The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

   Flowers for remembrance, sunshine on the ferns for the unofficial start of summer. BK photo. Click to see it all.

“Yet it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. One can have the clearest and most complete knowledge of what is, and yet not be able to deduct from that what should be the goal of our human aspirations.”
Albert Einstein

The Everyday Climate Crisis

I was listening to the SF Giants baseball game with the Colorado Rockies being played near Denver on Thursday.  After a damp third inning the play-by-play turned to describing bright lightning and loud thunder, the tarps being nailed down, and then hail in the outfield like snow. The day before it had piled up three inches deep in some parts of Denver. There was a nearly 90 minute delay, a couple of more innings, another half hour delay before the game was called.

There seem to be more games cancelled by weather this season.  The Pirates saw two in a row in New York, as I recall.  That's one little indication (yet one that sports fans will notice) of what I predicted would happen someday soon: weather-related stories, especially violent and disastrous events, would become frequent in the daily news, along with news of other climate crisis effects, like food prices and illneses.  That someday appears to be now.

In just the past month or so, there were the tornadoes that spun across a wide and long swath of states for several days.  There were the California wild fires.  Then the floods and some 2000 landslides in Bosnia and Serbia, (a house in Serbia in photo above) killing 40 and creating damage "as least as bad" as that left by the 1990s war there, while also exposing land mines from that war.

  Now there are huge wildfires in Arizona, possible tornado damage in Albany NY, severe thunderstorms in Washington DC (and a storm of criticism for the National Weather Service's failure to predict them) and severe storms predicted Friday for New Mexico.

Will such daily evidence change the minds of those who persistently deny the reality of the climate crisis, even when they become an even higher proportion of news stories?  Probably not. The issue is now part of the cultural politics that is becoming absolute, and people may accept whatever "information" supports the view of the culture that they belong to and that embraces them. When your world is defined by Fox, and three-quarters of their climate stories are deceptive, you're safe at home. As climate crisis effects become more obvious and awful, fear may even increase the strength of the denial.

 So what can be done?  Maybe it's time to just stop listening to deniers and count them as a lost cause.  They are noisy--very actively so on the Internet.   There is big fossil fuel money behind them, and one of the two political parties is entirely captive to this money and these deniers.  Right now, no matter how crazy they get (and in some ways, the crazier the better) the structure of American politics and government makes it very likely that they will have some political power.

Still, their noise is much greater than their numbers, and even progressive sites distort their numbers by featuring every outrageous thing they say.

They aren't the majority.  And as Kim Stanley Robinson pointed out here in Arcata, all we need is 51%, and at most 60 votes in the U.S. Senate, to get to work.  It's time to concentrate not on the loud and the lost, but on those who vacillate (they don't want to think about it, they sort of believe but look for any excuse not to, they just want to think about and vote on other things) and those who know in general terms what the climate crisis is and what it might mean.  And especially to motivate those who are already concerned.

I've always wondered about that expression "preaching to the congregation."  Who else does a preacher preach to but the folks who show up?  They preach to the congregation, to the choir, in order to inform them, steel their resolve, motivate them to act, and guide their actions.  

So Naomi Klein can explain to us some reasons why we have trouble accepting the reality of the climate crisis, and exhort us: "And just as we have changed before, we can change again."  Rebecca Solnit can demonstrate the violence that climate crisis is already causing, and the political forces that suppress this knowledge, and what citizens can do about it.

Others bypass the arguments over climate change itself and go directly to such problems as the economics of dealing with it.  While some say there is not enough information generated on the costs of dealing with the effects (such as these fires, storms and droughts), others say the expense of addressing the causes is not ruinous, as the critics say, and the economics actually come out on the plus side. The International Energy Agency "concludes that the switch to low-carbon technologies such as solar power—together with anticipated improvements in efficiency—will bring huge savings from reduced fossil-fuel consumption. As a result, the world actually comes out slightly ahead: the costs of switching will be paid for in fuel savings between now and 2050."   

Another strategy that is in fact widely embraced is to simply work on the problems and ignore the deniers. How to change those minds is a less pressing challenge," write the editors of Bloomberg View, "than how to slow down climate change."  On the federal level, there's relative consensus among non-deniers around some proposals (the carbon tax) and healthy debate on others.  President Obama seems set to act--as soon as early June--to regulate coal fired plants, which may well have a decisive effect in slowing down climate change.

 But on both causes and effects, local, state, regional and international efforts are going on, beneficiaries perhaps of all the surface noise.  And research continues on ways to deal with the causes and effects rather than only predict the effects and prove over and over the causes.

A number of those who realize the reality of climate crisis and see it as the major human challenge of the future (and to the future) must get motivated to create a political movement.  That's the conclusion of several notable figures who started out studying or writing about the coming climate crisis, and now are also activists, such as Bill McKibben, former NASA scientist James Hansen, Mark Hertsggard and others.

Even Hillary Clinton has called for a citizens movement on this issue.  Kim Stanley Robinson says that it needs to be for the long haul and therefore self-perpetuating, led by succeeding generations of young people with the energy, talent and time to keep it going.

One movement strategy that's worked in the past is starting. Stanford University made some news when it decided to divest all coal company stock, but divestment is underway elsewhere.  It's not an exact analogy to South Africa, but divestment certainly worked there.  Some other under-the-radar political efforts are also underway, such as cowboys and Indians organizing against the Keystone pipeline.

So far a mass political movement hasn't happened, but that doesn't mean it won't happen.  In an interview, the late Jonathan Schell had some ideas for what might work but ultimately he admitted, why movements rise when they do is a mystery.  When their time comes, they just do.

Maybe that time begins this year. With an article in the new Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben is organizing a big march in New York City when the United Nations meets in September.

The challenge is daunting, and some--like MSNBC's Chris Hayes--says it is unprecedented, because of all the fossil fuel wealth that would have to be left in the ground.  He writes that such restraint has never happened.  I'm not so sure--there are still some forests left.

But nobody really knows exactly what the future holds, especially in responses to the climate crisis.  We can only form a vision of a better future, and work towards it in the present.  That's all we can do--our best in our present, for the future.

Fire, Got That, What About Ice?

It's melting.  Not exactly news, especially since last week, but the studies keep coming in.  According to NBC News:"Three years' worth of readings from the European Space Agency's CryoSat 2 satellite indicate that Antarctica's ice sheets are losing 159 billion tons of ice per year — which is twice as much as the estimates from previous altimeter surveys."  (There's more details in this BBC story, but the numbers are in metrics.)

The same story references another study, of Greenland: "A study published Sunday by Nature Geoscience reports that the canyons beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet are deeper and longer than previously thought. That suggests that there's more ice on the northern land mass available for thawing in a warming world, with the result that Greenland's future contribution to sea level rise could exceed past estimates."

Now how about ice and fire together? "New research on the effects of ice sheet melt in the Antarctic shows climate change is deforming the Earth’s crust, potentially prompting volcanic activity that could cause global sea-levels to rise much more than predicted."

That's if the volcanoes are under the ice and an eruption accelerates the melt.  There are possible sites in Alaska and Antarctica.  This story ends with the chilling news that Australian scientists who have been studying their fairly near neighbor of Antarctica may not be able to continue due to cutbacks in government funding.  Australia has yo-yoed back from being led by climate crisis believers to climate crisis deniers.

The response of the earth's crust to the redistribution of weight (as ice melts into oceans) and perhaps even to atmospheric temperature is another unknown, in this utterly interrelated planetary ecology.  But volcanoes would be one manifestation, earthquakes another.

The new Antarctic study comports with the results of studies released and referenced here in the past week or two.  The conclusion of all the studies is that while scientists cannot yet predict how fast the sea levels will rise, they're now pretty damn sure they are going to rise, certainly enough to threaten coastal cities worldwide and islands and even states (Florida) low in the water.  And maybe by a lot more, and maybe a lot faster.

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

"In the end it is a moral question whether individuals apply what they have learned or not."
C.G. Jung
photo: LA Times

It's Graduation Day at Humboldt State.  The ceremonies are held by college divisions, beginning in the morning and continuing into late afternoon.  I happened to be walking along the soon to be empty streets of Arcata as the last batch was leaving, heading for cars and apartments and restaurants, caps in hand.  None of them I saw was smiling.

There haven't been too many graduation days in recent years opening to robust economic opportunity.  And there are other factors that have prompted fear as well as hope.  I spent my college graduation day watching Bobby Kennedy's funeral.

Humboldt State is not known for bringing in graduation speakers, as least of general note.  But considering the future these graduates face, I thought today of one they could have easily had, who might have given them some genuinely encouraging words about that future.

Author Kim Stanley Robinson, who lives down the coast at Davis, was actually here just last week.  He spoke before a fairly small crowd on campus and then read at Northtown Books.  He was invited, not by any university group or entity, but by an outside environmental organization.  His talk on the economics of the near future was a variation on one that he gave to a different sort of audience in 2011, which is available for viewing   on YouTube.

This 2011 talk was framed as a thought experiment about an optimal future 200 years from now.  He spoke of the economics of getting there, though he said that the exact economic system--which would have to be post-capitalist--is unclear: he called it X.  But notably his vision of that future was less about a system and more about how life would be in a post-consumerist future, where pleasure would be derived from friends, family and community, sports and other activities, rather than buying things.  His novel Pacific Edge fills in a future like this.  

He ended this 2011 talk this way (more or less, this is my transcription) by addressing the students in the audience, in an authentic message that today's graduates should hear :  "The idea that the 1950s were the height of human culture and that we accidentally torched the world and now all you kids have to live like saints and have a lower standard of living than what we had back in those days--it's all wrong in three or four different ways that I hope my talk has elucidated.  Once you've got enough, once you've got the technology growing, once you're engaged in the process of making a sustainable civilization on this planet, you've got more than enough, you've got it better than it was back in the Cold War."

"It's more clever, it's more sophisticated, it's cleaner, it's more stylish--you have all the happiness without so much of the stupid ambition and the waste of your life doing stuff that you don't really want to do, in getting and spending and staying in a money economy that doesn't mean anything to you--we want meaning in our lives.  And making a sustainable civilization, which is now an emergency task, is all the meaning we need. 

 It's a beautiful meaning, and so in a way climate change, the environmental crisis, the tremendously fraught moment that we find ourselves in right now, is really just an opportunity for us to have meaning throughout our careers.  It's meaningful work, and it extends across all disciplines--it's in the sciences, it's in engineering, it's in the humanities, in the arts--all are going to be concerned with getting us through the next century alive and healthy and headed towards this next system, this X that I've been talking about."    

The Fires This Time

Even though the normal fire season has yet to begin, the huge fires raging in southern California aren't the first of the year--there have been "1,400 wildfires so far this year, double what the state would normally expect" in what officials now consider a year-round fire season.

But it's not just California.  The above map, produced by the U.S. Drought Monitor and published today in Wired, shows that fully half of the contiguous United States are in drought.

Meanwhile, a real time study concludes what other climate scientists predicted: the droughts as well as the extreme weather seen this winter (the polar vortex) are related to the climate crisis.

Another effect likely influencing today's weather is suggested in a NOAA study says that tropical cyclones of maximum intensity have been moving northward, now threatening China and Japan.

In other scientific findings about the climate crisis in the past week or so, after some scientists suggested that the East Antarctic ice may be close to a tipping point which would raise sea levels dramatically above what's been forecast so far, other researchers believe the melting of the West Antarctic has already begun and is probably unstoppable, adding 4 to 12 feet more of sea level rise.   Both of these however will take anywhere from a century to nine centuries to reach their maximum effect.

Today the droughts and storms are threatening food supplies, even food quality (less nutrition in grains) and causing other economic strains that threaten millions of people worldwide.

Summarizing

Wednesday Update: Another warm one for us today but nothing like the temps in southern California, where fires were raging, especially in the San Diego area where nine fires have burned over 9,000 acres and a number of homes.

Today (and forecast for tomorrow) it is summer in Arcata.  Record-breaking temps (low 70s to 80 or so, depending on the source) meet the usual high humidity.  Outside the door into the air the immediate difference is smell.  Barely noticeable manure spread on gardens in the neighborhood is suddenly pungent, as is the garbage in the bins outside groceries and restaurants.

New neighbors have a young son with another child on the way.  From over the fence the sound of water from the hose hitting the bottom of a small bright plastic pool.  It prompts an image maybe from memory, of standing in the sun-dazzle trying to wrap my mind around the idea that while I was really hot, in a few minutes, when the little pool is filled and I jump in, I will be cool.  Truth is I'm not sure I ever had a little plastic pool.  I probably played in a wash bucket.  But my sisters had one, and that sound is truly in the memory.

Students converge on Wildberries for their finals prep sustenance. My duty as a reporter forces me to observe that short shorts are in this year.

  From my window-side table, three horses with women riders pass through the parking lot.

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

“The experience of France in the Belle Époque proves, if proof were needed, that no hypocrisy is too great when economic and financial elites are obliged to defend their interest.”

Thomas Piketty
quoted by Paul Krugman in his New York Review of Books review of Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Sunday Sports Prattle

Baseball: The Giants are off to a great start.  Rejuvenated by new acquisitions, including the veterans pitcher Tim Hudson and the power hitter Mark Morse, they lead a competitive division.  Their starting pitching, while not up to standards of championship years, is pretty good, and relief pitching is better. They've gotten timely hitting and though some are (or were) not hitting well, they've been able to pick each other up.  What's most impressive about them, especially in this latest road trip, is their defense.  They are once again a fun team to follow.

I know the most about the Giants because I can listen to their games on radio.  My other team, the Pirates had a rocky start.  Inconsistent hitting but mostly pitching has hampered them.  But they're winning more lately--the Giants won 7 and lost only 3 games on their road trip--two of them to the Pirates.  Their trades seem to be working out well, but I sense a lack of depth.

Basketball: Weird playoffs, with nobody looking that good consistently.  While I'd like to see Oklahoma City get to the finals, right now I don't see anybody defeating Miami in seven.

Meanwhile, the disastrous reign of Dantoni with the Lakers is over.  Kobe is saying positive things about baby Buss but he's the one responsible for passing on Phil Jackson, twice.  Still think his oedipal ego is a huge problem.  However they do seem to have some young players with a future.  As long as they don't trade them away for another marquee has-been.  That's never worked for the Lakers (cf Gary Payton.)

Football: Concussion dangers talked about more but still not seriously addressed at any level.  So it's a dying game.  NFL draft was this weekend--lots of show for something that's more fantasy at this point than fantasy leagues.  Nobody knows how any of those players will perform.  The Steelers seem to have had a decent draft with intentions to completely revamp their defense with more speed, so their games may be more entertaining next year even if their record doesn't improve.      

We Are All Five Year-Olds Now

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones wrote a column about expressions of dissatisfaction with President Obama's foreign policy--by people who accept or at least admit that they agree with his foreign policy: "Fareed Zakaria is the latest columnist to acknowledge that although President Obama's foreign policy decisions have been largely correct, they've been sadly unaccompanied by any magic powers."

Drum goes on to wonder: "Has any president in history been so widely criticized for doing everything right but not crowing loudly enough about it? I mean, it's nice to think that a silver tongue would have gotten congressional Republicans to support intervention in Syria and Germans to approve harsher sanctions against Russia, but it's just not so. I think everyone knows this perfectly well, but we find it so frustrating that we blame Obama for it anyway. It's as if we're all five-year-olds."

There is something that political scientists have begun calling the Green Lantern Theory, or the expectation that the President alone can right every wrong, fix every problem single-handed and be the hero of the day.  Whereas they have known the limitations of presidential power for at least the past 50 years, since the publication of Richard Neustadt's classic Presidential Power.

But of course it's more than that, because Drum is right: in some ways we are all five year-olds, if that advanced.  We are first and foremost one basic thing (as William Irwin Thompson points out): we are mammals.  We are creatures born of mothers and fathers, and most often nurtured by them.  This is the unconscious source of many of our primary beliefs and assumptions, and the dramas of our lives, including expectations, projections and conflicts.

It's yet another reason that to deny that psychology is crucial in every aspect of our lives, including political, is sheer arrogant folly. If we don't make conscious the possibilities of (for instance) projecting the ideal father on the king or the President, we'll continue to befuddle ourselves and increasingly threaten our democracy, and now our civilization as well as many of earth's lifeforms, including our own.  Unless we at least take this possibility into consideration when evaluating our opinions, we are unlikely to make good decisions.

R.I.P. Jonathan Schell

It was only in seeing an issue of The Nation that is a few weeks old that I learned of the death of Jonathan Schell.  He was a writer and an activist who identified and helped to define the major issues of our time beginning with the Vietnam War, and his influential book of reporting, The Village of Ben Suc.

In the early 80s he wrote one of the most powerful books ever on the human dimensions of nuclear conflict, The Fate of the Earth.  Reading it first in the New Yorker was a powerful, poignant experience.  It had a great deal to do with the nuclear freeze movement of the 80s.

He warned against the Iraq war and remained an articulate opponent.  His 2007 book The Seventh Decade warned of new dangers of nuclear weapons and warfare--all the more dangerous because the common conception is that this danger is over.  It is not.

More recently he turned his attention to the climate crisis.  When asked to compare the threat of nuclear war with the climate crisis in a 2009 interview he said: "They are two of a kind. They’re both threats to species including our own and mutilations of the Earth which is all that we have. The difference is really between detroying ourselves instantly [with a nuclear war] or doing it more slowly with global warming. It’s a threat of a new order and death and magnitude. I think the nuclear danger was an alarm bell for the environment."

The book that binds the others together is his 2003 masterpiece The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People.  If democracy and indeed civilization are to have a future, it is a book that will grow in importance.

"Books outlast their writers; his masterpieces are vividly alive now," writes Rebecca Solnit in her Nation remembrance (April 21).  "We can remember Jonathan Schell by continuing to read his incomparable insights and analyses and be grateful that he gave us all those decades of words describing the world in unexpected and important ways."

The Big Pivot

Update Tues. p.m.: Links to the National Climate Assessment Report, to the well constructed White House graphical summary and to one of the news stories about the report.

It begins tomorrow.  Rolling Stone describes it, and the Guardian lays out the immediate agenda that starts with Tuesday's official release of the latest National Climate Assessment. It's the pivot to making the climate crisis a major topic for the rest of the Obama administration.

The Assessment basically says, it's clear: it's here.  The climate crisis is underway and is already causing problems and pain for Americans.  The Guardian in its story headlined Climate change is clear and present danger, says landmark US report : The National Climate Assessment, a 1,300-page report compiled by 300 leading scientists and experts, is meant to be the definitive account of the effects of climate change on the US. It will be formally released at a White House event and is expected to drive the remaining two years of Barack Obama's environmental agenda.

The findings are expected to guide Obama as he rolls out the next and most ambitious phase of his climate change plan in June – a proposal to cut emissions from the current generation of power plants, America's largest single source of carbon pollution. The White House is believed to be organising a number of events over the coming week to give the report greater exposure."

Concentrating on the Assessment is about more than raising general awareness and support.  It's proximate preparation for the EPA rules on coal-fired power plants to be announced in June.  One possible barrier may have been avoided already with last week's Supreme Court decision on regulating power plant pollution.  But the political battle could be epic, with the Koch Oven Brothers and other fossils leading a furious opposition.  Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone:

It's a gamble that could have a profound impact on energy politics, our economy and our ability to stabilize the climate. But if the president is wrong, it could not only cost his party control of the Senate this fall but also blow the last opportunity we have to save ourselves from life on a superheated planet. "It's a transformative moment," says Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in what may be the understatement of the century.

But the possible payoff, Goodell writes, is immense. If the EPA rules are like those proposed by the Natural Resources Defense Council, it could be that "470 million to 700 million tons of carbon pollution can be eliminated per year by 2020, equivalent to the emissions from 95 million to 130 million autos. NRDC calculates the plan would result in up to $63 billion in health and environmental benefits and up to $120 billion in investments in energy efficiency and renewables."

Reductions like this would place the U.S. in the forefront of reigning in greenhouse gases, in time for the next international climate summit at the end of 2015, providing negotiating muscle for a global agreement.

A chief player in all of this is undoubtedly John Podesta (seen also in the photo at top with President Obama and current chief of staff Denis McDonough.)  My guess is that he joined the Obama White House with this issue and these goals not only in mind, but as the brief that brought him there.  He's quoted several times in the Rolling Stone piece, so it's likely he was a major source.

Speaking of the EPA rules and their consequences: "This is a game-changer on the international front," says Podesta. "It will re-establish U.S. leadership, and it will demonstrate that America is committed to taking significant action to reduce emissions." Podesta points out that other progress has been made on the international front, including a deal with China and most developing nations to phase out so-called "superpollutants" like hydro fluorocarbons, or HFCs, which are used in refrigerators and other industrial applications.

Goodell also writes that even if the EPA rules are strong, the Keystone pipeline is eventually not permitted (his sources tell him this is likely) and there is a global agreement, it won't necessarily be enough to meet the minimum goals of limiting greenhouse gases emissions.  But he notes that Hillary Clinton has been speaking on the subject recently, and Podesta suggests it could be a major issue in her potential campaign.  Again, Podesta is an important connection.  Having served in the Bill Clinton White House (and Bill Clinton also being outspoken on the climate crisis), he represents a strategy that could potentially continue in the next presidency.

As for President Obama, Goodell's story notes early: Taking action on climate is one of the most important goals in the president's second term," John Podesta, counselor to the president and his point man on climate policy, told me a few weeks ago. "He feels a profound and urgent obligation to get as much done as he can before he leaves office."

But Goodell's story ends with Podesta quashing talk in the White House about legacy."It's not helpful in the day-to-day task of getting our work done," he explains. "Besides, if we don't take serious action on climate now, we may not have any history to look back on anyway."

A Tipping Point That Is Really A Tipping Point

Sometimes the "smoking gun" really is a smoking gun.  And now there's the possibly fateful case of a climate crisis tipping point that is actually a point at which something tips over.

That something unfortunately contains enough melting ice to raise sea levels by ten to thirteen feet worldwide, all by itself.  According to a study by climate scientists, it could well happen if global heating continues.  The place is East Antarctica.

"East Antarctica's Wilkes Basin is like a bottle on a slant," said lead-author Matthias Mengel in a statement. "Once uncorked, it empties out."

This basin is much larger than the UK. Right now this bottle is sealed by a rim of ice.  But melting already predicted could pop the stopper.

Sea level rise from Antarctica is projected to increase by 16 centimeters this century. "If half of that ice loss occurred in the ice-cork region, then the discharge would begin. We have probably overestimated the stability of East Antarctica so far," said co-author Anders Levermann.

Once the top is popped, the point is tipped, and the deluge begins. And once started it will continue for estimates of 5,000 to 10,000 years.

Though really a tipping point, it isn't exactly a smoking gun, at least not right now, because it may well take a long time--even hundreds of years--to become evident.  But it does suggest how these things can work.  Once begun, the effects continue, and may be impossible to stop once they are started.  Once the genie is out of the bottle.

The President and the People

Saturday night saw President Obama in one of his roles that generally gets little criticism--the presidential stand-up at the White House Press Association dinner.

But many of the President's roles are off screen or not covered by the media, including perhaps the most important ones.  White House spiritual advisor Joshua DuBois wrote about one such role in his book, excerpted here.  He writes about President Obama meeting with parents of the children gunned down at Sandy Hook elementary school in 2012:

The president took a deep breath and steeled himself, and went into the first classroom. And what happened next I’ll never forget.

Person after person received an engulfing hug from our commander in chief. He’d say, “Tell me about your son. . . . Tell me about your daughter,” and then hold pictures of the lost beloved as their parents described favorite foods, television shows, and the sound of their laughter. For the younger siblings of those who had passed away—many of them two, three, or four years old, too young to understand it all—the president would grab them and toss them, laughing, up into the air, and then hand them a box of White House M&M’s, which were always kept close at hand. In each room, I saw his eyes water, but he did not break.

And then the entire scene would repeat—for hours. Over and over and over again, through well over a hundred relatives of the fallen, each one equally broken, wrecked by the loss. After each classroom, we would go back into those fluorescent hallways and walk through the names of the coming families, and then the president would dive back in, like a soldier returning to a tour of duty in a worthy but wearing war. We spent what felt like a lifetime in those classrooms, and every single person received the same tender treatment. The same hugs. The same looks, directly in their eyes. The same sincere offer of support and prayer.

The staff did the preparation work, but the comfort and healing were all on President Obama. I remember worrying about the toll it was taking on him. And of course, even a president’s comfort was woefully inadequate for these families in the face of this particularly unspeakable loss. But it became some small measure of love, on a weekend when evil reigned.

And the funny thing is—President Obama has never spoken about these meetings. Yes, he addressed the shooting in Newtown and gun violence in general in a subsequent speech, but he did not speak of those private gatherings. In fact, he was nearly silent on Air Force One as we rode back to Washington, and has said very little about his time with these families since. It must have been one of the defining moments of his presidency, quiet hours in solemn classrooms, extending as much healing as was in his power to extend. But he kept it to himself—never seeking to teach a lesson based on those mournful conversations, or opening them up to public view."

Wins

Not a bad day for the good guys.  In what sportswriter Bill Plaschke called "the most spectacular slam dunk in professional basketball history," new NBA commissioner Adam Silver responded to the racist comments of LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling by banning Sterling from any association with the NBA for life, fining him the maximum allowed $2.5 million, and urging the Board of Governors (other team owners) to force Sterling to sell the Clippers.  Silver seemed confident he had the votes to get that done as well.  These are the maximum possible penalties.

Who's going to be the first to call this the Day of Sterling/Silver?  Me I guess.
 Silver appointed an independent investigator to determine if the voice on the widely heard tape was Sterling, and that determination was affirmative.  Sterling admitted to the investigator that the voice was his.  Silver's decision was made easier, if not mandatory, by the turmoil in the league, sponsors leaving the Clippers in droves, and the certainty of a player boycott if maximum penalties weren't exercised.

This spectacular news overshadowed another couple of victories.  A federal judge struck down that state's Wisconsin voter ID law because it imposed an undue burden on poor voters.  The decision could well be a precedent for challenges to voter ID laws in other states.

Earlier the US Supreme Court "upheld a federal regulation requiring some states to limit pollution that contributes to unhealthy air in neighboring states, reversing a lower court ruling and handing a victory to President Barack Obama.

By a 6-2 vote, the court said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency acted reasonably in requiring 28 states to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which can lead to soot and smog."

This decision reversed a lower court ruling, and apart from its positive effect alone in reducing pollution and scaling back greenhouse gases, it may support the EPA standards now in process for regulating emissions.

The decision has the most immediate effect on coal-fired power plants.  There are scientists and economists who believe that ending the burning of coal over time will be enough to forestall apocalyptic climate change.  Others don't go that far, but do agree that ending major coal use is essential to saving the planet.

Race In Your Face

Talk about chickens coming home to roost.  The sight of President Obama in the White House, acting as head of state, the prime representative of the United States, has driven some people--most of them rabid right Republicans--into a frenzy of madness, tripping over their projections and denial and letting out what perhaps even they are surprised is in their hearts and minds.

Most recently there was Cliven Bundy, a tax dodger hero of the right (except perhaps those who themselves own cattle ranches and don't get a free ride) who spouted off with such racist analysis that conservatives are repudiating the guy who was their hero 48 hours before.  Adam Serwer asks why, when what he's saying simply follows from the rabid right theology.  Their problem was nailed by, of course, a satirist: Andy Borowitz headlined: Republicans Blast Nevada Rancher For Failing To Use Commonly Accepted Code Words.

Now a huge firestorm over intensely and personally racist dialogue that no one seems to be denying is Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers NBA team.  The best commentary on this situation I've seen is from Amy Davidson here at the New Yorker.

Davidson points out how extreme Sterling's comments are, objecting to his girlfriend (that the guy is married and she is 50 years younger are normally the top details but not this time) posting a photo of herself with Magic Johnson, not only a personal acquaintance of Sterling but of course he's...Magic Johnson.

  "But it’s also worth talking about how we let racism hide in a tissue of supposed dispensations. A Magic Johnson gets a pass—usually—and the people at the parties where he shows up congratulate themselves with the idea that their discomfort around other black people had nothing to do with race at all. It is, supposedly, because of “culture” and attitude, education and status. This presumes that it’s left to black people to erase the racial aspect of their presence (or absence)—that is, to remake themselves so that they fit in certain rooms. That is an unfair obligation to start with. (If Magic Johnson isn’t a respectable person to be seen with, how about the President of the United States?) But the recordings expose the fraudulence of the whole transaction, the whole setup."

The Sterling situation is still gathering force, as the multiple ironies as well as big money involved begin to burn through American society.  Maybe making all of this conscious will turn out to be a good thing, a cleansing thing, but at the moment we're in the phase of facing the ugliness.  And it is important that we really face it.

E-Moloch

In the burgeoning controversy over e-cigarettes, this and similar stories caught my eye: a congressional hearing exposing how e-cigarette sellers were marketing specifically to young people, by using social media but also by handing out free samples at music and other events that attract the young.

It reminds me all too well of similar efforts in the late 1980s and early 90s when I was a columnist for a weekly alternative newspaper in Pittsburgh.   It was in fact called In Pittsburgh, and it was mostly of interest to a young adult readership.  At one of my frequent lunches with the editor-publisher, he informed me that the paper had been offered two very large new ad accounts, both from cigarette companies.  One of these companies was buying multi-page inserts three weeks out of four.  But they had a condition: no anti-smoking stories or words could appear in that issue.  The editor was telling me because I'd already written such columns, and he was accepting the ads and their conditions.

As shocking as this was, I was even more surprised that I was virtually alone in seeing it as betraying basic journalistic principles.  If anyone else connected with the paper thought so, they didn't say so or do anything about it. For some at least it was a small inconvenience for a greater good.  "All I know is that I'm getting health insurance," was one comment I recall.

At about the same time I went to a local club to hear a band--some place I went to fairly often, and where I usually saw a lot of people I knew.  There were Salem cigarette banners everywhere.  At the door to the dance floor and performance area, young ladies in fetching green and white outfits stood with trays of cigarette samples.  And what was the reaction?  I heard somebody say how flattering it was that a national brand was paying attention to a club in Pittsburgh.

I soon wrote about this event and the compact that my newspaper had made, knowing that the column would not be published and that I would resign in protest, which is how it played out.  I got no support from "friends" on the paper.  There suddenly appeared letters in the daily papers ostensibly from other writers for the weekly (though I'd never seen the names before) criticizing my action.  I got no support from anyone in the Pittsburgh press or media. Along with my gig and my readership, I lost pretty much all of my friends.

There were a number of lessons I learned from this, about habitual ways of thinking (no one connected this with censorship, although the usual suspects were up in arms when someone was prevented from describing a sexual act on the radio), about the power of money to corrupt and compromise at any level, and about costs that never quite end.  Some of this informs my understanding of reactions to the climate crisis.

 But some of it of course bears directly on this current e-cigarette situation.  This time however reaction time has been at least a little quicker.  It didn't take as long for a congressional hearing and substantive political opposition.  And today the Food and Drug Administration is exploring rules governing e-cigarettes as well as other new tobacco products.  It's been a 5 year struggle to get that far, and the proposed rules don't do much to restrict marketing to youth.  But that's par for the course.  It wasn't until several years after my confrontation that the FDA finally declared that nicotine is a drug that it could regulate.

Update: However, the FDA action may not be all that it seems, judging from this Wall Street Journal article: "Makers of electronic cigarettes breathed a big sigh of relief Thursday as the Food and Drug Administration avoided a heavy-handed approach to regulating the fast-growing alternative to traditional smokes, likely paving the way for stepped-up investment and even more varieties."

Several years ago I wrote an anti-smoking musical for school children (never produced) that included the figure of Moloch representing the cigarette companies.  Moloch mythologically is a demon who devours children.  He's apparently still working for tobacco interests, although he's branched out since then, considerably.

Life in the Day

                                      Remember me?
                                      Remember me.

Clouds of Unknowing

Cloud computing, sold to a tech-drunk citizenry as the latest heavenly benefit of the corporate gods of cyberspace, is perhaps the biggest environmental blind spot left. Because, as this NPR report points out, these clouds aren't puffy white spirits smiling from the sky.  They're acres of machines on earth, needing and ravenously eating power in rapidly increasing quantities.

Right now, Greenpeace estimates that if the cloud were a country it would rank sixth in the world in power consumption, just before the actual country of Germany.  The New York Times figures it would take 30 nuclear power plants to supply it.  It also needs constant air conditioning and enormous amounts of water to keep all those fevered machines cool.

And the cloud is getting bigger all the time.  For now, most of the electricity is generated by clean energy methods, mostly wind and water power.  But how long can that last?  It may even be that so much clean energy is being soaked up by servers that a lot less is being used for the normal grid than otherwise might be the case.

Apart from the ramifications for the environment and the climate crisis, there's the issue of vulnerability.  Consumers are only too eager to cede control to corporations that store an increasing proportion of what we've learned to call information.   So photos, music and reading material as well as important documents are increasingly being stored nowhere but in some cloud somewhere.  And it takes electricity all along the way from there to you in order for it to, well, exist.

So what happens when the cloud blows up or the power goes off long enough to erase everything in the cloud? Or you lose your electricity and therefore your access for part or all of the time?  And you look around to find no photo albums, no recorded music, not even CDs or DVDs, let alone magazines or books.  Just your multiple "platforms" now connecting you to nothing.

But even without an electric Armageddon, none of this stuff (which is no longer "stuff" but digits) is actually yours anymore.  It belongs to the company that holds the cloud.  You're only renting access to it, if you accept the terms and conditions and how the hell could you not?

Though several people in my life have tried to buy me a Kindle or similar device, I've resisted.  At first it was until the devices were improved and more versatile.  And maybe until prices of books etc. came down (which is never going to happen now that so many people are hooked on the devices.)

Then this weekend I saw at TPM that subscribers (i.e. paid subscribers) were going to be discussing "the transformation from reading paper books to digital books," and proprietor Josh Marshall admitted that he switched to digital three years ago, and is now unable to read paper books anymore.  

That scared me straight.  No digital drugs for me.  When I buy a book, or borrow one from a library, it's mine.  I can hold it, carry it wherever, but most of all, it's mine.  It doesn't sit in some cloud where Amazon is always watching, and sending me emails asking me how I like it.  Or more to the point, where Amazon can always take it away from me.  Amazon, the cloud, or the grid.

Maestro

                               Marquez on his 87th birthday earlier this year

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the greatest writer who began publishing in my lifetime, died on Thursday. He was singular in his ability to delight readers of every class and country.  For years when anyone asked me to recommend a book to read, I gave them A Hundred Years of Solitude. It didn't matter if the reader was a PhD in Cambridge or a waitress in western Pennsylvania.  It never missed.

He wrote inimitable fiction and insisted on journalism as a literary form. His Nobel Prize lecture was mostly about Latin America rather than literature. It gives human and historical dimension to a book that appeared long after, The Shock Doctrine.  It ended:

"On a day like today, my master William Faulkner said, "I decline to accept the end of man". I would fall unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to engage in the creation of the opposite utopia. A new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible, and where the races condemned to one hundred years of solitude will have, at last and forever, a second opportunity on earth."

Yet at other times he talked wisely, compassionately and valiantly about literature and the work of writing. One of my favorites, from an interview:

"You write better with all your problems resolved. You write better in good health. You write better without preoccupations. You write better when you have love in your life. There is a romantic idea that suffering and adversity are very good, very useful for the writer. I don't agree at all."

But my favorite, that in some sense serves as an epitaph, is this:
"Some say the novel is dead. But it is not the novel. It is they who are dead."

Moving Climate

There was a lot of news  bearing on climate crisis matters in the past week or so. The second part of the UN report was issued, characterized every which way in media headlines. Climate Change Adjustments Must Be Fast And Major, U.N. Panel Says, according to NPR. IPCC climate change report: averting catastrophe is eminently affordable says the Guardian.  The points stressed in the latter are that clean energy conversion is pretty cheap, plus it has other benefits (ultimately economic) besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Another new thing on the climate block is a television series about the climate crisis, Years of Living Dangerously, which began on the Showtime pay cable channel Sunday but also is viewable for free here on the Internet.  It has Hollywood stars interviewing and investigating pertinent events and issues.  There's a kind of paid advertising blog on it at TPM, starting with this one.

 I haven't had a chance to watch it yet, but I will note that I proposed something like this in probably the first thing I wrote specifically for a web site more than a decade ago, and reposted at Kowincidence: "Use Hollywood faces and voices, send them places where something can be shown that indicates the effects of global heating. Send Julia Roberts to interview an Inuit elder on camera about the change in Arctic ice and weather patterns, and the effects on the animals and plants. Take an action hero to high altitudes, take Mariel Hemingway up to Mt. Kilimanjaro and measure the snow, and some swimsuit models to an island that will disappear under the water because of global heating."

A TV broadcast network--NBC News-- also reportedly did a decent special report.)

I also pleaded for making the climate crisis a moral issue, and another step was taken in this direction by one of my favorite writers writing, Rebecca Solnit, in  her Guardian piece "Call climate change what it is: violence."

That wasn't the only tell-it-like-it-is pronouncement.  A Boston Globe column came right out and said that climate crisis skeptics don't deserve a veto.  Probably one of the more positive moves this week in the media was the full-throated cry in what must be the definition of a middle American newspaper, USA Today: On climate change, expect the worst.

A very public gauntlet was thrown down by a U.S. Senator (Sheldon Whitehead) and prominent senior House member (Henry Waxman)--both Democrats--who made a very strong case that the Obama administration has all the facts it needs to deny the Keystone pipeline because of how much worse it could make the climate crisis.  And they made it in a very public place, on the CNN site. Update 4/18: The State Department postponed final decisions until after a Nebraska court case settles the route the pipeline can take, which affects environmental impact.

As the UN report notes and the Guardian emphasized, the economy of change is positive, and basically unreported progress is being rapidly made on efficiency and cost of clean energy. A big step was taken last week in legitimizing the business future of clean energy when IKEA made a big investment in an Illinois wind farm, its first in the U.S. and second in North America.

 But there's even a cheaper way to cut emissions, though it seldom gets mentioned: conservation and energy efficiency.  This Think Progress piece  uses the information that when Japan closed its nuclear power plants after the catastrophe of Fukushima, half of the energy those plants produced was saved in the next several years by conservation, mostly by ordinary people.  Energy efficiency helped maintain that savings over 3 years now.  Studies show that the U.S. could cut 20% of its energy use by these means.  It would take a deliberate commitment so that the savings wouldn't disappear with new uses, but it's not something that has been tried.

All of this happened as other scientists made their case that the previously mysterious First Extinction--the worst known--some 250 million years ago, was caused by microbes that over a very long time excreted enough methane into the atmosphere to heat the planet and change the climate. "I would say that the end-Permian extinction is the closest animal life has ever come to being totally wiped out, and it may have come pretty close," said Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Greg Fournier, one of the researchers.

What it took tens of thousands of years for these microbes to do, humans are well on the way to doing in a comparative split second.  In the first week of April 2014, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Earth hit the highest level in at least 800,000 years.

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

                 April White #1 by BK  click to see complete photo

"The only glimmer of hope is that their newly developing sciences are quickly proving...the interrelatedness of all life. If they can develop enough scientific evidence to bring their knowledge back up to the level of natural peoples, they may cease their war against the world. We must hope that one day they will realize that Indian beliefs are backed by thousands of years of close observation.”

Carter Camp (Ponca)

R.I.P. Amos Tripp

The North Coast and the California Indian community lost a valued leader in Amos Tripp, who died at the age of 70.  An obit is posted here at Lost Coast Outpost.  I worked with him when he was on the Humboldt Area Foundation Board of Directors, and I was writing the grant for what became the Native Cultures Fund.  He was warm and funny in conversation, and invited me to attend a particular ceremony that remains special in my memory.  We will all miss him.

Mourning

4/12:An Update from the LA Times.

Here at Humboldt State University we are mourning the deaths and injuries of those caught in a bus and truck collison who were on their way to campus.  The bus was one of three carrying high school students from southern California for a college visit.  The crash happened late afternoon Friday on U.S. highway 5 some 200 miles away. A Federal Express tractor trailer truck crossed the median and collided head-on with the chartered bus.  There were several explosions and both vehicles burned completely. Ten people were killed and 40 or so injured, some with serious burns, others with minor injuries.

Among the ten who died were 5 high school students and the drivers of the bus and the FedEx truck.  Also killed were HSU alum Michael Myvett and his fiancee, Mattison Haywood.  Myvett was a therapist at an autism treatment facility.  They were chaperoning the trip.

Also killed was Arthur Arzola, an HSU Admissions Office staff member who worked primarily with low-income and first-generation students in the Los Angeles area.  Arzola and Myvett were known for their dedication to young people often overlooked or abandoned because of their economic status or health challenges.

That the students on this bus (and the two that made it safely to campus) were low-income students who would have been the first in their families to attend college naturally figured in follow-up news stories, though this approach led to some headlines in questionable taste. Because of that, I'm not linking to any of those stories.

 University and California State University officials however have acted with sensitivity and restraint, but proactively, visiting the injured and looking after the students on the other buses who had arrived before the accident.

A Nation's Thanks

The resignation of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was handled by most media outlets with headlines that almost uniformly linked it with the initial failure of the heathcare.gov website--even though this is May and that was October, and in the end the ACA signups exceeded the predictions made before the website problems, which lasted less than a month.

Almost totally ignored was the dogged determination that Kathleen Sebelius exhibited in bringing to fruition the largest, most comprehensive new social program since the 1960s.  She endured hours of ugly, mean-spirited and politically motivated interrogation by Republicans in Congress--hours amounting to days she could have spent in the real work of administering this complex and unprecedented program, in addition to the many other responsibilities of her office.

For this she has been tarred and feathered by Republicans with the continuing connivance of the media.  Here at least is a fair-minded story, which includes the ultimate successes as well as the failures along the way, which in any case were not only her responsibility. (Update: And here's another.)

This nation owes Kathleen Sebelius more than it can repay for her sacrifices as well as her determined good work.  When this epic change in healthcare insurance has more miles on it, perhaps then the extent and importance of her work as HHS Secretary will be honored, and her name remembered with Frances Perkins and  Hallie Flanagan as forces for good at a crucial time, even in the otherwise thankless and always temporary job of federal administrator.  The nation owes her thanks.

Medicine

Yes, as Obamacare participation numbers go higher with each new study, it's time for GOPers to take their medicine.  But in the states they can still kill people with their obstructions, as in Florida where the failure to take advantage of free support from the federal level for Medicaid expansion has cost this woman her life--and is on track to kill thousands more.  Said the friend of Christine Dill, 32 year old mother of three who was working 3 jobs but couldn't make enough to pay for her heart medicine: “I am burying my best friend because of the policies of the Republican Party. I am burying my best friend because had Medicaid expanded, her needs would have been met.”