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The Bizarro World of Bjorn Lomborg and the NY Times’ “Post-Pollution” Solution to Climate Change

By Joe Romm on Dec 13, 2011 at 6:45 pm

http://boards.420chan.org/sport/src/1318996821525.jpgThe NY Times, through blogger Andy Revkin, is pushing Bjorn Lomborg’s alternative-universe “Post-Pollution” solution to global warming — more research and development (R&D).  Revkin is also misrepresenting a Center for American Progress report, which is why I am going to debunk this too-little, too-late strategy for the umpteenth time.

As Andrew Light, the lead author of the CAP report, explains, “I think Andy read our piece too quickly” and “I’m disappointed to see once again here the false dichotomy” that “somehow an agreement on CO2 is mutually exclusive with a mechanism to grow clean technology and sustainable development solutions.  It’s a completely uninformed view.“  I’ll repost his statement in full at the end.

False dichotomy is what the do-little crowd traffic in, sadly, and it mucks up the debate — see Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy.  No, that abbreviated description of the optimal strategy has never been my suggestion for the sequence of investments [!] but for the ratio of spending needed!

See also this post by a leading journalist and climate expert, Robert Collier, noting “The basic message of all these reports is akin to Romm’s mantra: Deploy, deploy, R&D, deploy, deploy — but all simultaneously.”  Precisely.

We do need a vast increase in clean energy R&D spending, as I have been arguing for more than two decades.  But averting catastrophic warming requires spending several times more on deployment than on R&D.

I would have thought that the recent International Energy Agency report would have made clear to all that aggressive deployment, not R&D, must be where we put most of our money ASAP:

On planned policies, rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change.

… we are on an even more dangerous track to an increase of 6°C [11°F]….  Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

The IEA is one of the few credible international bodies with a combined global economic and energy model that allows them to come to quantitative conclusions rather than just the hand-waving that dominates most discussions.  And by handwaving, I specifically mean this nonsense from Lomborg (Revkin’s comments are in italics at the end):

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Alyssa

Details on This Weekend’s New York Meetup

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 13, 2011 at 6:38 pm

Saturday. 7:30pm. Dewey’s Flatiron (Seth Eagelfeld gets credit for the endorsement), which is within a few blocks of the N, R, 4, 6, F and M. Do holler and let me know if you think you can make it so I can figure out how many tables and chairs to try to grab. I’m looking forward to it!

LGBT

Gay Vietnam Vet Schools Mitt Romney On The Constitution And Gay Marriage

By Igor Volsky on Dec 13, 2011 at 6:17 pm

Bob Garon — the 63-year-old gay Vietnam veteran who confronted Mitt Romney over gay marriage in New Hampshire on Monday — appeared on MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews this evening and challenged the former governor’s understanding of the Constitution. Romney, who supports a federal constitutional amendment outlawing same-sex marriage, had told Garon that “at the time the Constitution was written, it was pretty clear that marriage was between a man and a woman.” Garon said he was “dumbfounded” by Romney’s interpretation of the founding document:

MATTHEWS: Most people recognize that the Constitution has taken different meanings over the years because times have changed. I mean, there is no reference to an air force, for instance, in the Constitution….Were you surprised he took that sort of old, conservative argument, oh, that’s not the way Franklin looked at it? And by the way, we have no idea how they actually looked at it. What did you make of that?

GARON: Well, I was very surprised. First, I’m not a professor of the Constitution. I didn’t know he was either. I didn’t know the Constitution makes it clear what a marriage was between a man or a woman. There is nowhere in the Constitution that I can remember that it says anything about that and here is a man that plans to be in the White House and apparently he doesn’t know about the Constitution either. I was dumbfounded. I just don’t know where he came up with that kind of information.

Watch it:

While running for Senate in 1994, Romney himself argued that same-sex marriage is “a state issue as you know – the authorization of marriage on a same-sex basis falls under state jurisdiction.”

Related Posts

Health

Santorum Slams Administration For ‘Considering’ Expanding Access To Morning After Pill

By Igor Volsky on Dec 13, 2011 at 6:00 pm

If Democrats thought that limiting access to the morning after pill would win over anti-abortion voters or at least reduce some of the vitriol spewed by Republican politicians, they’d be sorely disappointed in Rick Santorum’s comments at a town hall in Belle Plaine, Iowa this morning. Just days after Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius overruled the Food and Drug Administration to limit access to the medication for women under the age of 17, Santorum described the Obama administration as “the most pro-abortion” and criticized the president for even considering expanding the availability of the drug:

SANTORUM: You have this administration, the most pro-abortion. They were trying to make the morning after pill an over the counter drug. This is just outrageous…I think you still need a prescription to get it, but they wanted to make it an over the counter drug…And of course it is an abortificaiton, and not always, but many times is an abortion.

Watch it:

Santorum, of course, has his facts wrong. In August of 2006, President George W. Bush’s FDA approved over-the-counter access to Plan B emergency contraception for women 18 years and older and the medication is currently available behind the counter to women 17 and older — meaning that they do not need a prescription but they have to ask a pharmacist for the drug. Following Sebelius’ decision, girls 16 and younger will still need a prescription in order to obtain it. Plan B is a form of oral contraception that works in the same way as the birth control bill, only after sexual intercourse. It prevents pregnancy and will not work after a fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus. Despite the lack of conclusive scientific evidence, some conservatives like Santorum also argue that the pill and emergency contraception could prevent implantation and thus result in an abortion.

Security

Response To The Simon Wiesenthal Center

By Ben Armbruster on Dec 13, 2011 at 6:00 pm

For the third time in two weeks, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin today authored a blog post calling CAP and ThinkProgress “anti-Semitic” and “anti-Israel.” Prompted by an inquiry from Rubin, the Simon Wiesenthal Center has regrettably joined in the attacks on us. In a press release, the Wiesenthal Center said we “are guilty of dangerous political libels resonating with historic and toxic anti-Jewish prejudices.” While calling for raising the level of discourse on the one hand, the Wiesenthal Center makes a number of unfounded allegations. Let’s review them.

The SWC writes, “recent attacks on the Simon Wiesenthal Center by the Center for American Progress (CAP)-associated bloggers on ‘the far-right Simon Wiesenthal Center, which purports to promote tolerance, [but] basically called Obama a Nazi’ for saying that Israel should return to the pre-1967 borders.”

But the SWC omits what we were responding to — the fact that SWC attacked President Obama, claiming he wants Israel to “return to 1967 ‘Auschwitz’ borders.” Here is the headline of their May press release:

SWC: Israel Should Reject a Return to 1967 ‘Auschwitz’ Borders

We found the reference to Auschwitz to be gratuitous and inflammatory in the context of President Obama’s address. Leaving aside whether one considers the 1967 lines to be defensible, the fact is that is that President Obama did not call for Israel to return to those lines, only that they should be the basis for negotiations. Back in May, we highlighted a number of baseless right-wing attacks on Obama for his proposition that “a lasting peace” between the Israelis and the Palestinians “will involve two states” and that “the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines.” Obama’s pronouncement wasn’t new; President Bush in 2005 endorsed a two-state solution with negotiations based on the post-1949 Armistice, pre-1967 borders.

Also in its press release today, the Wiesenthal Center suggested that ThinkProgress was out of bounds when we “articulated the view that it is ‘factually inaccurate’ to assume that ‘Iran has a nuclear weapons program’ — and, in any case, that the danger posed by that program is exaggerated for political purposes.” This is a misrepresentation of what we wrote.

The SWC is referring to a recent ThinkProgress post titled “Quinnipiac Poll Poses Factually Inaccurate Questions Assuming Iran Has A Nuke Weapons Program.” In this post, we took issue with the pollsters’ reference to the existence of “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” in polling questions and noted that that assertion — a determination that neither the International Atomic Energy Agency nor the White House has made — may have impacted the poll’s outcome. In fact, the Washington Post’s ombudsman recently addressed this issue and agreed, warning reporters and policy makers of “[g]etting ahead of the facts on” Iran’s nuclear program.

It is incorrect to assert that we do not take the threat of Iran’s nuclear program seriously. As we noted last week, the Iranian issue is a strong point of concern for us. While we support the Obama administration’s position of “no options off the table,” we do not believe that a military strike would achieve those goals, and we will continue to push back against overheated rhetoric calling for war with Iran.

The Wiesenthal Center does some great work on tolerance that we support. But an effort to build partnerships can and must begin with an understanding that we have shared goals. We’re happy to join in a common pledge of raising the level of discourse. Rejecting the outrageous charges of anti-Semitism made against us lodged by Jennifer Rubin would be a good start.

NEWS FLASH

Putin To Be Confronted Over Russia’s Anti-Gay Proposals | Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, has promised to raise concerns over Russia’s anti-gay laws with Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin tomorrow at the EU-Russia summit. Ashton made the pledge after receiving a petition from AllOut.org with 246,245 signatures from around the world calling on lawmakers in St. Petersburg to abandon legislation that would outlaw so-called “gay propaganda.” The bill, which has passed first reading and is being advanced by Putin’s United Russia party, would fine groups or individuals who promote homosexuality, pedophilia, or transgenderism to minors and could serve as a model for a federal ban. Two other regions in Russia have adopted similar measures.

Alyssa

‘The Good Wife’ Open Thread: See You At The Grand Jury

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Dec 13, 2011 at 5:23 pm

Editor’s Note: Kate was traveling over the weekend, thus the one-day delay. Consider this an open thread for the first half of this season of The Good Wife. And enjoy!

By Kate Linnea Walsh

We begin “What Went Wrong” with a slightly distracted Alicia and her colleagues defending a police officer, Lauryn, accused of killing her husband. The judge instructs the jury to only consider judgments of “guilty of first-degree murder” or “not guilty,” but the prosecution – led by Cary – is afraid they didn’t make a strong enough case for that, so they offer a deal: Lauryn pleads guilty to second-degree murder (and gets four years in prison). When the defendant asks for Alicia’s advice on whether to take the deal, Alicia says: “I think that you need to make that decision, Lauryn. You can’t defer to anyone else. You know what you did. You know what you didn’t do. You also know sometimes that doesn’t matter.” Alicia’s words aren’t really helpful to Lauryn, but the fact that Alicia came up with those words – especially the last sentence – encapsulates the way her character has evolved over the past two and a half seasons.

Lauryn doesn’t take the deal, and the jury decides on a guilty verdict. Alicia and her colleagues immediately start talking to jurors to figure out what went wrong, because everyone – prosecution, defense, and the judge himself – is surprised by the verdict. Something clearly happened, because in just one round of voting, over half the jurors changed their votes to guilty. It may have had something to do with outside evidence about one of the witnesses that the foreman introduced, but Lockhart/Gardner can’t use that because they found out about it by going through the trash from the jury deliberation room without permission. Instead, they must play a game of cat and mouse with the State’s Attorney’s office as Cary and Dana follow Alicia and her colleagues around and try to stop them from getting useful information from the jurors – a game that culminates in Cary throwing Kalinda in jail for a while. Lockhart/Gardner finally convinces the judge to declare a mistrial based on a technicality: The judge himself accepted a juror’s Facebook friend request during the trial, which counts as unauthorized outside contact with a juror. Everyone knows that something weird went on with the jury, but everyone also knows that this Facebook friending had nothing to do with it. It’s a perfect illustration of the point the show likes to make about using the system to get a desired (or even correct) outcome, even if the means end up having nothing to do with the motive.

While the Lockhart/Gardner lawyers are looking for evidence, Dana uses the threat of the judicial corruption investigation to try to scare the judge into deciding against Lockhart/Gardner, but he’s not playing. The investigation itself, however, is still going on, and Wendy Scott-Carr dramatically confronts Will at the basketball court where so much of the supposed corruption was alleged to have taken place. She tells him that he’s not her real target – Peter is. (She also tantalizingly mentions that Peter used to be part of Will’s basketball game. I’d love to know more about the history between Peter, Alicia, and Will.) In an echo of the case, Wendy, too, is using the system she’s been given to accomplish her own objective. Now, does she mean that Peter is literally the target of the investigation, or that she plans to use the publicity of the investigation to gain support for another run against Peter when his term is up? It could be either, but I think she meant the former, because she said “Peter’s clean this term. But he wasn’t his first term, was he? And you know where his weaknesses lie.” Will: “Well, I know a lot of things.” I’m sure he does. When he refuses to talk without a lawyer, though, she says the next time they talk will be in front of a Grand Jury. Will calls her bluff: “Okay. So be it.” That should be interesting.
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Economy

ANALYSIS: Gingrich’s Tax Plan Would Cause Perpetual Trillion Dollar Deficits, Triple The Debt By 2024

By Guest Blogger on Dec 13, 2011 at 5:20 pm

Our guest blogger is Seth Hanlon, Director of Fiscal Reform at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

2012 GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich is outdoing his Republican rivals in promising enormous tax cuts for the very wealthiest Americans. According to an independent analysis by the Tax Policy Center, Gingrich’s plan would violate basic notions of fairness by requiring middle-class families to pay higher tax rates than millionaires.

But that’s not all that’s wrong with it. Gingrich’s plan is by far the most fiscally reckless plan to be released by a major 2012 contender. The magnitude of the tax cuts he is proposing to the wealthy and corporations would drive the debt to unprecedented and dangerous levels even if federal spending is cut drastically.

Gingrich has not proposed specific levels for federal spending, so to analyze the effect of his plan on the debt, we assumed that he adopts all of the draconian spending cuts in House Budget Committee Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget. Gingrich originally dismissed the Ryan budget as “right-wing social engineering,” but later said he would vote for it.

The spending levels in the Ryan budget are unrealistically and irresponsibly low. And yet Gingrich’s tax giveaways are so enormous that there wouldn’t be nearly enough revenue to fund even this extreme conservative vision of government.

The Gingrich plan would reduce federal revenues by $1.28 trillion below CBO’s baseline, according to the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, resulting in revenues of about 13.2 percent of GDP. That is an absurdly low level. Unsurprisingly, therefore Gingrich’s plan would pile up debt shockingly fast. Ultimately, Gingrich’s plan would:

– Result in perpetual trillion-dollar deficits: The budget deficit is expected to be 6.2 percent of GDP in the current fiscal year, but projected to decline in the coming years. With Gingrich’s tax plan in place, however, deficits would be even higher in perpetuity. In the best year under his plan, fiscal year 2015, the deficit would be $1.2 trillion, or 6.6 percent of GDP. Annual deficits would continue to mount, reaching $2 trillion in just over a decade. Again, this assumes that drastic spending cuts also take place.

– Explode the debt to historic levels: Under the Gingrich plan, the publicly-held debt would double by 2019, and triple by 2024. By the end of a second Gingrich term as president, the debt would reach $25 trillion, or more than 100 percent of GDP. The United States will have added about $12.5 trillion in debt during that period, with no end in sight.

– Commit the United States to trillion dollar interest payments on the debt: By enacting a tax plan with grossly inadequate revenues, the U.S. would be committing to pay ever-increasing sums of money to creditors like China. Under Gingrich’s plan, by 2021 the United States would be paying more than $1 trillion every year just in interest on the debt. Interest on the debt would represent nearly a quarter of all government spending.

Of course, if Gingrich can’t get spending down to the Ryan level, his deficits would be larger and his debt higher. In short, Gingrich’s tax plan simply cannot be taken seriously. As fiscal policy goes, it is every bit as ridiculous as his nutty proposals to replace school janitors with child laborers or colonize the moon.

NEWS FLASH

Study: More Gays Appear In Ads, Link Material Consumption To Self-Worth | The number of “gays depicted in advertising has soared,” according to a new study from the University of Miami School of Communication and published in the Journal of Advertising by assistant professor Wan-Hsiu “Sunny” Tsai. The research notes that “Ikea was one of the first companies to have an American commercial that depicted two gay men shopping for a dining table together” in 1994, and today “gays and lesbians appear frequently in products that tend to experiment with edgy and unconventional imagery, such as fashion, design and alcohol.” The study explored how gay-themed commercials informed and shaped personal identities and found that “Gay men accepted the perception of ‘higher disposable income of gay male households’ and transformed material consumption into a definition of self-worth.”

Justice

The Return Of Debtor’s Prisons: Thousands Of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Their Bills

By Marie Diamond on Dec 13, 2011 at 5:20 pm

Federal imprisonment for unpaid debt has been illegal in the U.S. since 1833. It’s a practice people associate more with the age of Dickens than modern-day America. But as more Americans struggle to pay their bills in the wake of the recession, collection agencies are using harsher methods to get their money, ushering in the return of debtor’s prisons.

NPR reports that it’s becoming increasingly common for people to serve jail time as a result of their debt. Because of “sloppy, incomplete or even false documentation,” many borrowers facing jail time don’t even know they’re being sued by creditors:

Take, for example, what happened to Robin Sanders in Illinois. She was driving home when an officer pulled her over for having a loud muffler. But instead of sending her off with a warning, the officer arrested Sanders, and she was taken right to jail.

“That’s when I found out [that] I had a warrant for failure to appear in Macoupin County. And I didn’t know what it was about.” Sanders owed $730 on a medical bill. She says she didn’t even know a collection agency had filed a lawsuit against her. [...]

A company will often sell off its debt to a collection agency, generally called a creditor. That creditor files a lawsuit against the debtor requiring a court appearance. A notice to appear in court is supposed to be given to the debtor. If they fail to show up, a warrant is issued for their arrest.

More than a third of all states now allow borrowers who don’t pay their bills to be jailed, even when debtor’s prisons have been explicitly banned by state constitutions. A report by the American Civil Liberties Union found that people were imprisoned even when the cost of doing so exceeded the amount of debt they owed.

Sean Matthews, a homeless New Orleans construction worker, was incarcerated for five months for $498 of legal debt, while his jail time cost the city six times that much. Some debtors are even forced to pay for their jail time themselves, adding to their financial troubles.

Stories of surprise arrests for unpaid debt have been reported in states including Indiana, Tennessee and Washington. In Kansas City, one man ended up in jail after missing only a furniture payment. The Federal Trade Commission received more than 140,000 complaints related to debt collection in 2010, and they’ve taken 10 debt collection agencies to court for their practices in the past three years.

Since the start of 2010, judges have signed off on more than 5,000 arrest warrants since in nine counties alone. Beverly Yang, a legal aid attorney, says many debtor’s — and judges — don’t know debtor’s rights, which results in the accused being intimidated into a pay agreement. She’s seen judges interrogate debtors about why they can’t pay more and whether they are trying hard enough to find a job.

Yang says some collection agencies are only too eager to use needlessly harsh tactics. “Whatever the creditors or the creditors’ attorneys can do to leverage some kind of payment, it will help their profits enormously because they have, literally, millions of these.” Debt collection is a lucrative business — the industry is set to grow 26 percent in the next three years.

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