Quick Hit: Moe Keller on Immigrants’ Education

A bill is making its way through the Colorado legislature that would allow children of undocumented workers to pay in-state college tuition instead of out-of-state college tuition.  A number of conditions would have to be met – conditions that naturalized citizens don’t have to worry about to get in-state tuition, I might add.  It could be stalled in the Senate Appropriations Committee because of one Democrat – Moe Keller.  If she votes against the bill, it dies in committee.  If that happens, a door of opportunity would be closed to a small group of people who have committed no crime of their own.

So I spent a few minutes looking at who Moe Keller is.  She is a Senator from District 20, according to her website.  She has town hall meetings in Golden and Wheat Ridge.  She sponsors bills regarding the developmentally disabled.

This brings up a set of questions for Sen. Keller.  Why is it okay to restrict opportunity for the children of undocumented workers but not okay to restrict opportuinty for the developmentally disabled?  Neither chose their status.  At what point do the right-wing blowhards control acceptable legislation?  If Limbaugh, Rosen and others railed against the developmentally disabled, would Sen. Keller abandon her efforts?  If not, what does that say about her attitude toward children who have done nothing wrong and lots of things right?

Now, I don’t know Sen. Keller or her reasons for potentially voting against this legislation. This bill seems pretty straightforward and the morally correct thing to do. I want to hear that it has passed – that we’re a state of compassionate people who fight for opportunity, not against it. I hope Sen. Keller feels the same way and votes accordingly.

h/t to Mike Littwin.

Read The Bill Petition

One potential added measure of transparency for legislation would be if the American public were allowed 72 hours to read bill before Congress voted on them.  The 1100 Stimulus Bill is a perfect case in point.  Had we been able to read it, the provision allowing exorbitant executive bonuses probably would have been noticed – and we could have done something about it before the fact, not after.  No matter your political stripe, increased transparency is a pretty good idea.  Go here to sign a petition to call on Congress to allow Americans 72 hours to read the bills they’re voting on.

Quick Hit: CO SB1 Signed

Gov. Ritter signed 5 bills yesterday.  From a press release:

Sen. Dan Gibbs and Rep. Christine Scanlan sponsored SB 1, which supports communities in preventing and preparing for wildfires.

“As a wildland firefighter I know how important community prevention plans are in terms of public safety for the citizens of Colorado,” Sen. Gibbs said. “I’m pleased that Gov. Ritter signed this bill today and that it soon will be in place to help communities when wildfires strike. It will help communities prioritize, prevent, and prepare for wildfires in their area.  With 2 million acres of dead lodge-pole pine and about 1 million Coloradans living in the wildland urban interface, SB 1 will bring the tools, resources and assistance to help people prepare for the worst.”

“Having a preparedness plan ready to go before firefighters hit the ground to battle a wildfire will help tremendously in emergency situations,” Rep. Scanlan said. “Colorado has more than 22 million acres of forested land, and with the threat of fire due to the dead lodge-pole pine, we need to take these steps now to protect our natural habitat and Coloradans who are living within the wildland urban interface.”

This is a good bill.  But it won’t bring all the tools, resources and assistance to help people prepare for the worst.  Some, yes.  Most – I don’t know.  But certainly not all.  There are over 2 million acres of dead pines just waiting for a bad summer of lightning.  Their only good news this year?  The drought afflicting the Front Range hasn’t been felt in the mountains – precipitation this winter has been over average.  A dry spring, summer or fall could change things quickly.  The bottom line is there is simply no feasible way to handle that many acres of dead trees.  Public education and expanded preventative roles will help though.

Quick Hits: Colorado News

Oil corporations bought conditional senior water rights to 7.2 million acre-feet of water earlier this week.  Why?  So they can potentially use the water in the future to drill for oil in shale in Western Colorado.  Some things come to mind: diverting water from the Front Range to drill for oil in shale won’t go over well if it ever happens; diverting water from downriver states won’t go over well either (read: tons of litigation); oil shale development won’t be viable for decades – by that time, I don’t think we’ll need the oil.

A foundational health care bill passed out of a Colorado House committee Wednesday.  Somehow, the Cons think double-digit insurance rate increases year after year should be totally loved by everybody.  The reality is far from that.  People are justifiably upset with for-profit insurance that doesn’t deliver care.  The bill still has to pass the House Appropriations Committee before going to the full House.

Colorado’s newest Senators might be deciding to go the pro-corporatist, non-progressive route in Congress.  Sens. Udall and Bennet have joined a gang in Washington (just like the Senator Bennet replaced, Ken Salazar) that tries to sell itself as ‘centrist’.  I’m going to be very clear about this: the difference between most Senate Democrats and the Senate Cons isn’t a lovely place called centrism.  If they want to join the Cons in their assault on the American worker and our economy, they’re free to do so.  Colorado voters are similarly free to examine their efforts and decide if Udall and Bennet are who they want in the Senate.  Joining a gang isn’t the worst thing that can happen.  But if Udall or Bennet decide to vote like Salazar did – if they develop a clear pattern of voting against Colorado citizens’ best interests, I won’t hesitate to call them on it or work to get somebody else elected in the next election.  I was reasonably sure Udall would do this – it remains to be seen how he votes.

Yesterday’s paper version of the Denver Post had a full-page, color ad that lied to readers.  It claimed new energy taxes were going to be passed soon by Congress.  They provided a website that is full of pro-industy spin and very short on facts.  The fossil fuel industry has enjoyed years’ worth of tax loopholes – they’ve cheated the U.S. out of billions of tax dollars.  Now that real public anger has bubbled to the surface over fuel costs; now that the public is demanding fossil fuel corporations finally pay their fair share; after years of not developing refining infrastructure but buying up 60 million acres of land that isn’t being drilled, how does the industry respond?  With full page ads and websites, part of a multi-million dollar marketing campaign.  Remember that when fuel prices shoot back up this summer.  And remember this too: fuel corporations were making tens of billions of dollars of profit every three months last year while telling everyone that they couldn’t produce anymore product.  The fact is, they refuse to produce more.  They’ve refused to do it for a long, long time.  Americans are ready to move to a post-fossil fuel era.  And that scares the hell out of the industry.

Four-Corners Tree Die-Off Tied To Global Climate Change Drought

This post will cover a lot of ground.  I’m writing it having just read a PNAS paper from 2005 about a massive vegetation die-off event being tied to global climate change-type drought in the four-corner states.  I have been thinking that such a study should be done as I read and learned about the various pine beetle epidemics afflicting Western North America.  The paper, “Regional vegetation die-off in response to global-change-type drought“  contains the kind of information that is critical in piecing a number of different threads together to weave a coherent story.  The results contained within the paper, which can also be seen at this PNAS website,  provide a profound message about the impacts of climate change.  Such impacts have already occurred.  As I’ve written recently (here and here, for example), they are growing in number and intensity.  We ignore them at our (and the Earth’s) peril.

A series of big messages I got from this paper can be summed up as follows.  With human-forced climate change, warmer droughts are predicted to occur more often.  One such drought has already occurred (and could be continuing to occur) in the southwestern U.S.  That drought has had a profound impact on a large region’s worth of vegetation.  That impact came in two waves: the drought weakened the vegetation which then fell to the beetle epidemic.  The beetles were able to spread due to the warmth that characterized this drought.  With this and other region-wide die-offs, the potential for large changes in carbon stores is real we will face with their consequences.  As a result, carbon-related policies must be prepared to take such die-offs (and their after-effects)  into account.  The failure of region-wide ecosystems, a disaster on its own, would also present a real danger to our society.

The paper identifies regional-scale mortality of overstory trees.  Such events alter ecosystems and land surface properties for decades.  Greenhouse forcings are expected to amplify the periodic, cooler droughts found in previous climate regimes.  The drought that has occurred across the southwest since 2000 offers evidence about how those forcings manifest.  [On a short tangent, the widespread, severe drought in Australia provide additional evidence.]  This paper focused on a Piñon pine die-off.  Additional trees act as overstory species across the four states studied.  At this time, I’m not aware of similar studies detailing the greenhouse-forcing-drought-beetle-die-off relationship as it relates to those species.  It is something I will look for after writing this.

There is one figure in this paper that I want to draw particular attention to:

This figure shows annual average temperatures and precipitation values for all the stations included in the study.  The yellow-shaded vertical bands point out two regional-scale droughts – the first in the 1950s and the second in the early 2000s.  In particular, I want to draw attention to the rise in average annual temperatures from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s (top panel): from ~10.7C to 12.3C.  Combined with the corresponding drop in precipitation from 380mm to ~250mm, this is what the authors have characterized as a global-change-type drought.  It contrasts with the 1950s drought by being statistically warmer to a significant level.  The bottom two panels also deserve some attention.  Two of the last four years in the study exhibited maximum average annual temperatures at the 90th percentile (panel c).  Three of the last four years in the study exhibited minimum average annual temperatures well above the 10th percentile (panel d).  That information isn’t available from the top panel

The reason I draw attention to the temperature rise in particular is the warning it provides about anticipated future warming across the region as the climate continues to respond to greenhouse forcing.  Under scenarios now considered likely with the “warming in the pipeline”, temperatures across this region are expected to rise another 2-10C.  As I wrote above, this paper demonstrates the impacts that warming has on dominant vegetation types: water stressing the plants and allowing bark beetle infestations to spread unabated.  With even more warming, what effects will ecosystems in the region experience?  I’ve written before about the bark beetle problem affecting the higher elevations of Colorado and other regions across the Rocky Mountains (see list below).  Those trees were impacted in a similar fashion that the Piñon trees were in this study.  How many additional species will be stressed to the point that they will also experience region-wide die-offs?  Under those same climate change scenarios, annual precipitation is expected to continue to decrease.  That decrease will be for all purposes permanent as far as humans are concerned.  Desert-level precipiation amounts are quite possible for hundreds of years.

Now look at the graph more closely.  We’ve seen the devastating effects just a small quantitative amount of warming has already had.  That’s one of the real dangers of climate change: ecosystems are quite used to the climate of the 20th century (in a larger sense, that of the past few thousand years).  There is no way of accurately foretelling how those ecosystems will respond to a significantly different climate, which we might already have entered into.  The die-offs I’ve seen and read about; the shifting climate and ecosystems zones I’ve seen evidence of tell me that the climate at the end of the 21st century could be quite different than the one of the 20th century.

Expanding on this a bit: at what stage would prairie grass die-off?  I can hear the denialist line about tree die-off and small animal die-off not being a big deal and not indicative of climate change.  The level of tree die-off discussed in this paper was unprecedented in scope: all ages, all sizes were affected.  Beyond that though, I wanted to come up with a scenario that would provide more visceral evidence of climate change impacts on human society.  If grass or hay or the like experienced a regional die-off due to an expanding, long-term warm drought, what would we do?  If cattle started dying by the millions due to water stress and epidemics, would more people take notice?  I have to think so.  I hope it doesn’t get to that level, but it might before we all aggressively look for greenhouse forcing solutions.

One additional question I have is what story does the post-2004 data tell?  I will look for additional, related studies to this one to fill out the scene.  It was somewhat surprising that this study was published in 2005 .  Nobody I’ve spoken to about the ponderosa pine die-off was aware of this paper – which is part of the reason I’m writing about it.  If anyone is aware of such a study, I’m all ears.  Otherwise, I’ll write something up on whatever I find.

Cross-posted at SquareState.
***

Here is a list of some of the bark beetle epidemic posts I’ve written:

Western Forests Could Become Carbon Source, Not Sink

2008 Pine Beetle Kill: 400,000 acres in CO

Healthy Forests/Vibrant Communities Act of 2009

Wilderness Society’s Aerial Investigation of CO Pine Beetle Kill

Beetle Killed Trees May Be Allowed to Burn

Battling the Mountain Pine Beetles

Catastrophic beetle kill in Colorado

Quick Hit: ISS Solar Wings Getting Unpacked

Shuttle Discovery’s astronauts are in the midst of a two-day project to unload and unpack the last truss segment and last set of solar arrays at the International Space Station.

I didn’t know until now that these solar arrays were actually the first constructed for the station.  They’ve been tested repeatedly on Earth prior to their packing and launch for this flight.  Hopefully their installation and deployment are done without incident.

Quick Hit: GM & Volt Battery

In what’s unfortunately become routine, GM joined other corporations receiving taxpayer bailout money in continuing to make bad decisions.  With the U.S. economy in the tank, their own industry on the edge of collapse and growing populist anger, do you think GM chose an American company to develop the batteries for their over-heralded Volt?  Of course not – GM chose a foreign battery maker.  Some portion of the money GM has received to save its ass is being sent to the Korean battery manufacturer LG Chem Ltd instead of batteries being developed by GM and A123 Systems.  Simply amazing.

United Launch Alliance Contracted for Four NASA Missions

There’s new science news that’s good for Colorado: United Launch Alliance has been chosen by NASA to launch four missions through 2014.  The deal is worth about $600 million to the Colorado economy.  According to a NASA press release:

The launches will be from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. The four payloads are the Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission, the Magnetospheric Multiscale mission, and the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites K and L, or TDRS-K and TDRS-L, missions.

Planned for launch in 2011, the NASA Radiation Belt Storm Probes mission uses two almost identical spacecraft built by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. For two years, the twin probes will study the radiation belts surrounding Earth to improve our understanding of how the sun’s changing energy flow affects them.

Two new Tracking and Data Relay satellites will be launched, TDRS-K and TDRS-L, to replenish the NASA communications relay network that provides voice, data, video and telemetry links between spacecraft below geosynchronous orbit and the ground. Among the major users of the relay network are the International Space Station and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The launches are planned for 2012 and 2013.

The Magnetospheric Multiscale mission is a NASA space physics research effort to discover the fundamental plasma physics processes of magnetic reconnection that occurs when energy emanating from the sun’s solar wind interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field. Four identical satellites will be launched together in a stacked configuration. They will fly in an elliptical orbit around Earth. The Magnetospheric Multiscale Project is managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., under a contract with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. The launch is planned for 2014.

This is the kind of benefit that science can bring to a state.  Each mission will be launched aboard a ULA Atlas V rocket.  Such an undertaking requires a great deal of intensive scientific support – to build and support the vehicles.  Colorado benefits greatly from having institutions of higher education in place to produce the scientists and engineers necessary for these mission launches.  Colorado futher benefits from having a large footprint of aerospace-related companies.  Those companies employ folks who are very well paid, benefiting their local and state governments.  Kudos to NASA and ULA for partnering on these vehicles.  Kudos to Colorado for attracting and keeping companies like ULA.

Cross-posted at SquareState.

Quick Hit: Corrupt Murtha Must Be Investigated

I’ve done my fair share of railing against corrupt Cons, of which there was an abundance during the Bush years.  Unlike Cons however, I don’t reserve my criticism for only the opposing party’s members.  If someone is corrupt, they have no business being in a position of power.

Such is the condition of Rep. John Murtha.  Up to $250 million in federal funding from Murtha found its way to a Pennsylvania defense research center.  Additionally, Congressional Democrats are blocking ethics investigations into Murtha and this case.  Such a thing should never happen.  I was infuriated when the Cons blocked investigations into their members.  I am even more infuriated now that Democrats are doing it.  It’s unethical, disgusting and needs to change now.  The last thing I want to see is Democrats lose power because they’re as corrupt as the Cons are.

So I’m going on record as saying Rep. Murtha should be promptly investigated.  If he is as corrupt as some information makes him out to be, he should resign or be forced from office and prosecuted accordingly.  Similarly, any Democrats who are protecting him should be reprimanded for allowing corruption within their ranks.

Corporate Media Gunning for Obama – Part II

I’m sure I could track down a dozen of these examples per day.  I wrote a post yesterday detailing the washington post’s attempted smackdown of Obama’s AIG bonus handling that lacked any shred of evidence supporting their wild accusations.  Today, the washington post delivers another gem: Obama’s budget strategy under fire.  As usual, the corporate media barely scratches the surface of this subject, doing all of their readers an immense disservice.

The article uses one of the corporate media’s favorite methods of relaying information: he said, she said.  In this case, its the Cons accusing the Obama administration of being a Chicago tough-guy by considering putting his energy and health care policies in a bill that cannot be filibustered.  The post’s Lori Montgomery misidentifies how the Senate actually works by writing the method would allow Democrats to pass the bill with only 51 votes instead of the usual 60.  Apparently our school system has been failing to educate us longer than I thought.  There is no “usual 60″ votes needed to pass a bill in the U.S. Senate.  It requires only 51 unless someone threatens to filibuster it.  There is a cloture vote to determine if consideration of the bill should continue or not – that’s the only vote that requires 60 or Senators.

Lori doesn’t share this vital information with her readers until later in her article.  Indeed, she wrecks her journalistic credibility by purposefully withholding the information for that long.  She does mention that Reagan, Clinton and the Boy King used the tactic to pass some of their own measures.  Interestingly, I don’t recall the post taking Bush to task for not being the uniter he promised to be on the 2000 campaign trail.  But they are all too willing to allow the Con talking point against Obama to pass by unchallenged – as if that were the news instead of the underlying procedural details.

Moreover, the acceptance of Con talking points completely ignores what the President said just yesterday.  If Republicans have solutions, they need to present them.  Standing on the sidelines and criticizing and obstructing everything isn’t what they’re there to do.  Lori doesn’t put these things into perspective.  The Cons are supposed to be there to work with Democrats to implement solutions.  But today’s Cons haven’t believed in true bipartisanship for years.  Their concept of bipartisanship is passing their policies without negotiation.  That’s why they’re in the severe minority they find themselves in: they’re a whining, regional, out-of-touch group of people.  Only a tiny fraction of the American public support their backwards policies.

Democrats like Sen. Lincoln and Sen. Baucus were abused when they were in the minority just a few short years ago.  Today, they’re all too willing to allow the Cons more influence than the American people want them to have.  What Democratic policies got through the Senate while Bush was in the White House and the Cons ran Congress, especially energy and health care policies?  None.  The fossil fuel industry took over our energy policy, resulting in record high oil and gas prices last year.  The for-profit health management and pharmaceutical industry took over our health policy, resulting in double-digit price increases year after year after year.  The American people do not want the fossil fuel or for-profit health industries in control of our energy or health care policies anymore.  Allowing the Cons to control even a small measure of the procedure is cowardly and pathetic.

As I wrote above, the Cons are not interested in finding a middle ground.  They haven’t been interested for as long as I can remember.  They want to continue their way of running things – that’s why they’re called conservatives.  There won’t be any progress if Democrats solicit Con input.  Our energy and health care policies are in desperate need of complete overhauls.  Senate Democrats are dragging their feet, being too willing to water down the necessary changes just so the corporate media won’t spread the name-calling the Cons rely on.  It’s a sad state of affairs.

What makes it worse is the corporate media’s handling of the news.  When groups opposed Bush’s strong-arm tactics, which would crush Obama’s any day (remember late night and weekend votes the Cons scheduled without notice, ensuring a lack of Democratic resistence – the post obviously doesn’t), the washington post treated them with derision.  MSNBC didn’t regularly front-page articles from media sources that had a legitimate problem with the Bush administration.  Journalistic standards indeed.