Tea Partiers Are Mostly Wealthy, White, Ultra-Conservative Men

It’s a little surprising to me why so much attention is being given to the extremist Tea Party.  What’s so shocking about a bunch of older, white rich men being angry at the rest of the country?  They’ve demonstrated for the better part of 30 years that they love to cast themselves as the victims of our society – so nothing they’re saying today is novel, let alone grounded in reality.

Be that as it may, more and more corporate media outlets are running polls to try to crack the nearly impenetrable nut that the Tea Party supposedly represents.  In politics, it’s always good to have numbers to back up arguments.  It won’t make the fringe right-wing any more accountable for their own actions, but the rest of America at least gets a chance to see who they really are.

A majority of Tea Party folks don’t actually seem to be so terribly upset about taxes, which commenters commonly cite as their raison d’etre.  They have said so themselves – they think they’re being taxed fairly.  They have a skewed view of the job President Obama is doing, especially as it relates to the federal deficit and the health insurance mess that was the result of a wasted year of “debate”.

Their deficit concerns are incredibly laughable.  And I think they actually demonstrate what they’re really concerned about.  Before I get to that, I would like to point out that no media polling has yet asked a very important question: if the deficit is really so troubling to you, where were you in the years 2001-2008, when the federal deficit exploded?  President Obama has added a little to the national deficit, it’s true.  I say a little because the last president added many times what this President has or will.  Angry, old, rich white men weren’t screaming about revolts and revolutions last decade.

Why?  Because the president looked like them; because he was one of them.  When the Tea Partiers are threatening to commit violence and cheering domestic terrorists in 2009 and 2010, it is in no small part due to the fact that they don’t like operating in a society that takes care of everybody.  The Tea Partiers loved the historic transfer of wealth that the Cons gave to rich white people.  They’re angry because some of that wealth might find its way back to the people who gave it up in the last 10 years.  Tea Partiers are greedy and selfish.  A majority of them are racist, evidenced by a growing number of poll results, given by the Tea Partiers themselves.

These extremists have made up their own twisted version of history and are trying to force it onto the rest of the country.  Terrorists and their supporters should not be given credence by our media.  That wouldn’t happen if the corporate media didn’t cater primarily to them.

NASA: March 2010 Warmest On Record

According to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), March 2010 witnessed the warmest globally averaged temperatures for any March in the past 131 years: 0.84°C above normal.

Globally, temperatures from January-March were 0.75°C above normal, ranking 2nd in the GISS record and beating out the same time periods from 2005 and 1998, the two warmest years in the GISS record.

This comes on the heels of the 6th warmest February, according to NOAA, which calculates global temperatures slightly differently than does NASA.  NOAA should release their own monthly report in the next couple of days.

The location of places that were warmer and cooler than normal continued from the past few months: below average in the southeast U.S., Europe and most of Russia.  Mexico was also cooler than normal.  Meanwhile, Canada and the Arctic experienced much warmer temperatures than normal.  The Middle East, northern Africa, South America and Antarctica were also notably warm.

Given our continued climate forcing with greenhouse gas pollution, the 2010s are likely to set a new record for the warmest decade.  This was true for the 2000s, the 1990s and the 1980s.  2010 is already starting out with some of the warmest temperatures globally on record.  Shifting some of those warmer than normal temperatures over the U.S. might help to convince the public that the developing climate crisis deserves their attention.

Record Atmospheric CO2 Concentration March 2010: 391.06ppm

A record was set in March 2010, though you won’t find any mention of it in the corporate media.

Atmospheric CO2 concentrations measured at Mauna Loa, Hawai’i were the highest for a single calendar month in our history: 391.06ppm.

Monthly data for the past four years and the entire 52-year dataset can be found at NOAA’s ESRL Trends website.

Reputable climatologists have identified 350ppm as a goal that should be formally adopted by the world’s governments.  That’s going to take some work since CO2 concentrations increased at ~2ppm/year in the last decade.

The last time atmospheric CO2 concentrations were this high was 15 million years ago.  How was the Earth different back then?

“The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland,” said the paper’s lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.

State of the Poles – 4/7/10

The state of polar sea ice in March 2010 is fairly good compared to climatological conditions (1979-2000), which strongly contrasts with the past few months when global conditions were below climatology.  As it has done this time of year for a few years in a row, the global sea ice extent increased to the point where it is near climatological values, as this graph demonstrates.  The anomalies observed in 2006 and 2007 become more obvious each time the globe’s sea ice increases in March.  The most recent data show that global sea ice covers ~15.25 million sq. km., compared to 15.75 million sq. km. normally.

More Good CO Energy News: Xcel Will Retire Old, Dirty Coal Plants

Coal corporations have been running ads in the Denver, CO TV market trashing natural gas for the past couple of weeks.  The reason?  The state government wants to replace antiquated, dirty coal plants with newer, cleaner natural gas plants.  The coal commercials point out a fact that I won’t deny: coal is up to 3X cheaper than natural gas in some markets; but that I will provide more detail on: because coal corporations successfully externalize their costs to every other industry.  Instead of charging customers for the real-world costs associated with the dirtiest of all fuels, coal corporations let the health and environmental industries pay for the bad effects of their product.

The good news is enough citizens have recognized coal’s costs to them and have done a better job of organizing and fighting back against the powerful coal lobby in forming public policy.  Take a look around – stories of coal plants that utilities have wanted to build but have instead been scrapped for other power plants are beginning to populate the news.  Additionally, as older coal plants near the end of their serviceable lives, utilities will be faced with the prospect of either retrofitting them, building new ones, or replacing them with cleaner alternatives.  In Colorado, the fate of old plants that generate 900MW of electricity is being decided.

If those plants end up going offline and are succeeded by natural gas plants by 2017, almost 1/3 of Colorado’s coal generation will have been replaced.  5 million tons per year of carbon pollution will be avoided, making a not-so insignificant stride toward a cleaner energy future.

Even better is, as I alluded to above, Colorado isn’t alone in this effort.  The piece I link to above also points out that Nevada has decided that instead of building a new 750MW coal plant, officials have decided to build a 750MW natural gas plant and combine it with a 50- to 100-MW solar PV plant.  One-half of the CO2 pollution that coal plant would have generated will be avoided by building the natural gas plant.   A much higher percentage of the CO2 pollution will be avoided by incorporating the utility-scale solar PV plant.  Eventually, even the natural gas plants under consideration today will need to be replaced with solar (PV or more likely thermal) and wind plants.  Emitting one-half the pollution in the near-future is a good idea.  But we need to emit even less if we are to avoid the worst-case climate crisis that we’re hurtling towards today.

Spot of Good Energy News: More Wind Power for CO

After yesterday’s immensely disappointing news that President Obama had preemptively given away a potential bargaining chip in the climate/energy debate (somehow viewed as a positive by the administration), I was pleased to read that Xcel Energy will purchase wind generated energy from a new farm in Colorado.

The wind farm will deliver 252.2MW of renewable energy to Colorado’s grid, enough to power ~68,000 homes.  Vestas Wind Systems, lured to Colorado by Gov. Ritter, built the 139 turbines making up the farm.

This is another small step moving in a critical direction.  It doesn’t completely offset yesterday’s news, but I’m glad to see it nonetheless.