I’m surprised they bothered doing it on Pruitt’s final day. I’m sure anyone else Trump puts in charge would be happy to sign off on ignoring pollution controls.
Proposal from a Republican that’s actually pretty good (which means it stands no chance.)
The government contended that letting the case proceed would be too burdensome, unconstitutionally pit the courts against the executive branch, and require improper “agency decision-making” by forcing officials to answer questions about climate change.
That’s not what government’s for, the temerity of it all! /s
ONe of the more frequent RW/Alt-Right talking points of the past decade debunked:
One of the stranger conspiracy theories against climate science is that corporate interests are pulling all the strings so that “Big Green” can get rich from action against climate change. Of course, it’s no secret that industries related to fossil fuels have lobbied for the exact opposite, pushing to avoid any significant climate policy.
So what do American industries spend to lobby Congress on this issue?
Drexel University’s Robert Brulle used lobbying reporting laws to find out. Not every penny spent on persuading congresspeople has to be reported—and a lot of political activities, like think tank funding, don’t count as lobbying. But spending on lobbying itself has been tracked in the US since a 1995 law mandated it. Brulle was able to sift through climate-related expenditures between 2000 and 2016, sorting the entities into groups.
The result: “Big Green” is being massively outspent by fossil fuel industries.
In other news, I could see CA placing a massive State Tax on vehicles which exceed the CA rules if this goes through:
As someone who lived in LA in the 80’s & 90’s, and could see first hand the cumulative effects of cleaner emissions (what? there are mountains over there?), and feel them in my lungs when exercising outside, I can’t see CA letting this happen.
I hope not. There are few things that make me hate the GOP more.
What’s their catch phrase? Well STATES RIGHTS MOTHERFUCKERS
Like the deficit, being pro-life, and so many other things, they only actually care about that shit when they have a political motivation to do so.
The description of the questions this guy fielded from tech moguls is, well, pretty unbelievable.
Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?”
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time.
That was depressing (he said for the nth time.)
Here’s an interesting Chris Hayes twitter exchange. He admits that when they (MSNBC) do climate change stories they get low ratings. Hence the lack of coverage (we knew this, but still.)
So I take from this that it is the unhealthy maniacs that are drawn to accumulate compulsively money. I feel even safer now.
Illustrates the difficulty media have with climate change and why Americans in particular continue to shrug.
Geoff Brumfiel, NPR’s science editor, vigorously defended the public radio network’s climate coverage. “We’re actively working on a story, trying to see what scientists think all of these events,” he told me on Tuesday. “You don’t just want to be throwing around, ‘This is due to climate change, that is due to climate change.’” I suggested that journalists don’t need to determine whether an event was caused by climate change to make a climate connection—a journalist could merely say climate change makes extreme events such as these more likely. “It’s an interesting question if there should be boilerplate language [in extreme weather stories],” Brumfiel replied.
Addressing the crisis will require getting more people to care about it in the first place. The scientific community is doing its part by providing the evidence that climate change is real, and that it’s making extreme storms, droughts, wildfires and other weather more likely. It’s up to journalists to convey those truths to public at large.
Yeah, we’ve always had extreme weather, so you need to be careful about saying “see, climate change!” every time it happens. It’s what gives ammo to those idiots that say “so much for global warming!” whenever there’s a cold winter or a March snowstorm.
And yeah I know, idiots are going to idiot. But I think most climate scientists would argue to be cautious of linking a specific weather event to global warming. I do like what he’s saying about pointing out that extreme weather events such as what are being reported become more common with climate change.
What do you know, something actually is too obviously corrupt for this administration.
Long form.
This is about as depressing as it gets.
A friend of work volunteered yesterday that he had read this article (a self-styled libertarian, not maga though.) “I had no idea,” he said. He’s not alone - I wager the majority of Americans are in the same place.
I wonder, sometimes, which has been the larger media failure - trump, or climate change?
Yet as the impact of climate change becomes more evident, so too does the scale of the challenge ahead. Three years after countries vowed in Paris to keep warming “well below” 2°C relative to pre-industrial levels, greenhouse-gas emissions are up again. So are investments in oil and gas. In 2017, for the first time in four years, demand for coal rose. Subsidies for renewables, such as wind and solar power, are dwindling in many places and investment has stalled; climate-friendly nuclear power is expensive and unpopular. It is tempting to think these are temporary setbacks and that mankind, with its instinct for self-preservation, will muddle through to a victory over global warming. In fact, it is losing the war.
I read this today. It’s a great piece.
I was struck by a couple of things:
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Even though it spanned a decade, Congress was actually having a decent, bipartisan conversation about this issue. Imagine that happening today. Both parties even got pissed when it was shown that the administration made the government employee change his testimony. The oil and coal companies almost seemed resigned to some major changes and were trying to get ahead of it…if this can be believed. Granted, it ended with the GHW Bush administration killing it at the summit. The article doesn’t go into whether or (more likely) how much the industries were lobbying behind the scenes.
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Even if successful and an accord had been reached in The Netherlands, I have no confidence that major players like the US or Russia would have actually adhered to it through the years. I unfortunately agree with the comment that John Sununu made at the end of the article along the lines of “it was impossible and not enough countries would have agreed…same as today”.
Possibly the most depressing bit in a very sobering piece:
They had to get it right: Their conclusion would be delivered to the president.
Did we once live in that country?
Adding to my own post…
The CFC a.k.a. “ozone hole” comparison also resonated with me. As an environmental professional in the 90’s for heavy industry, I dealt with the results of that for several years as we phased out CFCs and adapted to new regulations. And the article is right…the phase-out was supported because people “saw” the issue on the Antarctica animation, and the media pushed it as a personal health issue, and the Montreal Protocol was an easy sell after that.
As another part of the article states:
Yes, Moore clarified — of course, it was an existential problem, the fate of the civilization depended on it, the oceans would boil, all of that. But it wasn’t a political problem. Know how you could tell? Political problems had solutions. And the climate issue had none. Without a solution — an obvious, attainable one — any policy could only fail…
The CFC/Ozone Hole issue had a definable solution. At least for a problem that would likely affect those in office in the short term.
Right? When it goes to hell, it goes quickly. I still can’t wrap my head around it.
https://twitter.com/GreenRupertRead/status/1024377781801689089
The media began their “balanced” coverage as soon as industry began their disinformation campaigns. People see two ‘scientists’ debating a scientific issue, how are they going to judge the validity of the claims? It’s like if CNN et al had two physicists debating the meaning of the double slit experiment.
Industry followed the same playbook they used for tobacco and leaded gasoline. Only this time it worked, and it worked because in the larger picture we - collective we, humanity - don’t want to do anything about it. It’s difficult and painful and there’s no tangible costs that we’re paying for fucking over the climate and every living thing on it, now and for the future (well, until recently anyway.) We want cheap energy. Cheap cars, cheap consumer goods. Doesn’t even matter if things break or become obsolete, just buy another one. We don’t pay the actual costs for the products we consume, nor do we want to (I’m as guilty as anyone of this when it comes to computers.)
I got my environmental studies degree in the early '90s. Climate change was just starting to become an issue, but the courses I took covered acid rain for example far more in depth. (Hell, we barely touched on biodiversity loss in the tropics.)
And now we’re gonna sail right by two degrees, and probably three degrees too. We’re going to keep on the course we’re on, building pipelines, mining oil in Canada, ripping apart the last remaining tropical forests and fracking everywhere.
I have a hard time imagining what the next century is going to look like.