The Republican Drive To Destroy The Environment

Trump plans to run the EPA by executive order. The most ignorant man to ever occupy the White House will now dictate environmental policy.

From Reuters

Republicans have begun their effort to gut the Endangered Species Act which saved the Bald Eagle and the Timber Wolf

Reported by The Week

A bill has been proposed to eliminate the EPA altogether

Reported by CNBC

In early January Jason Chaffetz offered a bill to sell millions of acres of federal land. It was later withdrawn.

From the LATimes

The bright siders say the extremely anti-environmental aggressiveness of the Trump administration and the Republican Congress may galvanize environmentalists.

But why do we need to refight wars? Is it a good thing to redirect energies to saving what was saved already and telling people what everybody has known for the past 20 years?

The world has known about the dangers of climate change for longer than that actually and instead of reaching consensus on it we lost consensus.

Because fossil fuels were simply too profitable and its corporations were too greedy and the politicians they owned were too needy.

Climate Change May End Civilization But The GOP Has Decided They Don't Care

VOX posted a disturbing video history of how the climate change consensus devolved into a partisan football game pitting the stupid people who distrust science against the rational people who trust science.

There was scientific consensus early on, then there was political consensus. Then people who disliked the consensus decided to sabotage it and destroy it. Why? For reasons of profit.

But the main visible reason that consensus seems to have broken down is because Americans elected a black man president. Republicans didn’t like having a black president and decided that everything he proposed needed to be blocked.

Of course it’s more complicated than that. Fossil fuel billionaires poured billions into the PR campaign to derail the rational response to the climate change threat. Their profits drove the whole propaganda machine. But the unifying principle behind the opposition and its absolute team unity was racism.

FoxNews enforced this opposition with dangerously misleading and prejudicial reporting and the Republican Party turned the future of civilization into a team sport. They decided they were on the team that didn’t believe the scientists. A Republican senator said on the floor of the Senate that climate change was a hoax because he had a snowball in his hand.

We know what the problem is. We know which companies are causing the problem. (You'll find a list here at Science Magazine.) We know our behavior is making the problem worse and we have the ability to choose. But the most powerful media force available to Americans, the most watched news network, FoxNews, is dead set against a rational response. Why? Because they are the network of the Republican Party and the Democratic Party is dedicated to the rational scientific response, so they are opposed to it. It’s a binary response. Whatever the other side is proposing, they’re against it.

For eight years this obstruction remained unified because the leader of the Democrats was black. They hated being told by a black man that something needed to be done. Following the leadership of a black man was against 500 years of tradition.

The new obstruction that will begin in 2017 will dictate that all Republicans must oppose everything President Hillary Clinton proposes because they dislike having a woman president. This opposition will be built on thousands of years of male dominant tradition.

Deep racism and sexism and the sacred profits of oil and coal companies have energized half of America into an irrational mob. They refuse to believe anything except what they are told by their masters. This has turned a danger into an existential threat to civilization.

This seems attractive to some on the right who believe if they screw up the world badly enough Jesus will come.

What people need to understand is simple enough. Civilization is built upon a predictable and reliable climate––reliable rainfall and reliable growing seasons. Climate change will end that. It took thousands of years of reliable rain and growing seasons to lay down the soil that grows the crops we live on. We built our infrastructure around these reliable growing regions. People need to understand what will happen when our farming infrastructure and our fertile soil is located where crops will no longer grow. When the oceans rise we will have difficulty shipping food because our port infrastructure will be flooded.

A recent president who was faced with his failure said he didn’t mind how history judged him because he’d be dead. This appears to be the reasoning of the wealthy and stupid forces organized to oppose responsible action to slow and halt climate change. By the time the world knows the Koch Brothers helped doom our civilization they will be dead.

At some point people with enormous wealth stopped behaving responsibly as people, as citizens, and began playing wealth as a game in which nothing mattered but the score they could rack up before they died, at which point the game was over.

The Nullification of Science

Exxon did this for decades. They'd discovered that continued use of fossil fuel would warm the climate, raise the oceans and make large growing areas into deserts. What did they do? They hid the information. Why? So the owners of oil shares could continue to reap high profits from peak oil and their top executives could pull down decades of multimillion dollar paychecks.

Recently we've learned that pesticides manufactured by powerful multinational corporations have begun killing off bees and butterflies necessary for the pollination of a large percentage of our food crops. But powerful multinational corporations know how to reach deep into academic research institutions and shut the science down. Because they sponsor those institutions. (Nobody else has enough money and they do. They hold the purse and the veto power.) These multinationals also can dictate government policy. A story on public radio yesterday told of how a USDA bee scientist was upsetting the pesticide companies with his findings. They shut him down.

The Four Stage Policy of Climate Change Denial

A series of stories in the LATimes has been explaining how EXXON knew very early that fossil fuel use was causing potentially catastrophic climate change and how they decided to cover it up and tell the public nothing was wrong.

This bit of dialogue from a BBC political comedy sums up the trick that’s been played on humanity by the oil companies and their Republican stooges.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Sir Richard Wharton: In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Sir Humphrey Appleby: Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now.

Meanwhile our tax dollars subsidize the oil giants with billions of dollars a year and their shareholders pocket trillions of dollars of profits year by year. By the time the oceans rise and global food production collapses they will be beyond prosecution and their riches will be safely stashed somewhere beyond our reach. Because of what they knew all along their offshore bank will not be on a Caribbean island but Switzerland.

Here's Bill McKibben's damning article about what EXXON knew, in the New Yorker.

And in The Nation, again by Bill McKibben.

Planned Ignorance

There is a well-funded effort in this country to hide, suppress, distort and outright kill the truth––to kill the truth about a lot of things––about climate science, about the economy, about the ways concentrated wealth distorts our democracy and our justice system. Mostly they are determined to suppress the truth about their dangerous power. They have the power to hide the truth, to distort the public conversation, to suppress the public’s right to know things. They benefit from our ignorance and confusion.

Truth and honesty and understanding are inconvenient for certain powerful people and groups. The Founders of this country believed and never hesitated to say that the full and honest truth is a public good. It’s a conversation, a process, not a fixed truth but something we are constantly working out. This is why the public conversation cannot be a private one carried on in board rooms. But some very superior people hate the notion that the public has a right to anything. They believe nothing is deserved, that no one is entitled to anything unless they have the money to buy it. They believe this knowing that they have a growing monopoly on wealth.

Of course those with infinite wealth think it's appropriate (and safest for them) to keep information from the public: nobody is entitled to the truth. They own it and can dole it out as they like. They think nothing is deserved–––except the wealth they inherited, their dividend checks, their annual bonus. Owning for a living entitles a person to everything; working for a living entitles you to nothing. The democrats who founded this country invented our system of government to guard against this idea of narrow privilege. But that history is also being suppressed and distorted.

(The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an essay about this suppression and withholding of information from the public.)

Realizing that knowledge is dangerous to them, the fossil fuel billionaires have leveraged their influence to blackmail universities and professors and scientists. “If you publish your findings you will lose your professorship. You will lose the funding for your research. Your university won’t get the grants it needs in other areas. You will be targeted by our news organizations. We will question your integrity. We will investigate your private life. We will target your family.” Al Gore gave his film a perfect title: the overwhelming science on climate change was an Inconvenient Truth. He became inconvenient. They succeeded in making him disappear.

(From the Guardian: 125 million dollars have been spent hiding, disputing and distorting key climate science the public is entitled to know.)

Luckily there is some pushback… But what this does is promote the idea that climate scientists aren’t sure about what is happening. And the media owned by the fossil fuel billionaires will broadcast “the controversy” which doesn’t really exist.

(From VOX: luckily there is money being spent to get the climate science out there.)

I mentioned that concentrated wealth has also distorted the measuring and regulation of our economy. It’s a fundamental conundrum: is cash value the only measure of validity? Actually, the answer is Yes and No. Those with the most money can, in the words of Karl Rove, “create their own reality.”

(An excellent article from Bloomberg about the illogic and biased nature of modern economics and finance.)

But bad math and bad economics will have consequences somewhere. Great wealth insulates the wealthy from consequences. Great wealth has even been able to persuade the millions who suffer from the the wrongdoing of the billionaire class that these consequences were properly paid out and to applaud the vulgar excess of the billionaire class the way the poor used to applaud kings and queens. It’s all very different from what Franklin and Jefferson and Paine and Washington planned. Of course Franklin warned about this very thing.

Here's some further reading:


A new book about the problem of Willful Blindness.


What is the Dunning Kruger Effect?


What is Illusory Superiority?


What is Hanlon's Razor?


Why do some people believe knowledge is a curse?


(Now that we have a full Republican Clown Car) what is the Imposter Syndrome?


What is the ultimate insult you can throw at a foolish pundit?

Meanwhile, Red States across America are rewarding their citizens by dismantling their education systems.


(The Nation reporting on the dismantling of higher ed in North Carolina)


(Salon reports on college dropout Scott Walker's defunding of the university system in Wisconsin.)


Adam Smith was the father of capitalism. Today's capitalists worship him. But (as reported in MinnPost) even Adam Smith knew the immense value of a liberal education.

(Rolling Stone looks at the dystopia that will remain after the oligarchs are done with our public education system.)

And even if the public is able to think clearly, Congress doesn’t care. Why? Money. Concentrated wealth and power has completely corrupted our democratic system.

THE TRIUMPH OF STUPIDITY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

Civilization, meaning everything in history that comes after we learned to farm, in fact all of history, is founded upon reliable climate, reliable rain and growing seasons. Climate change caused by the greed of fossil fuel billionaires fucks all of that.

Some places will be warmer, some colder, some will have longer growing seasons, some shorter, most will fluctuate meaning farmers will have to guess and hope even more than they do now (imagine the crop insurability problem then).

The changes will be dramatic. Some places will be too dry to support life. Some will be washed away in huge floods or flattened by huge storms. Things like this that happened in the Bible were interpreted as God’s punishment for wrongdoing––our wrongdoing this time is stupidly placing ourselves in the political grip of fossil fuel billionaires.

Think we can solve these problems by shipping grain from one lucky continent to another? Picture all of our functioning and extremely expensive port facilities under water and no longer functional.

Weird how the big insurers haven’t cottoned to this huge risk overhang. I think it’s because most big insurers think of themselves as investment companies investing the premiums they collect rather than insurers of risk, and right now at peak oil their biggest investments are with the oil companies. Colossally stupid. Stupid on top of stupid, which should help disprove the free market capitalist’s religion that says money is smarter than any of us. Money is mostly just greedy.

The greed of the top 1% may doom all of civilization, murdering millions. We should mind.

There is a local weatherman where I live who hosts “documentaries” that explain why Climate Change and Global Warming are stupid hoaxes. He says it’s hard enough to predict weather two weeks out, so it has to be impossible to predict what will happen in two decades. This sounds persuasive if you don’t think about it. Children are unpredictable too. We can’t predict what they’ll do tomorrow, but we have a pretty good idea what they’ll be up to over time, and we can be pretty sure in twenty years they’ll be twenty years older, with average luck. With average luck they'll live lives like ours, with better than average luck, better lives. Throw that average luck out and what happens?

Climate stability gives us average luck that we can build on. Climate instability takes that away: no predictability, no reliable averages to plan our complex civilization around. Climate scientists are warning us about the risks of enormous changes in our children's lifetimes. What changes exactly? It's hard to say, and that is the danger. Unreliable climate destroys civilizations and has ground many into dust over the centuries. Usually it happens slowly. Previously the climate changed slowly. Not this time.

The well paid attractive telegenic criminals who are distracting us from this enormous danger are being paid to distract us and dissuade us. 97% of all climate scientists agree, but we are being persuaded by smiling weathermen and ignorant politicians to ignore science.

These shills are being paid to help shore up a dirty 19th century industry that threatens us all. They are being paid to help us confuse Weather and Climate. Weather is if it’s raining outside. Weather is a discussion about whether to carry an umbrella tomorrow. It’s not deep stuff. Climate change is as deep as life and death for our nation, the happiness or misery of our descendants' lives, the arc of history itself.

Climate is the reason we have a prosperous nation. We are lucky to have a good, reliable, moderate and predictable climate. Climate Change is why there are dead civilizations buried under the sands of North Africa. Usually climate changes slowly. We are changing it radically and quickly and lethally unless we decide to stop changing it by changing the way we fuel our lives.

Why Have Insurers Been Silent on Climate Change?

I began asking this question among economists, opinion shapers and policy people. Then I read the article in the Guardian, about how Lloyds is finally beginning to charge for climate change risk. Then, just this week, Farmers Insurance began filing lawsuits, not against the fossil fuel companies triggering climate change, but against the communities who failed to plan for the harm climate change will wreak on properties insured by Farmers. Why did it take so long for the insurance industry to wake up?

Maybe they were distracted. Maybe they had (in Dick Cheney's famous phrase) "other priorities." Are insurers still in the business of protecting against risks? Is that just a sideline, a way of raising investment capital?

I would suggest that insurance companies stopped being insurance companies at least a decade ago. They evolved into financial companies whose main duty is getting maximum returns on Wall Street…and these days that means sizable investments in the very profitable peak-oil fossil fuels business. Damn the risks. Profits tend to speak louder than risks at shareholder meetings.

Last month* I put these questions to a small group of people whose job it is to think forwardly. One reply from (a national columnist’s intern) suggested I need to learn more about how business works. The rest was silence. It is important to consider which division of massive financial companies dominates the thinking.

There was another time, in 2006 and 2007, when huge profits dulled the financial sector’s awareness of significant dangers. We ended up paying for their stupidity. Which means they are probably still stupid.

* "When you think of the vast liabilities of violent weather and rising ocean levels, insurers should be mounting a narrative to overturn the fossil fuel industry's campaign.

One reason occurs to me why they’re not. Perhaps insurance companies are overinvested in fossil fuel stocks. The returns on these stocks are huge because of the subsidies and because of peak oil, but they cannot possibly outweigh the potential for disaster.

Can the issue be raised that insurers are investing in industries that are causing these disasters? The causal link would be difficult legally, but less so as a narrative, letting the public change its mind.

Maybe it’s time for people to start writing to insurance companies. Ask an actuary if climate change will pose risks to their insured and to their companies. These issues have enormous economic consequences. The losses may be even larger than profits can cover."

The Scandal About Global Warming

The big scandal about global warming isn't over whether it's happening. It's happening, and the effects are horrendous.

The scandal is that in most American living rooms the term "global warming" is taboo, Off limits. Censored. We get alarming reports about the latest storms, the vast wildfires, the horrible drought conditions, the deaths from the heat, but NOT ONE TV OR RADIO WEATHER REPORTER SAYS A WORD ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING.

Newspaper stories in Europe are linking the summer's powerful storms to global warming.

The New Scientist is connecting the dots between superstorms and climate change.

Business journals are beginning to track what business journals track: the huge economic downside of our doing nothing. If the climate doesn't kill us with weather events it will make us poorer and hungrier. I suppose the upside of that is there are business moguls who will find a way to profit from misery.

Global warming (surprise) causes inconveniences like power outages.

Scientists warn that global warming is killing off the world's coral reefs, which protect millions of coastal dwellers from being washed away by the ocean. Reefs also support the populations of fish we eat. Here's a trenchant and frightening analysis from the New York Times.

Still, there is a coordinated embargo of broadcast discussion of global warming. You won't hear about the embargo on TV, but you can read about it in print. Which means only people patient enough to read are aware of the censorship.

Inside Climate News sums it up.

The Houston Chronicle created a storm of controversy when it raised the issue in the newspaper. Houston's weather guys replied, basically claiming they believed in global warming, but thought it might be rude to discuss it on the air.

I've read articles about the heat waves across the U.S. and watched reports about catastrophic superstorms in middle America and millenial floods in Duluth and across Europe...

The Guardian reports.

But I have yet to hear ONE television meteorologist mention global warming or global climate change. Not one. Not once. Scientists, yes; weathercasters, no. Not once. Never. And when a scientist is brought on to discuss the issue a fossil fuel flunky is usually there to rebut it. We have facts and evidence on one side but, apparently, it's only fair to give enormous profits equal time. After all, they pay for it.

I'm not the only one who's noticing this, but an embargoed idea doesn't get discussed. That's the point of embargoes.

Why is the discussion of the embargo confined to sciency and lefty websites?

Is there an organized ban on broadcast meteorologists discussing global warming? TV weather forecasters are where most people learn about what's happening in the atmosphere. Most people think it's the best science there is.

If there is a TV ban on climate change talk (and it appears there is) why aren't major print media outlets reporting on it?

Who is behind it? Who is enforcing it? Why does a weathercaster on TV need to be "brave" to report consensus science in the first place?

My guess is that the fossil fuel billionaire Koch brothers and their paid and programmed pseudo-scientists have ordered the silencing of TV weathermen and weatherwomen. They've frightened program directors to obey their commands. They have successfully cast global warming as dangerously controversial, as something that will threaten friendships and endanger jobs.

This ban on climate change reporting is being enforced despite the fact that most Americans link the extreme weather with climate change. A new Washington Post/Stanford University poll backs this up.

But despite the evidence of our science and the direct experience of most Americans, the science is being censored, suppressed, silenced. This takes money, and the fossil fuel industry has it. Science groups are fighting back. Remember this organization: Forecast The Facts––forecastthefacts.org.

Sadly, good science has become risky for the first time since the Enlightenment.

Good science that helps the global population reduce and plan for risks is considered a risk itself. That's ironic. It's also big story. And it's another story that's too risky to report on.

George Will is intelligent enough to know when a fool is running for the Republican presidential nomination, but he has not mastered the basic Venn Diagram. What contains what? Climate contains weather, weather is or can be evidence of climate change but understanding of weather patterns and being able to predict rain a week in advance doesn't imply a mastery of the much greater complexity of climate. Weather is a wholly owned subsidiary of climate just as one company's finances are a tiny portion of the larger economy. And the big worry among climate scientists is that global warming will trigger, is already triggering, larger, more frequent, more powerful more sudden changes in weather.

Media Matters, discussing George Will's lame climate change denial commentary, uses an economics analogy, and it's apt. Because all economics is based on climate. All civilization is based on climate. And the ability of households and companies and economies and societies to survive is predicated on an ability to predict relevant trends, their specific climate, from one season to the next. An economy that gyrates, as ours did prior to the New Deal regulations that steadied and moderated it, is a hard environment to survive in. You would hope economists and corporations would appreciate that and want to ensure against volatility, but sadly short term profits, the weather that rains millions on CEOs, is all that matters to them.

During the winter, when heat sounds like a blessing, climate advocates argue back that "weather is not climate". They are trying to communicate that weather variability doesn't stop and cold weather doesn't entirely disappear just because the planet is heating up on average. It's crucial to note that they are saying this in response to those who claim a snowstorm or a cold snap refutes global warming. Big snowstorms are part of the climate change volatility too. The evidence of a single moment tends to convince most people, and the fossil fuel billionaires use that kind of persuasion. Weathermen also think short term; if their weekly forecast is off, they lose credibility. But climate science is a longer and more complex game than that, and what takes more than a soundbite to explain is usually too complex for Americans to understand. This shortness of attention span may kill us. It will kill our economy first.

Think We Don't Need To Worry About Climate Change?

Wrong. We need to worry. The vast majority of scientists and the vast majority of good science confirms what NASA and other bodies have been telling us. Here's a good article from Scientific American. Read it. Share it. Climate change is already hitting us where we live.

And if you heard a local TV weatherman saying an inch or two more of sea level won't harm us, read this. He's wrong. It won't be inches; it'll be feet. That and more and stronger storm systems like those that submerged New Orleans a few years ago and flattened large areas of the American south this month.

Get used to the idea of Miami, London, Baltimore, Copenhagen and other cities under water. Not to mention whole countries. Bangladesh. The Netherlands. With once-a-century floods every year or so and more frequent and more powerful storms like the one that hit the American South two weeks ago, picture whole areas in a state of permanent wreckage. Climate change does more than make the flowers bloom a week earlier, it sometimes makes them bloom later. It unhinges the steady climate that civilizations rely on. Babylon fell because the climate changed. So can we.

Meanwhile Americans flock to exhibits in our national museum (funded by the Koch Brothers) telling us climate change isn't happening.

And if it is happening it's not a bad thing.

And if it's a bad thing, there's nothing we can do about it.

And if there were something we could do about it it's too late now.

And anyway the Koch brothers (who paid for the exhibit) are in no way responsible. And who cares––all the fossil fuel giants are raking in billions more every year. It's especially nice when there are tax breaks on top of the profits.

Maybe the next exhibit at the Koch-Smithsonian will tell us about Jesus's pet dinosaur, or how the sun revolves around the earth.