Tag Archives: climate change

There’s More….

Yesterday, I shared some of the disturbing proposals of Project 2025, but of course, a document of nearly 1000 pages includes many other terrifying “ideas.”  The New Republic has listed several, gleaned from an advance copy of the book by Kevin Roberts, who captained the Project for the Heritage Foundation.

There’s good reason publication of the book has been delayed until after the election.

Dawn’s Early Light has all the misplaced confidence of a movement that’s mistaken a 6–3 Supreme Court and an easily played New York Times op-ed page for some kind of mandate. The party that has won the popular vote in a presidential election exactly once in the last 35 years is not popular, and people do not want what they’re selling. When your only path to power consists in gerrymandering and shaving tight victories in a few key swing states while the opposition runs up the margins nearly everywhere else, you might try for some soul-searching about why people don’t like you, but Roberts and his Heritage Foundation have instead opted for violent threats, claiming a “second American revolution” is coming that will remain “bloodless” only “if the left allows it to be.”

The book details the Project’s enemies: public schools, China, godlessness, and government regulations are prominent, but the Project proposes widespread destruction of numerous other American institutions.

“Every Ivy League college, the FBI, the New York Times, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Department of Education, 80 percent of ‘Catholic’ higher education, BlackRock, the Loudoun County Public School System, the Boy Scouts of America, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, the Chinese Communist Party, and the National Endowment for Democracy.”

What is the plan to enact this bloodletting? While there are sops to Ronald Reagan throughout, Dawn’s Early Light is clear that the era of small government is over; Roberts thinks government should be the change he wants to see in the world. The New Conservative Movement, as he terms it, will use the federal government as a bludgeon against any and all of its cultural and economic foes, while the small-minded small government folk are derided throughout as “wax-museum conservatives.”

Roberts wants government to force American to embrace his vision of “Faith, Family, Community, and Work.” And–not surprisingly–“Faith” means Christianity.

Policies that encourage religious observance, such as Sabbath laws and voucher programs that include religious schools, should be encouraged. American society is rooted in the Christian faith—certainly public institutions should not establish anything offensive to Christian morals under the guise of “religious freedom” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

As I noted yesterday, Roberts reserves special animus for reproductive freedom, especially the birth control pill–which he wants to outlaw.

“The birth control pill,” he tells us, “was the product of a decades-long research agenda paid for by the Rockefeller Foundation and other eugenicist and population control-oriented groups.” These eugenicist-sponsored technologies, Roberts believes, are the true culprits, for they “shift norms, incentives, and choices, often invisibly and involuntarily,” making us think we want something that we in fact don’t.

Even a thing you might think the pro-birth crowd might like, like in vitro fertilization—which produces babies!—is not good in Roberts’s view….

This technological conspiracy, where every modern convenience from the Pill to the Playstation is keeping us from our God-given duty to be fruitful and multiply, must be fought at every level—from government tax policy and regulation (to encourage stay-at-home mothers) to pro-family technologies (like Tinder rival “Keeper,” a dating app whose mission is to “end human loneliness by giving everyone the opportunity to start a happy, healthy family”).

The article has much more of this insane world-view. (I just learned that Heritage wants to end government’s hard-won new ability to negotiate drug prices, something that just saved seniors and government billions!) But you might also be wondering how these lunatics plan to sell their vision to an American public unlikely to favor their version of utopia.

Pro Publica has answered that. It’s reporters uncovered “training videos” produced for Project 2025’s proponents/salespersons.

“Eradicate climate change references”; only talk to conservative media; don’t leave a paper trail for watchdogs to discover. In a series of never-before-published videos, Project 2025 details how a second Trump administration would operate.

The videos have strategies for avoiding Freedom of Information Act disclosures, for ensuring that conservative policies aren’t struck down by “left-wing judges,” and for “radically changing how the federal government works and what it does.”

This entire enterprise is delusional. It entirely ignores the existence of a robust contemporary culture that would resist a U-turn to the 1950s (or, really, the 1850’s).

Project 2025 accurately reflects the MAGA worldview. Sane people must defeat it in November.

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Appalling..And Telling

Wow. Just…wow.

I have repeatedly attributed America’s polarization to my perception that MAGA folks occupy an alternate reality–an environment where Democrats drink kids’ blood in a pizza parlor’s (non-existent) basement and a mysterious figure known as “Q” will emerge to save the world from a nefarious (non-existent) “deep state.” But recently, the Guardian reported on an even more troubling refusal to confront a reality that is rapidly becoming too obvious for sane folks to ignore.

According to that report, nearly one in four members of Congress dismiss the reality of climate change. The paper identified a total of 123 elected federal representatives – 100 in the House of Representatives and 23 US senators – who continue to deny the existence of human-caused climate change.

You will not be surprised to learn that they are all Republicans. Every single one.

According to a Center for American Progress report, those climate-change-denying lawmakers have been rewarded with a combined $52m in lifetime campaign donations from the fossil fuel industry, so it is difficult to tell whether they are profoundly anti-science (and, arguably, intellectually unfit to hold elective office) or simply corrupt.(Ethically unfit.)

Meanwhile, rational folks–especially those with children and grandchildren who will have to navagate an increasingly hostile environment–want government to take measures to ameliorate the threat.

And that threat–despite GOP insanity–is very real. In the same issue of the Guardian that contained the report on Republican climate denial, there was a brief story about photos taken by British tourists at the same spot in the Swiss Alps. The photos were taken almost exactly 15 years apart and highlighted the speed with which global heating is melting glaciers.

i talk a lot about culture war on this blog. Because I’m a recovering lawyer and a past Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, those discussions have disproportionately focused on the threat culture warriors like Micah Beckwith and Jim Banks pose to civil liberties, especially (but certainly not exclusively) the threat that these American theocrats pose to genuine religious liberty. That threat is very real, but–as the Guardian report makes abundantly clear–adherence to a worldview that excludes empirical evidence isn’t just an affront to the Constitution. It’s suicidal.

Over the past few years, we’ve read headlines like this one from the Telegraph: “Congressman says God will save us from climate change.” (At least he admitted that climate change exists, so I suppose that’s a point in his favor…)

A Republican congressman who believes that global warming is not a threat because God has promised not to destroy the Earth has put himself forward as chairman of a powerful committee that deals with energy policy and its effect on the environment.

John Shimkus, an evangelical Christian representing Illinois, quoted the Bible in a congressional hearing last year on a proposed “cap and trade” legislation designed to limit carbon emissions…

Shimkus isn’t the only Republican culture warrior who relies on God to fix those pesky climate problems. That reliancee is nothing new, either–in 2017, Time Magazine reported

A Republican congressman told his constituents that he believes God will “take care of” climate change if it proves to be a “real problem.”

Michigan Rep. Tim Walberg said during a town hall in Coldwater, Mich., on Friday that while he believes climate change is real, it is not something for humans to solve.

Subsequent evidence of intensifying bad weather hasn’t challenged Walberg’s belief that God will take care of the problem, so mankind need not bother. Not long after then-President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, Walberg told his constituents that if it turned into a “real” problem, God would “take care of” climate change.

So here we are, with an entire political party that rejects science and empirical evidence  (including the evidence of their own “lying eyes”) in favor of fundamentalist religious dogma. (It should go without saying that such dogma is hotly contested by more rational religious figures–the Pope, for one, has issued an Encyclical urging action on climate change.) 

This rejection of evidence–this wholesale dismissal of science and logic and expertise– is an underappreciated threat posed by MAGA culture warriors. Fully one-fourth of currently-serving American legislators have opted to live in–and defend–an alternate reality. These people shouldn’t be in government. To a significant extent, they owe their elections to Republican gerrymandering, but voter apathy has also been a contributor.

A Blue wave would sweep at least some of these people out of office, and would facilitate government action on the environment. By humans.

Another reason to vote Blue…..

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The Price Of Ideology

In posts to this blog, I often criticize ideological rigidity. Hopefully, those criticisms come in a context that makes the meaning of “ideological” clear, but it may be worthwhile to focus on just what it means to be “ideological” rather than simply convinced of the likelihood that some phenomenon is true.

Ideology has a lot in common with prejudice, which means “pre-judging.” (We all know people who firmly believe that “those people” [insert your chosen group here] are lazy, unintelligent, shifty…whatever–and who dismiss any inconvenient evidence to the contrary.)

Ideology extends beyond such categorizing of one’s fellow humans, of course, and its most obvious characteristic is a stubborn refusal to adapt belief to evidence, and to change or at least modify one’s opinion when that evidence is too persuasive to ignore.

The problem, of course, is that persistent rejection of an unwanted reality usually prevents people from coping with very real problems.

The situation in Florida is an excellent illustration of the foregoing, somewhat abstract discussion. A while back, I came across a discussion of the impact of climate change on Florida residents and businesses. It began by focusing on the closure of assisted living facilities in that state as a result of huge increases in the cost of property insurance–not to mention the growing inability to even find a property insurer willing to write such coverage in Florida.

The state of Florida is incredibly vulnerable to climate change and to the newly numerous and severe weather events that change is triggering. Thanks to its shape and location, it is also uniquely vulnerable to rising sea waters–the Miami airport has spent some seven billion dollars “modernizing” and raising the elevation of the facility due to the speed at which Florida’s sea level is now rising. (Currently, by as much as 1 inch every 3 years.)

Right now, the most obvious effect of climate change on the state is the crisis of property insurance rates and availability.

It is not just business that is taking it on the chin. Floridians pay the highest home insurance rates in the country. The good old gator boys love to point out how expensive the Socialist Republic of New York is. But like all conservative rhetoric, it is vacuous self-congratulation with no foundation in reality.

Homeowners in the Sunshine State do not pay state income tax. But, while a married New Yorker earning $70,000 p.a. pays c.$2,726 in state income tax, a married Floridian living in a $300,000 house will pay c.$4,733 more ($6,366 vs. $1,633) than the NYer for home insurance.

Any effort to solve that crisis runs into DeSantis’ ideology–which denies the evidence every sensible Floridian can see.

Global warming denial is a state religion in Florida. As early as 2014, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection bosses banned their subordinates from saying “climate change” and “global warming.” Because, as everyone knows, the most effective way to tackle a problem is to deny it.

In March 2015, The Miami Herald reported what DEP employees had to say on the matter:

“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013.

“That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.” Kristina Trotta, another former DEP employee who worked in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a 2014 staff meeting. “We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” she said….

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation deleting even the mention of climate change from state laws. It gets worse. As CNN reported:

The wide-ranging law makes several changes to the state’s energy policy – in some cases deleting entire sections of state law that talk about the importance of cutting planet-warming pollution. The bill would also give preferential treatment to natural gas and ban offshore wind energy, even though there are no wind farms planned off Florida’s coast.

The bill deletes the phrase ‘climate’ eight times – often in reference to reducing the impacts of global climate change through its energy policy or directing state agencies to buy ‘climate friendly’ products when they are cost-effective and available. The bill also gets rid of a requirement that state-purchased vehicles should be fuel efficient.

I’m not sure when ideology morphs into insanity…

A popular cartoon posed the question: what if there isn’t climate change and we made the world more livable for nothing?

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About That “Hoax”

I  think climate change deniers will eventually be defeated by challenges to our common lives that most of us don’t currently recognize.

As Paul Krugman has recently noted, one of those is sewage.

How many people do you know whose homes aren’t connected to a sewer line? Sewers and garbage pickup are among those (largely urban) amenities that folks fulminating about “socialism” rarely consider, but they are part and parcel of important collective public health measures.

They are also services that are rarer in some parts of the country than in others.

As Krugman reminds us, many American homes, especially in the Southeast, aren’t connected to sewer lines. They have septic tanks, and these days, more and more septic tanks are overflowing. As he notes, that’s both disgusting and a threat to public health.

The cause? Climate change. Along the Gulf and South Atlantic coasts, The Washington Post reported last week, “sea levels have risen at least six inches since 2010.” This may not sound like much, but it leads to rising groundwater and elevated risks of overflowing tanks.

The emerging sewage crisis is only one of many disasters we can expect as the planet continues to warm, and nowhere near the top of the list. But it seems to me to offer an especially graphic illustration of two points. First, the damage from climate change is likely to be more severe than even pessimists have tended to believe. Second, mitigation and adjustment — which are going to be necessary, because we’d still be headed for major effects of climate change even if we took immediate action to greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions — will probably be far more difficult, as a political matter, than it should be.

At this point in my initial reading of the linked column, I rolled my eyes–because these days, anything and everything is more difficult as a political matter than it should be. When a significant percentage of the population insists on denying science, scholarship, logic, fact–opting to discount what their own “lying eyes” are trying to tell them–political gridlock is inevitable.

As Krugman points out,

Estimating the costs of climate change and, relatedly, the costs polluters impose every time they emit another ton of carbon dioxide requires fusing results from two disciplines. On one side, we need physical scientists to figure out how much greenhouse gas emissions will warm the planet, how this will change weather patterns and so on. On the other, we need economists to estimate how these physical changes will affect productivity, health care costs and more.

Actually, there’s a third dimension: social and geopolitical risk. How, for example, will we deal with millions or tens of millions of climate refugees? But I don’t think anyone knows how to quantify those risks.

Krugman, of course, is an economist, and he worries that the efforts so far to estimate economic costs of climate change have failed to take things like septic tank failures into account.

So what are we going to do about it? Even if we were to take drastic steps to reduce emissions right now, many of the consequences of past emissions, including much bigger increases in sea level than we’ve seen so far, are already, as it were, baked in. So we’re going to have to take a wide range of steps to mitigate the damage — including expanding sewer systems to limit the rising tide of, um, sludge.

But will we take those steps? Climate denial was originally all about fossil fuel interests, and to some extent it still is. But it has also become a front in the culture war, with politicians like Ron DeSantis of Florida — who happens to be the governor of one of the states at greatest immediate risk — apparently deciding that even mentioning climate change is woke.

Evidently, DeSantis’ definition of “woke” is “rational and informed.” Logic tell us that refusing to mention climate change–or the existence of gay people–won’t make either one disappear.

What will the politicians pandering to the frightened and angry folks frantic to reject any evidence of things they dislike or can’t understand–politicians like Indiana’s Jim Banks, who insists that climate change is a “hoax”– say when their constituents’ septic tanks fail? What will DeSantis say when significant portions of Florida are underwater. (I wonder who he’s blaming now for the rapidly growing inability of Florida residents to get property insurance–gay people??)

The disappearance of homeowners’ insurance and the failure of septic tanks are just two of the largely unanticipated–and logically inevitable– consequences of climate change. There will be others, no matter how many culture warriors like Jim Banks stand athwart reality yelling “hoax.”

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Ship To Shore

We are a bit over halfway on our cruise across the Pacific–by far the longest such trip these old folks have ever taken–and the days at sea have allowed me to maintain a certain distance from the news of the day. Not that we can escape knowing about the wars–both the actual ones in Ukraine and Israel and the political ones in the United States–but the time differences and internet interruptions allow for a bit more space for reflection.

Most of the passengers on this voyage are–like us– elderly, and the entertainment tends to cater to our age cohort. For example, one night, as we were visiting islands in French Polynesia with their breathtakingly beautiful landscapes (and obvious reliance on tourism dollars), the ship’s “World Stage” substituted the 1958 film “South Pacific” for the usual live entertainment.

It had been quite a while since I’d last seen South Pacific, and what struck me most forcefully was how very contemporary its message has remained. If my math is correct, it has been 65 years since the movie was filmed, but the issues it addressed remain uncomfortably relevant: war, of course, but especially bigotry –the ways in which that bigotry gets transmitted and the ways in which it distorts our perspectives and our relations with other human beings.

If I had to guess, I’d assume that every regular reader of this blog is familiar with Lt. Cable’s famous lament, “You have to be taught to hate.”

You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear,
You’ve got to be taught from year to year,
It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

You’ve got to be taught to be afraid
Of people whose eyes are oddly made,
And people whose skin is a different shade—
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late,
Before you are six or seven or eight,
To hate all the people your relatives hate—
You’ve got to be carefully taught!
You’ve got to be carefully taught!

We haven’t come very far in those 65 years….

There have been several other “lessons” I’ve gleaned from being on a ship that is most often far from land. One is the recognition of just how dependent we passengers are upon the safety and sea-worthiness of that ship and the competence and care of its crew.

As I have measured my steps along the Promenade Deck, I’ve seen members of the crew working non-stop to keep the vessel in safe and seaworthy condition. Whenever we’re in port, the entire crew participates in safety drills–some focused on the lifeboats, others I don’t begin to understand–all of which they clearly take very seriously.

The analogy sort of writes itself.

We’re all passengers on two other, larger ships: the ship of state, and “spaceship Earth” –and we aren’t tending to either one with even a fraction of the attention and craftsmanship being displayed daily by the crew of this cruise ship.

My husband and I would not have boarded a ship run by a cruise line noted for its rejection of reality–a line managed by people who pooh-poohed the dangers of weather and navigation. I rather imagine that the people who comment here are equally cautious when choosing modes of transportation. We expect that airline pilots and ship’s captains will be trained professionals, that the mechanics and other crew members will have the requisite expertise and that they all will take their jobs seriously.

America’s Congress just elected a Speaker of the House who insists that the Earth is 6000 years old, that climate change is a hoax, and that all Americans should abide by his biblical beliefs. The systemic failures that led to his election will impede efforts to address the warming of the planet, and may well sink the ship of state.

I wouldn’t board a ship captained by someone who trusted his version of deity to steer a course. I wouldn’t board a ship being maintained by an untrained crew–especially one that inhabited an alternate reality in which the sea’s dangers went unrecognized. I wouldn’t board a ship on which the captain and crew cared only about the safety and well-being of passengers who looked like them and shared their religious beliefs.

I’m very much afraid, however, that both of those larger ships we humans share–the global one and the political one– are sailing in turbulent and life-threatening waters.

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