Paul Klee, 1940.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The great redeeming and reassuring element in this whole Nixon business is that the majority of ordinary people is still capable of recognizing an abuse of power not as the norm. If it becomes the norm and nobody recognizes it as an abuse, then you're in real trouble."

Tom Stoppard
1974 interview with Mel Gussow of the New York Times

"Disgrace Disguised as Achievement"

That's what Al Gore called the Gee, Ate climate crisis statement. He also is criticizing 2008 presidential candidates for not leading on the climate crisis. What Gore has been saying is the subject of a diary at Daily Kos by jekyllnhyde. What I said is further down this page, or here at Daily Kos.

The National Climate Data Center said today that so far 2007 is tied for the hottest first six months of the year on record.

Hey, it's flag day!

Hotspot Video Contest

An email from Mike Palamuso, of the League of Conservation Voter's Global Warming Project:

I saw your recent diary on global warming on kos...good stuff. And thanks for the Heat Is On plug!

I wanted to let you know about a new video contest we've launched -- "The Hotspot Contest: 30 seconds to convince the next president to COOL IT DOWN." The basic idea is that we are asking people to give us their best 30 second message to get the next president to be a leader on the issue of global warming. The winner will get 2 tickets and airfare to the NY Live Earth Concert on July 7. You can check out the contest page at www.heatison.org/hotspot. We just launched it yesterday and will be accepting submissions for 2 weeks.

Thanks again,
Mike

-----------------------------------------------------------
Mike Palamuso
Deputy Director, Global Warming Project
League of Conservation Voters
http://www.heatison.org

Helix Nebula.

After the "Gee, Ate!"-- Time For State Based Heroism

Update: A version of this has been Rescued at Daily Kos.

The G8 meeting of powerful western nations was not a pretty sight, especially when it came to confronting the Climate Crisis. After evidence surfaced that the U.S. was going to scuttle the European plan to cut carbon emissions, a compromise was announced at the conference, which may have saved face but little else. The agreement was to "consider" efforts to cut emissions in half by 2050, in concert with the U.S. plan to convene yet another conference.

Some gullibles hailed it as a step forward for Bush in admitting reality, but the difference may well have been only in semantics. Check this statement from Bush: "And the fundamental question is how best to send proper signals to create the technologies necessary to deal with this issue." That's been the Bush mantra: the problems will be solved by new technologies...as soon as his buds can figure out how to make money from them. And even the 50% goal is short of what's necessary, according to most experts.

As evidence continues to mount of just how serious and imminent a crisis this is, and awareness around the world has grown fast, the most effective responses have so far been from individuals, communities and (within the U.S.) a few states, cities and regional arrangements. These efforts can make a big difference, but until huge energy producers and huge corporate and government energy users are effectively regulated, and until other efforts are encouraged by national policies and programs (such as tax credits and even changes in the tax system itself, as Al Gore suggests), the Climate Crisis will not be seriously addressed.

So far the record of nations has been dismal. India refuses to regulate emissions, and China's goals are modest at best. But even many of those nations that have committed to reducing CO2 aren't meeting their goals, including the UK and Japan. Al Gore calls Canada's announced program "a complete and total fraud."

The nations that are rich now and have been for years--like the "gee, ate!"--are precisely the ones who need to be leading and acting, for as Desmond Tutu wrote last week, the three billion poor in the rest of the world "are not responsible for global warming, but they will pay the highest price if wealthy countries refuse to do their fair share."

We need these nations to step up. It's clear that even the initial attempts to confront this crisis aren't easy. But this is the time for some state-based heroism.

New leadership in the U.S. could help a lot, provided there is a real commitment and it is articulated to the electorate. There are some hopeful signs: two Democratic candidates, Senator Chris Dodd and Governor Bill Richardson, have aired the first political ads focused on the Climate Crisis. In fact, all of the major Democratic candidates and several of the Republican candidates have spoken in their respective debates in favor of efforts to address the Climate Crisis, and of an Apollo-size effort (as advocated by the Apollo Alliance) in alternative energy.

So candidates are beginning to recognize new levels of concern in the electorate. As the opening paragraph of a story on a new Neilson poll says: Global concern about climate change has risen dramatically over the last six months and consumers increasingly expect their governments to act..." There are new grassroots effort to apply political pressure on candidates to pay attention, such as the Climate Summer project in New Hampshire. There is a new web site--Heat Is On.org--created by the League of Conservation Voters to monitor and encourage candidates' confronting the Climate Crisis directly.

The questions now must be: how committed are they really? What are they committed to, and how deep is their committment? How much do they understand, and how much do they care? Lip services to a suddenly popular issue is not enough. They must know and communicate the importance of a shared commitment, and be ready and willing to lead the nation and the world.

Who is ready to lead the U.S. in state-based heroism on behalf of the planet's future? The stakes are high. As Bill McKibben writes, "By now, most observers think that the fate of the U.S. climate effort may be decided in the first few months of 2009, when we find out whether the new president will take it on as an incremental issue or a transforming one."

Broken

The United States of America is founded on two basic functional principles: our democratic system and our rule of law, both set forth in the U.S. Constitution. In both categories, thanks to the Bush administration, this nation is in grave danger of failing. And by failing I mean setting itself up for chaos and blatant dictatorship, which in effect will threaten the future of the civilized world and perhaps life as we know it on Earth.

Our rule of law is challenged again and again, so obviously this past week when the Bushites try again to override a court decision that denies them their ability to destroy constitutional and international rights. The principle of habeus corpus is obscurely named --perhaps it should be repeated as "the right to your day in court" or to be charged and put on trial according to law. But its bad branding shouldn't obscure how fundamental a right it is--basic to every other right in the Constitution, including free speech and freedom of religion. As Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley said on Countdown: "...it is actually the foundation for all other rights. When the president—when the government throws you into a dungeon for what you say or who you pray to, it‘s habeas corpus that‘s the right that allows you to see the enforcement of the other rights."

We learned more last week about the lengths to which the Bushites go to deny these rights, in the effort to circumvent the law by appealing to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft when he had relinquished his authority temporarily to have surgery and recover from it.

But these are not new efforts--the Bush administration has been doing all this persistently, and yet they continue to do so, with no one effectively stopping them. Such brazen success emboldens others to defy the rule of law, such as the Republicans who lined up last week to demand the immediate pardon of Scooter Libby, despite his lawful prosecution and conviction, despite the fact that he was convicted of obstructing justice by preventing effective investigation and possible prosecution of larger, underlying crimes in the Valerie Plame affair, and despite contravening the established procedures for pardons in the most outrageous ways. Pardons are normally given after the sentence is served or at least begun, and after the convicted admits guilt, repents and asks for mercy. But Republicans want the law and the courts to simply be ignored and overpowered by the executive.

What if President Clinton had looked at the Supreme Court decision of Gore v. Bush that gave the election to Bush in 2000, rightly concluded that it was a flawed decision, against precedent, and made by justices with political conflicts of interest, and simply voided it? The principle is exactly the same.

In other times, actions of which President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are accused or have admitted would be sufficient cause to bring articles of impeachment against them. But no such congressional action is forthcoming.

The Bushite challenge to the rule of law is an aspect of their challenge to the fundamentals of our democratic system. The Iraq war is opposed by three-fourths of the American people, yet it goes on. Three-fourths of the American people believe the country is on the wrong track, and yet the Bushites persist. Even though the Bushites are legitimately in power until the next election, this indecent ignoring of the opinions of citizens is very dangerous to democracy.

More serious still are the Bushites direct threats to electoral democracy. The pattern of firing and hiring officers of the law in the U.S. Justice system based on political party and ideological loyalties is itself a major threat to our system. Yet the people responsible for this have not been held accountable. After many calls for his firing, after many predictions that he would not last out the week or the month, Alberto Gonzales is still the Attorney General of the U.S., despite evidence which continues to mount that he has been dishonest, incompetent and acted against the rule of law, and against fairness necessary for the democratic electoral system to function.

Moreover, the intent of these manipulations of justice seems more and more clearly to be to suppress votes that may go to Democrats, by appointing judges who would prosecute charges of voter fraud against Democrats, no matter how dubious those charges might be, and to ignore charges of voter suppression and fraud against Republicans, no matter how substantial the evidence might be.

The intent clearly is to create a permanent majority for Bushites, who might more properly be called Rovians, because they intend to continue beyond this administration (possibly with Fred Thompson.) So simply waiting for Bush to leave office won't be enough. The intent is to subvert the electoral system.

The Bushites have so far successfully acted like a dictatorship, and no one has stopped them. There are ongoing investigations but they are painfully and perhaps fatally slow. The Bushites, the Rovians seek to establish the means for further dictatorship, and no one is preventing them. The U.S. is in deep trouble, and so is the future.

RFK

The anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's death comes at a dark moment of intense political polarization, in a nation roiled by an unpopular war characterized by official deceit. Many of Robert Kennedy's words on Vietnam could be dropped into the newspaper today and they would be just as relevant.

It is a time of violence in word and deed. It is a time mortal peril for this country and its institutions, the country and the institutions of which he had a deep knowledge, for which he had a deep commitment. It is a time of mortal peril for the world and its life. His son and namesake knows this--Robert Kennedy, Jr. has been and remains one of our greatest champions of our environment.

1968 was a time of political upheaval as well. In this election year it is well to remember that the revered RFK, if he were a politican today, would be criticized and castigated from one end of the political spectrum to the other, and all over the Internet. He would be charged today, as he was charged then,with opportunism, cynical and self-centered politics, and trading on his name and wealthy family.

Kennedy was himself a polarizing figure, although his words were of reconcilation. That in part was what made him polarizing. His positions on various issues did not satisfy the templates of the left or right. Yet he was the only white politician who had the passionate support and love of many blacks. He was the only political leader who spent time on Indian reservations and tiny Inuit villages as well as southern rural and white West Virgina mountain shanty towns.

He inspired passions for and passions against. People wanted to touch him, and he needed to touch others--he seemed to learn through touch. He learned through children, extending the feelings of a father to compassion for all children.

He grew up in privilege, and his early meetings with black leaders were not warm. Yet by 1968, when Martin Luther King was shot and killed, his widow asked Robert Kennedy to arrange to have his body moved from Memphis to Atlanta. His impromptu speech, passing on the news of King's assassination in a black neighborhood where he happened to be, is one of his most famous.

Kennedy's first major speech was just after King's death, and after the violent riots that torched and destroyed significant parts of many cities. In some cities, like Washington, it would be more than a decade before those areas recovered.

I could quote his Vietnam speeches, emphasizing the horror for the victims of war. But Robert Kennedy's life, and a great deal of the promise of America, was ended by an act of violence in June 1968. I remember those hours and days. The primary emotion I felt I later understood as this: loneliness. Robert Kennedy's death made this a very lonely country for me.

Robert Kennedy took on that last political fight, knowing the odds were against him, knowing that violence was in the air. He was a warrior for peace. It is important to remember even as we stand up against the cynical and cowardly violence of the rabid right, that Robert Kennedy's last crusade was this: as he said to a largely black audience in that unwritten speech on the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, "Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world."

In his next major speech, in Cleveland, Ohio, on April 4, he said this:

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact. The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

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.

A friend of ours was talking the other day about how much
she enjoys watching the barn swallows on her property
go through their nesting rituals in the spring. We see them
only occasionally around our house, but this is a photo off
the web of one. But we have seen that at least one of our
hummingbirds has returned.

Wolfing Down the Debate

UPDATE: A post by MissLaura at Daily Kos reminds me that even before Hillary objected to the hypotheticals, Barack Obama called Wolfie out on an overly simplistic "show of hands" question on English as the official U.S. language. His statement set the stage for Hillary's, and is in itself another victory in demanding serious consideration of serious issues, which involves using language correctly.

In many ways the debate among Democratic candidates on Monday was heartening. It's a capable group of candidates, substantative and incisive. Several mentioned the climate crisis though there were as usual no questions directly about it. Senator Biden showed real passion on the Darfur genocide and for a moment took the debate out of politics when he insisted that while they debated, people were dying, and it is needless.

Some say Hillary won, some say John Edwards, and except for momentum of the moment, it hardly matters. But there was a moment that might matter: when the candidates revolted against the inquisitor, Wolf Blitzer of CNN.

I've seen comments on several blogs assuming that Blitzer is a Republican advocate, but what certainly was clear by his questions was he is a wolf for the most sensational possible headline he could create from the event. Every chance he got he honed in on some hot button issue or phrase. He often did it with hypothetical scenario questions, like the one in the first debate (if two U.S. cities were attacked simultaneously by terrorists, what would you do? or some such.)

The first such hypothetical I can recall was the most devastating: in 1988, when the Willie Horton ads were honing in on the Crime issue, and specifically the record of Governor Michael Dukakis, the Dem candidate, the first question in the debate was how would he feel if a criminal released from prison raped his wife (or something like that), and he gave a bloodless policy wonk answer. Years later he said he knew immediately that he'd just lost the election.

Well, that only increased the hunger for hypotheticals among "news reporters" eager to make news and their mark on history. Still, the candidates appeared surprised by the one in the first debate this year. Not this time. Wolf asked several, there was general grumbling, and then Hillary said directly, "we're not going to answer hypotheticals." And that's all it took.

I hope this is a trend, and I'd advise the next bugaboo they take on directly is the language that Republicans impose on issues. There has been endless debate and discussion the past few years about framing and memes and branding and Frank Luntz versus George Lakoff. It's about time to bring it out in the open on the presidential debate level.

For example, right now the Republican buzzword is "amnesty" on immigration. Somebody has to step up and say, regarding provisions in the current immigration bill, "It's not amnesty. Amnesty is a general pardon. Nobody's being pardoned--illegal immigrants will pay a fine and go through a process in order to become citizens." Etc. Refusing to let the newsWolf control the debate and distort its purpose with simplistic hypotheticals is the first step. The next is refusing to accede to distorting and simplistic language just because it's endlessly repeated.

Seal Shaman Mask by Edward Tocktoo
at Stonington Gallery.

Politics v. Science in Fight for the Future

I am not particularly pious about objective science--it's flawed like any human enterprise. Nor do I believe that politics is automatically ignoble--although it's in eye of the needle territory. But when it comes to information bearing on the Climate Crisis, it's important to notice the difference.

For example, President Bush got headlines for proposing an international conference to set carbon emission limitation goals, something he's resisted in the past. Some have applauded this move, including political leaders in and beyond the U.S. But others see it as a calculated political diversion, meant to postpone action that many countries are ready to take, notably as a result of the European Union proposals that the U.S. rejected. In this view, Bush's proposals are a p.r. smokescreen to deflect criticism at the upcoming international conference Bush will attend in Germany. And as has happened so often, U.S. media fell for it, hook, line and sinker, though European media did not.

The climate crisis debate, which must appear to be predicated on science, is often dominated by politics, which in turn serves the interests of the rich companies that finance political campaigns and careers, and otherwise buy influence with ideologically-driven or just plain fearful constituencies.

Political interference with climate science has been well documented in the Bush administration. But sometimes it is more subtle, like the latest Bush move, which deflects attention rather than squashes information. Something similiar may have happened last week after NASA scientists, led by Dr. James Hansen, issued a sobering report on the Climate Crisis, indicating that the world has no more than a decade to address it with measures that substantially lessen climate crisis pollution.

As ABC News put it: Even "moderate additional" greenhouse emissions are likely to push Earth past "critical tipping points" with "dangerous consequences for the planet," according to research conducted by NASA and the Columbia University Earth Institute. With just 10 more years of "business as usual" emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas, says the NASA/Columbia paper, "it becomes impractical" to avoid "disastrous effects."

These are scientists, not politicians, telling us that our planet as we know it is in grave danger, and of course they are not the first or only ones to have done so in the past year, or five, or ten. These are the people we educate and pay to study these subjects, and to give us just such a warning.

But instead of spurring debate and action with urgency befitting such a warning, our media got suddenly deflected by another story that by some strange coincidence also had the NASA label affixed to it--a statement by the head administrator of NASA that it's arrogant to assume that global heating requires action--after all, who's to say what climate is best?

NASA chief Michael Griffin isn't a climate scientist. His background is in engineering. But his comments got talked around, angrily opposed, debated point by point with reason and evidence and---well, that was the point. To get everybody talking about this outrageous nonsense, and not about scientific findings.

Now, like clockwork, India has reportedly announced that it won't abide by any binding restrictions on fossil fuel emissions that might emerge from the G8 international summit, because they would limit its economic growth. Besides being the country where your customer service representative likely lives, India is also the nation with the Bush's biggest sweetheart deal on nuclear weapons and nuclear power in general. What a coincidence. Otherwise known as politics.

Griffin got some traction on his possibly poll-tested remarks because a lot of people think scientists are arrogant, and some doubtlessly are. On the other hand, when it works right, science is self-correcting. So when a new study contradicts accepted climate models--suggesting a global heated future may be considerably wetter than suggested--scientists take note. And they get going on doing more science to get it right.

Elsewhere

Recollection of the classic 1962 film, To Kill A Mockingbird at Boomer Hall of Fame.

And even more about Harper Lee's novel, and the play as well as movie based on it, at Stage Matters.

Paul Klee: Cosmic Composition.

When Will We Ever Learn?

Once again, we had no phony Memorial Day around here. All the false and misguided pieties can't obscure the conviction that a people that truly cares about fallen soldiers would be intent on making sure needless war never takes another. We're very far from that these days.

The reflex to call such sentiments pacificism and ask the sophomoric question about standing by while your grandmother gets attacked is so bitterly out of place these days, in view of the kind of war we're sending soldiers to die in. And dying they are, at record speed. All you need to know about the disposition of this war now is in this report on what soldiers in Iraq told a blind warhawk senator and his response. That this war is so obviously wrongheaded that even soldiers are speaking out, and that this war was founded on lies from the start--the most recently one to be exposed being that the "intelligence" was faulty.

The soldier defending the homeland from attack is so seldom the actual cause of war--and hasn't been in the wars America has fought since at least World War II, not counting at least the intent of military action in Afghanistan. The cynicism of those in power who speak piously of patriotism and supporting the troops for political and monetary advantage and nothing else is disgusting. The awful truth is that many if not most warfare is to make the rich richer, and for that, the non-rich will die and be maimed, and their families and the rest of the non-rich are tricked and manipulated into believing it's all for a noble cause.

The noble cause is developing, acquiring and using the skills of peace. It is facing the real threat to our people, like the climate crisis. It is facing the future together, rather than repeating the terrible patterns of the past that benefit the undeserving few.

The plight of desert pulpfish in Death Valley was instrumental
in creating the Endangered Species Act. There are but 42 of them left,
apparently on the brink of extinction. SF Chronicle photo.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"I hate pathos. It's soft and weak. But tragedy has fight."

Dame Sybil Thorndike

Mother Earth

"Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world."

So wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring in 1962. She wrote about the unthinking threats to nature and to our own lives from the indiscriminate and large-scale pollutions humanity was imposing on the stuff of life--the air, water and earth, the plants and animals and the cells of our own bodies. She wrote:

"For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death."

Though her book helped lead to banning DDT and some other chemicals, and though she is justifiably known as the mother of the environmental movement, her clarion call still needs to be heard. Chemicals in vast numbers and combinations continue to enter our lives, these days with little attention or question. My generation was the first to be subjected to many of these chemicals, and early evidence suggests we may be paying the price in more sickness and earlier death as we enter our last decades.

But her words ring true especially for the future. The climate crisis caused by fossil fuel pollution is another extension of the basic problem she identified.

Rachel Carson died of cancer just a few years after this book was published. Her 100th birthday was celebrated Sunday, in (among other places) Pittsburgh, which claims her as a native, and where she attended college. These two quotations from her book are also, appropriately, from a fine article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette by Scott Shalaway that is well worth reading for a summary of her legacy.

Elsewhere

Reflections on the psychedelic 60s prompted by a new exhibit in New York at 60's Now.

80sF in yellow orange to 100+ deep red. And this is just May 25...

The New Normal

The Solstice aside, this weekend is the official beginning of summer, and guess what--it's likely to be a long, hot one. But by now, we should be getting used to it. It's the New Normal.

“The New Normal” became a catch phrase in the months after 9/11, suggesting that international terrorism had changed the nature of daily life. But as we continue to shed our shoes in airport lines, we dance around the recognition of the true New Normal settling over our lives: the slow terror of the climate crisis.

We feel it now most persistently in summer. July 2005 to June 2006 were the hottest twelve months in U.S. history—and that was before the July and August heat waves responsible for some 225 deaths. California saw all-time records broken for high temperatures and lengths of heat waves last summer. But we weren’t alone: summer temperatures were above normal in all fifty states.

Though largely ignored in the U.S., the summer heat wave that hit western Europe in 2003 killed more than ten times the number of people who died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In fact, after severral years of accumulating data, the Earth Policy Institute believes that it caused more than 50,000 deaths.

Yet in many European countries, last summer was even hotter. Though heat related deaths were higher than normal among vulnerable populations, this time communities were more prepared: responding to the New Normal.

Besides the direct threats to health (dehydration, strokes, heat-intensified pollution worsening allergies and other ailments), there are the burdens on the psyche—the anxieties, frayed nerves and tempers, the weariness of mind and body that heat waves engender. In their intensity and relentlessness, they can be terrifying.

As can other effects of extreme heat: rainfall patterns alter, leading to droughts in some areas and floods in others (as in the mid-Atlantic states last summer, which killed 16 and caused more than a billion dollars worth of damage.) Thunderstorms are more violent, wildfires are larger and more frequent, roadways buckle, water lines rupture and heavy demand for electricity leads to blackouts. Warmer air feeds tornadoes, and warmer ocean waters are likely to increase the ferocity of hurricanes. Apart from danger to life and limb, all of these stress services, government and the economy in general, as well as individuals, families and communities.

In an interconnected economy, disruptions caused by extreme weather extend far beyond their origins, as frequent flyers can attest.

We can hope this summer will be cooler, but these days that would qualify as unusual. Forecasters predict that in both the U.S. and Europe, this will be another hot summer (with a high number of Atlantic hurricanes.) The pattern of the past several decades seems well-established: hotter summers are becoming more frequent, with fewer years of less extreme temperatures between them. All seasons appear on average to be getting hotter, but the New Normal is most noticeable, and most threatening, in summer. A NASA study suggests that the eastern U.S. will see a 10 degree F rise in average summer temperature in the next 80 years.

If the consensus of climate scientists is correct, and global heating caused by greenhouse gas pollution is a major cause, it’s just the beginning of this New Normal. Our summers now are the product of fossil fuel emissions from years ago. Those emissions have accumulated and grown over time, and they appear to be growing ever faster: last week a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that annual carbon dioxide emissions have tripled in this decade. One hot summer after another should soon bring home this reality: the climate crisis is here and now, and it will be part of the rest of our lives.

Local municipalities especially are forced to prepare for the increasingly and persistently hotter summers, but while more people in general seem alarmed by the climate crisis, it’s not clear that they yet accept that it’s here: that this is the New Normal.

And what will the terror of overheated summers lead to? Perhaps to a new heated argument over what to do about the climate crisis. Until now, the efforts to address climate change have mostly been discussed in terms of a future crisis. Will there be pressure to shift attention from efforts to prevent worse heating in the future by cutting emissions, in favor of devoting resources solely to coping with heating effects in the present? Will the aborning committment to lowering carbon emissions fall to the urgent desire for air conditioning, by any means necessary?

Dr. Susan Solomon, one of the leaders of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, made a little-noted observation during that organization’s convention in San Francisco earlier this year: “Changes already underway will require adaptation in the short term… while efforts to reduce or reverse change will only occur on a long term.”

These are the twin necessities of the climate crisis: anticipating and responding proactively to its effects in the present, while forestalling even worse consequences in the future—which experts tell us could include the end of human civilization, and life on earth as we know it. We need to face the urgency of the New Normal, but we also need to keep faith with the future. If we don’t, these long hot summers will look like paradise compared to the New Normal in coming decades, perhaps even in the lifetimes of today’s children.

"Gathering Spring Plants" by Eegyvadluk Ragee
at Inuit.com

Get Busy: A Climate of Urgent Dullness

In his latest Viridian Note, science fiction author, futurist and eco-design advocate Bruce Sterling writes about his attendance at the recent Clean Energy Venture Summit of businesses involved in green technology, which was held in Austin, Texas at the same time as the Large Cities Climate Summit in New York. While Texas may seem the anti-environmental state, thanks especially to Lord Bushemort, Austin claims the title of the nation's top city for clean technology development. (In an earlier note, Sterling rightly focused on the otherwise unheralded but very important buyout in Texas that stopped the construction of eight coal-fired electrical plants, in a sweeping deal partly negotiated by the Environmental Defense Fund. Coal produces more global heating pollution than any other fuel.)

Here's what Sterling said about the conference itself:

The Clean Energy Venture Summit was an intensely dull event. There was scarcely a "visionary" to be seen. On the contrary: suited, duely-diligent lawyers and bankers were throwing millions of dollars at engineers. That's the work of the world, folks. This is our third swing at this particular baseball: 1970s: eco-consciousness raising; 1990s, global political accords; 2010s, cybergreen ecotech. They gotta win, they must not fail, because otherwise, by the 2030s it's gonna be Khaki Green all the way: a future of All Katrina, all the time, for everybody.

And that's the truth. Somebody has to dig into the dull details of technologies, and carbon cap and trade, and so on. The problem is not to lose the vision, not to lose the point, in all that detail and the politics of it, which is what I'm afraid largely happened to the environmental movement. But the "work of the world" has to be done. At the moment, there is still a role for people like me, to thread the information into the Big Picture, to keep badgering and coming at it from different directions until it all sinks in. Changing the world one heart&mind at a time.

Because every day brings impetus to urgency. While the Bush Death Eaters try to stop next month's Group of Eight summit in Germany from advocating urgent talks on a new deal to fight global heating, the National Academy of Scientists released a report Monday saying that carbon dioxide emissions increased worldwide three times faster after 2000 than in the 1990s, putting them at the high end of a range of forecasts by an international climate change panel. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

another classic pulp s/f cover

Waste Not

The New York Times Magazine Sunday was largely devoted to articles about environmentally sensitive design, including an article about Shigeru Ban , whose ecological designs include elegant and useful buildings out of paper (from emergency shelters in Rwanda to a paper church now ten years old), and an interview with William McDonough about his obsession with renewable energy systems and recycling waste.

The article on Ban is headlined "Waste Not: The Accidental Environmentalist." Both the content of these articles and that title remind me of a position I've long espoused: that basic ideas behind "environmental design" and energy-saving processes are completely in line with some traditional practices and ideas. Some are simply traditional processes with fancy new names.

Years ago, when Pennsylvania was adopting its mandatory recycling plan, the editorial firm I worked for in Pittsburgh was responding to a Request for Proposals from the state government on how to effectively publicize the program. I developed the basic framework of a campaign that attempted to show that "recycling" was really a traditional idea with a new name and a larger purpose. To communicate that idea, I proposed using the Benjamin Franklin dictim of "Waste Not, Want Not" (which I thought would make a good reggae hook). Franklin was also the most prominent Pennsylvanian among the Founding Fathers.

Around that time I wrote an oped piece for one of the Pittsburgh dailies predicting (contrary to its official editorial opinion) that Pittsburghers would recycle with few problems. My reason was similiar: the immigrant frugality of just a few generations past in this very traditional and ethnic city would make this a common sense concept. And "recycling" in order to further a larger goal was also familiar from efforts during World War II to help the war effort.

We came in second to a much larger Philadelphia advertising firm on the recycling contract, but I was right about Pittsburgh's response to recycling. In fact, the willingness and even eagerness of people to recycle has been an unheralded success story almost everywhere.

For our grandparents and even our parents, it was simply common sense to reuse, reduce waste, and "recycle". You don't throw away socks when they get holes; you darn them. You don't throw old clothes into the trash--you tear them up for rags, which you use to clean. Though these attitudes would be ridiculed in the consumer "throwaway" society, they remained dormant but alive. "Waste not, want not" was a rule of survival, and it had a certain elegance and satisfaction to it at well. It was part of a traditional way of life that people seem to be paying a lot of money to emulate these days.

All that "waste not" requires is removing the stigma, the idea that it is shameful not to waste ( because it is a sign of being poor and therefore a failure.) That's the role of leadership and institutional support. It's how recycling happened, and it is a procedure that in general will work in other areas, such as energy efficiency, in addressing the climate crisis.

Expanding Soul for the Future

Another intriguing article in the NY Times Magazine Sunday suggested that the American Evangelical movement is changing--moving away from obsession with gay marriage and God's Own Party to different and in some ways more traditional concerns. Though the issue of abortion continues to unite conservative Christians, some of the newer Evangelical leaders are also talking about poverty, health issues such as AIDS, and the chief illness of the earth: the climate crisis:

Members of the baby boomer generation are taking over the reins, said D. G. Hart, a historian of religion. The boomers, he said, are markedly different in style and temperament from their predecessors and much more animated by social justice and humanitarianism.

One example was the call to see the climate crisis as a moral issue which brought together some "mainstream conservative Christian leaders with prominent liberal evangelicals, such as the Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners and the Rev. Ronald J. Sider of Evangelicals for Social Action, who have long championed progressive causes."

Though some observers caution that this is only the beginning of a shift (and one Evangelical leader was forced to step down because of his climate crisis advocacy) and that it may take a generation to become dominant, it does suggest there is less enthusiasm for automatic party line GOP politics, which includes climate crisis denial and contempt for "bleeding heart" efforts to address poverty, disease and injustice. Within the Evangelicals (roughly a quarter of the U.S. population), this new "centrist group" is roughly equal in numbers to the far right group (according to Pew Research) and it is the centrist group that is growing.