend well into next week.  And we are feeling it here as well--the first time a heat wave has included us.  It's nowhere near as intense as these places--but for us, a week or more of highs in the mid to upper 70s and into the 80s is unprecedented.  Our normally high humidity makes these temps seem hotter, and though by next week we may not be cooling down at night quite as much as we are now, we still have cool breezes once the sun goes down.  That's absent for much of the West, including most of California.  Temperatures in Phoenix are staying above 90 at night.

The same change in the Jet Stream that's apparently responsible for this heat and dryness is bringing rain to the East, including places where June was the rainiest on record.

Our heat spell comes as our North Coast area has officially been declared to be in drought.  We had a sunnier and colder winter than normal (I wore wool coats I haven't worn as often since I left Pittsburgh) and while the sunshine was cheery, it also made people really nervous.  It's our rainy season, and it wasn't raining.  We got one but really only one of our usual December storms,and though it had unusually fierce winds (it blew my basketball hoop apart), it brought little rain.  After that there was some stealth rain at night, a few rainy days in February, but not much more. Winter rain has been arriving later and later the past few years, and this year it just didn't come.

Recently it became official--this was the driest winter since North Coast records were kept.

In terms of effects, I'm expecting the unexpected.  But there will be effects, to the drought (moderate, so far) and to the string of hot days that this ecosystem is not used to.  But even in places accustomed to hot summers, the intensity of this heat wave is also something new.

A Dream of Water

Global heating because of greenhouse gases pollution is not the only contributor to present and future environmental problems and likely crises.  Many however work in tandem with global heating, and/or make the effects potentially worse.

For example, the misuse of water. This spring PBS ran the scary two-part docu by Ken Burns on the Dust Bowl, that profound human tragedy in the 1930s American West caused by the confluence of climate patterns and bad human management of land and water.  It finally ended when FDR's New Deal helped to reform farming practices,  and then the rains came again.

But the docu also mentions that the same area most affected by the Dust Bowl was backsliding.  The lesson of more modest demand on fragile resources ended when the High Plains Aquifer was discovered and tapped, providing water that created agricultural bounty and expansion.  But, the docu warned, when the acquifer is depleted, even more people would be devastated than during the Dust Bowl.

Now it may be starting to happen.  The New York Times reports from Kansas:  The land, known as Section 35, sits atop the High Plains Aquifer, a waterlogged jumble of sand, clay and gravel that begins beneath Wyoming and South Dakota and stretches clear to the Texas Panhandle. The aquifer’s northern reaches still hold enough water in many places to last hundreds of years. But as one heads south, it is increasingly tapped out, drained by ever more intensive farming and, lately, by drought.

Vast stretches of Texas farmland lying over the aquifer no longer support irrigation. In west-central Kansas, up to a fifth of the irrigated farmland along a 100-mile swath of the aquifer has already gone dry. In many other places, there no longer is enough water to supply farmers’ peak needs during Kansas’ scorching summers. And when the groundwater runs out, it is gone for good. Refilling the aquifer would require hundreds, if not thousands, of years of rains. 

It is a "slow-motion crisis," the Times says, but also a completely predictable one.  As predictable as the final draining of oil and other fossil fuels, already begun (or we wouldn't be trying to wrench more fuel out of tar sands and fracking) and just as inevitable.

Now deep in drought, the American West is coming up against its limits, which most often means water.  For example, as this report indicates, the Colorado River, which supports some 40 million people over several states, is already "reduced to a trickle" in some places.  While the discussion underway in the region involves management and conservation (more efficient use of water for agriculture) one participant in this NPR interview noted, And I think just to add on to that, what I think I don't hear very often is: Have we reached the carrying capacity for the Southwest in terms of water? And I don't hear people raise that.

I was once involved in a meeting that includes some big Colorado developers as well as political and civic leaders in Colorado Springs.  I listened to one developer at dinner talk about all the expansion plans, and I raised the question of whether there would be enough water.  He looked startled, but recovered to call me a visionary who cut right to the essence, because it's a pretty damn dry place all right.  But clearly nobody making the decisions was thinking about it.

That was about twenty-five years ago.  And they still aren't.  But if this drought is part of a long-term pattern caused by global heating, rather than just intensified and made a bit longer by global heating, then everybody is going to be thinking about it, and maybe even wondering why it slipped their minds in the first place.

The Future of This Week

The news was pretty full of significant stories this week.  On Thursday the U.S. Senate passed an immigration reform bill, watched by a gallery of DREAMers chanting "Yes we can."  On Wednesday the Supreme Court nullified the Defense of Marriage Act, and essentially allowed gay marriage to proceed in California.  On Tuesday the Court struck down a key element of the Voting Rights Act, and without federal oversight several states immediately jump-started their push for voter ID laws.

On Tuesday as well, President Obama made his speech on the climate crisis.  It will probably come as no surprise that I consider this the most significant event of the week.  The gay marriage progress is a victory for  equal rights, and therefore for us all.  But the actual changes it enables will not affect everyone directly.

And while the Supreme Court affirmed the right of a group of Americans to marry, it also limited the federal government from protecting the rights of other groups of Americans to vote, and the loss of those rights may well have direct consequences for the country as a whole.  Nor is that theoretical, evidenced by the rush to enact voter ID laws for the demonstrable purpose of disenfranchising non-whites and poor and others who are less likely to vote Republican.

And of course the immigration bill is far from law; most predictions are that it will not pass (or possibly even come to a vote) in the GOPer House.

There are several interesting points of view on President Obama's speech on the climate crisis.  Frank Rich suggests that the effect is not in the actions he outlined ("I don’t think anyone believes that he can achieve more than incremental environmental goals by executive order; the legal challenges alone will long outlast his presidency.")  but "by acknowledging that governance is impossible with the current Congress and taking action, he has catapulted over Washington to the voters and strongly identified his party and presumably its next presidential candidate with policies that are in sharp contrast with what he calls the “Flat Earth Society” on the other side...Obama has put his party firmly on the side of the country’s future, not its past." 

Jonathan Chait disagrees on the effect of the executive changes in his plan, which he asserts"taken together, add up to a significant climate response."  And that's before the EPA standards on carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act.  He thinks that together these will mean that "Obama can meet environmentalists’ near-term goal of reducing carbon emissions 17 percent by 2020 on his own," but that to do better, especially after 2020, will require congressional action.

David Roberts acknowledges that "Obama is in a highly constrained position on climate. He faces hostility from Congress and the courts alike, with no broad-based popular movement behind him to scare them into line. All he can do is use the power of the executive branch."  Moreover, Roberts believes that the Obama team scheduled this address deliberately in the midst of what they knew would be a week of big news stories, so it wouldn't inspire "a pitched public battle."

Roberts says that some of the changes are potentially a big deal but that there's no way of knowing if they will actually get the U.S. to a 17% drop in emissions.  He notes also the No Drama Obama rhetoric of the speech, and concludes:

 "This is vintage Obama. He refuses to wage lofty ideological battles, which frustrates the hell out of people who view those battles as necessary and inevitable. He doesn’t direct a lot of energy at bashing his head into walls. He just puts the available resources to work doing what can be done. It’s not enough — it’s not even as much as he could do — but it would be a big mistake to think it doesn’t matter."

Xpostfactoid puts together Greg Sargeant's comment (similar to mine) that Obama's speech "recast the call for climate action as the centrist, common-sense solution" with Chiat's observation that  "Fashioning a long-term growth strategy is, and has always been, Obama’s deepest passion," and points out:  "I must add that if Obama's vision of enacting liberal policies as a means for achieving long-term growth has been left untold by certain parties, those parties don't include Obama. He has never stopped telling that story: it is the very heart and soul of his pitch to America and always has been." 

Though I don't agree entirely that economic growth is "the heart and soul," it certainly is a priority and a theme of the story. (Children, the future, including but not limited by economics, are also themes.)  But he's right that Obama has been telling his story and a lot of journalists haven't really been listening. Which is one reason I've spent so much time summarizing and liberally quoting his speeches--what he says is almost never reported, and when somebody finally listens, they assume he's never said before why they've just heard for the first time.

It occurs to me as well that the timing of this address may also result from Obama being able to cite growth in clean energy technology, seeded in part by his economic stimulus package and other legislation passed in the early Dem majority days.  It helps make the economic argument.

Roberts, who writes for Grist and has environmental cred, is right about the pressure from the enviro left--they want big dramatic speeches and proposals.  One such writer I saw crowed that Obama finally took her advice and made the big speech, but though it was "a nice try" it wasn't going to amount to anything-- classic double-bind bullshit.  And the right is even more extreme, beyond sanity, but some Beltway commentators think their arguments (carbon regs will kill economic growth) are still politically potent.

So given all of this, my sense that this is the most significant act of the week seems in  the distinct minority.  That doesn't surprise me.  All the same things were said about President Kennedy's American University speech fifty years ago--his proposals for a limited nuclear test ban were too modest, and too radical; they wouldn't mean anything, they would endanger American security and hasten war.  But that seed grew, and so will this one.  In the end it will affect more people--and more of the planet--than anything else that happened this week.

As for "nothing new," here's what was new in the speech (separate from the actions or proposals):

An American President declared that addressing the climate crisis is an urgent national and global need.

He declared that addressing the climate crisis means addressing both the causes and the effects.

He acknowledged that even as we address the causes, we will continue to feel the effects for some time to come.

No President has said any of that before.   But it is the agenda and the reality going forward into the future.

As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act.

President Obama's speech on the climate crisis accurately outlined both parts of the problem, the cause and the effects, and not only proposed a comprehensive range of ways to address particularly the causes, but announced meaningful efforts by his administration, regardless of congressional inaction.

He spoke in the hot DC sun, to an audience of Georgetown University students, deliberately selected because this issue will begin to seriously affect their generation and the following generations.

His rhetoric was mostly simple, though the speech cleverly turned the tables on critics by characterizing them as negative and "doomsayers" on America's potential to deal with environmental challenges and still be economically viable.  He dealt with deniers in just one sentence, as akin to the Flat Earth Society.

His speech is accompanied by an even more comprehensive plan, made available in the form of infographics and a pdf detailed plan. In later posts I plan to look into the plan.  In this post I want to summarize the speech.  Quotes are in italic.

President Obama began by talking about the famous photo that first showed the Earth from moon orbit to the Earth in 1968.  At the same time, scientists were studying changes in the atmosphere brought about by greenhouse gases that threatened that whole Earth.

That science, accumulated and reviewed over decades, tells us that our planet is changing in ways that will have profound impacts on all of humankind. 

He summarized some of the most recent and most compelling evidence, and talked about the effects of storms, droughts and extreme weather made more extreme by global heating. And we know that the costs of these events can be measured in lost lives and lost livelihoods, lost homes, lost businesses, hundreds of billions of dollars in emergency services and disaster relief. In fact, those who are already feeling the effects of climate change don’t have time to deny it -- they’re busy dealing with it.

Having examined the science on the causes of global heating and described some of the effects, the President makes an historic commitment:

So the question is not whether we need to act. The overwhelming judgment of science -- of chemistry and physics and millions of measurements -- has put all that to rest. Ninety-seven percent of scientists, including, by the way, some who originally disputed the data, have now put that to rest. They've acknowledged the planet is warming and human activity is contributing to it.

So the question now is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late. And how we answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.

As a President, as a father, and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act. (Applause.)

I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.

And that’s why, today, I'm announcing a new national climate action plan, and I'm here to enlist your generation's help in keeping the United States of America a leader -- a global leader -- in the fight against climate change.  

He described some of the progress made, and acknowledged the opposition that has meant that the challenge he gave to Congress to act ("or I will") has gone unmet.  So he will.

But this is a challenge that does not pause for partisan gridlock. It demands our attention now. And this is my plan to meet it -- a plan to cut carbon pollution; a plan to protect our country from the impacts of climate change; and a plan to lead the world in a coordinated assault on a changing climate. (Applause.)

Cutting carbon pollution is to be addressed in three basic ways.  This plan begins with cutting carbon pollution by changing the way we use energy -- using less dirty energy, using more clean energy, wasting less energy throughout our economy.

He talked about the Clean Air Act, passed in 1970 by Congress with one dissenting vote in the House and none in the Senate, and signed into law by a Republican President.  The principle of regulating to preserve the environment and therefore the health and safety of Americans was established, and the pollution that the EPA is now required to regulate includes carbon, by a recent Supreme Court decision.

So new rules will be made and enforced to regulate the currently not-regulated-at-all carbon emissions of both new and existing power plants.  That's probably the major news from this speech, because regulating existing power plants was not thought to be in the cards for the near future.

He notes that critics will say this will crush the American economy, as they have before every major step to regulate harmful pollutants etc., but that the "doomsayers" were always wrong.  American ingenuity always rose to the occasion, and so did business.

 The old rules may say we can’t protect our environment and promote economic growth at the same time, but in America, we’ve always used new technologies -- we’ve used science; we’ve used research and development and discovery to make the old rules obsolete.

Besides using less dirty energy, he advocated for more clean energy. He spoke about successful efforts to expand clean energy, and announced new efforts to expand it further.He spoke in favor of natural gas as a less carbon polluting fuel that can bridge to a more complete clean energy future.

 A low-carbon, clean energy economy can be an engine of growth for decades to come. And I want America to build that engine. I want America to build that future -- right here in the United States of America. That’s our task.

He spoke more generally about not wasting energy, but pointed out once again that energy conservation is one of the easiest ways to address the climate crisis, and one that adds immediately to jobs and the economy.

In all three categories he noted what had already been done or was being done--by states, cities and corporations.  He noted that in some efforts the federal government would be playing catch-up.

Then he turned from causes to the effects--and to the fact that many advocates for action would not themselves face until recently: that global heating is going to continue, and it is going to have effects, even if we do what must be done to blunt the catastrophic effects of climate cataclysm in the farther future.

So using less dirty energy, transitioning to cleaner sources of energy, wasting less energy through our economy is where we need to go. And this plan will get us there faster. But I want to be honest -- this will not get us there overnight. The hard truth is carbon pollution has built up in our atmosphere for decades now. And even if we Americans do our part, the planet will slowly keep warming for some time to come. The seas will slowly keep rising and storms will get more severe, based on the science. It's like tapping the brakes of a car before you come to a complete stop and then can shift into reverse. It's going to take time for carbon emissions to stabilize.

So in the meantime, we're going to need to get prepared. And that’s why this plan will also protect critical sectors of our economy and prepare the United States for the impacts of climate change that we cannot avoid. 

Once again, he was able to describe efforts in this regard already underway in cities and states, including those with Republican governments.  (He'd previously noted that 75% of wind power generated in the U.S. is in Republican states.)  This is another way he was able to undercut critics who say all this is radical and (in the immortal phrasing of John Banal) "crazy."

And we’ll partner with communities seeking help to prepare for droughts and floods, reduce the risk of wildfires, protect the dunes and wetlands that pull double duty as green space and as natural storm barriers. And we'll also open our climate data and NASA climate imagery to the public, to make sure that cities and states assess risk under different climate scenarios, so that we don’t waste money building structures that don’t withstand the next storm. 

The last part of his speech was about the U.S. leading international efforts, not only to meet the Copenhagen goals for 2020 but to go beyond them in following decades by bringing in the developing nations.

What we need is an agreement that’s ambitious -- because that’s what the scale of the challenge demands. We need an inclusive agreement -– because every country has to play its part. And we need an agreement that’s flexible -- because different nations have different needs. And if we can come together and get this right, we can define a sustainable future for your generation. 

We’re going to need to give special care to people and communities that are unsettled by this transition -- not just here in the United States but around the world. And those of us in positions of responsibility, we’ll need to be less concerned with the judgment of special interests and well-connected donors, and more concerned with the judgment of posterity. (Applause.) Because you and your children, and your children’s children, will have to live with the consequences of our decisions. 

President Obama said that addressing the climate crisis must once again return to bipartisan efforts, because this is a responsibility to the future.

Our founders believed that those of us in positions of power are elected not just to serve as custodians of the present, but as caretakers of the future. And they charged us to make decisions with an eye on a longer horizon than the arc of our own political careers. That’s what the American people expect. That’s what they deserve.

And someday, our children, and our children’s children, will look at us in the eye and they'll ask us, did we do all that we could when we had the chance to deal with this problem and leave them a cleaner, safer, more stable world? And I want to be able to say, yes, we did. Don’t you want that? (Applause.)

He called upon citizens to persistently make their voices heard on this issue:


Americans are not a people who look backwards; we're a people who look forward. We're not a people who fear what the future holds; we shape it. What we need in this fight are citizens who will stand up, and speak up, and compel us to do what this moment demands. 

That means insisting that communities, corporations, governments and individual office-seekers take responsibility:

Convince those in power to reduce our carbon pollution. Push your own communities to adopt smarter practices. Invest. Divest. (Applause.) Remind folks there's no contradiction between a sound environment and strong economic growth. And remind everyone who represents you at every level of government that sheltering future generations against the ravages of climate change is a prerequisite for your vote. Make yourself heard on this issue. (Applause.)

And in the year that is the 50th anniversary of so much involving President Kennedy--Berlin,  his American University speech on the nuclear test ban, his Civil Rights speech the next day, and of course his assassination--President Obama contrasted the goals of this effort from the "clear moment of victory" of the Apollo program.  And he did so with rhetoric that more than in any other part of the speech comes closest to  Kennedy's:

 I understand the politics will be tough. The challenge we must accept will not reward us with a clear moment of victory. There’s no gathering army to defeat. There's no peace treaty to sign. When President Kennedy said we’d go to the moon within the decade, we knew we’d build a spaceship and we’d meet the goal. Our progress here will be measured differently -- in crises averted, in a planet preserved. But can we imagine a more worthy goal? For while we may not live to see the full realization of our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that the world we leave to our children will be better off for what we did.

President Obama returned to the image of the Earth as seen in that 1968 photograph, also a product of the Apollo project (as was the famous Blue Marble whole Earth photo):

“It makes you realize,” that astronaut said all those years ago, “just what you have back there on Earth.” And that image in the photograph, that bright blue ball rising over the moon’s surface, containing everything we hold dear -- the laughter of children, a quiet sunset, all the hopes and dreams of posterity -- that’s what’s at stake. That’s what we’re fighting for. And if we remember that, I’m absolutely sure we'll succeed. 

I'll end this post with one more comment.  I remember President Kennedy's American University speech, and a lot about the JFK years.  The historic importance of that speech of course could not be fully known right away, but at the time the response was mixed.  It, too, was partially driven from headlines by other events, including JFK's own Civil Rights speech the next day.  And even today it is not appreciated for its historic role, but it was a pivot point in history, accomplished in part by his rhetoric and his arguments, that grew more powerful as time went on.

Given all that has happened and has not happened for the past 20 years I've been participating in this debate, President Obama's speech was comprehensive, forthright, strong, clear, rhetorically adept and eloquent.  He delivered it in his low key common sense persuasion mode. (I'm not sure about the "optics" of the hot glare of the sun, wiping sweat from his brow frequently, practically smothered in American flags, but I'll be interested in what others saw.)

That he did what I've become a broken record advocating for a decade--that true and realistic leadership must address both the causes and effects, the "stop it" and "fix it," or what the wonks call mitigation and adaptation (unless I have them confused and reversed again)--leaves me with a feeling of great relief.  Maybe tomorrow I can even exhale.

The other headline of the speech came with an interpolation--that the tar sands oil pipeline will not be approved if it is found to contribute significantly to greenhouse gas pollution.  That decision is still a couple of months off, they say.

Three Rings of Fire

Things are hot and crazy in the DC circus.

The so-called IRS scandal quickly devolved into partisan madness, despite the emerging facts: that the scrutiny of Tea Party groups was initiated by Republicans in the IRS under the authority of a GW Bush appointed director, and that however clumsily it was done, it had validity in that prominent Tea Party groups may well have been funding political activity while trying to get tax exempt status, which forbids such activities.

But it was such a vivid political wet dream for the rabid right that it took on a life of its own. It  led to the tawdry McCarthyism of Rep. Issa and his "edited" hearing transcripts, and the rabid right's latest conspiracy theory, which is that slowing the approval of tax exempt status for Tea Party groups is how the Dems won the 2012 election.  A paper that makes this contention first of all assumes that the Tea Party is so powerful and popular that it could sway an election, which no actual polls or scholarship support, as Jonathan Bernstein points out.  He also adds this analysis of the second point:

   Got it? The complaint is that the IRS was slow in granting all these groups a tax status that depending on them not being primarily devoting to electioneering, thus preventing them from..."volunteering, organizing, donating, and rallying" for the "midterm elections."

I mean, as far as I can see (and I only read co-author Stan Veuger's summary post, not the whole paper) the entire thing is premised on a "constitutional right" for these groups to get tax-exempt status so that they can do things they aren't supposed to do with that tax-exempt status. And there's not even a pause to explain why some might see something amiss in that.

So there's not much more to be said about that.  The other ongoing controversy, over NSA data mining and the government's response to David Snowden, the person who blew the whistle on it is more substantive, complex and troubling.  There's humor to be found in it of course--as in Andrew Borowitz's Friday piece headlined U.S. Seemingly Unaware of Irony in Accusing Snowden of Spying.  But it's also serious and dangerous.

The dangers are multiple, and Sunday provides examples, as when David Gregory as host of NBC's Meet the Press--as establishment as journalism gets these days--asked leftist journalist Green Greenwald if he should be charged for "aiding and abetting" Snowden, who is under federal indictment.  

Now in my opinion, Greenwald is a demonstrable asshole who is even more often dangerously slipshod in his accusations.  So this could have been provocative payback.   But it demonstrates just how dangerous all this can become. And it's no excuse for Gregory using his wattage to suggest someone might have committed a federal crime that nobody in the federal government has charged him with. 

Get To Work on the Climate Crisis

Update: President Obama's speech on the climate crisis is now scheduled for Tuesday, June 25.

President Obama spoke at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, joining with Chancellor Merkel in marking an anniversary of President Kennedy's famous Berlin speech in 1963.  "His pledge of solidarity -- “Ich bin ein Berliner” -- echoes through the ages," Obama noted, then added:  "But that’s not all that he said that day. Less remembered is the challenge that he issued to the crowd before him: “Let me ask you,” he said to those Berliners, “let me ask you to lift your eyes beyond the dangers of today” and “beyond the freedom of merely this city.” Look, he said, “to the day of peace with justice, beyond yourselves and ourselves to all mankind.”

Obama's speech made news first of all for what he said about reducing nuclear weapons, which was one of the signal issues of JFK's last years as President, and the realm of one of his most significant accomplishments, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.  "After a comprehensive review, I’ve determined that we can ensure the security of America and our allies, and maintain a strong and credible strategic deterrent, while reducing our deployed strategic nuclear weapons by up to one-third. And I intend to seek negotiated cuts with Russia to move beyond Cold War nuclear postures."

Obama spoke of other problems that exist in Europe as they do in America, particularly income inequality and poverty (another issue that the Kennedys often asserted as priority).  But President Obama identified the greatest and now most urgent global problem, especially for the young and future generations, in a way that President Kennedy might have as well.

"With a global middle class consuming more energy every day, this must now be an effort of all nations, not just some. For the grim alternative affects all nations -- more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise. This is the future we must avert. This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work."

But a global compact is not all that's needed.  To even lead towards one, the United States must show how serious it is.  In this speech President Obama also said: "In the United States, we have recently doubled our renewable energy from clean sources like wind and solar power. We’re doubling fuel efficiency on our cars. Our dangerous carbon emissions have come down. But we know we have to do more -- and we will do more." 

In that regard, stories have been appearing for the past few days about President Obama getting set to announce new initiatives to confront the climate crisis.  The New York Times reported Wednesday:

Heather Zichal, the White House coordinator for energy and climate change, said Wednesday that the president would announce climate policy initiatives in coming weeks. Another official said a presidential address outlining the new policy, which will also include new initiatives on renewable power and energy efficiency, could come as early as next week. Ms. Zichal said none of the initiatives being considered by the administration required legislative action or new financing from Congress. 

The Times story led with a "senior officials" suggesting that President Obama will propose new regulations limiting CO2 emissions from existing power plants.  Other stories note that the EPA still hasn't issued final regulations on new power plants, which could also be part of a package.

Some are speculating however that these announcements may come as counterweight to final approval of the tar sands oil pipeline.  A decision on that is expected to be announced within the next month.  

But for the moment the significance might well be the focus that President Obama can bring to the absolute necessity of strong, multiple and intentional efforts to cut and end global heating emissions and other steps to address both the causes and effects of the climate crisis.  A Bloomberg report from a few days earlier cites a Palo Alto gathering where President Obama is quoted as saying:  "We’re not going to be able to make those changes solely through a bunch of individual decisions,” he said at a June 6 event hosted by Flipboard Chief Executive Officer Mike McCue. “Government is going to have a role to play.” 

When President Kennedy outlined his agenda in his Inaugural he warned that it would not be accomplished in a hundred days, "or a thousand days, or in the lifetime of this administration--But let us begin."  In the speech that reignited negotiations with the Soviet Union for a limited nuclear test ban treaty (which he made in that same summer of 1963), he spoke of future dangers--like nuclear proliferation--and of future hopes.  The years of treaties and nuclear weapons control and reduction have all sprung from that speech.  He began.

That treaty broke the ice of the Cold War and allowed limiting and someday eliminating nuclear weapons to become a legitimate political goal, a topic for open and serious discussion in which advocates were no longer marginalized, and a vision of the future. We can only hope we're going to see history repeat itself when President Obama next talks about the climate crisis.

sporting views

Survived the first of the Pirates-Giants series, which the home team (Pittsburgh) won two of three.  Both teams go on, wounded but always entertaining.

I'm not watching the actual games but I am noting the NBA finals--I never thought I'd ever root for the San Antonio Spurs, but they are playing the Heat and now it's all up to a game 7.  It's sort of amazing that the Spurs are still built around the stars that were playing when the Lakers were beating them en route to championships.  Anyway, they came within a shot of winning the 6th game and the series, and keeping LeBron out of the Michael Jordan greatness conversation.  Though the game 5 winner usually wins the 7th, the depressing prospect is that the Heat will finish it.  The Spurs need a big lead in the fourth, because they just don't have a finisher.  On the other hand I'm surprised it's going 7, so I could be happily wrong--not happily exactly, more like grimly satisfied.

Meanwhile there's the sporting event above to report on--the congressional baseball game, won by the Dems 22-0. 

Postscript: On Wednesday afternoon the SF Giants won their second come from behind game in a row against San Diego--they would have won the entire series except for a miraculous catch in the 12th inning Monday night.  They're at home, and with today's game, they've sold out their 200th consecutive game at AT&T Park (as it's called now), the longest active streak in the majors. And this sellout was an afternoon game in the middle of the week.  San Francisco's way too laid back image is obsolete.

That's Why They Call It Global

Last week Colorado was hit with a sudden and surprisingly ferocious series of wildfires.  CNN reported:

Over several hellish days, the Black Forest Fire singed more than 15,000 acres north of Colorado Springs. What's left behind, in some areas, "looks like a nuclear bomb went off," according to El Paso County Sheriff Terry Maketa.

In the first few days after the first broke out, for still unexplained reasons, crews had zero containment on the Black Forest Fire as it ravaged woods and neighborhoods. County spokesman Dave Rose told CNN it appeared to be the most destructive in the history of Colorado -- a state that's all too familiar with devastating wildfires.

By Saturday and Sunday, the Black Forest Fire was mostly contained, but several other large wildfires broke out elsewhere in Colorado.

The Colorado fire and its exceptional nature are no longer exceptional in huge swaths of the United States.  The droughts and dryness and resulting fires are burning up state funds but also the common fund called federal, which thanks to the wolves in Congress, has less money and fewer resources.  This CBS News report:

Fire season has exploded across the country. So far this year, more than 19,000 wildfires have scorched the equivalent of 700 square miles, forcing thousands out of their homes.

"We've had numerous fires already," said firefighter Miguel Martinez. "I foresee a very busy season for us."

Martinez fights fires in California, where the number of wildfires is up 45 percent this year. The reason: unusually dry weather. Nearly half the country is already experiencing moderate to exceptional drought conditions.


"We've seen a significant change for the worse, in terms of how hot fires burn and how quickly they explode," said Tom Harbour, fire chief for the U.S. Forest Service. But federal firefighters are facing another challenge: a loss $50 million mandated by the budget sequester. That forced the Forest Service to cut 500 firefighters and 50 engines just when they're needed most."

Climate crisis effects like fires that require federal responses mean that climate changes in one locality or state  eventually affect everyone in the country, if only through federal taxes.  Then of course there is the economic activity that is lessened, the crops burned up by droughts, etc.  Global heating is not just an atmospheric phenomenon with different local effects.  It is a fact: those local disruptions and catastrophes ripple very far, and the ripples don't necessarily fade with distance.

For another example, a new study found that the impact of climate crisis on the UK is not limited to rising sea levels and hotter summers: an even greater impact may be the availability of food imports.

"What's interesting is that threats from climate change overseas appear an order of magnitude higher than domestic threats," PWC's Richard Gledhill told BBC News.

"This doesn't just refer to the most vulnerable countries like the small island states... climate events in developed countries could damage the UK economy by impacting on food and other resources. We could also suffer damage to assets from events like the floods in central Europe or Superstorm Sandy; this all feeds back into the UK economy."

Many crucial ways of addressing the climate crisis are local, regional, national.  But at least at this level of human civilization, the truth is we're all in this together, and solutions on dealing both with causes and effects of  the climate crisis are necessarily global.

A Climate Crisis Agenda

While some media coverage of the International Energy Agency report this week stressed what it confirmed about the ongoing climate crisis, the Agency itself (and some news reports) stressed its proposals to prevent runaway climate deterioration and collapse that would likely spell the end for this human civilization.

The report does confirm the urgency of other science-based studies: that (as the National Geographic wrote in its first graph) " If the world waits until 2020 to take action on global climate change, it will undoubtedly be too late."

Let's pause for a moment and take that in.  In the midst of all the worthy issues, idiotic trivialities, shameless posturing and greedy inflation of nonsense that absorbs every facet of this constant overwhelming blitz of private and public information that absorbs our time, we're being told once again that we have less than seven years to save humanity, at least in its present form.

Which is made even more poignant by the main IEA message: four fairly simple steps that together may well slow carbon poisoning of the planet just enough to limit the climate damage before it becomes apocalyptic.

According to the IEA, they are:

• Targeted energy efficiency measures in buildings, industry and transport account for nearly half the emissions reduction in 2020, with the additional investment required being more than offset by reduced spending on fuel bills.
• Limiting the construction and use of the least-efficient coal-fired power plants delivers more than 20% of the emissions reduction and helps curb local air pollution. The share of power generation from renewables increases (from around 20% today to 27% in 2020), as does that from natural gas.
• Actions to halve expected methane (a potent greenhouse gas) releases into the atmosphere from the upstream oil and gas industry in 2020 provide 18% of the savings.
• Implementing a partial phase-out of fossil fuel consumption subsidies accounts for 12% of the reduction in emissions and supports efficiency efforts.

Or as the Christian Science Monitor summarized it:

"Over the next seven years, aggressive efforts to tackle greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, refineries, and pipelines, and especially to boost energy efficiency, could still keep the world on track to meet its goal of holding increases in global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

What’s more, those efforts need not come at the expense of a profitable energy sector, a concern that has fueled opposition to international agreements on curbing emissions and slowing climate change."

A couple of other features of these proposals: they are basically intensifications of policies and efforts already begun, and while they may shift profits from some corporations, they all generate economic activity and generate new jobs.

The IEA and others have the figures to back all this up.  Energy efficiency may seem like just a feel good drop in the bucket, but it is not.  And there are simple adjuncts or changes that can contribute enormously.  For example, it's been estimated that making all roofs and roadways white (to reflect sunlight) would be the equivalent of taking all cars off the roads for 18 years.

The Monitor article is interesting also because it places the advocacy of such efforts in context of upcoming international attempts to finally address the climate crisis in a real way.  Some progress may have been made in that regard in the latest meeting between President Obama and leaders of China.

Big Commerce Is Watching You

The revelations about national security telephone and internet data mining bring up a lot of issues, as well as a lot of misinformation, opportunism and hysterical bloviating.  Here's an explanation and defense of the program, here's what such a program could lead to, and here's Josh Marshall's careful parsing of the whistleblowing part of it.

While all of this bears monitoring, I have perhaps different points of view.  Apart from its secondary importance when ranked with global heating as something to concentrate on and get all upset about in the media, it further illustrates to me how effectively we've been propagandized into getting hysterical about abuses real and imagined in government that we let slide or ignore in the corporate complexes.

While agencies of the federal government may be gathering vast amounts of data on who is calling who,  I don't see the same outrage about tech corporations with playful names following my every keystroke on the internet or reading my address book and sending me emails about what they find.  There is no privacy on the internet, and very little over any phone system that gets outside of a wire connection.  The feds monitor emails for key words--haven't we known that for awhile now?--to lead them to terrorists and child pornographers.  The private sector basically is using every available means, skirting the law or simply staying ahead of it, to learn as much as possible about each one of us, down to the most private details.  Technological means are constantly developed and refined to interpret information in order to predict behavior and profile every one of us.

So while the private sector can gather all the information it wants in order to sell us stuff, and set prices individually according to what they think they can get us to pay, anything the government does is an abuse of privacy.

I'm not necessarily defending these NSA programs, and certainly not the Patriot Act, nor do I believe it's wrong to question possible overreach by the national security state.  Abuses that are more than theoretical, like censorship or monitoring what information I access (something that those internet companies do routinely), or torture or even the force-feeding of inmates at Guantanamo (which got very little media coverage and no big outrage), merit coverage and outrage.  But it's curious to me that people go nuts over government getting involved in health care but don't seem to mind when corporations engage in price fixing and multiple abuses that have driven the cost of US healthcare through the roof and cost people their lives.  They rail about Medicare abuse, when its private individuals and businesses who are cheating Medicare.  So the government is always big and bad, while it it doesn't seem to be big and bad enough to control the banks, the oil companies or corporations in general.

Moreover, corporations are unaccountable to anybody except their bottom lines, and if they are too big and powerful to fail, not even to the courts.  But government is still at least theoretically accountable to the courts and more to the point, run by elected officials, who can be replaced by voters.

Which of course is part of the answer: because government is accountable, these controversies are political--people get voted out or in because of them.  Whereas we all feel powerless to change the behavior of the most powerful corporations, and elected officials are wary of touching them, since their wealth finances their campaigns.

Emerson for the Day

"The best you can write is the best you are."

Thoreau

Sports Weekend

It's time to step back a bit from baseball, as my two teams begin what looks like a solid month playing each other.  The Giants and the Pirates start visiting each other's spectacular ball parks on Tuesday.  A glass half full way of looking at it is that I win either way.  On the other hand...

A sport that I don't follow at all is hockey.  The few hockey games I've watched were Stanley Cup finals in which the Penguins were involved, usually the deciding game.  Not many of those either. (Now it's not going to happen at all this year.)  I just don't like the game.

But there's another way of looking at it, a poetic way.  This is from a prose poem by Robert Bly from his book What Have I Ever Lost By Dying?

"How weird the goalies look with their African masks!  The goalie is so lonely anyway, guarding a basket with nothing in it, his wide lower legs as wide as ducks'...No matter what gift he is given, he always rejects it...

The goalie has gone out to mid-ice, and now he sails sadly back to his own box, slowly; he looks prehistoric with his rhinoceros legs; he looks as if he's going to become extinct, and he's just taking his time...

When the players are at the other end, he begins sadly sweeping the ice in front of his house; he is the old witch in the woods, waiting for the children to come home."

 

Inflaming Eyeballs

Two of the political news sites I check every day--and fairly often, the only two--are Teagan Goddard's Political Wire and Talking Points Memo, also known as TPM.  They would be characterized politically as not right wing, and I have found them to be dependable in their facts.  The Political Wire is more of an aggregator (so every new poll's conclusion gets a flat headline that so and so is ahead of so and so, even if other polls report the opposite) but TPM is very good at following a story, correcting where necessary, showing the evolution of an issue.

The Internet as well as presumably cable news exploded Thursday with various revelations concerning federal government data mining of phone calls and Internet traffic.  The New York Times, perhaps eager to stake its claim as having broken one of the stories, published an editorial slamming the Obama administration.

It's a harsh enough editorial, but both Political Wire and TPM seriously--really seriously--misquoted it, TPM even doing so in an inflammatory headline.  Both misquoted the Times in exactly the same way.

Both TPM and Political Wire led their items with a quote from the Times: "The administration has now lost all credibility."  But the Times editorial states: "The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue."

There is a world of difference.  Apart from the merits involved in these allegations, it is quite a serious and possibly consequential statement that possibly the most prominent newspaper in America has asserted that the Obama administration has lost all credibility, period.  Particularly on the eve of President Obama's meeting with the Chinese leadership. 

TPM places a comma after their quotation, so they might say it is not technically a misquotation, as the Political Wire's is, since it places a period before those important words "on this issue."  Nevertheless, this is significantly inaccurate and unnecessarily inflammatory.  It smacks of sloppiness at best, and a competitive eagerness to get eyeballs on the site, regardless of accuracy.

I've emailed both sites asking for a correction.  We'll see what they do.  If they were less generally credible sites I'd have no hope.

Update: Interesting.  The Political Wire has not changed a thing, but TPM made the correction--noting however that it was the New York Times that changed the sentence from "lost all credibility" to "all credibility on this issue" a few hours after they first published the editorial on line. 

RFK on The Future

On the 45th anniversary of his assassination, some words on the future, from speeches made at various times and places by Robert F. Kennedy.

"The future is not a gift: it is an achievement. Every generation helps make its own future. This is the essential challenge of the present."

"The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of bold projects and new ideas. Rather, it will belong to those who can blend passion, reason and courage in a personal commitment to the great enterprises and ideals of American society."

"We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land."

"If we fail to dare, if we do not try, the next generation will harvest the fruit of our indifference; a world we did not want - a world we did not choose - but a world we could have made better, by caring more for the results of our labors. And we shall be left only with the hollow apology of T.S. Eliot: 'That is not what I meant at all. That is not it, at all'."

Shaping Things to Come

With several appointments and nominations recently, President Obama is saying--among other things--didn't you notice?  I was reelected.  The people he's hiring seem more than ever the people he really wants to be hiring, with hopes that they will move things forward, even beyond his term.

Today's big appointment was Susan Rice as National Security Advisor, an appointment I advised that he make back immediately after John Kerry was appointed Secretary of State and she was still  being shamefully slammed by opportunistic GOPer bigmouths. 

Also today, President Obama appointed Samantha Powers to take Rice's old job of UN Ambassador.  From the first interview I saw with her as an author years ago, I knew Powers was impressive: smart, incisive, morally impassioned.  She's also young and attractive with a powerful charisma.  Because of the public demands, Susan Rice would not make a great Secretary of State because she can't really smile.  Samantha Powers doesn't have quite the wattage of President Obama's smile, but she can turn it on.  (She didn't look too comfortable trying to negotiate the Rose Garden steps in heels, however. She's going to have to get used to those kinds of shoes as Ambassador.)  She'll be a real if different kind of presence at the UN, where the climate crisis is taken seriously as a global security issue.

These are great second term appointments: of younger people with the potential of taking on major responsibilities, who got a lot of experience in the first term and are now ready to take on those top jobs. 

President Obama's apparent choice for the next FBI director is legendary in Washington--though he served in the Bush administration, he blew the whistle on some of Cheney' shady dealings and appointed the special prosecutor who followed the trail of the outing of Valerie Plame into Cheney's office.  Obama's appointment of CIA director may be the sleeper of them all, if he can deal with the leftover problems from the Bush era: the CIA involvement in drones and its problems with the State Department (it may well turn out that part of the protection problems involved in the tragic events in Benghazi were  to the consulate being only formally a State Department post but actually a CIA station.)  Maybe even Guantanamo, although the barriers to solution there are largely GOPers in Congress.

President Obama also nominated three judges to the DC Court of Appeals, two women and the black judge who as a public defender, successfully attacked "driving while black" racial profiling.  The President did so without mincing words.
  
“My judicial nominees have waited three times longer to receive confirmation votes than those of my Republican predecessor,” Obama said. “What’s happening now is unprecedented. For the good of the American people, it has to stop. Too much of the people’s business is at stake. Our legal framework depends on timely confirmations of judicial nominees....“This is not about principled opposition; this is about political obstruction.”

The president fired back against Republican accusations that he is trying to revive President Roosevelt’s “court packing” plan to add additional seats to the court to gain support for his political agenda.  “We’re not adding seats here. We’re trying to fill seats that are already existing,” Obama said. “I didn’t just wake up one day and say, ‘Let’s add three seats to the District Court of Appeals.’ These are open seats. And the Constitution demands that I nominate qualified individuals to fill those seats. What I’m doing today is my job. I need the Senate to do its job.”

“Republican senators are now pushing a proposal to reduce the number of judges on this independent federal court also makes no sense. When a Republican was president, 11 judges on the D.C. Circuit Court made complete sense. Now that a Democrat is president, it apparently doesn’t. Eight is suddenly enough,” he said to laughter. “People are laughing because it’s obviously a blatant political move.”

Obama said his three nominees were uniquely qualified for the positions. ”These three individuals are highly qualified to serve on the D.C. Circuit. They have broad bipartisan support from across the legal community. The nonpartisan American Bar Association has given them, each of them its highest rating. These are no slouches,” he said. “These are no hacks. These are incredibly accomplished lawyers, by all accounts."

The poli-sci types I check in with periodically (less and less actually) are especially interested because Harry Reid is signaling the possibility that changing the rules on filibuster might really be result of continued obstruction on judicial appointments.

The next appointment to make news is likely to be New Jersey Governor Christie's appointment to fill a Senate seat until the special election he opportunistically called for October.  The seat is vacant due to the death of Dem Senator Frank Lautenberg, who was a leader in one of the few successful social revolutions of our time: ending public smoking in America.  He also was a leader for gun regulation.

The most sensible appointment R Gov Christie could make is former NJ Governor Christine Todd Whitman.  She's R in the old sense, and is probably the best that Dems could expect for a Dem seat.  If she'd take a temp job like this--it might hinge on how much she cares about bills that are likely to come up in the next months, like immigration, and how badly she wants to stick it to the new Rs who have dissed her the way they diss everybody: savagely.

The Weight/Wait

On the Stop It! side of addressing the climate crisis, everybody seems to be waiting for the shoe to drop on the Tar Sands Oil Pipeline, with the assumption that sometime soon President Obama is going to approve its extension from Canada to the Gulf.

The issues involved continue to be clarified in opposition, however.  Bill McKibben has been leading a vocal and demonstrative opposition on the basis of the effect on climate of a lot more carbon burned from dirty tar sands oil, a stand backed up by the premier scientific voice on climate, James Hansen, although he seems to be more focused on promoting a carbon tax that would be especially high for tar sands oil and the like.

But this week President Obama's former advisor on climate matters, Van Jones, was especially aggressive in his opposition to the pipeline.  In media statements and a YouTube video, he is calling out President Obama on the issue.  He joins others in asserting that tar sands gunk is especially dangerous, that spills of it are proving impossible to clean up, and that the jobs it will create are minimal, with less than 50 non-temporary jobs.   He also asserts that the idea that this oil contributes to U.S. energy independence is false--that there is no guarantee the oil will stay in the country--he asserts that it will probably end up in China.

Also the 350 organization (McKibben's) claims in an email that "big chunks" of the favorable environmental review of the pipeline issued by the U.S. State Department (their clearance--and Obama's--are necessary because the pipeline crosses from another country, Canada) were written by a client of the very company that is building the pipeline.  This consultant, Environmental Resource Management, not only has TransCanada as a client, it is" a dues-paying member of the American Petroleum Institute, big oil’s top lobbying group that has spent millions trying to get Keystone XL built."

There's a lot of politics going on, and possibly institution-building, but the issue is serious.  For example, Organizing for America--the former Obama for America--is building support for addressing climate change, but is notably not opposing the pipeline.  Other organizations, including 350.org, are trying to organize demonstrations and civil disobedience, even if the pipeline is approved.

All this in the week that President Obama remarked that he has no patience with climate crisis deniers, but amidst criticism that his actual efforts are insufficient. Jonathan Chiat put this in perspective, as noted in this report:

However, others argue that Obama has been a good steward of the environment. As New York's Jonathan Chait pointed out, under Obama, carbon dioxide emissions have fallen, vehicle emissions standards have gone up, and the government has poured tons of new funding into green technology and research.

"The assumption that Obama's climate-­change record is essentially one of failure is mainly an artifact of environmentalists' understandably frantic urgency," he said. "The sort of steady progress that would leave activists on other issues giddy does not satisfy the sort of person whose waking hours are spent watching the glaciers melt irreversibly."

Even Gore gave Obama some credit, saying he'd "accomplished more than any president before him" in combating climate change.

Meanwhile, it's worth noting that positive steps in replacing the need for fossil fuels is proceeding significantly, though they don't get much press.  Solar power is becoming better and cheaper, wind power is contributing more and more to electricity generated and used, and electric cars are coming down in price, to be competitive with the fossil fueled.

In terms of addressing the climate crisis with clean energy initiatives, Republican Senator Lamar Alexander made a strong speech in support last week.  This is not new for Alexander, but it's news for a Republican to take the climate crisis seriously.  Alexander is one of the few who hasn't recanted.  It remains to be seen however how influential his position actually can be.

May Baseball

As May ends, my teams are diverging.  After a series of improbable victories, climaxed by the first inside the park home run ever to win a game in San Francisco, the Giants are stumbling.  Some key injuries are hurting them (including to Angel Pagan, who hit that homer and hasn't played since) but they are really struggling away from their home field. That could prove fatal to their season--because with those injuries, they spend most of the month of June on the road.

Still, at just a couple of games above .500, they're in second place in their division.  While the Giants reel, the Pittsburgh Pirates rock.  They are 13 games above .500--but in their division that's good enough only for second or third place.

For the past several years, the Pirates have had a run of wins and spectacular play, especially in the first part of the season.  And then every year, they've collapsed just as spectacularly.  That it might not happen this year is suggested by the ways they've been winning--which is every way.  They're winning with early offense, and with come from behind.  They're winning with starting pitching, and especially relief pitching.  If their winning ways continue, analysts may point to Tuesday night's game as the tip-off.  They won 1-0 in the 11th inning over the Detroit Tigers, a formidable team (managed by the guy who managed the last great Pirates teams, Jim Leyland.) That kind of win suggests a solid team. Then Wednesday they beat the Tigers again, surprising them with a flurry of late offense, 5-3. Update: Then they did it again--once again in the same series, the Pirates beat the Tigers 1-0 in the 11th inning. The Pirates could finally be for real this year.

Weekday Update

From: Doonesbury.   Click comic to enlarge to readable size.

Meanwhile, Andy Borowitz reports on the meeting between Senator McCain and Syrian rebels: Syrian Rebels Urge McCain to Get Over Losing to Obama: 

 SYRIA (The Borowitz Report)—During a meeting yesterday with Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona), Syrian rebels told the senator that he still seemed “really bitter” about losing the 2008 election to President Obama and advised him to “get over it.”

Summer

Well, there's the immigration bill, President Obama's landmark speech trying to inject some sanity into the overreaction to terrorism, etc. etc. and I find myself without the motivation to pay much attention.  I'm not watching the same people say the same sorts of things on television, or offer the same opinions and "news judgment" in print media.

Right now I'm enjoying the weather, my corner of the planet as it is, and as I'm hoping it will mostly be for the rest of my life.  But it's changing and it's going to really change.  Maybe not as much right here, but everywhere.

It's summer here, defined as the time when the students are gone, Arcata becomes quieter, and although I have less income, I have less I must do.  So I turn to my long-range and so far never-ending projects.  And I watch baseball.

And I'm noting the news on what matters for the future, and spending more time (online and in print) with people who are serious about what is serious: de-carbonization.  Energy conservation.  Clean energy development.  Constructing the means to respond to problems that are coming because of climate disruption.

There's some political activity worth watching, like the fossil fuel disinvestment campaign. Disinvestment is what turned the corner on apartheid in South Africa.

  I note in passing (and with weariness) that people still must make the case for saving civilization.  Here's a detailed piece by an economist who concludes that even with uncertainties the sane thing to do is to de-carbonize, since the cost of not doing it may be so much greater than the cost of doing it.  He likens it to insurance.  

Whatever floats your boat.  That this society still considers this debatable is certainly depressing.  But that doesn't mean I have to humor them.  I don't have time.

Scandal of the Week

To be more explicit, quoting from this piece by Robert Liddy in the Portland (Maine) Daily Sun:

"The moment marks the highest concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the entirety of human history; at current rates of growth NOAA predicts eight hundred parts per million will be the norm by the year 2100. We are on a climate change path that will make a mockery of political name calling about protection of exotic embassies and render issues of IRS abuse meaningless. Yet not a single major news outlet has offered one minute of analysis of the economic crisis of climate change in the hours of nonstop coverage of political fallout in the presidential race of 2016."

"A legislative bill in the United States Senate named the Environmental Protection Act of 2013 (S 309) was immediately tabled by the senate leadership and not a single word was spoken on this inaction in the reporting media. Regardless of wide support by liberal and conservative economists, no congressional representative has called for consideration of a meaningful Carbon Tax provision."

Tiny Giants Note

After a homestand of heroics, the San Francisco Giants went on the road to play with flashes of brilliance (coming back from 6-0 to win over the Rockies), but also awfully like a Little League team, making odd distracted errors in Toronto and Colorado.  Entertaining still, but still...

One cool note: The Giants brought up Brett Pill, formerly of the Humboldt Crabs, and he doubled and scored against Colorado.

I have the Giants and the Pittsburgh Pirates scores on my start page everyday, and it seemed that when one of them won a game, so did the other.  The same with losses.  That's unlikely and one of those selective attention things, I figured.  While I haven't gone day to day through the season, the fact is that when I checked the other day they did have identical won-loss records, 24-17.  That's good enough for the Giants to lead the NL West by a game, but only good enough for third place in the NL Central, where the Pirates are 2 1/2 games behind St. Louis.

Breaking!

The week's biggest scandal!!!

(Unless it's this one!!!!!!)