Via a tweet, I found this letter to the editor, trying to argue against the inclusion of a public option in legislation this year. The Denver Post had previously written a short take in favor of Congress passing a public option.
First, the DP Ed board is pretty conservative. That said, I agree with the Post – the public option bill won’t pass this year.
Second, what is the Broomfield Con arguing? It’s actually pretty hard to tell. Something about “government controlling everything”. Eye-roll. He cites the government’s control of the American auto industry, the finance industry, the banking industry, and then tries to scare readers into thinking Congress wants to control the energy industry too!!! Oh noes!
This letter-writer obviously has no problem with the government controlling the war industry. How many of his taxpayer dollars were physically lost in Iraq and Afghanistan? I’m not talking about the supplementals funding the occupation; I’m talking about the physical bills that were well and truly lost – by Bush’s government, if it makes any difference to the writer.
The auto industry isn’t any more controlled by the government than the energy industry would be if the pathetic energy bill now being considered passes. Unfortunately, private corporations will still control the lion’s share of the generation and transmission of energy across the entire country. By the way, letter-writer, we pay dearly for that dirty energy immersed in the most inefficient infrastructure possible, just as we pay for the lack of care (but bountiful private management!) and massive inefficiencies in our health care system.
After the Bush government gave away more billions of dollars to the largest banks in the land, did this person write a letter of protest? I doubt it. Guess what those private entitie did with our taxpayer dollars, Mr. Letter-Writer. They bought smaller banks. They still aren’t lending the money to those who would help the economy to grow again – us. They’re sitting on it all, waiting until the broken economy (which they broke, by the way), finally turns around. Just as many honest observers pointed out back in 2008, the plan to dole out our tax dollars to unaccountable private industries wouldn’t pan out. Yet you sit there defending them!
If a government entity can help provide energy, or health care, or directly loan money to people who actually need it, I’m all for it. There’s an advantage in that approach, actually. Governments, unlike obscenely profitable corporations, can be held accountable. Neither you nor I can hold Bank of America or United Health or Xcel or Halliburton as accountable as we can our Representatives and Senators.
If you truly believed in the power of private industry, Mr. Letter-Writer, you would be begging for the government to offer a public option. Because if private industry was as smart and powerful as you seem to think it is, that public option would have no chance in surviving. Your attack against the editors and a public option indicates that you recognize that health care isn’t being delivered by our private entity dominated industry. Why are you rooting for failure and profiteering, Mr. Con? Are you one of the billionaires running one of those corporations?
Today was another day in which a number of news articles caught my eye. They warrant additional context, especially the connections between some of them.
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been working behind the scenes to talk with what the corporate media likes to term “centrist”/”moderate” Democratic Senators regarding health care. He will continue to try to convince CorporateDems to vote to allow debate on the Senate health bill. What’s the center position between corporatist lackeys and principled public servants anyway? Another very popular Washington buzzterm came into play: Salazar is involved because he was involved in several bipartisan agreements while a Senator. He was at the forefront of what I term the Gaggle of Gangs in the Senate – joining with other “centrists” to keep the filibuster around but ensure Democrats wouldn’t use it while in the minority. Which is part of the reason why Salazar is being sent back to work on his former colleagues: the Cons are threatening to filibuster the health bill (though Democrats won’t actually force them to carry one out) and -gasp- Democrats might join them. That’s the answer to “How did that bipartisanship end up working out”. Whatever happened to the Cons’ “Upper-down-vote!” they couldn’t get enough of? One person of concern is Sen. Lieberman, the man who campaigned for Sen. John McCain in last year’s presidential election and is doing everything he can to keep himself in the news this year. Salazar was “mentored” by Lieberman when he joined the Senate, so I’m sure Lieberman can be convinced to play nice – aren’t you? Oh, and after watering down the bill with nonsense to appease “centrist” Republicans, where are their votes to move to debate? MIA? Why did we negotiate with them exactly? They’re not going to vote for the final bill.
It should come as no shock to most people that one reason the print version of the corporate media is failing so spectacularly is that journalistic integrity has been sorely lacking for the better part of a generation. I make it a point to write about the corporate media a couple of times a week to point out the most blatant examples of the sorry state of “professional journalism”.
Once you know what to look for, it’s easy to pick out examples of when writers had someone do their job for them. Today’s case in point: Michael Riley of the Denver Post in an article this past Thursday about Colorado Representative Betsy Markey’s vote for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Despite the foreknowledge that if she voted for the bill, some of the right-wing’s craziest crazies would do their darndest to smear her for the next year and a half, Rep. Markey voted for the bill.
Riley does a fairly decent job of describing the right-wing’s plans to target Rep. Markey, based on an NRCC spokeswoman’s quote. What followed is a sickening example of journalistic stenography.
The telephone ads blast the so-called cap-and-trade provision of the bill as “the largest tax in American history” because of some studies that suggest it could cost the average family several thousand dollars a year.
Because of “some studies”, Riley?!?! Are you freaking serious? What studies would those be? Does he even know what they were? I seriously doubt he does, because if he read the studies, or even knew about their general findings, he wouldn’t have included this thoroughly debunked right-wing talking point from his “news article”.
In reality, the study that Riley’s dictators are referring to was done by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change back in 2007. It examined a number of different cap-and-trade proposals. Cons, being the duplicitous, immoral actors they are, intentionally misrepresented one of the results of the study – fitting the study’s findings around their talking points, as they often do.
One of the authors spoke with a representative of a senior Con legislators, John Boehner, on March 20 of this year. He did so to make clear that they were misrepresenting MIT’s work and to stop doing so immediately. Needless to say, this has not happened. The Cons were claiming that the cap-and-trade proposal would cost families up to $3,100 per year in additional energy costs. The MIT study actually found that MIT’s correct estimate was closer to $340 per year. It seems the Cons tacked on an extra zero to prop up their talking point. More than that, however, the author – John Reilly – publicly made the point that lower- and middle-income households could almost certainly have those costs completely offset by returing allowance revenue to those households. In other words, most American families have the potential to pay nothing more for energy as a result of implementing a cap-and-trade proposal than they do without it today.
The role of the media is to inform the American citizenry of pertinent information they need to help make decisions. By acting as a stenographer instead of a journalist, that role has been compromised. The best thing to have done was to not include this ridiculous talking point in the article. The next best thing would have been to inform the public that the NRCC’s use of this figure was incorrect, as the study’s author has vehemently argued for months.
Indeed, the article presents the reader in the very next paragraph a figure from the CBO – a nonpartisan group – of costs being less than $200 per year, less than what the MIT study estimated. Oh, that $200 per year wouldn’t kick in until after 2020 – a far cry from the Con’s claim. The NRCC’s political motivation of using several thousand dollars per year is directly contradicted by the unmotivated CBO’s figure, yet both are presented to the reader as being equal. That is immoral.
I don’t wonder why the print media is failing. The evidence pointing to that failure is in front of us every day.
I read an article from yesterday that provides a good place to bring a number of climate and energy related items together. Controversial deals behind climate bill presents the unfortunate circumstance of some Democrats’ refusal to back the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) unless agriculture intensive areas were largely exempted from paying for the measures included in the legislation. This concession was won despite the fact that farmers and rural areas get a disproportionate amount of their energy from coal plants – the dirtiest and most polluting energy sources in use today. Among those Democrats are Rep. John Salazar (CO-03) and Rep. Betsy Markey (CO-04).
I make this point while holding a good deal of respect for farmers – the actual folks who are out on their land far earlier in the morning than I’m up and who work until later than I do every day – often just to survive, both physically and economically. But the point of any legislation that says it deals with energy and security needs to address the usage of fossil fuels, among many other purposes. By that, I mean that the legislation needs to reduce our bad habits and encourage good habits. Burning coal needs to stop – the sooner the better. By ensuring that rural citizens won’t have to face any temporary cost increases on the way toward phasing out coal burning, Democrats are passing the costs along, which is pretty irresponsible.
Someone, somewhere will eventually have to pay for reducing greenhouse pollution. Will it be urban citizens today? Will it be rural citizens in the near future? Will it be urban and rural citizens at a future date? The answers to those questions seem very relevant to me – and in my opinion, they’re not being addressed by the corporate media in any regularly meaningful way. It’s good for me as a blogger that some recent articles were written that get at these details, which I will share and try to tie together below.
H.R. 2454 (ACES) is coming up for a vote this afternoon in the House. As a quick action item, I’m providing some numbers for Reps. Markey and Salazar, cited as some of the fence-sitting Dems. Give them a quick call and ask them to vote for H.R. 2454.
Rep. Markey:
p. 202.225.4676
f. 202.225.5870
Rep. Salazar:
p. 202.225.4761
f. 202.226.9669
As currently written (to the best of my knowledge), the bill in the House would set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17% of 2005 levels by 2020 and 80%+ by 2050. As someone who has followed the science surrounding greenhouse gases and climate change pretty closely for a few years now, I want to be clear that I don’t think the 2020 goal goes far enough. I certainly hope I’m proven wrong as the measures in the bill are enacted and take effect.
Among the many specific details in this legislation, it worries me that the Dept. of Agriculture and not the Environmental Protection Agency will be responsible for deciding how farms will have to curb their emissions. There is nothing in the Dept. of Ag’s mission that indicates that they have experience with or are interested in monitoring or reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s not a knock against the agency – it is a straightforward observation. Neither am I saying that the Dept. of Ag won’t seek emissions expertise from other government agencies. However, something that bedevils all government agencies is a tendency to become insular – robust collaboration across agencies with regard to implementing policy isn’t the first characterization of those agencies that comes to mind.
The Democrats were somewhat justifiably concerned about potential rising energy costs. I say “somewhat justifiably” for a few reasons. The easiest is their lack of public concern regarding rising energy prices in the past due to other pieces of legislation or especially corporate greed. Energy prices outpaced inflation and real-wage increases (which were actually zero) this entire decade, most of which had Bush and the Cons running the country into the ground. The same Democrats threatening to go home pouting now (not Salazar or Markey, btw) were nowhere to be seen on the energy price front until last summer when they skyrocketed so high so fast that the corporate media’s obsession with infotainment couldn’t mask them anymore. Their concern doesn’t seem to be morally founded, which is disturbing.
There are trustworthy cost estimates available, more so now than before this Congressional session. The latest, by the Congressional Budget Office, estimates that the annual cost by 2020 would be $22 billion on the entire economy; or $175 per household on average (note that averages tend to be skewed by outliers). Cons, as usual, spent yesterday talking about gross costs as well as citing cost estimates that have been thoroughly debunked by climate and energy activists.
As I’ve written about before, groups like the McKinsey Group have shown in a couple of reports that actions taken to reduce our greenhouse forcing can be revenue neutral. By 2030, McKinsey estimates a 0.6-1.4% cost to the global economy. By 2050, McKinsey estimates a 1% rise or a 5% decrease in costs are possible.
Might there be a short-term cost involved? It looks likely. In contrast, what are the costs incurred by doing nothing? That’s a subject the Cons don’t want to go near – and nobody in the corporate media is making them answer that easy question.
For starters, the link between climate change and extreme weather events is by now evident. Extreme weather events such as intense drought and torrential rains when they do come are only going to become more common and intense if action continues to be delayed. Papers like Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate and the Earth Policy Institute’s Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization give us a clear view of the dangers involved with further delay. The bottom line: climate change will challenge societies worldwide more than any other issue in the 21st century. 1C warming translates to a 10% reduction in staple crop yields. With 2C-10C possible warming in select regions, massive crop failures would be the result, especially in the face of populations that continue to rise. How much would a 10%, 20% or more reduction in yield cost farmers? More than that it’s a short road from crop failure to political instability. Falling governments compared to a couple hundred dollars more on an energy bill – the choice seems pretty clear to me.
The problem, of course, is none of this is being communicated to the interested parties. How many farmers know about the downside of doing nothing about climate? Even if they knew, would they still not support action if it meant higher costs?
The Denver Post front-paged an article about the bill this morning, citing Salazar and Markey as potential swing votes as the bill comes up in the House today. It also notes that the Wildlife Action Fund and the League of Conservation Voters are watching Markey’s vote especially close. I have close to the same sentiment as the LCV – I will have a very hard time supporting a Democrat, no matter the district, if they vote against this bill. It’s not a progressive vs. con issue. It’s a moral issue.
Given the reasons to vote for the bill, as I outlined above, it is disheartening to note that political backers of this bill don’t mention the climate change effects a business-as-usual approach would entail. Economic arguments have taken sway, which is perhaps natural considering the sorry state of the economy. Unfortunately, Rep. Markey’s spokesman Ben Marter was quoted in the Post article pooh-poohing the environmental angle:
Markey will “ultimately make a decision in the best interest of her district, the state and the country, not for any one group.”
That sounds really good as a soundbite, Ben. If the Eastern Plains turn into a desert, as is currently predicted under business-as-usual conditions, I don’t think the 4th district will be particularly happy with that outcome. The environmental ramifications dominate the interests of the district. I hope such short-sightedness doesn’t derail or stall the necessary actions we all must take.
Here are Rep. Markey‘s Washington contact numbers. Please take a moment this morning to give her office a quick call and encourage her to vote for H.R. 2454.
p. 202.225.4676
f. 202.225.5870
Here are Rep. Salazar‘s Washington contact numbers. Please take a moment this morning to give his office a quick call and encourage him to vote for H.R. 2454.
When I wrote about FasTracks’ financial difficulties last week, I wasn’t expecting the story to stay in the headlines the way it has. I suppose it was inevitable: a $2.2 billion shortfall is nothing to sneeze at and something has to be done sooner rather than later if the entire project is to continue as originally envisioned.
The longer this story goes, the more parallels to similar stories become apparent.
First, here are the facts from the Post story. A majority of the Metro Mayors Caucus voted to ask voters this year for a second 0.4% sales tax increase in order to make up for the shortfall that is the result of bad economic forecasts and even worse economic conditions.
The commitment from the Metro Mayors Caucus is perceived as necessary so RTD can present a unified position to the federal government when they seek additional funds to help pay for the project. Without that commitment, those funds could be shifted elsewhere and FasTracks would have more financial distress. The mayors’ acted yesterday because they want to see the entire project finished by 2017.
A large, looming question is whether such a sales tax could pass in this economic environment. To that, I’ve answered that if a campaign is properly run (a big if, I know), I think voters will continue their support of the project. An easy point to make is that if the tax isn’t passed, a number of transit lines won’t be finished until 2034, if at all: 3 FasTracks lines would be finished by 2017 and the remainder might be started afterward.
Here is a second easy point to make: another option is to shorten all the lines. That makes no sense either. Why would a line go to Stapleton and not DIA? Why would a line go to Westminster and not Boulder? I think those arguments could be presented in such a way that a majority of voters would see the imperative of finishing FasTracks as it was originally proposed.
Okay, onto the part of the article that I was fully expecting to read.
The prospect of a vote reinvigorated FasTracks opponents.
Independence Institute president Jon Caldara, a longtime critic, said backing another tax increase would “reward RTD for lying to us and deceiving us” before the 2004 vote on the original FasTracks tax.
I will mince no words: Jon Caldara is one of the most disingenuous pundits out there. Caldara lies and makes stuff up every chance he gets as long as it advances his ideology. Caldara issues a number of lies here. Backing another increase would in no way reward RTD for anything approaching lies. RTD relied on a variety of economic forecasts when they were drawing up the plans for FasTracks.
While I might agree with Caldara that the economic forecasts were probably too rosy, Caldara fails to call out the correct culprit. Caldara perpetrates what I’ve come to call the Economists’ Infallibility Syndrome. People suffering from this syndrome find themselves unable to hold economists accountable for their forecasts. They instead direct their energy to non-responsible parties when those forecasts bust. In Caldara’s case, he attacks the only thing his extremist ideology allows him to attack: any entity that receives tax dollars. In Caldara’s warped worldview, RTD apparently knew this recession was going to happen and decided to try to bilk the taxpayers anyway. It makes for a cute bumper sticker, Jon, but it doesn’t work in the real world.
This misguided criticism reminds me of the Jon Stewart – Jim Cramer story (which I totally love, btw). Cramer, just like Caldara, has totally missed the point of Jon’s original piece. The vast majority of players in the financial industry didn’t have any idea that their sector was about to crater. Some of us argue that they should have. More of us are arguing that given their horrible track record, little confidence can now be placed in their opinions today.
The article does contain a worthy response, the first part of which did not appear in the print version of the Post:
In response, RTD spokesman Scott Reed said, “Jon is concocting a statewide conspiracy that would have included the Office of State Planning and Budgeting, the Colorado Legislative Council, the Denver Regional Council of Governments and two different highly-respected financial firms.”
“All of the RTD estimates were based upon their collective work,” Reed said. “The financial plans were public and there was no upside for RTD to over-estimate finances or low-ball costs.”
Whether it’s RTD or climate change, Jon Caldara and his ilk are fond of concocting grand conspiracies which could not and cannot possibly exist. The obvious question is why the Denver Post continues to use nut cases for quotes and present them to the public as serious people. Such is the extent of the mis-named “Independence Institute”. Independence from rational thought, perhaps, but nothing more.
So to sum up, I’m glad the Metro Mayors Caucus has decided on a course of action. The next step is for the RTD board of directors to approve a tax increase ballot measure. In the meantime, there is no time to waste working to build support for such a request. The sooner the public is educated, the more likely I think the increase will be approved. Support must start high now because we know it will taper off as election day draws near.
Aurora’s mayor has publicly put forth a 3rd option to the current FasTracks funding problems. This was exactly what I was talking about in my post about the Denver Post’s Gatekeepers approach: lots of complaints, no solutions. The original reporting about the funding problems offered only two solutions: build 3 lines to their original completion by 2017 and drop the remainder of the lines (and possibly finish them in 2034) or ask voters for additional funding to complete all the lines by 2017. Ed Tauer has put forward a 3rd option (and there are others that are obvious): introduce a slight delay to the Gold, West and DIA (East) lines of about one year while asking voters this November for additional tax money to finish the entire set of lines as originally designed. The reasoning is actually pretty strong: what incentive do voters along the Gold, West and DIA lines have to tax themselves further for the remainder of the system when their lines are already nearly guaranteed to be finished on time?
As community-oriented as I am, I was kind of put off by this reasoning at first. But as I thought more about it, I realized that Tauer has a point here. As much as I want to think that voters approved the original tax in 2004 because it would build out a transit system, it’s likely that many voters thought only of the line that would service their community. From this vantage point, I am inclined to agree with Mr. Tauer that perhaps a more realistic approach would be to introduce a slight delay to more or less force an incentive on some folks.
This Post article does a good job of correctly identifying the culprit: falling tax revenues. It’s something, if you read some of the comments below the article, that some people just don’t want to understand. They somehow think that RTD managers are deciding not to wave their magic money wands, and thus they must be removed! This scenario actually plays into my pet peeve that economists are infallible but the weatherman can’t forecast a thing. RTD based their estimates off of a 4.4% decline in sales tax revenues from 2008 levels. So far in January of 2009, those revenues are down 13% from Jan. 2008. Yet who gets the majority of the blame – the economists or RTD? The Infallibility Syndrome marches forward.
The current estimated shortfall to operate the system for the next 8 years comes up to $6.9 billion. With current tax receipt levels, only $4.7 billion is expected to be generated. All the management in the world isn’t going to alter area residents’ spending habits in this economy. Did the economy in 2004 lend confidence to voters that an ambitious project like FasTracks would be straightforward to fund and build? It probably did. Will the economy in 2009 take away confidence from voters that FasTracks should receive additional funding? That’s the answer nobody knows right now.
The fact that isn’t in dispute is the metro area needs alternative methods of transportation such as mass transit. Our roads are congested and falling apart. Our environment is incredibly stressed by the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution from our over-reliance on gas-powered vehicles. The Denver area is far behind the mass transit curve. FasTracks won’t solve all our problems, but it’s a decent next step, I think. I don’t think Mayor Tauer’s proposal is the best possible solution. But it is another potential solution – one that should continue the conversation of what to do to fix the problems the entire area faces. I don’t see three complete lines as an acceptable addition to our current transportation system. All the FasTracks lines should be completed in the shortest amount of time possible.
There will be a meeting on Wednesday for the entire 38-member metro-area mayoral caucus. There has to be a viable solution in between the two extremes proposed prior to this. I look forward to hearing what solutions were discussed and what the eventual choice will be.
The Gatekeepers at the Denver Post have issued their opinions on the proposal for bankruptcy judges to alter mortgage terms and how FasTracks should proceed. I can’t help but think that articles written by papers’ editorial boards have helped contribute to the decline of the newspaper industry over the past 30 years. They have become increasingly anti-citizen and pro-corporation. Now that Americans are left holding the tab for the corporate-government-media insanity over those same 30 years, and as those institutions fight harder to maintain their obsolete ways, I expect more media outlets to fall into the history books.
The first opinion piece has this lede: “Don’t let judges decide mortgages“. It’s interesting that the Post’s editors are calling for selective restraint on the power that bankruptcy judges can possess. Judges have immense control over how millions of Americans will be able to lead their lives, no doubt. Similarly, banks also have immense control over our lives. With respect to the foreclosures that are plaguing this country, banks have had the power to renegotiate loans to keep people in them. They have refused to do so. Despite taking billions in taxpayer dollars and spending it on buying each other and serving up millions in executive compensation, the rate at which mortgages were renegotiated didn’t appreciably increase in the past six months. We all know the result: millions more Americans are now upside-down on their mortgages because of widespread falling home values. The housing crisis precipitated the worst recession since the Great Depresison. Now, Congress is proposing to do something about it. If the banks are going to sit on their hands (and our billions), someone else should be given the authority to try to stem the tide. The Gatekeepers at the Post advocate instead for homeowners to put their heads between their knees and hope the industry recovers. Someday. Maybe. Also, more people than those who have lost their jobs should be eligible for assistance, contrary to what the Post wants. As with many crises we currently face, the pro-corporatist Post editors would rather do nothing than stand up for Americans. Thankfully, adults, and not the petulant op-ed whiners, are once again in charge in Washington.
The second opinion piece is calling for no new taxes for FasTracks. It acknowledges the problems that RTD and the FasTracks plan is currently facing, which I last covered here. That part is at least fact-based. As it is an opinion piece, the next part is fine, but I don’t think it’s reality-based. The editors don’t think voters would approve a new or additional tax on top of the one they already approved in 2004 to fund the mass-transit project. They cite the current economic downturn as the reason voters wouldn’t go for it. I disagree. If three lines have to wait, as the idea is being currently floated, until 2034 to get their transit lines (instead of 2017 for others), I think voters and taxpayers will be more than willing to approve more money for the project. One reason is Coloradans have now seen what $4 gas does to their budgets. It wasn’t pretty. While gas is only about $1.85 a gallon now, most people recognize that gas isn’t likely to stay there for long. Whether it’s six months or six years, Denver-area residents are going to want transportation options. The only way to get the project in a reasonable amount of time is to pay a little extra now, rather than a whole lot more in 8-25 years. But here’s a novel idea: let’s actually let the voters decide what they want. The Post’s editors have a weaker read on what we want than does RTD, which commissioned a poll asking about this very subject. The Post doesn’t like any proposed solution to FasTracks’ woes. As editorialists, perhaps they should come up with their own. But that isn’t what Gatekeepers do. Just like the foreclosure/bankruptcy crisis, the Post editors advocate doing nothing – thereby leaving future Denver-area residents with little to no transportation options. Wait and see isn’t a solution. It’s more of the failed practice of kicking the can down the road and letting someone else deal with today’s problems.
Human-forced climate change has already many effects that are visible today. An article that appears in today’s Science introduces another candidate: trees in the Western U.S. are living only half as long as they did 50 years ago. In the climate most of us grew up in, western forests acted as carbon sinks. Their growth “scrubbed” carbon from the atmosphere. Climate change has introduced conditions that are drier than normal; severe drought has ensued across the region. As a result, trees are growing less and dying earlier than they used to. That could result in less carbon being removed from the atmosphere, creating yet another positive feedback loop in the climate system.
Researchers focused on what’s called “background” mortality – trees dying from events that do not include infestations of insects like the mountain pine beetle currently afflicting the West, which is identified as “abrupt” mortality. They studied 76 plots where trees were at least 200 years old. They were undisturbed by logging (harder to do every year), bark beetle epidemic or wildfire. Trees being studied in Colorado were largely wiped out by the mountain pine beetle epidemic currently moving across the state’s forests, itself a trend linked to climate change. Temperature data in the research plots (across the entire West) showed an increase in every season of the year. The warming and drought conditions we’ve experienced in Colorado has also made its presence felt across a much larger region.
Our forests are suffering from multiple coincident effects of a warming planet and regionalized drying. Direct human pressures such as increased population in the inter-mountain West and hundreds of years of logging aren’t helping matters. Efforts need to be made today to decrease our forcing on the climate system. Carbon emissions need to be drastically reduced so that concentrations in the atmosphere can be reduced later this century. If forests are unable to play their historic role of a carbon sink, those efforts become all the more critical. Unfortunately, it will likely increase their cost, something environmentalists cited regularly during the past eight years’ of climate inaction.
[Update]: While reading the article again, something important popped out at me. The authors note the following:
From the 1970s to 2006 (the period including the bulk of our data; table S1), the mean annual temperature of the western United States increased at a rate of 0.3° to 0.4°C decade -1, even approaching 0.5°C decade -1 at the higher elevations typically occupied by forests.
So between 1.2°C and 2°C warming has already occurred since the 1970s. That means the forests of the future are in for bad times. If we could somehow magically stop emitting greenhouse gases today, the climate system would still get warmer for the next 100+ years due to the forcing “in the pipeline”, as climatologists refer to it. The climate system hasn’t fully responded to the gases emitted in the last 5, 10, or 50 years.
Of course, no such magic is going to occur. Emissions will have to stop increasing (stabilize) then start decreasing. Which means there is plenty of additional forcing (warming) that will occur. The 2007 IPCC assessment relied on models that didn’t demonstrate the warming that has already occurred very well. Policy decisions based on that report would therefore be poorly suited for the task we face.
[2nd Update]: NPR’s Science Friday discussed this paper with one of the researchers today. The segment can be found here.
The editorial boards of Denver’s two largest newspapers penned screeds that once again displayed a stunning hatred of workers that stand up for their rights this weekend.
The Rocky Mountain News was the more overt of the two, which comes as no surprise to local progressives. Their conservative bent has grown stronger over the years as they cheer on the race to the bottom America’s workers are facing. Their lede: Caving to the UAW. Their secondary lede: Concessions should precede bailout.
I have but one question for the Rocky and every other group that hates workers: what concessions have executives of America’s major auto manufacturers given in this crisis? The auto labor unions of America have conceeded on every issue possible in the past 20 years. What have executives given up for the privilege to continue in their positions? It’s been those executives’ decisions that have placed their corporations at the precipice of failure, not the workers’. The Rocky places all of the blame at the feet of the labor-friendly Democratic Congress. What about the corporate-friendly Republicans that threatened to filibuster the deal or the corporate-friendly Republican supposedly running the country? How many times has Bush issued executive orders in the past 8 years? If he (his handlers) wanted to save the auto industry from itself, he would have done it already.
The Denver Post came no closer to trying to address some real issues associated with the Big 3′s failures. They called out Michigan Gov. Granholm’s assessment of the vote in the Congress as un-American. I don’t remember the Post chastising the Cons who called anti-invasion and anti-occupation Democrats as anti-American. It’s actually much more applicable to those same Cons vis-a-vis the failed vote. Con Senators from the South would rather see American auto manufacturers fail (their true goal is to break up the UAW) than help them out. Con Senators from the South would rather see foreign auto manufacturers succeed – foreign car plants have begun to really populate the American South, instead of American car plants as they do in Michigan and other northern states. Con Senators would rather see the world plunge into a second Republican Great Depression just so they can teach Big, Bad Labor the lessons they deserve than stand up as proud Americans and preserve some of our last in-country manufacturing. Con Senators (and their un-American supporters) would literally rather have workers make no wages or receive any benefits than support what little Americans’ actually end up making today. If that’s not un-American, I don’t know what is.
Why isn’t the Rocky or the Post supporting workers? Because their right-wing benefactors don’t support workers. Because they don’t receive anti-corporate messages from Con “think-tanks”. Because they practice exactly what those Con Senators supported: they’ve shifted their “news” coverage from solid journalistic standards to focusing on entertainment instead. An uneducated population of workers won’t want to stand up for their rights. Instead, they’ll blame those workers who dare to do so just like their major corporate media outlets tell them to.
This race to the bottom must stop. Stand up for your fellow worker, Coloradans and Americans. Or get used to double-digit unemployment and another Depression.
***
In a related vein, the Rocky’s Ed Stein had a cartoon appear next to their screed that dealt with the nationwide collapse of the newspaper corporate industry. Depicting newspapers as pillars of democracy that were falling over, Stein blatently ignored newspapers’ failure to uphold democracy these past 8 years under the worst president this country has suffered under. Due to the corporate newspapers’ stunning lack of holding Con officials responsible for their actions, Bush leaves this country in much worse shape than he found it. The media’s latest attempts to tie President-elect Obama to the corrupt Illinois Governor despite no evidence to support their witch-hunt is all the more disturbing when Bush’s actions remain univestigated. For this reason and others, I honestly have zero pity that corporate newspapers are failing. Just like the auto industry, they make their bed all too willingly. Now they get to lie in it.
The theme from yesterday’s Sunday Denver Post was pro-Republican, pro-Republican and pro-Republican. From headlines to important yet missed details, readers were treated to another example of why it pays to beat up on the media for 30 years, as long as you’re a Republican.
Article #1: “McCain faces a wild West” by Chuck Plunkett. Inside, Chuck details how Colorado’s Republican elites didn’t back McCain in the caucus. In fact none of them joined McCain for his stop here last week. Chuck writes how James Dobson has said he cannot and will not vote for McCain in the general election. Americans believe the economy is in a recession, foreclosure rates set a record every month, the dollar’s value is collapsing, oil approaches $120 per barrel (and reached it today), gas prices are setting records, families are having trouble paying for food, a super majority now want troops out of Iraq in a small time-frame (one year or less), and voters are registering as Democrats faster than Republicans, turnout in the primaries thus far has averaged 2-1 D to R. Poll after poll has shown, at best, tied support for McCain versus either Democratic contender. More polls are showing a substantial margin in the Democrats’ favor.
Imagine a similar scenario for the Democratic nominee: local party leaders refusing to show up for a town hall meeting/fundraiser. Environmental leaders refusing to vote for the nominee. Do you honestly believe the headline would read, “Nominee faces a wild West”? Hardly. The number one topic would be how unelectable they were and how the Democratic Party was mortally split. But not the Republican nominee and not in the Denver Post, no siree.
Chuck does spend some space regaling readers with the ridiculous Rev. Wright “controversy” and Obama’s “now infamous bitter comments”. Really? McCain faces a wild West because of two issues that aren’t on any voters’ radar screens? Chuck should be spending more time discovering how much a non-story Wright and Obama’s commentary really is. For instance, a CBS/NY Times poll shows support for Obama growing since Obama’s denunciation of Wright two weeks ago. The so-called “flap” exists only in the minds of conservative talkers and beltway bloviators. Thus, the Denver Post makes sure to include the non-issue in the article.
As currently written (to the best of my knowledge), the bill in the House would set a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 17% of 2005 levels by 2020 and 80%+ by 2050. As someone who has followed the science surrounding greenhouse gases and climate change pretty closely for a few years now, I want to be clear that I don’t think the 2020 goal goes far enough. I certainly hope I’m proven wrong as the measures in the bill are enacted and take effect.
