pollution

...do you think the nutroots would stop plugging their ears and shouting "nah nah nah nah nah nah nah"?

Oh, probably not. It's that godless science that's the problem, right?

REPORT: Academics' donations go overwhelmingly to Democrats

...The report also says that academics donated more than employees of oil companies and drug makers.

It's a conspiracy, see? All the universities are really brainwashing institutes. They pretend they're teaching you critical thinking, you know, how to think for yourself, but they're really turning you into a liberal! That's why all these people are supporting Democrats! That's why we need to get rid of tenure and put ignorant people into teaching positions in colleges so that they can allow us all to remain ignorant! Because what you don't know won't bother you!

--In fact, we should ban professors from being able to donate to political candidates altogether! They're a special interest, doncha know! Unrestricted campaign contributions are only for the Republicans. Can't let just anybody give money to Democrats, can we?

Apparently being poor in America means going out to eat, living a comfortable life, but perhaps having to cope with an "old car" or a "black-and-white television" -- as opposed to back in the '50s, when people had to live "modest lives."

Apparently there's no "net" cost to globalization borne by America. On the whole, it's not like anybody is suffering, right? Right?

Apparently "centralization of power" -- of which O'Rourke claims to be suspicious -- does not include the multinational conglomerates that run our government and have quite a bit of power, thank you very much.

Apparently there is no real poverty in America. Apparently the disappearance of the middle class didn't happen because apparently there never was a middle class -- just people living "modest lives."

Apparently we're supposed to be happy because we're better off than Lebanon and Russia.

Apparently there is no economic basis for requiring trading partners to follow similar rules about the environment or child labor.

This from the white male living in his suburban house in the suburbs, enjoying what -- six-figure income? Seven? What does P.J. O'Rourke know about poverty in America?

Obviously not much.

mp3

Funny how some bloggers of the the right wing is so obsessed with party colors that they cannot see green. Clinging to their delusions in spite of scientific evidence, this past week we marveled as the right wing continued to plug its ears and start shouting wild accusations of pseudo-facts about individuals rather than see what is coming down upon us all: global warming. Gotta hand it to them: these folks are very effective at their GOP-stooge role, repeating anger points generated from Dittohead Command Headquarters. (Inconvenient truths are conveniently ignored.)

In response to my piece on Peter Schweizer's inane attempt to dismiss global warming because of unsubstantiated assertions about Al Gore's personal finances and business ties, I received this email from Lisa Wade Raasch of empowerchange.com that seems to shed new light on all this.

I'll just paste it here and let you read it:

This is yet another in the long string of tactics tied back to Exxon --
the CEI ads, the YouTube penguin video, the skeptic evangelical
response, etc. etc. Exxon gave $295,000 to the Hoover Institution where
Peter Schweizer is a research fellow.

It's amazing, on one hand the global warming skeptics call Gore an
environmental extremist, and on the other they say he isn't extreme
enough to be a credible spokesperson.

[contact info removed. -mg]

Exxon is at it again.
Setting the record straight on Peter Schweizer's misleading USA Today
piece

Peter Schweizer's ("Gore not quite as green.") piece that ran in USA
Today (August 10) was a grossly inaccurate misrepresentation of the
facts.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schweizer's op-ed is the latest in a string of
attacks from organizations receiving money from ExxonMobil-in this case
an attempt to attack the messenger to divert attention from the message
of the climate crisis. Mr. Schweizer is a research fellow at the Hoover
Institution, which has received $295,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998.
(http://www.exxonsecrets.org/html/orgfactsheet.php?id=43)

PETER SCHWEIZER'S MISLEADING CLAIMS:

CLAIM: Schweizer claims that Gore receives royalties from a
zinc mine on his property.

FACT: This charge is false. Gore receives no royalties from the mine,
which shut down in 2003. Like many owners of small farms in Smith
County, Tennessee, the Gores received royalties on their mineral rights
when the mine operated. (A correction ran in USA Today on page 10A.)

CLAIM: Schweizer makes the false assertion that Gore controls stock in
Occidental Petroleum.

FACT: This claim is also false. Gore has never owned stock in
Occidental. His late father, Albert Gore Sr., did work for a number of
years at Occidental. At the time of his death, he owned stock in the
company, all of which was sold almost six years ago. The former Vice
President's mother had a small number of shares in her own name at the
time of her death; that stock was also disposed of by the trustee of her
estate. Mr. Gore is not the trustee.

CLAIM: Schweizer attacks Gore for not using green energy alternatives
at his home.

FACT: Gore was already in the process of adding photovoltaic solar
panels to his home before this scurrilous attack. The Gores have signed
up for every "green power" option their utilities make available.

CLAIM: Schweizer asserts that Gore does not offset his carbon
emissions because Paramount Classics pays for the offsets.
FACT: The Gore's personal carbon offsets are achieved independently of
and in addition to the carbon-neutral leadership shown by Paramount
Classics, Participant Productions and Rodale.
(more)
An Inconvenient Truth: "An Inconvenient Truth" is the first carbon
neutral documentary ever. Paramount Classics and Participant
Productions have worked with Native Energy to offset 100 percent of the
carbon dioxide emissions from air and ground transportation and hotels
for production and promotional activities associated with the
documentary (http://www.paramountvantage.com/blog/?p=35). In addition,
with the book "An Inconvenient Truth," Rodale became the first publisher
to produce a carbon-neutral book. The offsets for "An Inconvenient
Truth" will support New Native American and Alaskan Native wind turbines
and new family dairy farm methane energy projects will deliver clean,
renewable energy to the power grid and displacing power that would
otherwise come from burning fossil fuels.

Generation Investment Management: In addition, Gore co-founded
Generation Investment Management, which invests in companies that are
part of the climate solution. Not only does Generation offset the
carbon emissions of its London and DC offices and business travel
through purchases on the Chicago Climate Exchange to permanently retire
carbon credits, it also offsets the personal home and travel emissions
of all its employees through the CarbonNeutral Company. These offsets
support two projects: 1) a dam-less, "run-of-river" hydro power project
in Bulgaria forecast to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by as much as
10,000 - 13,000 tons per year, and 2) a rural solar electrification
project in India and Sri Lanka to replace the use of dangerous kerosene
lamps that produce high levels of CO2 emissions to light homes with
solar powered lighting systems that produce no CO2.

Current TV: Current TV (www.current.tv), an independent media company
co-founded by Gore that features viewer created content, approved going
carbon neutral at the beginning of 2006, while still in its first year
of operation, and will have completed the process by the end of the
fiscal year.

Reducing CO2 Emissions: Recognizing that we all inevitably emit CO2,
Gore sees offsets as one way to keep total global CO2 emissions in check
and to support alternative "green power" programs in the process. That
said, he believes that the first line of defense is to reduce carbon
emissions as much as possible. Gore works to reduce his overall energy
use by: switching to compact florescent light bulbs, driving a hybrid
vehicle, using green power, adjusting the thermostat a few degrees,
using clock thermostats to make sure no portions of the house are kept
warmer or cooler than needed throughout the day, installing sensors to
ensure that no lights are inadvertently left on in rooms that are not in
use, making a point of flying commercially whenever possible, and
telecommuting when he can.

Al Gore has worked for 30 years to raise awareness about global warming
and to advocate for meaningful solutions. In addition to the very
important role that government (at all levels) and companies must take
to cut emissions of pollution that cause global warming, he urges each
of us to take individual responsibility for our carbon dioxide
emissions. However, he has not asked more from the public than he is
willing to do himself.

Al and Tipper Gore are donating 100-percent of the profits from both the
"An Inconvenient Truth" book and movie to fight against global warming
pollution.

For a bit more context, I recommend David Roberts' post in Grist Magazine.

Methinks Peter Schweizer doth protest too much. The Republicans have enjoyed a nice political bubble over the years when it comes to the environment. "Global warming? What global warming?" has been typical of their responses.

That's been changing since Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth (directed by Davis Guggenheim) hit the screens. Since then, the film has enjoyed some remarkable documentary-level box office. As a result, the American public is seeing what the rest of the world has for years: that when it comes to the environment, the Republicans and the Bush Administration have no clothes.

Yet one more area where right-wing fantasies failed to convince the prevailing facts to change themselves. Reality's a bitch. And people realize that Al Gore, whom the wingnuts ridiculed in the 2000 campaign, was right all along.

Those stale old jokes no longer stick. And the Republicans are scared.

Now the right-wing fictioneers who so expertly dismantled Michael Moore's public image with loud and repeated falsehoods, distortions and outright lies of their own are now turning their sights on Gore. Why? Maybe because they are finding the truth just a tad too inconvenient.

In today's USA Today, we get an early shot -- intended to be a barrage, but which comes off more as a bb-gun sniper attempt: right-wing Hoover man and dittohead-industry author Peter Schweizer has a petty little piece nitpicking Gore's life.

Public records reveal that as Gore lectures Americans on excessive consumption, he and his wife Tipper live in two properties: a 10,000-square-foot, 20-room, eight-bathroom home in Nashville, and a 4,000-square-foot home in Arlington, Va. (He also has a third home in Carthage, Tenn.) For someone rallying the planet to pursue a path of extreme personal sacrifice, Gore requires little from himself.

Smell a little envy there? This is a typical smear by the right, attacking Gore based on class. "He's not like you folks," Schweizer is saying to us "peasants" (a popular word used in right-wing power circles to describe us non-special folks born without silver spoons in our mouths). I don't know what Schweizer's lifestyle is like, but his Republican and corporatist allies live much fatter lives. Besides, this is about global warming, not about a real estate crunch.

Schweizer then goes on to talk about the apparent fact that Gore's estates have not yet switched to alternative energy options in their areas, and that Gore owns stock in Occidental Petroleum. Apparently these are to be considered glaring character flaws and indications of some big great hypocrisy. He also goes after the Democrats, who also have not signed up for alternative energy.

Then, in a well-practiced move of non-sequitur pseduo-logic -- a speciality of Schweizer and Coulter and the other writers in the alternate-reality books genre -- he suggests:

Maybe our very existence isn't threatened.

Not exactly stellar reasoning from a defender of the ruling class, is it?

Ironically, Schweizer doesn't acknowledge that us non-ruling-class Americans are already struggling with energy prices. We aren't cashing in on big trade with mass-polluter China, or raking in record profits from oil speculation, or laughing all the way to the bank with 10-figure government checks for no-bid contracts. The men in power are screwing over America big time, and we're supposed to get mad at Al Gore?

The issue here is not simply Gore's hypocrisy; it's a question of credibility. If he genuinely believes the apocalyptic vision he has put forth and calls for radical changes in the way other people live, why hasn't he made any radical change in his life? Giving up the zinc mine or one of his homes is not asking much, given that he wants the rest of us to radically change our lives.

In other words, if you can't refute the scientific evidence, then shoot the messenger. Global warming, according to Schweizer, is not a scientific theory with evidence in our faces every day. No, global warming is just what Al Gore wants. Get it? Our response to global warming should be tempered by the right wing's approval of Al Gore's politics and financial investments.

My own guess is that Schweizer is accusing Gore of simple class betrayal. After all, being rich and powerful, Al Gore should be a Republican, right? How dare he!

Inconvenient indeed.

So could someone please tell me what the hell this is about?

Dobbs: "I was asked the other day about whether or not the American people had the stomach to stand up and stop this nonsense, this direction from group of elites in absolute contravention of our laws, our Constitution and every national value.... This is beyond belief!"

Pretty scary when Lou Dobbs has a problem with what the Bush Administration is doing.

The Money Changers

from Talk to Action

Last week, Mainstream Baptist wondered, What's the Matter with Texas?, and referenced the Texas Freedom Network's incisive new report: "The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006."

No one should be surprised to hear that there's a whole lot the matter with Texas, or that -- as is the case even in religion-driven politics – the root of our state's particular evil can be traced to the love of money. Here in Texas, rich men who hand money out by the bucketload are using their wealth to buy a state government that looks like their vision of the promised land.

Just to make sure he hasn't done gone grown a conscience by announcing an effort to look into possible price gouging by the multinational oil companies, President Bush has called for a retreat from clean air:

WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday ordered a temporary suspension of environmental rules for gasoline, making it easier for refiners to meet demand and possibly dampen prices at the pump.

Let our children choke and chug down toxic drinking water.

...New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez proposed a 60-day suspension of the gasoline tax, saying the money could be recovered by repealing tax breaks for energy companies. He scoffed at Bush's call to curb tax breaks for the oil companies.

"What we're left wondering today is why it took five years" for Bush to support tax increases on the energy industry, Menendez said.

Bush, in his speech, urged Congress to revoke about $2 billion in tax breaks over 10 years that Congress approved and he signed into law to encourage exploration. "Taxpayers don't need to be paying for certain of these expenses on behalf of the energy companies," Bush said.

He also urged lawmakers to expand tax breaks for the purchase of fuel-efficient hybrid automobiles.

Just the kind of thing that Bush -- and every Republican since Reagan -- has opposed: tax breaks for alternative energy. In fact, gutting tax breaks for alternative energy was one of the first things Reagan did when he got into the White House.

So what gives now? Could it be -- gasp! -- security? Bush was emphatic:

There's an interesting article in this week's New York Review of Books, written by Garry Wills about Jimmy Carter's new book, Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis, that offers some quite sharp insights on the so-called "pro-life" movement -- something I consider only slightly short of remarkable, given that this is coming from a patriarchal moralist and a paternalistic liberal journalist, two men who've not demonstrated much insight when it comes to women's rights.

In his book, Wills writes, Carter lays into the fundamentalist authoritarianism that's sweeping across the religious landscape, and which took over the Southern Baptist Convention in 2000.

Such attitudes are far from the ones recommended by Jesus in the gospels as Carter has studied and taught them through the decades, and their proponents have brought similar attitudes into the political world, where a matching political fundamentalism has taken over much of the electoral process. Such dictatorial attitudes defeat the stated goals of the fundamentalists themselves. On abortion, for instance, Carter argues that a "pro-life" dogmatism defeats human life and values at many turns. Carter is opposed to abortion, as what he calls a tragedy "brought about by a combination of human errors." But the "pro-life" forces compound rather than reduce the errors. The most common abortions, and the most common reasons cited for undergoing them, are caused by economic pressure compounded by ignorance.

Yet the anti-life movement that calls itself pro-life protects ignorance by opposing family planning, sex education, and informed use of contraceptives, tactics that not only increase the likelihood of abortion but tragedies like AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. The rigid system of the "pro-life" movement makes poverty harsher as well, with low minimum wages, opposition to maternity leaves, and lack of health services and insurance. In combination, these policies make ideal conditions for promoting abortion, as one can see from the contrast with countries that do have sex education and medical insurance. Carter writes:

Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany.... It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs.

The result of a rigid fundamentalism combined with poverty and ignorance can be seen where the law forbids abortion:

In some predominantly Roman Catholic countries where all abortions are illegal and few social services are available, such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the abortion rate is fifty per thousand. According to the World Health Organization, this is the highest ratio of unsafe abortions [in the world].

Don't tell the zealots. They don't want to hear it. More importantly, they don't want you to hear it.

A New York Times article that came out after Carter's book appeared further confirms what he is saying: "Four million abortions, most of them illegal, take place in Latin America annually, the United Nations reports, and up to 5,000 women are believed to die each year from complications from abortions."[*] This takes place in countries where churches and schools teach abstinence as the only form of contraception—demonstrating conclusively the ineffectiveness of that kind of program.

By contrast, in the United States, where abortion is legal and sex education is broader, the abortion rate reached a twenty-four-year low during the 1990s. Yet the ironically named "pro-life" movement would return the United States to the condition of Chile or Colombia. And not only that, the fundamentalists try to impose the anti-life program in other countries by refusing foreign aid to programs that teach family planning, safe sex, and contraceptive knowledge. They also oppose life-saving advances through the use of stem cell research. With friends like these, "life" is in thrall to death. Carter finds these results neither loving (in religious terms) nor just (in political terms).

In other words, the so-called "anti-abortion movement" in the United States wants authoritarian political policies that emulate policies in countries where the unsafe abortion rates are highest in the world.

"Pro-life"? More like a Culture of Death. A Culture of Death that promotes the un-checked proliferation of military weapons into the hands of criminals and terrorists....

The pro-life forces have no problem with a gun industry and capital punishment legislation that are, in fact, provably pro-death. Carter, a lifelong hunter, does not want to outlaw guns and he knows that Americans would never do that. But timorous politicians, cowering before the NRA, defeat even the most sensible limitations on weapons useful neither for hunting nor for personal self-defense (AK-47s, AR-15s, Uzis), even though, as Carter shows, more than 1,100 police chiefs and sheriffs told Congress that these weapons are obstacles to law enforcement. The NRA opposed background checks to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and terrorists and illegals, and then insisted that background checks, if they were imposed, had to be destroyed within twenty-four hours. The result of such pro-death measures, Carter writes, is grimly evident: "American children are sixteen times more likely than children in other industrialized nations to be murdered with a gun, eleven times more likely to commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from firearms accidents." Where are the friends of the fetus when children are dying in such numbers?

A Culture of Death that fights against the power of the people against the super-rich multi-national corporations....

It is the gap between rich and poor in the world that presents the main threat to our future, yet American policies increase that gap, at home and abroad. We give proportionally less money in foreign aid than do other developed countries, and our ability to give is being decreased by our growing deficit, incurred to reward our own wealthy families with disproportionate tax cuts. Carter points out that much of the aid announced or authorized never reaches its targets. This reflects a general smugness about America's privileged position. We are dismissive of other countries' concern with the world environment, with nuclear containment, and with international law.

A Culture of Death that proudly crows its willingness to use torture and bribery and nuclear weapons to push "national interests"....

We have, for example, declared our right to first use of nuclear weapons. We have used aid money to bribe people against holding us accountable to international law. We have run secret detention centers where hundreds of people are held without formal charges or legal representation. We have rewarded with high office men who, like Alberto Gonzales, say that the Geneva Conventions on treatment of prisoners are "obsolete" or even "quaint," or who, like John Bolton, say that it is "a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so."

The result, as Carter writes, has been to turn a vast fund of international good will accruing to us after September 11 into fear of and contempt for America unparalleled in modern times.

In other words, it's all of a piece -- the right's contempt for human life, which for American citizens is so cynically packaged by as a "Culture of Life," promotes death in America and worldwide. And what is becoming increasingly clear is that the right's bottom line is that they are all for promoting governmental and corporate power at the expense of human rights and human lives.

How can a loving religion or a just state support such a culture of death? Only a self-righteous and punitive fundamentalism, not an ethos of the gospels, can explain this.

Indeed.

Since this is a long-standing tradition in news shows, magazines and papers, and naturally therefore is something people blog about, I thought I'd offer my view on what the biggest story of the year is.

A lot of people will say it's Iraq. Or the Bush Administration scandals. Or the radical right's Terri Schiavo miscalculation. And sure, those are all big, but not the biggest.

Many would probably say Katrina was the biggest story of the year, but really I think that's only a part of it. The biggest story of the year was -- and still is -- global warming.

Consider just a few of the findings published in the major scientific journals during the last three months:

—Arctic sea ice is melting fast. There was 20 percent less of it than normal this summer, and as Dr. Mark Serreze, one of the researchers from Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center, told reporters, "the feeling is we are reaching a tipping point or threshold beyond which sea ice will not recover." That is particularly bad news because it creates a potent feedback effect: instead of blinding white ice that bounces sunlight back into space, there is now open blue water that soaks up the sun's heat, amplifying the melting process.

—In the tundra of Siberia, other researchers report that permafrost has begun to melt rapidly, and, as it does, formerly frozen methane—which, like the more prevalent carbon dioxide, acts as a heat-trapping "greenhouse gas"—is escaping into the atmosphere. In some places last winter, the methane bubbled up so steadily that puddles of standing water couldn't freeze even in the depths of the Russian winter.

—British researchers, examining almost six thousand soil borings across the UK, found another feedback effect. Warmer temperatures (growing seasons now last eleven days longer at that latitude) meant that microbial activity had increased dramatically in the soil. This, in turn, meant that much of the carbon long stored in the soil was now being released into the atmosphere. The quantities were large enough to negate all the work that Britain had done to switch away from coal to reduce carbon in the atmosphere. "All the consequences of global warming will occur more rapidly," said Guy Kirk, chief scientist on the study. "That's the scary thing. The amount of time we have got to do something about it is smaller than we thought."

Years later, as even nimwits like Bush and Cheney can no longer deny that some serious shit is happening, people will look back at 2005 -- at Hurricane Katrina, the storm in an extraordinarily busy season of storms that wiped out a city, the first city of what will prove to be all too many.

But the hurricanes also demonstrated another fact about global warming, this one having nothing to do with chemistry or physics but instead with politics, journalism, and the rituals of science. Climate change somehow seems unable to emerge on the world stage for what it really is: the single biggest challenge facing the planet, the equal in every way to the nuclear threat that transfixed us during the past half-century and a threat we haven't even begun to deal with. The coverage of Katrina's aftermath, for instance, was scathing in depicting the Bush administration's incompetence and cronyism; but the President —and his predecessors—were spared criticism for their far bigger sin of omission, the failure to do anything at all to stanch the flood of carbon that America, above all other nations, pours into the atmosphere and that is the prime cause of the great heating now underway. Though Bush has been egregious in his ignorance about climate change, the failure to do anything about it has been bipartisan; Bill Clinton and Al Gore were grandly rhetorical about the issue, but nonetheless presided over a 13 percent increase in America's carbon emissions.

That lack of preparation and precaution dwarfs even the failure to prepare for the September 11 attacks, and its effects will be with us far longer. It's not, of course, that America could in two decades have prevented global warming. But we could have begun taking the steps to keep it from spinning entirely out of control, steps that grow ever more difficult to take with each passing season.

That, stated so succinctly by Bill McKibben in the current issue of The New York Review of Books, is why global warming is the biggest story.

And the most alarming part of the story is that nobody seems to know it. Yet.

[photo: U.S. Antarctic Program]