Climate change, not the national debt, is the legacy we should care about


Worry about the grandchildren? Then stop global warming, but don't pretend deficit reduction by slashing pensions is for them

The political leadership, including the Washington press corps and punditry, were already intently ignoring the economic downturn that is still wreaking havoc on the lives of tens of millions of people across the country. Now, in the wake of the destruction from Hurricane Sandy, they will intensify their efforts to ignore global warming. After all, they want the country to focus on the debt – an issue that no one other than the elites views as a problem.

The reality, of course, is straightforward. The large deficits of recent years are due to the economic downturn caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. If the economy were back near its pre-recession level of unemployment, then the deficits would be close to 1% of GDP, a level that could be sustained indefinitely.

But the deficit scare-mongers are not interested in numbers and economics; they want to gut key government programs – most importantly, social security and Medicare. That is why they are pushing the fear stories about the debt and deficit. This is the rationale for theCampaign to "Fix" the Debt, a collection of 80 CEOs ostensibly focused on getting the budget in order.

What is perhaps most infuriating about this crew is the claim that their efforts are somehow designed to benefit our children and grandchildren. This is bizarre for a number of reasons. First, while they do want to cut social security and Medicare for current retirees and those expecting to benefit from these programs in the near future, the biggest cuts in their plans will hit today's young.

In effect, they are promising to "save" these programs for young workers by destroying them. Under most of the proposals designed to "fix" these programs, social security will provide a sharply-reduced benefit for retirees in 40 to 50 years' time, compared to the currently scheduled level. And Medicare will by no means ensure most seniors' access to decent healthcare.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...al-debt-legacy

Originally Posted by Vandal-72

For those actually interested in learning how deniers lie about the climate check this out:

http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/10/...eet/#more-5830

-For "cherry picking", notice that the AGW bed-wetter starts the data from the mid-1970s, which were unusaully cold.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...artland-expose

...Peter Gleick, who impersonated a Heartland board member to obtain and make public confidential budget and strategy documents, was restored to his position as president of the Pacific Institute, the organisation announced on its website.
The Pacific Institute indicated in the statement that it had found no evidence for Heartland's charges that Gleick had forged one of several documents he released last February.
But the Institute offered no further information on the findings of the investigation, or any evidence to support the claim of having conducted a fully independent investigation. It gave no further explanation for its decision to reject Heartland's charges that Gleick had faked a document.
Nancy Ross, a spokesperson for the Pacific Institute, said the review would not be released because it was a confidential personnel matter.

For the past three months, Pacific Institute board members and staff have refused to even name the entity conducting the investigation...

IOW, they don't bother to explain that the documents Gleick forged don't look like any of Heartland's real doc's. And that's from the Guardian.

This part is bull:

The documents released by Gleick exposed Heartland's donors' list – which it had kept private – as well as a plan to spread misinformation about climate change in schools...

Pointing out that the GW bedwetters haven't proven the Chicken Little Case is a fact, not "mis-information."

vandal The models work just fine...
No, they don't. Anyone remember the AGW based "2006: Hurricanes of Death"?

You still haven't answered this one:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html

...The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources​—​and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do...

An email from an organization I am invested in:

Dear Eric,
Clean energy was a big winner yesterday.

American voters not only re-elected a president who made green jobs a cornerstone of his first term and his campaign, they also rejected some of the shrillest champions of Big Oil and Big Coal in key Senate races from Massachusetts to Ohio, from Virginia to New Mexico.

We should be heartened that the fossil fuel lobby could throw $270 million at so many candidates hawking “drill, baby, drill” and climate denial -- and get so little back on their investment.

Apparently, democracy lives ... as does common sense. Voters roundly rejected an extremist agenda that says protecting polluter profits is job one, while the rest of us pay the price in illness, poisoned ecosystems and apocalyptic weather.

That last point was hardly academic this Election Day, as millions in the Northeast are still struggling to recover some shred of normalcy after Hurricane Sandy. Our own New York headquarters was dark last week and it has been both surreal and heartrending to watch people lining up -- all across the region -- for food, fuel and shelter just as winter is bearing down.

The human toll is hard to grasp but all too real: more than 100 people have paid with their lives. Tens of thousands more have lost everything; for them life will never be the same. Dozens of devastated communities are torn apart, feeling suddenly and terribly vulnerable to the next storm on the horizon.

These are the terrible costs of our increasingly extreme weather. Of the ten costliest hurricanes to hit the United States since 1900, eight have occurred in the past eight years -- and that was before Sandy. The latest superstorm only underscores what atmospheric scientists have been trying to tell us: the future is here, and the bill has come due for a century-long binge of fossil fuel consumption.

Will Sandy awaken America from our slumber of climate denial? Yesterday’s thrashing of Big Oil’s candidates is one reason for hope. So is the response to the hurricane from politicians of both parties, who are now grappling with the undeniable reality that their states are at the mercy of rising seas.

But hope is not enough. Action is needed ... and fast.

NRDC is not waiting. Today, we are calling on President Obama to confront the urgent threat of global warming by reining in carbon polluters and dramatically boosting the role of renewable energy in American life. That is our very best hope for breaking Big Oil’s stranglehold on both our economy and our climate.

Toward that end, we’ll work closely with the second Obama Administration to build on great progress already made in so many sectors -- like the new clean car standards we championed that will double the fuel economy of the average vehicle on the road.

But we’ll also be watchdogging the administration to ensure it does the right thing: that the EPA proposes carbon limits for existing power plants ... that the State Department delivers on its promise of a complete and independent review of the climate-wrecking Keystone XL tar sands pipeline ... that the BLM cracks down on dangerous fracking.

Of course, NRDC always stands for the environment, not for any party or elected official.

So if the Obama Administration strays from its avowed commitment to the environment, then we will hold their feet to the fire -- in court -- just as we’ve done with every other president over the past forty years.

As you read this, we are suing the administration to save the Polar Bear Seas from Shell’s reckless plans for drilling in the Arctic ... and to safeguard the very last 284 beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet from oil exploration.

Simply put, we will do everything in our power to help President Obama deliver on his goals of clean energy and environmental protection. But NRDC will hold him accountable -- for our planet’s sake -- if and when he falls short.

As for Congress, it is time for the House Republican leadership and Tea Party members to face reality: the American people are in no mood for more ideological intransigence. By rejecting Big Oil’s candidates, voters sent a message loud and clear that they want more clean energy, less climate denial and an end to the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels.

Those are the priorities NRDC will be putting front and center when the lame duck session of Congress begins next week.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

An email from an organization I am invested in:

Dear Eric,
Clean energy was a big winner yesterday.

American voters not only re-elected a president who made green jobs a cornerstone of his first term and his campaign, they also rejected some of the shrillest champions of Big Oil and Big Coal in key Senate races from Massachusetts to Ohio, from Virginia to New Mexico.

We should be heartened that the fossil fuel lobby could throw $270 million at so many candidates hawking “drill, baby, drill” and climate denial -- and get so little back on their investment.

Apparently, democracy lives ... as does common sense. Voters roundly rejected an extremist agenda that says protecting polluter profits is job one, while the rest of us pay the price in illness, poisoned ecosystems and apocalyptic weather.

That last point was hardly academic this Election Day, as millions in the Northeast are still struggling to recover some shred of normalcy after Hurricane Sandy. Our own New York headquarters was dark last week and it has been both surreal and heartrending to watch people lining up -- all across the region -- for food, fuel and shelter just as winter is bearing down.

The human toll is hard to grasp but all too real: more than 100 people have paid with their lives. Tens of thousands more have lost everything; for them life will never be the same. Dozens of devastated communities are torn apart, feeling suddenly and terribly vulnerable to the next storm on the horizon.

These are the terrible costs of our increasingly extreme weather. Of the ten costliest hurricanes to hit the United States since 1900, eight have occurred in the past eight years -- and that was before Sandy. The latest superstorm only underscores what atmospheric scientists have been trying to tell us: the future is here, and the bill has come due for a century-long binge of fossil fuel consumption.

Will Sandy awaken America from our slumber of climate denial? Yesterday’s thrashing of Big Oil’s candidates is one reason for hope. So is the response to the hurricane from politicians of both parties, who are now grappling with the undeniable reality that their states are at the mercy of rising seas.

But hope is not enough. Action is needed ... and fast.

NRDC is not waiting. Today, we are calling on President Obama to confront the urgent threat of global warming by reining in carbon polluters and dramatically boosting the role of renewable energy in American life. That is our very best hope for breaking Big Oil’s stranglehold on both our economy and our climate.

Toward that end, we’ll work closely with the second Obama Administration to build on great progress already made in so many sectors -- like the new clean car standards we championed that will double the fuel economy of the average vehicle on the road.

But we’ll also be watchdogging the administration to ensure it does the right thing: that the EPA proposes carbon limits for existing power plants ... that the State Department delivers on its promise of a complete and independent review of the climate-wrecking Keystone XL tar sands pipeline ... that the BLM cracks down on dangerous fracking.

Of course, NRDC always stands for the environment, not for any party or elected official.

So if the Obama Administration strays from its avowed commitment to the environment, then we will hold their feet to the fire -- in court -- just as we’ve done with every other president over the past forty years.

As you read this, we are suing the administration to save the Polar Bear Seas from Shell’s reckless plans for drilling in the Arctic ... and to safeguard the very last 284 beluga whales in Alaska’s Cook Inlet from oil exploration.

Simply put, we will do everything in our power to help President Obama deliver on his goals of clean energy and environmental protection. But NRDC will hold him accountable -- for our planet’s sake -- if and when he falls short.

As for Congress, it is time for the House Republican leadership and Tea Party members to face reality: the American people are in no mood for more ideological intransigence. By rejecting Big Oil’s candidates, voters sent a message loud and clear that they want more clean energy, less climate denial and an end to the $4 billion in taxpayer subsidies for fossil fuels.

Those are the priorities NRDC will be putting front and center when the lame duck session of Congress begins next week.

If the NRDC was really politically smart, they would take this guy's suggestion and run with it. Maybe they couldn't get NOAA to come along but they could set up a rival naming-system -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...e-fossil-fuels

Why we should name hurricanes after fossil fuel corporations

- this reminds me of one of the powerful forces in bringing down the KKK - infiltrators gave out all their secret handshake crap and made them look like clowns to even their own children.

Imagine if Sandy had been named instead "Hurricane Koch Brothers"

Well that's certainly a good idea, but I doubt people could get the bureaucrats to do it.

Originally Posted by JDG 66

-For "cherry picking", notice that the AGW bed-wetter starts the data from the mid-1970s, which were unusaully cold.

You really don't have a clue do you?

The entry starts in the early 70's because that's when the instruments to gather that data were first put into use. In other words he included the entire data set. That is the exact opposite of cherry picking.

Now tell me again why exactly the denier chose to plot the data starting in 1997 instead of including all the data?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environmen...artland-expose

...Peter Gleick, who impersonated a Heartland board member to obtain and make public confidential budget and strategy documents, was restored to his position as president of the Pacific Institute, the organisation announced on its website.
The Pacific Institute indicated in the statement that it had found no evidence for Heartland's charges that Gleick had forged one of several documents he released last February.
But the Institute offered no further information on the findings of the investigation, or any evidence to support the claim of having conducted a fully independent investigation. It gave no further explanation for its decision to reject Heartland's charges that Gleick had faked a document.
Nancy Ross, a spokesperson for the Pacific Institute, said the review would not be released because it was a confidential personnel matter.

For the past three months, Pacific Institute board members and staff have refused to even name the entity conducting the investigation...

IOW, they don't bother to explain that the documents Gleick forged don't look like any of Heartland's real doc's. And that's from the Guardian.

This part is bull:

The documents released by Gleick exposed Heartland's donors' list – which it had kept private – as well as a plan to spread misinformation about climate change in schools...

Pointing out that the GW bedwetters haven't proven the Chicken Little Case is a fact, not "mis-information."

Did you even look at any of the material they planned to use in their education packet? I have. It is full of misinformation.

vandal The models work just fine...
No, they don't. Anyone remember the AGW based "2006: Hurricanes of Death"?

Since Google returned exactly zero matches for that phrase, I'd say nobody remembers it.
In addition, since you are referring to hurricanes occurring in a single year, I'm surmising that you don't really understand what a climate model is. Or, you have a fundamental statistical illiteracy.

You still haven't answered this one:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...ng_631915.html

...The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources​—​and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do...

Winning? Winning what exactly?

If the Heartland Institute and other arch conservative organizations convince the public that Global Warming is not real, will that change the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide? Will the chemical products of fossil fuel combustion reactions no longer include carbon dioxide? Do the laws of physics really give a damn what some people want to be true?

Play make believe all you want. You and Karl Rove can share your favorite math tricks. The planet's climate will still continue to shift. And those shifts will continue to impact societies and ecosystems all around the world.

Exit Polls 2012: Hurricane Sandy Was A Deciding Factor For Millions Of Voters In The Election
by Brad Johnson, Climate Guest Blogger on Nov 6, 2012 at 7:16 pm

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/201...ion/?mobile=nc

Exit polls by CBS News reveal that Superstorm Sandy, and President Obama’s response, was a crucial factor for two in five voters nationwide. This recognition comes despite the Obama campaign decision to downplay the growing crisis of climate disasters and to minimize the actions of the Obama administration to build climate resilience. With Obama and Romney neck-and-neck in the polls, the reality of climate disasters and the need for strong governmental response may turn out to be the deciding element of the 2012 election.

Twenty-six percent of those polled said Obama’s broadly praised response was an important factor, and 15 percent — about one in six voters — said it was the most important factor in their vote:

IMPORTANCE OF OBAMA’S HURRICANE RESPONSE
Most important factor 15%
Important factor 26
Minor/not a factor 55

In contrast to President Obama, who has said on the campaign trail that the “droughts we’ve seen, the floods, the wildfires aren’t a joke,” Romney has mocked sea level rise and called for the privatization of the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
Recognizing the fingerprint of global warming pollution on the Sandy disaster, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Wall Street billionaire, endorsed Obama as a climate voter.

It now looks like tens of millions of Americans agree with Bloomberg: climate change is not a joke, but instead the most important reason to vote.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

It now looks like tens of millions of Americans agree with Bloomberg: climate change is not a joke, but instead the most important reason to vote.

Hmm. I'm still seeing Sandy as one more straw on the camel's back. Not sure the back is broken, yet.

Climate Change Denier Likely to Lead Congressional Science Committee

By Christine Gorman | November 14, 2012 |

Republican Party leaders in the House of Representatives will decide whether Representatives Lamar Smith of Texas, James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin or Dana Rohrabacher of California will succeed Ralph Hall, also of Texas, as chair of the House Committee. Because of term limits, Hall cannot continue heading the group, which has jurisdiction over energy research, NASA, the National Weather Service and the National Science Foundation, among other things.

What follows is just a sample of the three would-be chairmen’s public statements on climate change:

A 2009 statement by Rep. Smith that can still be found on his official House website, regarding the massively overblown Climategate scandal that involved emails stolen from East Anglia University:

“The [ABC, NBC and CBS television] networks have shown a steady pattern of bias on climate change. During a six-month period, four out of five network news reports failed to acknowledge any dissenting opinions about global warming, according to a Business and Media Institute study.

“The networks should tell Americans the truth, rather than hide the facts.”

From Rep Rohrabacher’s remarks on the floor of the House on December 8, 2011, as recorded by the Congressional Record:

“In my lifetime, there has been no greater example of this threat [the military-industrial complex], which Eisenhower warned us about, than the insidious coalition of research science and political largesse–a coalition that has conducted an unrelenting crusade to convince the American people that their health and their safety and–yes–their very survival on this planet is at risk due to manmade global warming. The purpose of this greatest-of-all propaganda campaigns is to enlist public support for, if not just the acquiescence to, a dramatic mandated change in our society and a mandated change to our way of life. This campaign has such momentum and power that it is now a tangible threat to our freedom and to our prosperity as a people.

“Ironically, as the crusade against manmade global warming grows in power, more evidence surfaces every day that the scientific theory on which the alarmists have based their crusade is totally bogus. The general public and decisionmakers for decades have been inundated with phony science, altered numbers, and outright fraud. This is the ultimate power grab in the name of saving the world; and like all fanatics, disagreement is not allowed in such endeavors.

“Prominent scientists who have been skeptical of the claims of manmade global warming have themselves been cut from research grants and have been obstructed when trying to publish peer-reviewed dissenting opinions. How the mainstream media or publications like the National Journal, for example, have ignored the systematic oppression that I speak about is beyond me.”

From Rep. Sensenbrenner’s videotaped presentation on May 22, 2012, at a conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute of Chicago, which the New York Times calls “the primary American organization pushing climate change skepticism.”

“[T]he emails leaked from the East Anglia University . . . simply revealed to the world what we already knew. There is a portion of the scientific community that is more interested in defending its findings rather than in finding the truth. . . .

“Climategate revealed that climate science is less about honest debate than ideological warfare. Despite the relentless push to dismiss the emails and to clear the scientists involved, the leaked emails can only be honestly read as an exposure of partisanship among climate change scientists. For that reason, it tainted not only the science but the investigations that would follow as groups scrambled to exonerate the scientists involved and to minimize the impact of their words.”

Meanwhile, scientific evidence is mounting that climate change is happening faster than most models had predicted.

About the Author: Christine Gorman is the editor in charge of health and medicine features for SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. Follow on Twitter @cgorman.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...nce-committee/

Fair use: much of the content is statements of elected officials doing official duty or involved in political activities related to their official duty.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...20-300x168.jpg

(from NOAA)

http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/cms-filesys...ght_vol1n5.pdf

From the IPCC* Summary For Policymakers...
“Long-term trends from 1900 to 2005 have been observed in precipitation amount over many large regions. Significantly increased precipitation has been observed in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe and central Asia. Drying has been observed in the Sahel, the Mediterranean, southern Africa and parts of southern Asia.” “Increases in the amount of precipitation are very likely in high latitudes, while decreases are likely in most subtropical land regions..., continuing observed patterns in trends.“

Warming of the global climate is expected to be accompanied by a reduction in rainfall in the subtropics and an increase in precipitation in subpolar latitudes and some equatorial regions. This pattern can be described in broad terms as the wet getting wetter and the dry getting drier, since subtropical land regions are mostly semi-arid today, while most subpolar regions currently have an excess of precipitation over evaporation. Though clearly a feature of a warming global climate, this characterization of the changing precipitation pattern cannot be applied to every locale, but should instead be thought of as a large-scale tendency that can be modified by local conditions in some cases. As seen in the map below, the drying is projected to be strongest near the poleward margins of the subtropics (for example, South Africa, southern Australia, the Mediterranean, and the south-western U.S.), a pattern that can be described as a poleward expansion of these semi-arid zones. This large-scale pattern of change is a robust feature present in nearly all of the simulations conducted by the world's climate modeling groups for the 4th Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), including those conducted at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). It is also evident in observed 20th century precipitation trends.

► How the atmosphere responds

As the atmosphere warms, it is capable of holding more water vapor, and computer climate models as well as observations indicate that the atmosphere’s water vapor is increasing and will increase further. The reason that the subtropics are relatively dry and higher latitudes relatively wet is that the water vapor that evaporates in the subtropics (roughly the band from 20° to 40° latitude in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) is continually being transported to higher latitudes by the atmosphere before it falls as rain or snow. As the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere increases, this transport increases, pulling more water out of the subtropics and depositing in subpolar latitudes (roughly the zone between 50° and 70° latitude in each hemisphere. Combined with wind pattern changes that cause the entire atmospheric circulation to be displaced polewards as the climate warms, these atmospheric climate change responses result in especially strong
drying tendencies near several subtropical regions This is seen in the graph to the far right as a decrease of 3 to 4 inches of annual precipitation centered near
35 latitude in both hemispheres. This pattern of large-scale precipitation changes also can be seen in animations and graphics found at
http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/research/climate/highlights.

Well, how about it? I look at the map of changes in precipitation, and even without changes in temperature I see some ugly trends. Most of us are Americans, so let's start with the most populous state. California loses its winter rains -- its sole source of rain. Coastal California becomes like Baja California with Eureka having about the climate of Tijuana. The Sierra snowpack largely disappears in winters, so once the fossil water is gone, the Central Valley becomes a wasteland. Beautiful Lake Tahoe desiccates into a place like Death Valley. That becomes the norm for places with Mediterranean climates. Sites of ancient Rome, Carthage, and Damascus become deserts. So do the South of France of Vincent, the Catalonia of Picasso, and the Venice of Canaletto. Even just beyond the Mediterranean zone... the Champagne region of France will no longer have the moisture for grapes, the Vienna woods will become a sparse prairie, and the eerie world of Dracula and Frankinstein known as Transylvania will be literally beyond the woods. The Blue Danube might become an ephemeral stream. If there will be bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover -- they will have much less to eat there. Winter rains will fail to reach southern England, and the Thames will be at most a creek in London. But such happens to any place with a Mediterranean climate. The Australian Outback will extend to the coast, Central Chile will become an extension of the Atacama. and the Kalahari will extend to the coast of South Africa. "Mediterranean" will be a synonym for "infernal". Maybe the classic Mediterranean climate will reappear along the North Sea and Baltic Sea or pop up around America's Great Lakes. (I guess that that would revive Michigan as a place to live!)

How about Texas, the second-most populous State of the Union? The state dries out. No, that does not mean that Texans quit getting drunk. The Panhandle becomes much like southeastern California or southern Arizona as rains fail. When the fossil water is gone, the agriculture dies. Indeed, the High Plains of the central US becomes a permanent dust bowl. The subtropical High positions itself over the Deep South -- and the Piney Woods of Mississippi and Alabama become a tinderbox. Texas is big enough that I an use it to describe what happens both to subtropical areas like northern India, where the monsoons fail -- and such breadbaskets as Ukraine, where the wheat fields become short-grass prairie. Florida extends into the tropics... and just as a reminder of all those horrible images of the Sahel as the Sahara extended southward into western Africa and Ethiopia -- that is back, but even harder.

New York State will probably again be the most populous State of the Union. It will be hotter and stickier. If you liked the climate of Houston when it wasn't on the fringe of the Great Texahara Desert, you will like the climates of New York and Philadelphia.

But there won't be an overall reduction in rainfall, will there? No -- it just gets concentrated in fewer regions, like the western tropical Pacific. That looks like year-round hurricane 'country'. Pity the Philippines and New Guinea that get raked year-round.

" If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again."

The Dust Bowl
Directed by Ken Burns
PBS Video 11/12 DVD/VHS Documentary
Not Rated

Memory & Survivors
In his introduction to Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Studs Terkel writes of the United States:

"Ours, the richest country in the world, may be the poorest in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of a time past may serve as a reminder to others."

A Cautionary Tale about Progress & Profit


Burns wants to make it clear that "The Dust Bowl" is a cautionary tale that has great relevance to contemporary society where the same pursuit of progress and profit is fueling extreme climate change and an unprecedented series of environmental disasters. Burns has stated:


"The Dust Bowl was a heartbreaking tragedy in the enormous scale of human suffering it caused. But perhaps the biggest tragedy is that it was preventable. This was an ecosystem — a grassland — that had evolved over millions of years to adjust to the droughts, high winds and violent weather extremes so common to that part of the country. In the space of a few decades at the start of the twentieth century, that grassland was uprooted in the middle of a frenzied wheat boom. When a drought returned, all that exposed soil took to the skies, and people worried that the breadbasket of the nation would become the next Sahara desert. If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again."

A documentary about this man made disaster is showing this evening on PBS.

Naomi Klein lays it out on climate change and Republican ideology.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/naomi-...limate-change/

(transcript link on the left, below the video)

"BILL MOYERS: Well, I understand that but we're so complacent about climate change. A new study shows that while the number of people who believe it's happening has increased by, say, three percentage points over the last year, the number of people who don't think it is human caused has dropped.

NAOMI KLEIN: It has dropped dramatically. I mean, the statistics on this are quite incredible. 2007, according to a Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans believed that climate change was real, that it was human caused. And by last year, that number went down to 44 percent. 71 percent to 44 percent, that is an unbelievable drop in belief.....

And on top of that, you have, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to both buy off the environmental movement, to defame the environmental movement, to infiltrate the environmental movement, and to spread lies in the culture. And that's what the climate denial movement has been doing so effectively.

BILL MOYERS: I read a piece just this week by the environmental writer Glenn Scherer. He took a look and finds that over the last two years, the lion's share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning red states. But those states have sent a whole new crop of climate change deniers to Congress.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, someone's going to have to explain Oklahoma to me, you know?

BILL MOYERS: My native state.

NAOMI KLEIN: My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate denying senator is from the state that is so deeply climate effected. There was something, actually, I was-- last year I covered the Heartland Conference, which is the annual confab for all the climate deniers. And James Inhofe was supposed to be the keynote speaker. And the first morning of the conference, there was lots of buzz. He’s the rock star among the climate deniers. Inhofe is coming, he's opening up this conference, right? And the first morning the main conference organizer stands up at breakfast and lets loose the bad news that James Inhofe has called in sick and he can't make it.

And it turns out that he had gone swimming in a lake filled with blue-green algae, which is actually a climate-related issue. When lakes get too warm, this blue-green algae spreads. And he had gone swimming. And he had gotten sick from the blue-green algae. So he actually arguably had a climate-related illness and couldn't come to the climate change conference. But even though he was sick, he wrote a letter from his sickbed just telling them what a great job he was doing. So the powers of denial are amazingly strong, Bill. If you are deeply invested in this free-market ideology, you know, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil and that, you know, our liberation will come from liberating corporations, then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because we have to regulate.

We have to plan. We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just, "Okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits." It's that it's that this science threatens a worldview. And when you dig deeper, when you drill deeper into those statistics about the drop in belief in climate change, what you see is that Democrats still believe in in climate change, in the 70th percentile. That whole drop of belief, drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political spectrum. So the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real is what their views are on a range of other political subjects. You know, what do you think about abortion? What is your view of taxes? And what you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science, because it threatens everything else they believe."


Copperfield, Gianthogweed, ClassicXer, Prince, The Rani, Weave, JPT, Wallace, all those who believe the free-market ideology, reality is challenging you. And everyone else needs to realize this too, and therefore to challenge this ideology directly. It is the nub of all other issues today.

Originally Posted by Deb C

" If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again."

The Dust Bowl
Directed by Ken Burns
PBS Video 11/12 DVD/VHS Documentary
Not Rated

Memory & Survivors
In his introduction to Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression, Studs Terkel writes of the United States:

"Ours, the richest country in the world, may be the poorest in memory. Perhaps the remembrances of survivors of a time past may serve as a reminder to others."

A Cautionary Tale about Progress & Profit


Burns wants to make it clear that "The Dust Bowl" is a cautionary tale that has great relevance to contemporary society where the same pursuit of progress and profit is fueling extreme climate change and an unprecedented series of environmental disasters. Burns has stated:


"The Dust Bowl was a heartbreaking tragedy in the enormous scale of human suffering it caused. But perhaps the biggest tragedy is that it was preventable. This was an ecosystem — a grassland — that had evolved over millions of years to adjust to the droughts, high winds and violent weather extremes so common to that part of the country. In the space of a few decades at the start of the twentieth century, that grassland was uprooted in the middle of a frenzied wheat boom. When a drought returned, all that exposed soil took to the skies, and people worried that the breadbasket of the nation would become the next Sahara desert. If we show the same neglect to the limits of nature now as we did then, it is entirely possible that this could happen again."

A documentary about this man made disaster is showing this evening on PBS.

And Part 2 tomorrow, same time.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Naomi Klein lays it out on climate change and Republican ideology.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/naomi-...limate-change/

NAOMI KLEIN: My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate denying senator is from the state that is so deeply climate effected. There was something, actually, I was-- last year I covered the Heartland Conference, which is the annual confab for all the climate deniers. And James Inhofe was supposed to be the keynote speaker. And the first morning of the conference, there was lots of buzz. He’s the rock star among the climate deniers. Inhofe is coming, he's opening up this conference, right? And the first morning the main conference organizer stands up at breakfast and lets loose the bad news that James Inhofe has called in sick and he can't make it.

And it turns out that he had gone swimming in a lake filled with blue-green algae, which is actually a climate-related issue. When lakes get too warm, this blue-green algae spreads. And he had gone swimming. And he had gotten sick from the blue-green algae. So he actually arguably had a climate-related illness and couldn't come to the climate change conference. But even though he was sick, he wrote a letter from his sickbed just telling them what a great job he was doing. So the powers of denial are amazingly strong...

The irony is that Oklahoma would be one of the states most hurt by global warming. It surprises me that Oklahoma set a dubious record in 2011 -- of having the highest statewide average annual temperature for any State in the US. I would have expected Arizona or Texas to set such a record -- but it was Oklahoma. Does anyone want to bet against a duplication of such a record this year? We would need a very chilly December to offset the first ten-and-a-half months of a very warm year.

I've been through eastern Oklahoma many times on US 69... and eastern Oklahoma doesn't look bad. Its poverty is hidden by the fact that housing is comparatively new, so one doesn't see the ramshackle houses of the Rust Belt. It has some nice recreational areas that probably mitigate the occasionally-oppressive heat. Of course those are perfectly made for motor boats that devour huge amounts of petroleum-based fuels... the state government wouldn't bite the hand (Big Oil) that feeds it. Let's put it this way: sailing is comparatively green. Motorboating is about as green as pointless auto travel.

Oklahoma is on the limit of climatic tolerability for most Americans. It wouldn't take much more heat to make it infernal.

Senator Imhofe has sold out to Big Oil -- and he has made a Mephistophelian bargain on behalf of his state. He has sold out the long-term future of Oklahoma for quick gains by the energy cartel. For his type the political agenda is to ravage the environment as intensely as possible in as short a time as possible and then run. He is thus the anti-environmentalist. But it is the common man who gets stuck with the consequences of bad environmental policy. He has no obvious concern for children who will starve with distended bellies in Africa or even poor people in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma is barely in the temperate zone. If it were decidedly warmer, probably through the disappearance of any semblance of a mid-latitude winter, it would become vulnerable to tropical diseases.

If you are deeply invested in this free-market ideology, you know, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil and that, you know, our liberation will come from liberating corporations, then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because we have to regulate.

We have to plan. We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just, "Okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits." It's that it's that this science threatens a worldview. And when you dig deeper, when you drill deeper into those statistics about the drop in belief in climate change, what you see is that Democrats still believe in in climate change, in the 70th percentile. That whole drop of belief, drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political spectrum. So the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real is what their views are on a range of other political subjects. You know, what do you think about abortion? What is your view of taxes? And what you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science, because it threatens everything else they believe."


Copperfield, Gianthogweed, ClassicXer, Prince, The Rani, Weave, JPT, Wallace, all those who believe the free-market ideology, reality is challenging you. And everyone else needs to realize this too, and therefore to challenge this ideology directly. It is the nub of all other issues today.

The Hard Right has become increasingly rigid in its values. It accepts a political hierarchy based upon economic power. It accepts the pronouncements of the trusted mouthpieces of the American oligarchy without any potential for criticism. It accepts that what happens in This World is a triviality in contrast to what happens in the Next. Heaven will of course contain no liberals, secularists, or socialists who of course will burn in Hell.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Naomi Klein lays it out on climate change and Republican ideology.

http://billmoyers.com/segment/naomi-...limate-change/

(transcript link on the left, below the video)

"BILL MOYERS: Well, I understand that but we're so complacent about climate change. A new study shows that while the number of people who believe it's happening has increased by, say, three percentage points over the last year, the number of people who don't think it is human caused has dropped.

NAOMI KLEIN: It has dropped dramatically. I mean, the statistics on this are quite incredible. 2007, according to a Harris poll, 71 percent of Americans believed that climate change was real, that it was human caused. And by last year, that number went down to 44 percent. 71 percent to 44 percent, that is an unbelievable drop in belief.....

And on top of that, you have, we've had this concerted campaign by the fossil fuel lobby to both buy off the environmental movement, to defame the environmental movement, to infiltrate the environmental movement, and to spread lies in the culture. And that's what the climate denial movement has been doing so effectively.

BILL MOYERS: I read a piece just this week by the environmental writer Glenn Scherer. He took a look and finds that over the last two years, the lion's share of the damage from extreme weather, floods, tornadoes, droughts, thunder storms, wind storms, heat waves, wildfires, has occurred in Republican-leaning red states. But those states have sent a whole new crop of climate change deniers to Congress.

NAOMI KLEIN: Yeah, someone's going to have to explain Oklahoma to me, you know?

BILL MOYERS: My native state.

NAOMI KLEIN: My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate denying senator is from the state that is so deeply climate effected. There was something, actually, I was-- last year I covered the Heartland Conference, which is the annual confab for all the climate deniers. And James Inhofe was supposed to be the keynote speaker. And the first morning of the conference, there was lots of buzz. He’s the rock star among the climate deniers. Inhofe is coming, he's opening up this conference, right? And the first morning the main conference organizer stands up at breakfast and lets loose the bad news that James Inhofe has called in sick and he can't make it.

And it turns out that he had gone swimming in a lake filled with blue-green algae, which is actually a climate-related issue. When lakes get too warm, this blue-green algae spreads. And he had gone swimming. And he had gotten sick from the blue-green algae. So he actually arguably had a climate-related illness and couldn't come to the climate change conference. But even though he was sick, he wrote a letter from his sickbed just telling them what a great job he was doing. So the powers of denial are amazingly strong, Bill. If you are deeply invested in this free-market ideology, you know, if you really believe with your heart and soul that everything public and anything the government does is evil and that, you know, our liberation will come from liberating corporations, then climate change fundamentally challenges your worldview, precisely because we have to regulate.

We have to plan. We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer. So it isn't just, "Okay, the fossil fuel companies want to protect their profits." It's that it's that this science threatens a worldview. And when you dig deeper, when you drill deeper into those statistics about the drop in belief in climate change, what you see is that Democrats still believe in in climate change, in the 70th percentile. That whole drop of belief, drop off in belief has happened on the right side of the political spectrum. So the most reliable predictor of whether or not somebody believes that climate change is real is what their views are on a range of other political subjects. You know, what do you think about abortion? What is your view of taxes? And what you find is that people who have very strong conservative political beliefs cannot deal with this science, because it threatens everything else they believe."


Copperfield, Gianthogweed, ClassicXer, Prince, The Rani, Weave, JPT, Wallace, all those who believe the free-market ideology, reality is challenging you. And everyone else needs to realize this too, and therefore to challenge this ideology directly. It is the nub of all other issues today.

It's a shame this country isn't remotely close to having anything resembling a free-market economy on the macroeconomic scale (and these days it's rare even on the microeconomic scale). If it did you wouldn't look so foolish mangling definitions yet again. Republicans certainly don't support the free market any more than Democrats do and frankly quite a few libertarians don't support the free market either.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

It's a shame this country isn't remotely close to having anything resembling a free-market economy on the macroeconomic scale (and these days it's rare even on the microeconomic scale). If it did you wouldn't look so foolish mangling definitions yet again. Republicans certainly don't support the free market any more than Democrats do and frankly quite a few libertarians don't support the free market either.

A truly free "free market" does not exist anywhere in the world today.

It does not exist even in that Libertarian paradise on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia - there, one needs to get permission from the local war lord to open a business and a tax that will likely include making one's wife available for entertainment purposes as well as a child or two for some soldering.

I'm sure those actually living the nearest actuality of your "free market" would find your magic pony 'thinking' amusing.

Originally Posted by playwrite

A truly free "free market" does not exist anywhere in the world today.

It does not exist even in that Libertarian paradise on the outskirts of Mogadishu, Somalia - there, one needs to get permission from the local war lord to open a business and a tax that will likely include making one's wife available for entertainment purposes as well as a child or two for some soldering.

I'm sure those actually living the nearest actuality of your "free market" would find your magic pony 'thinking' amusing.

I'm just amazed that a country that spent a saeculum under Britain's thumb, was then ruled by communists for another few decades, and is currently under Shari'a law, is your example of a place where a lack of government has doomed the people.

By the way, didn't you get the memo?

Since the communist government collapsed, the CIA estimates that real GDP growth in Somalia has averaged 2.6% a year for several decades now. The pirates are helping to protect the coast from over-fishing by multinational fleets. Electricity is available, as well as some of the fastest internet access in Africa.

No doubt life in Somalia sucks, but there's also little room to doubt they're better off today than they were in the 80s when a nice strong communist dictator was in charge.

Do you look at other ex-communist states as examples of the tragic nature of limited government?

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

I'm just amazed that a country that spent a saeculum under Britain's thumb, was then ruled by communists for another few decades, and is currently under Shari'a law, is your example of a place where a lack of government has doomed the people.

By the way, didn't you get the memo?

Since the communist government collapsed, the CIA estimates that real GDP growth in Somalia has averaged 2.6% a year for several decades now. The pirates are helping to protect the coast from over-fishing by multinational fleets. Electricity is available, as well as some of the fastest internet access in Africa.

No doubt life in Somalia sucks, but there's also little room to doubt they're better off today than they were in the 80s when a nice strong communist dictator was in charge.

Do you look at other ex-communist states as examples of the tragic nature of limited government?

But failing central govt is not the comparison now is it.

The fact that when a centralized govt fails the situation devolves into brutally violent chaos just helps prove the point that a truly-free "free market" (i.e. the aftermath of a failed central govt) is not likely to be actually achieved - the piles of corpses tends to get in the way and something or somebody emerges with the rules.

Whatever sanity has been brought back to Somalia is a result of its own centralize govt being backed by other centralized govt's BRINGING GOVT RULES TO BEAR.

Where near-Libertarian nirvana exist is in those areas outside of Mogadishu that are still run by warlords where GOVT RULES are still remain non existent. That is about as close as one can get to a truly-free "free market" on this planet.

If you have better examples, please share them.

Originally Posted by playwrite

A truly free "free market" does not exist anywhere in the world today.

Which is basically what I said. The point was that when Eric blames environmental issues on something that doesn't really exist it just makes him look foolish. You seem to struggle with reading comprehension almost as much as Eric does. I guess comprehension is a problem that commonly arises when one cherishes believing over thinking. Who knew?

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

I'm just amazed that a country that spent a saeculum under Britain's thumb, was then ruled by communists for another few decades, and is currently under Shari'a law, is your example of a place where a lack of government has doomed the people.

By the way, didn't you get the memo?

Since the communist government collapsed, the CIA estimates that real GDP growth in Somalia has averaged 2.6% a year for several decades now. The pirates are helping to protect the coast from over-fishing by multinational fleets. Electricity is available, as well as some of the fastest internet access in Africa.

No doubt life in Somalia sucks, but there's also little room to doubt they're better off today than they were in the 80s when a nice strong communist dictator was in charge.

Do you look at other ex-communist states as examples of the tragic nature of limited government?

I think we have already established that a lot of people don't keep up on current events these days. It is deeply important to some people that the official story be told and re-told with all of the inaccuracies intact. Boogeymen are usually a lot scarier to children when the lights are off as opposed to on. It's the difference between learning the lesson they want you to learn and learning the lesson.

"One day after thousands marched on the White House to protest the expansion of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, activists on the front lines in Texas faced pepper spray and arrests Monday as they blocked pipeline construction" begins a piece at Common Dreams this morning. Climate scientists have said this pipeline may exacerbate global warming like nothing else in the planning stage. This protest is a last-ditch battle against global forces of greed who would kill us all for a dime in profit.

A piece out this morning has it that even the World Bank is warning investors to put their money in investments not connected to finding new fossil fuels, although they are ignoring this in continuing to fund such activities themselves. The conflict for the banksters may be recent insurance company losses owing to catastrophes brought on by global warming as the bottom line appears to remain their only interest, no matter how many die as a consequence.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

Which is basically what I said. The point was that when Eric blames environmental issues on something that doesn't really exist it just makes him look foolish. You seem to struggle with reading comprehension almost as much as Eric does. I guess comprehension is a problem that commonly arises when one cherishes believing over thinking. Who knew?

Perhaps I was thrown off by your -

It's a shame this country isn't remotely close to having anything resembling a free-market economy ...

- and then going on how no one actually supports such a market. That sort of implies that a free market economy is possible just no one is pure enough to support it. However, your complaint is noted and so let's caulk it up to a rhetorical remark on your part to make a point and my misunderstanding of that.

However, what Klein said was "free market ideology" - that is very different than "free market" alone and it certainly exists in abundance. The ideology is about profit motive, unconstrained by societal pressures through govt regulation.

All economies are more or less free, more or less regulated, and it is in the eye of the beholder (or more accurately, one's sense of whether it is free enough to derive satisfactory income). "Free market ideology" pressures the needle toward more free, less regulated. Klein merely points out that a determination of anthropogenic climate change puts pressure on the needle in the opposite direction.

Frankly, I'm not sure why this is taken as some sort of new insight.

Originally Posted by Copperfield

I think we have already established that a lot of people don't keep up on current events these days. It is deeply important to some people that the official story be told and re-told with all of the inaccuracies intact. Boogeymen are usually a lot scarier to children when the lights are off as opposed to on. It's the difference between learning the lesson they want you to learn and learning the lesson.

While it has been over two decades, I've actually been to Somalia and I still have contacts there. What has happened in parts of the country, particularly along the coast where international pressure was brought to bear on the pirating, has not been uniformly adopted across the country. Tribal warfare and war lords still hold sway in large areas. I could probable arrange for you, or any other Libertarians here, for you to open a business there if you really want to get the feel of a place that comes about as close to pure free market as possible.

Originally Posted by playwrite

While it has been over two decades, I've actually been to Somalia and I still have contacts there. What has happened in parts of the country, particularly along the coast where international pressure was brought to bear on the pirating, has not been uniformly adopted across the country. Tribal warfare and war lords still hold sway in large areas. I could probable arrange for you, or any other Libertarians here, for you to open a business there if you really want to get the feel of a place that comes about as close to pure free market as possible.

Sure. While we already deal/trade with Somalis on a daily basis, we are always willing to look at new investment opportunities and new markets (you would be amazed at some of the places we have brick and mortar). That should not be a surprise really. As I understand it, a lot of companies and people have been successfully investing in Somalia (some for nearly a decade now).