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.”

Hunger Games Here and To Come

According to a blistering column by E.J. Dionne, recent Supreme Court cases could all be grouped under the title Rich v Poor, and you can guess who's been winning.  Others have also noted that the current Court is handing over the electoral system to the wealthy, though some of the richest aren't too happy about the attention it's bringing them.  One of the Kochs complained in the Wall Street Journal, which pretty much exists for complaints by the wealthy.  Josh Marshall has an ongoing series about the uber- rich who are amazingly sensitive to criticism if not to the suffering of others or their ongoing destruction of the planet.

The implications for politics suggests to Peter Bienart that mega-donors are now more important than the politicians themselves and ought to be covered by news media more assiduously.  Dionne goes further to pair the pro-wealthy Court decisions with their anti-poor (or everybody else) decisions to suggest we're becoming an oligarchy.  Update 4/18/14: And now according to a Princeton study it's official: the U.S. is an oligarchy.

But it may well be worse than that.  The enormous gap between the wealth of the wealthy and everybody else (that most recently got the full Bill Maher treatment) has been building for decades.  The disappearance of industrial jobs (closing of the steel mills etc.) in the late 70s was perhaps the first conspicuous indication.  Observers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Paul Krugman wrote about it in the 80s.  Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson took the long view, and saw that it could forecast the return of the Middle Ages.

Speaking of which, many apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories feature either a fairly stable feudal Middle Ages world of lords and serfs (The Hunger Games) or a Dark Ages organization of war lords and poor (from Shape of Things to Come to The Postman and the Mad Max movie series.)

There could hardly be worse societal preparation for the stresses of climate crisis effects than the current dive into oligarchy.  It might make money available for a few high profile projects in rich cities, for instance, but in general it is one of several current trends that make civilization even more vulnerable.  Food and water shortages are among the serious problems forecast by the latest UN report, as well as by many other studies.  As Elizabeth Kolbert writes of the report in the latest New Yorker: "Composed in a language that might be called High Committee, the report is nevertheless hair-raising. The I.P.C.C.’s list of potential warming-induced disasters—from ecological collapse to famine, flooding, and pestilence—reads like a riff on the ten plagues. Matching the terror is the collective shame of it. “Why should the world pay attention to this report?” the chairman of the I.P.C.C., Rajendra Pachauri, asked the day the update was released. Because “nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change.”

Though our media doesn't much say so, we've already seen food shortages and price spikes lead to political violence and chaos in various parts of the world, and very quickly.  Already a study has linked violence to climate crisis effects.

Add the penchant of the most politically active of the uber-wealthy to insist on ideology over even common sense, plus the fundamentalist dogmatism of their unwitting army, and the move back to the Middle Ages is a shockingly short one.

What stands between a Dark Ages anarchy and/or a Middle Ages system of lords who rule over a poor population by means of hired thugs (currently arming themselves) is the civilization that resides in the souls of our citizens.  And by civilization I mean not only enlightened, rational and practical evidence-based thinking and conscious valuing of diversity, but compassion, cooperation and empathy in everyday problem solving.

That the threat of falling into a new feudal Middle Ages or a new Dark Ages exists should be a cautionary tale to the young especially.  They need to be prepared to ward it off, to see the signs, to strengthen the consciousness and the values that may overcome it before it happens.  

The Dreaming Up Daily Weekly Quote

"Such hopelessness can arise, I think, only from an inability to face the present, to live in the present, to live as responsible beings among other beings in this sacred world here and now, which is all we have, and all we need to found our hopes upon.”
Ursula LeGuin

R.I.P.

"The absurdity of a life that may well end before one understands it does not relieve one of duty...to live through it as bravely and as generously as possible."

Peter Matthiessen
who died last week at the age of 86

      Pema 4/14  (click for full photo)

     April Pink #1 2014 (click for full photo)

Getting to the Heart of Obamacare

What is it--is everybody in the media just too busy to do their jobs?  Headline after headline described President Obama's remarks on Tuesday as a "victory lap" or "crowing" about the surprising 7.1 million signups for Obamacare through the health exchanges.  But President Obama wasn't crowing about a political victory.  He talked about a law that is not perfect but that is helping to fix a broken health care system and providing the opportunity for economic security, peace of mind, and a sense of value and dignity by providing the opportunity for affordable health insurance. ( See for yourself--here's the video.  I tried to embed it but for some reason couldn't.)

Yes, the success of the initial signup period beyond even supporters' expectations allowed President Obama to frame his remarks in a positive way.  But most of his 18 minutes were a robust explanation of the value of the ACA, including how it has already helped individual Americans, and the way forward.  Examples that tell the story:"that’s what the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, is all about -– making sure that all of us, and all our fellow citizens, can count on the security of health care when we get sick; that the work and dignity of every person is acknowledged and affirmed."

"Change is hard," the President said.  "Fixing what’s broken is hard. Overcoming skepticism and fear of something new is hard. A lot of times folks would prefer the devil they know to the devil they don’t. But this law is doing what it’s supposed to do. It’s working. It’s helping people from coast to coast, all of which makes the lengths to which critics have gone to scare people or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative so hard to understand."

And then he asked the key questions. "Why are folks working so hard for people not to have health insurance? Why are they so mad about the idea of folks having health insurance?"

Another question that these signups raise (and they don't include the many more who now have healthcare through Medicaid expansion) is: why were the pundits and the major media in general so sure Obamacare would fail?

The answer seems to be that they read polls which are simply responses to particular questions with results that seem to say more than they actually do.  They listened to the lavishly funded and unremittingly shrill opposition, the Washington insiders who are so inside that they believe each other instead of finding out what is really happening.  And in particular the media failed to report.

But Sarah Kliff did not fail to report.  Writing in the Wonkblog in December (hat tip to Jonathan Bernstein for linking to this article on Tuesday): "As a reporter who has covered the Affordable Care Act, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to uninsured Americans. Aside from the daily federal updates and traffic statistics, it’s been one of the more helpful ways to understand how the health-care law is working — and what its rocky rollout will mean.  And what I've learned from all those discussions is this: The people shopping on HealthCare.gov are incredibly, unwaveringly persistent in their attempts to purchase coverage."

As one of the few to actually report on individual Americans, she was also one of the few who suggested that 7 million signups might be possible.  As of Tuesday there were 7.1 million and counting.

The entire key to the Obama presidency is the 70 or so letters from Americans he reads each week.  President Obama provided examples of people already helped and what that help meant to them in his remarks Tuesday, and White House.gov shows quotes from other Americans helped by ACA, with before and after numbers concerning premiums and coverage.  But even beyond individuals, how about hard aggregate numbers?  How many reporters were keeping track of those?

Apparently none, including all the well-paid reporter/pundits.  But someone was, and he was doing it for free. His name is Charles Gaba and he blogs at Daily Kos under the name Brainwrap.  According to Kos himself, he " meticulously recorded all Obamacare signup information. Then, after gaining the attention of reporters everywhere, that blogger used hard data to utterly dismantle every bogus Republican talking point."

Not everybody who signed up did so on their home computer.  Many stood in long lines all over the country to get help signing up.  They were helped, informed about the sign-ups etc. by volunteers.  They were determined to get health care coverage.  (There are many more of these photos at whitehouse.gov.)

I was part of a dialogue about all this at Jonathan Bernstein's Bloomberg blog. Here's one of the responses, from "ochospantalones":

"It has been amazing for me to watch so many people acting like there are hordes of people who are happy they don't have health insurance, and will be angered at now having access to it. When I was younger I knew plenty of people who had no health insurance or had near-useless catastrophic plans, and none of them were in that situation because they thought it was great. They didn't have health insurance because they couldn't afford a decent plan, usually because they didn't have access to employer-based plans, and almost all of them prioritized getting the sorts of jobs that would offer health insurance. Many reporters act like someone without health insurance will check the website, see it doesn't work, and just forget about the whole thing. Most people I've known without insurance will put in the effort it takes to make it happen."

Play Ball!

In some places it was a strange Opening Day to the 2014 Major League Baseball season.  The New York Mets game couldn't start on time because nobody was playing first base.  Angels coach Don Baylor broke his leg during the ceremonial first pitch.  But in Pittsburgh's PNC Park, it was all good.

Former Pirates star (and twice MVP in a Pirates uniform) Barry Bonds was there to award the 2013 NL MVP to Andrew McCutchen.  Former Pirates manager Jim Leyland was back to award the 2013 NL Manager of the Year to Clint Hurdle. He told the Post-Gazette: "I've said this many, many times, but this is the most beautiful ballpark in America. It's nice to have the fans really be able to cheer for something."

And did they.  After expanded instant replay was used for the first time (and then the second), Pirates ace Francisco Liriano (who struck out 10) and four relievers combined on a 9 inning shutout.  And in the top of the 10th, Pittsburgh boy Neil Walker parked one in the right field seats for a walk-off win, 1-0 over the Chicago Cubs.

Going to Opening Day of the Pirates was a tradition when I lived in western PA.  And I recall a similar Opening Day game in 1980 when Bill Robinson parked one right in front of me in the right field stands at the top of the tenth to win that one.  They were the World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates that day.  Fans in the burgh figure that day could come again real soon.

Additional Dialogue

In the hours since I rambled on in the post below, there are more stories about the UN report on the climate crisis.  Here are some worth checking out:

The Guardian: A United Nations report raised the threat of climate change to a whole new level on Monday, warning of sweeping consequences to life and livelihood....“We are now in an era where climate change isn't some kind of future hypothetical,” said Chris Field, one of the two main authors of the report.

New York Times: Climate change is already having sweeping effects on every continent and throughout the world’s oceans, scientists reported on Monday, and they warned that the problem was likely to grow substantially worse unless greenhouse emissions are brought under control.

BBC: The costs of inaction on climate change will be "catastrophic", according to US Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr Kerry was responding to a major report by the UN which described the impacts of global warming as "severe, pervasive and irreversible". He said dramatic and swift action was required to tackle the threats posed by a rapidly changing climate.

This Real Climate link itself links to the actual summary and full UN panel report.

An NPR report offers both a print and audio summary of the UN report findings. 

Another NPR piece asks if the report is "too much of a downer," which is the opinion of one of it's authors, who didn't sign the summary.

Tipping Points

“Humans aren’t the first species to alter the atmosphere; that distinction belongs to early bacteria, which, some two billion years ago, invented photosynthesis. But we are the first species to be in a position to understand what we are doing. Computer models of the earth’s climate suggest that a critical threshold is approaching. Crossing over it will be easy, crossing back quite likely impossible.”

Elizabeth Kolbert in  Field Notes From a Catastrophe (2006)

That critical threshold is the tipping point, beyond which the climate begins to essentially feed on itself, changing the Earth significantly for thousands of years.  But along the way there are other tipping points, and we have quite likely passed some.  The Earth's atmosphere is getting hotter and will continue to do so for probably hundreds of years.  The climate is changing right now.  What's not known is whether it has passed the point at which human civilization will no longer be possible.

The latest UN climate report says as much.  It is about changes that can no longer be stopped, but it holds out hope that the ultimate tipping point has not yet been reached, though it probably will soon.  A changed climate cannot be changed back, not for a very long time.  We've made the world of the near future.

The CNN story on the report begins: "Your forecast for the next century: Hotter, drier and hungrier, and the chance to turn down the thermostat is slipping away. That's the latest conclusion from the United Nations, which urged governments to address the "increasingly clear" threats posed by a warming climate before some options are closed off for good.

The UN report analyzes efforts to deal with causes (mitigation) and effects (adaptation.)  There are lots of details but quite simply nobody is doing a very good job at either.

The report pleads with nations of the world to control greenhouse gases.  CNN quotes: Cutting emissions now "increases the time available for adaptation to a particular level of climate change," the report states. But it adds, "Delaying mitigation actions may reduce options for climate-resilient pathways in the future."

In its typically leaden language, the report is saying two things here.  First, the reason to cut emissions is to increase the time we have to deal with the effects of the climate change that's coming.  It's no longer to stop the climate from changing, with the effects we're beginning to see.  It's changing, and it's going to keep changing, probably much faster, to a hotter world than humans have ever experienced.  We need time to adapt to this world, which means a whole lot more than getting used to hotter summers.  It means dealing with huge changes in what food grows where, with droughts, floods and superstorms, with the spread of hot-weather infectious diseases, with rising seas and acidic oceans. With the dominoes of displaced and dying species of animals and plants as they affect the food chain and a lot more.  It means dealing with conflicts and even wars caused by these effects.

The second point is that if we don't deal with the causes--with greenhouse gases--we "may reduce options for climate-resilient pathways in the future."  Translation: if it gets worse, civilization and perhaps the human species will be fighting for survival.

There's a lot more in the report, and a lot more in the news that supports the main points of the report.  If anything, the news suggests things are getting worse faster.  (And there have been cries from within the climate community that the report's summary has been watered down.)

But I want to move onto another tipping point--the one in which an emotional consensus is reached to deal with this reality, and it becomes the central issue driving our political and civic life.

Some have hoped that a particularly eloquent clarion call might do it.  (I wrote a little about this recently.)  That hasn't happened.  Some fictional stories in print and on film suggest that a big enough terrible event will do it.  Paul Gilding's nonfiction book The Great Disruption (2001) suggests that when environmental calamities combine with resource depletion the global economy will stop growing, and the ensuing catastrophes will lead swiftly to a new economic and environmental system based on new priorities and principles that will, among other things, deal with the climate crisis : a tipping point.

Gilding believes civilization will not collapse and the outcome will eventually be positive (though he mentions that we will probably lose a billion people along the way,) based on his faith in humanity's response.  The whole process will take decades.

But why?  When scientists are all but unanimous, when the effects are already happening--why is human civilization incapable of anticipating such a mortal threat and preemptively acting to prevent it?  That's the question of our age, and I've tried to suggest some possibilities in my "climate inside" posts, for example.

Whatever the reasons, it's clear that no report, no catastrophe is going to convince the hardcore of people whose worldview is religiously political (or politically religious), and who believe that the vast majority of scientists are inventing the climate crisis for political reasons. (Everybody but their scientists, who are demonstrably inventing things for political and economic reasons.)

Exactly why we listen to these people and allow them to control things is another question.  It may be partly because we naturally don't want to believe it either, at least not now that we know it's coming.

Last week this story asserts that forecasters are saying that there's a 60 to 75% chance that a new El Nino is forming, perhaps as soon as April, and that it might be a Super El Nino, which could send temperatures soaring in 2015 for sure and possibly in 2014 as well.  The considerable heat trapped in the oceans could be released quickly.

These are changes we will feel immediately (if this happens.) It will also be further evidence that "normal" no longer exists.  The extremes of 2013 will be replaced by different extremes in 2014.  Could it be a tipping point in public perception?  Anything is possible.  But I wouldn't count on it.

 When it comes to the climate itself, the tipping point is a result of physics, brought about by the accumulation and complex interaction of factors. This El Nino could be a climate tipping point, which we would eventually realize. But it's perhaps more likely that things will change noticeably in fits and starts, both gradually and suddenly.  The most important changes may well remain invisible for awhile.  Others will accumulate over time before they have noticeable effects.

The fact that we're getting El Ninos so close together is itself yet another possible indication that global heating has already tipped over into a self-reinforcing regime.  The same is true about the violence and nature of storms and extreme weather, as this post at Real Climate explains.  Extreme events are extreme because they are out of the ordinary.  But they are becoming ordinary.  Yet even this is controversial, well beyond the usual deniers.

But what are the chances that this El Nino's effects will provide a political tipping point into robust public support for aggressive efforts to deal with the climate crisis?  As noted in comments to the Think Progress post, Australia is already experiencing the kind of heat that El Nino could bring to the U.S. for example.  But that didn't stop Australia from voting out the government that made dealing with the climate crisis a priority, and voting in a government that is busily trying to roll back all sorts of environmental measures.  So it's hard to hold out much hope.

The human species has missed all kinds of opportunities to be prepared for this.  Yet some of that same preparation--moral commitments, clarity, psychological skills included--will be necessary to deal with this future.  Because one way or another, life is lived.