The lessons of the Hebrew prophets can teach humanity how to respond to the catastrophe of global warming with strength and resilience. As we near Passover and Easter Sunday, it is a good time to reflect on their example.

The threat of global warming is almost unimaginable — sea level rise of metersswamping the world’s great cities, the desertification of lands populated by billions, the extinction of thousands of species, the death of the oceans, the destruction of ice caps, droughts, floods, fires, and storms of Biblical proportions. Unchecked, global warming could actually make regions of the planet literally uninhabitable to humans — so hot a person would drop dead in minutes.

The cause of this growing calamity — with terrible devastation already and much more to come — is humanity itself, with the unchecked burning of the fossil fuels that power civilization, despite the increasingly desperate warnings of scientific observers.

Yet people are told that we can fight global warming easily. Anointed leaders retreat into denialor simply avoid the subject. Many who grasp the terrible stakes righteously batter the “failure” of imperfect, “ineffective” governmental efforts to tackle climate pollution.

In Pillar of Fire, the second of his three-part biography of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch describes how the civil rights movement in 1963 faced a similar crisis of faith in trying to figure out how to fight entrenched, institutionalized, racism and segregation in what seemed at the time to be impossible odds and repeated failure.

At the January 1963 Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, one thousand delegates of assembled clergy from the various branches of the Judeo-Christian faith grappled with that question, which sent them careening from Pollyannish optimism to biting despair. As Branch relates, King found a fellow voice in Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic scholar who escaped the Nazis and then fought the wave of atheistic nihilism that followed the Holocaust. King and Heschel found guidance in the “ideal of the Hebrew prophets” who faced destruction not merely with virtue but also the “remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression”:

What brought King and Heschel together was a prescription for the dilemma that plagued the Chicago conference. Most of the delegates searched for ways to overcome a stubborn avoidance of race in religious discourse. To break such a barrier, nearly all the theologians felt the need for a calming approach that labeled racial prejudice a feeble anachronism, a holdover of premodern irrationality, but this very impulse to soothe and minimize opened them to charges of false engagement from realists such as Stringfellow and Campbell. Yet, the realists’ tinge of fatalism reminded Heschel of a ghostly legacy from the Jewish past — the defiant urge to abandon hope of any divine presence in the face of inexplicable calamity . . .

As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps — nihilism or blandness — Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prohpets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off in to saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression…”

Man-made global warming is another “inexplicable calamity.” Blandness, sarcasm, and nihilism are tempting responses. But there is another path — that recognizes that suffering is inevitably found on the way to justice, that knowing sacrifice can lead to redemption. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” King said in at the the funeral for the four girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing in 1963. “And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”

King continued with words that speak directly to the challenge we now face:

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

We have poisoned the very seasons, and people from New Orleans to Karachi have paid for that profligacy. The path to hope and redemption will not be easy or painless, but it can be found.

Here is his farewell TP Green blog post from yesterday. Please join me in wishing him the best of luck.

Today is my last day at ThinkProgress, after four exciting years of reporting on the front lines of climate and energy politics. The experience has taken me from Biloxi to Copenhagen, from New Hampshire to Cancun. I’ve gotten to publish guest bloggers from John Kerry to Van Jones, from Bill McKibben to Paulina Borsook. And I’ve been privileged to share my own perspective on this special moment in history.

Here are some of the highlights of that work:

Exposing The Koch Brothers. One of my proudest achievements was in starting the national conversation on the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers on our politics. I was the first ThinkProgress writer to start investigating the Kochs in 2008, exposing McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer and Americans For Prosperity president Tim Phillips as Koch operatives. I covered the extremist AFP summit and AFP’s goofy climate-denial ads. When Lee Fang joined ThinkProgress in 2009, he took the lead in investigating how the Kochs manipulated Tea Party activists and DC politics as the puppetmasters of American conservatism, kindling their fame. In 2010, I even hosted a conversation about the Kochs with AFP staffer Phil Kerpen at the Center for American Progress.

Supporting Climate Hawks. The best moments of the climate fight have been interviewing climate hawks such as Ira Magaziner, Tim DeChristopher, John Fullerton, Nicholas Stern, NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Kevin Trenberth, Gavin Newsom, Bangladesh Environment Minister Hasan Mahmud, Rep. Jay Inslee, Maggie Fox, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Dr. Markus Reichstein, C40 Climate Leadership Group manager Simon Reddy, African environmental activist Mawusé Hountondji, and Tulane University student Stephanie Stefanski:

How Carbon Cash Polluted Climate Legislation. Unfortunately, the effort to achieve Barack Obama’s promised goal of strong climate change legislation was hobbled by the U.S. Senate from the start of his presidency, when enough Democrats voted with Republicans to preserve the power of the filibuster over any kind of clean-energy legislation whatsoever. Along with detailed analysis of the provisions of several iterations of climate legislation, I investigated how the carbon pollution industry manipulated Congress through campaign contributions, powerful lobbying, paid-for witnesses, and dirty tricks.

Sen. Scott Brown Begs David Koch For Money. At the public dedication of MIT’s David H. Koch Integrative Cancer Institute in 2011, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) effusively thanked conservative billionaire David Koch for supporting his election in 2010 and made a plea for help in his re-election campaign next year. David Koch directly gave the National Republican Senatorial Committee $30,400 in November 2009, and the Koch Industries PAC threw in $15,000 to NRSC plus $5,000 more directly to Brown right before Brown’s special election. In a conversation I recorded on camera, Brown thanked Koch and his wife Julia for their support, saying “I can certainly use it again.”

The Billionaires Behind Drill-Baby-Drill. The same old men that propelled George W. Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 were behind Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF), which capitalized on the energy crisis caused by the Bush presidency to promote a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign. I uncovered the seven right-wing billionaires, headed by casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson, bankrolling this “non-partisan” organization:

The Climate Zombie Caucus. With painstaking effort, I uncovered the fact that every Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2010 was a climate denier — and then found that global warming conspiracy theorists were running for the House and governorships in practically every state of the Union.

Confronting The Washington Post For Publishing George Will’s Lies About Climate Science. In 2009, Washington Post columnist George Will published an error- and lie-filled column on climate science. I researched his long history of repeating long-debunked canards, and exposed Fred Hiatt‘s and Alan Shearer‘s fact-challenged defense of Will’s pollution. After I helped expose Will’s lies and his defense by top Washington Post editors, their collusive climate denial was criticized by Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, reporters Steve Mufson, Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, cartoonist Tom Toles, ombudsman Andrew Alexander, and blogger Andrew Freedman.

Investigating The Corrupt George W. Bush Administration. I helped expose the corrupt firing of EPA regional administrator Mary Gade, the pollutocrats of the Office of Management and Budget, the negligent career of creationist EPA administrator Stephen Johnson and his insouciant staff, the deliberate ignorance of climate negotiator Harlan Watson, as well as the astounding contempt for law and science from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself.

Poisoned Weather. The threat of global warming pollution is not merely a future challenge, but the new reality. For four years, I have documented the increasing onslaught of climate disasters, and explained how manmade pollution means that we now bear responsibility. Some of my first work on this topic garnered the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who called me a “wacko.”

And yes, it’s been four years of explaining how the right wing is lying about why gasoline prices rise and fall. Even though the climate is being transformed, some things never change.

According to leaked documents, Nucor Corporation (NUE), one of the largest steel producers in the United States, is the top named funder of the Heartland Institute’s climate denial efforts, which consist of smearing scientists, distorting climate science, and teaching children that “whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy.”

Nucor gave over half a million dollars to the Heartland Institute specifically for the Environment and Climate News (ECN) project in 2010 and 2011, internal documents reveal. Edited by Heartland fellow James M. Taylor, ECN promotes conspiracy theories about climate scientists, distorts climate science, and attacks regulation of air and water pollution.

Nucor’s support for climate denial is in conflict with the company’s branding campaign as an environmentally friendly corporation, deeply concerned about “issues concerning climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.” Nucor has called itself a “Green Company” and even registered the slogan “It’s Our Nature” in order to promote its “promise to be environmentally conscious” and its practice of primarily using recycled scrap metal.

Why the contradiction? It turns out Nucor’s green credentials may be more talk than action. A closer look at Nucor’s website reveals unscientific claims that the climate is experiencing a “natural recovery” from a relatively cold period in the 19th century and that “scientists still debate whether man is impacting the climate.” The company’s source for these claims? The Heartland Institute.

Additionally, Nucor has a spotty environmental record. In December 2000, Nucor paid nearly $100 million to settle an EPA lawsuit that alleged Nucor polluted groundwater and failed to meet air pollution limits. Based on Nucor’s 2006 air pollution emissions, the University of Massachusetts’ Political Economy Research Institute ranked the company the 24th most toxic large corporation in the United States.

In official filings, Nucor sees regulation of carbon pollution, not the impacts of climate change as a material financial risk. Its 2010 annual report cautioned that “onerous” legislation or regulation of greenhouse pollution could cause legal and business costs from the “alleged impact of our operations on climate change.” A Nucor iron plant in Louisiana was the first project to have a permit for greenhouse gas pollution, granted in the beginning of 2011. Months before, Heartland argued the permit program “will stifle innovation and choke off job growth.”

A Nucor spokeswoman told ThinkProgress Green that the company has not released a statement on its support of the Heartland Institute and had no comment on this story.

NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

Here are some of the highlights of that work:

Exposing The Koch Brothers. One of my proudest achievements was in starting the national conversation on the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers on our politics. I was the first ThinkProgress writer to start investigating the Kochs in 2008, exposing McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer and Americans For Prosperity president Tim Phillips as Koch operatives. I covered the extremist AFP summit and AFP’s goofy climate-denial ads. When Lee Fang joined ThinkProgress in 2009, he took the lead in investigating how the Kochs manipulated Tea Party activists and DC politics as the puppetmasters of American conservatism, kindling their fame. In 2010, I even hosted a conversation about the Kochs with AFP staffer Phil Kerpen at the Center for American Progress.

Supporting Climate Hawks. The best moments of the climate fight have been interviewing climate hawks such as Ira Magaziner, Tim DeChristopher, John Fullerton, Nicholas Stern, NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Kevin Trenberth, Gavin Newsom, Bangladesh Environment Minister Hasan Mahmud, Rep. Jay Inslee, Maggie Fox, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Dr. Markus Reichstein, C40 Climate Leadership Group manager Simon Reddy, African environmental activist Mawusé Hountondji, and Tulane University student Stephanie Stefanski:

How Carbon Cash Polluted Climate Legislation. Unfortunately, the effort to achieve Barack Obama’s promised goal of strong climate change legislation was hobbled by the U.S. Senate from the start of his presidency, when enough Democrats voted with Republicans to preserve the power of the filibuster over any kind of clean-energy legislation whatsoever. Along with detailed analysis of the provisions of several iterations of climate legislation, I investigated how the carbon pollution industry manipulated Congress through campaign contributions, powerful lobbying, paid-for witnesses, and dirty tricks.

Sen. Scott Brown Begs David Koch For Money. At the public dedication of MIT’s David H. Koch Integrative Cancer Institute in 2011, Sen. Scott Brown (R-MA) effusively thanked conservative billionaire David Koch for supporting his election in 2010 and made a plea for help in his re-election campaign next year. David Koch directly gave the National Republican Senatorial Committee $30,400 in November 2009, and the Koch Industries PAC threw in $15,000 to NRSC plus $5,000 more directly to Brown right before Brown’s special election. In a conversation I recorded on camera, Brown thanked Koch and his wife Julia for their support, saying “I can certainly use it again.”

The Billionaires Behind Drill-Baby-Drill. The same old men that propelled George W. Bush into office in 2000 and 2004 were behind Newt Gingrich’s multimillion-dollar front group, American Solutions for Winning the Future (ASWF), which capitalized on the energy crisis caused by the Bush presidency to promote a “Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less” campaign. I uncovered the seven right-wing billionaires, headed by casino kingpin Sheldon Adelson, bankrolling this “non-partisan” organization:

The Climate Zombie Caucus. With painstaking effort, I uncovered the fact that every Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2010 was a climate denier — and then found that global warming conspiracy theorists were running for the House and governorships in practically every state of the Union.

Confronting The Washington Post For Publishing George Will’s Lies About Climate Science. In 2009, Washington Post columnist George Will published an error- and lie-filled column on climate science. I researched his long history of repeating long-debunked canards, and exposed Fred Hiatt‘s and Alan Shearer‘s fact-challenged defense of Will’s pollution. After I helped expose Will’s lies and his defense by top Washington Post editors, their collusive climate denial was criticized by Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, reporters Steve Mufson, Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, cartoonist Tom Toles, ombudsman Andrew Alexander, and blogger Andrew Freedman.

Investigating The Corrupt George W. Bush Administration. I helped expose the corrupt firing of EPA regional administrator Mary Gade, the pollutocrats of the Office of Management and Budget, the negligent career of creationist EPA administrator Stephen Johnson and his insouciant staff, the deliberate ignorance of climate negotiator Harlan Watson, as well as the astounding contempt for law and science from Dick Cheney and George W. Bush himself.

Poisoned Weather. The threat of global warming pollution is not merely a future challenge, but the new reality. For four years, I have documented the increasing onslaught of climate disasters, and explained how manmade pollution means that we now bear responsibility. Some of my first work on this topic garnered the attention of Rush Limbaugh, who called me a “wacko.”

And yes, it’s been four years of explaining how the right wing is lying about why gasoline prices rise and fall. Even though the climate is being transformed, some things never change.

in an interview with Good’s Sarah Laskow, Matzzie describes how he began working on Ethical Electric when his father, who had spent his life downwind of a coal-fired power plant, died of cancer in 2010:

I’d been a supporter of addressing climate change and clean energy as a progressive, but it became much more personal. I didn’t want to spend any more of my money on dirty energy. I wanted to only support 100 percent clean energy.

Laskow explains that Ethical Electric will operate in deregulated electricity markets as a competitive retail electric provider in Pennsylvania in New Jersey, starting this year:

In deregulated electricity markets, delivering power—maintaining the power lines and the infrastructure that make up the grid—and selling power are two different businesses. If all goes as planned, Ethical Electric will sell power sourced from renewable energy projects to customers, starting this fall in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

As the Washington Director for MoveOn.org, Matzzie mobilized efforts against the Iraq war. He was also Director of Online Organizing for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in 2004 and the Online Mobilization Director at the AFL-CIO from 2000 to 2004.

Gov. Rick Perry on Thursday praised North Texas first responders for preventing loss of life during Tuesday’s tornado outbreak and indicated he was prepared to request federal disaster relief. [Dallas Star-Telegram]

Six months after the expiration of a renewable-energy federal loan guarantee program that backed $16 billion in loans to solar, wind and geothermal energy projects, the Energy Department has decided to offer a smaller set of similar guarantees by tapping another pot of money appropriated by Congress last year. [New York Times]

BP Wind Energy and Sempra U.S. Gas & Power officially launched construction of a $800 million, 419 MW wind farm southwest of Wichita, with Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback in attendance. [Kansas City Star]

A Mississippi man pleaded guilty on Thursday to charges he instructed a crew he was supervising on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico to falsify information regarding the testing of a blowout preventer. [NOLA.com]

California is one of only nine states that have developed comprehensive strategies and implemented policies to deal with water shortages, droughts, a shrinking snowpack and other water-related problems that are expected to occur as global temperatures increase this century as predicted by scientists, a Natural Resources Defense Council report said. [San Francisco Chronicle]

Two members of the U.S. House of Representatives want federal regulators to take a close look at a recent Colorado study of the practice known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” [Glenwood Springs Post Independent]

Eleven environmental organizations are suing the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to force it to better regulate toxic coal ash and citing recent groundwater contamination at 29 coal ash dump sites in 16 states, including two in Western Pennsylvania. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]

Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) toured the Xtreme Green Products Inc. electric car plant to promote green energy during the Senate’s Easter break. [Las Vegas Review Journal]

In a Daytona Beach town hall meeting, Sen. Ben Nelson (D-FL) said that speculators in oil futures accounted for 63 cents in the price of every gallon. [Daytona News Journal]

Minority business owners want the Maryland legislature to use its final days pass a measure to develop offshore wind energy. [Washington Post]

CUPP: Here’s what I find infuriating. We have a long and glorious tradition in this country of questioning science. We’ve been questioning science in fact for centuries, asking is science right on this? The idea that science is some unimpeachable institution that cannot be questioned flies in fact in the face of the bedrock of the scientific method, which is skepticism. Whether we are trying to disprove science as junk science or exposing certain science as immoral. I’m thinking of eugenics here, population control. The idea that when a Republican does it is somehow scary or backwards, is exactly why the public is skeptical of science as having been politicized because of suggestions like this that Republicans writ large are afraid of science.

WAGNER: I mean honestly. We have seen Newt Gingrich on the couch with Nancy Pelosi talking about climate change.

CUPP: There have been, to quote Rick Santorum, phony studies on climate change. East Anglia University I should mention!

WAGNER: And that study –

CUPP: Every time science has been corrupted by politics, everyone in the scientific community should be worried!

Watch it:

As Wagner was evidently trying to point out, the hacked emails from East Anglia University were shown by repeated independent investigation to show nothing other than private conversations among ethical scientists doing valid scientific work, despite a well-funded smear campaign to distort the contents of the emails.

“It’s good to be open-minded,” Mooney responded, “but at some point you have to respect the process and the scientific consensus that emerges. That’s what doesn’t happen from the right.”

PepsiCo has now also admitted to being a past funder of the climate-denial think tank Heartland Institute. In a statement to ThinkProgress Green, the $57-billion food and beverages giant indicated that its funding was for Heartland’s efforts against soda and junk food taxes, not for its promotion that climate change is a “myth.” A PepsiCo spokeswoman explained that the company “is currently not a member of the Heartland Institute”:

PepsiCo was a member of the Heartland Institute specifically related to taxes on the consumption of food and beverage products. PepsiCo is currently not a member of the Heartland Institute nor did we engage with them on climate issues while a member.

The Heartland Institute has argued that “sin taxes” on soda, liquor, or cigarettes “lead to smuggling across state lines” and “gang activity.” An article attacking state-level soda taxes questioned “how bad the obesity problem is.” Instead of improving public health with taxes on products that degrade children’s health, Heartland argues, we should be “privatizing non-core functions of government.” The institute even railed against governmental “obesity police” for proposing voluntary children’s advertising guidelines for the junk-food industry.

An internal document leaked from the anti-science group showed that PepsiCo gave at least $5000 in tax-deductible contributions in 2010 for Heartland’s Budget and Tax News Initiative. It is unknown whether PepsiCo gave earlier contributions. PepsiCo’s public page listing its charitable contributions in 2010 does not list the Heartland Institute as a recipient. PepsiCo has spent nearly $20 million on Washington DC lobbying since 2009.

PepsiCo’s support for Heartland’s attacks on public-health-driven policy is not an isolated incident. In an article at the City University of New York Law Review, public health lawyer Michele Simon argues that PepsiCo is “coopting the scientific conversation around public health and diet.” As a member of the industry front groups Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative and the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, PepsiCo has opposed even voluntary regulation of the junk food that drives PepsiCo’s profits and America’s obesity epidemic.

Simon argues that PepsiCo’s hiring of internationally renowned public health experts like Derek Yach and Dr. George Mensah is an attempt to subvert public-health science rather than to make their business healthier.

PepsiCo’s past willingness to support the Heartland Institute — which even argues against the health threat of cigarette smoking — does raise questions about the earnestness of PepsiCo’s pledge to improve the public-health impact of their products.

However, PepsiCo has one of the strongest public stances on the threat of man-made global warming in corporate America:

It is clear that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have an adverse impact on global temperatures, weather patterns and the frequency and severity of extreme weather and natural disasters. Because these changes could have an impact on the availability or pricing of certain commodities that are necessary for our products, we are continuously working to address climate change, from scaling up the company’s use of renewable fuel sources to reducing energy consumption.

In 2009, PepsiCo joined the Ceres company network, pledging its “executive-level commitment to improve environmental and social performance” and “public reporting on sustainability strategy, commitments and performance.” As a member of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, PepsiCo lobbied in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, comprehensive climate legislation that would have dramatically advanced the future of global public health.

The PepsiCo spokesperson contacted by ThinkProgress Green did not made any public commitments about future funding for the climate-denial think tank.

NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

King said the hearing included witnesses who called to testify before the House Agriculture Committee, including the president of the Humane Society as well as other animal rights groups. He recalled how during the hearing, he asked the individuals, “under oath, are you a vegetarian?” King smiled as he told the town hall constituents that they “confessed they were vegetarians, all of them.”

KING: I’m here to tell you I’m a committed carnivore. I like meat. I sit on the Ag Committee and we had a hearing before the Ag Committee when we invited in the president of the Humane Society of the United States, HSUS, President Wayne Pacelle. And we had one or two other witnesses from the anti-meat crowd or anti-animal husbandry crowd. PETA was there and one other animal activist group. So we just asked them, under oath, “are you a vegetarian?” And they confessed they were vegetarians, all of them. Well there they are with an agenda for our diets.

Watch it:

King offered his own “confession” at the end of the hearing. “I too am a vegetarian,” said the Iowa Republican. “I eat concentrated, recycled, enhanced vegetables in the form of meat.”

ThinkProgress went back to review the hearing transcripts to determine whether King’s story is accurate. It is not. The congressional hearing on animal welfare that King appears to be referencing occurred on May 8, 2007. There were no witnesses from PETA. King did not ask anyone “are you a vegetarian?” In fact, it was another member — Steve Kagen (D-WI) — who asked the Humane Society witness to say he was a vegetarian.

The only thing about King’s story that does appear to be true is that he did in fact say “I eat recycled, concentrated, enhanced vegetables in the form of meat.”

AT&T’s support for the science-denying Heartland Institute contradicts the image the company projects as a leader on environmental sustainability and climate change:

AT&T: Climate change is a fact, and the scientific evidence so far seems to implicate greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, as the cause of climate change. [AT&T whitepaper]

Heartland: On the most important issue, the IPCC‘s claim that ―most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid- twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations [emphasis in the original], we once again reach the opposite conclusion, that natural causes are very likely to be dominant. [NIPPC summary]

AT&T’s website boasts of several environmental awards it has received, including being listed as the top company in its category for its answers to the Carbon Disclosure Project’s “survey on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as well as risks and opportunities associated with climate change.” The company makes public its annual greenhouse gas emissions and claim they use the data to help their “improvement efforts.”

The telecom giant also funds the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing organization that provides Republican state legislators with model legislation, including bills to block climate science in the classroom and deny the threat of carbon pollution.

In a statement to ThinkProgress Green, Beth Gautier Alm, director of public relations at AT&T, defended its past contributions to the Heartland Institute:

We are not currently contributing to the Heartland Institute. Our past contributions were earmarked for their technology and telecom efforts. Heartland keeps its specific project areas completely separate, in terms of staff, publications, events and budgets, so our contributions were strictly limited to supporting their work in the technology and telecom area.

AT&T’s $100,000 contribution was earmarked for Heartland’s “information technology & telecom news” project (ITTN). On those issues too Heartland opposes government regulations of business. The think tank’s website says it believes “rules for the Internet and electronic commerce should result from private collective action, not government regulation.”

The company spokesperson did not address whether it would give future contributions now that the Heartland Institute has acknowledged its plan to develop a classroom curriculum denying climate science. She also did not address whether AT&T has any disagreement with Heartland’s climate denial.

In contrast, General Motors recently announced it would no longer fund the Heartland Institute, because “we’ll continue to run our business as if climate change is real and believe we have a role to play in developing new cars, trucks and technologies that can make a difference.”

NOTE: One in a series of posts about the Heartland Institute’s inner workings, from internal documents acquired by ThinkProgress Green. ThinkProgress is among several publications to have published documents attributed to the Heartland Institute and sent to us from an anonymous and then unknown source. The source later revealed himself. Heartland Institute has issued several press releases claiming that one document (“2012 Climate Strategy”) is fake and asserting other claims regarding the other documents. ThinkProgress has taken down the “2012 Climate Strategy” document as it determines the document’s authenticity.

Why wouldn’t we embrace it as a darn good outcome? This was not the wicked wind of the east. This was the good wind of the south.

The record warmth has already led to pervasive drought in Colorado, an early wildfire season across much of the country, a record-breaking onslaught of pollen. The heat has fueled an early and destructive tornado season and crippled ski areas and maple-syrup producers.

Hoerling’s sentiment was shared by President Barack Obama, who said “we really have enjoyed the nice weather” even though it makes him “a little nervous.”

Hoerling says that global warming was “certainly a minor factor” in causing the March madness.

Hoerling — who clearly accepts that man-made global warming is making weather hotter and more extreme — has published several non-peer-reviewed reports as the lead of NOAA’s Climate Scene Investigators that claim global warming did not influence recent catastrophic extremes, such as the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon, the 2010 Russian heat wave, and the 2011 tornado outbreak. Hoerling’s team did conclude, however, that “human-caused global warming was a factor in the Midwest flooding disaster” of 2008. Hoerling’s method of ascribing attribution to global warming relies primarily on statistical analysis of weather records. His method can miss phenomena that occur because of non-linear changes in the climate system, such as how the decline in Arctic sea ice caused by global warming is influencing large-scale circulation patterns.

Peer-reviewed studies that don’t rely on a single test for attribution have found a clear link between global warming and the 2009-2010 Snowmageddon and the 2010 Russia heat wave.

In a peer-reviewed work, Hoerling did find that the increasing frequency of Mediterranean droughts is caused by global warming.

Mrbps via Flickr

One thing I’m seeing—and I see it in our own paper as well as many other news outlets—is that people are covering the crazy weather we’re having and, more often than not, dodging the subject of whether there’s any relationship to climate change. TV weathermen are dodging that subject. Print reporters are dodging the subject. And it’s not so easy to cover because science does not have particularly good answers for us. The concept that I wrote about last week—that we’re in the middle of a sort of weather “weirding”—isn’t really a scientific concept for which you can build a weird index and figure out where we are on that index, but there are some things that scientists can say about weather extremes. Some of the extremes are very consistent with what is expected and what has long been predicted, and we’re seeing very clear trends in certain extremes like heat waves and heavy precipitation events. Reporters are not going to be able to be definitive, in real time, about whether this particular event was or wasn’t connected to climate change, but it’s a bit of a scandal that there’s not enough connecting the dots for people.

As climate scientist Kevin Trenberth said in 2011, “It is irresponsible not to mention climate change in stories that presume to say something about why all these storms and tornadoes are happening.”

The threat of global warming is almost unimaginable — sea level rise of meters swamping the world’s great cities, the desertification of lands populated by billions, the extinction of thousands of species, the death of the oceans, the destruction of ice caps, droughts, floods, fires, and storms of Biblical proportions. Unchecked, global warming could actually make regions of the planet literally uninhabitable to humans — so hot a person would drop dead in minutes.

The cause of this growing calamity — with terrible devastation already and much more to come — is humanity itself, with the unchecked burning of the fossil fuels that power civilization, despite the increasingly desperate warnings of scientific observers.

Yet people are told that we can fight global warming easily. Anointed leaders retreat into denial or simply avoid the subject. Many who grasp the terrible stakes righteously batter the “failure” of imperfect, “ineffective” governmental efforts to tackle climate pollution.

In Pillar of Fire, the second of his three-part biography of Martin Luther King, Taylor Branch describes how the civil rights movement in 1963 faced a similar crisis of faith in trying to figure out how to fight entrenched, institutionalized, racism and segregation in what seemed at the time to be impossible odds and repeated failure.

At the January 1963 Chicago Conference on Religion and Race, one thousand delegates of assembled clergy from the various branches of the Judeo-Christian faith grappled with that question, which sent them careening from Pollyannish optimism to biting despair. As Branch relates, King found a fellow voice in Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the Hasidic scholar who escaped the Nazis and then fought the wave of atheistic nihilism that followed the Holocaust. King and Heschel found guidance in the “ideal of the Hebrew prophets” who faced destruction not merely with virtue but also the “remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression”:

What brought King and Heschel together was a prescription for the dilemma that plagued the Chicago conference. Most of the delegates searched for ways to overcome a stubborn avoidance of race in religious discourse. To break such a barrier, nearly all the theologians felt the need for a calming approach that labeled racial prejudice a feeble anachronism, a holdover of premodern irrationality, but this very impulse to soothe and minimize opened them to charges of false engagement from realists such as Stringfellow and Campbell. Yet, the realists’ tinge of fatalism reminded Heschel of a ghostly legacy from the Jewish past — the defiant urge to abandon hope of any divine presence in the face of inexplicable calamity . . .

As proof that human beings could engage the most deadening crises without falling into either of the classic polar traps — nihilism or blandness — Heschel held up the ideal of the Hebrew prohpets. While facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people, the prophets remained suffused with redemptive purpose. Far from soaring off in to saccharine self-persuasion, however, they made biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments. “Moralists of all ages have been eloquent in singing the praises of virtue,” wrote Heschel. “The distinction of the prophets was in their remorseless unveiling of injustice and oppression…”

Man-made global warming is another “inexplicable calamity.” Blandness, sarcasm, and nihilism are tempting responses. But there is another path — that recognizes that suffering is inevitably found on the way to justice, that knowing sacrifice can lead to redemption. “God still has a way of wringing good out of evil,” King said in at the the funeral for the four girls killed in a Birmingham church bombing in 1963. “And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive.”

King continued with words that speak directly to the challenge we now face:

Now I say to you in conclusion, life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. Like the ever-flowing waters of the river, life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-changing cycle of the seasons, life has the soothing warmth of its summers and the piercing chill of its winters. And if one will hold on, he will discover that God walks with him, and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope, and transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.

We have poisoned the very seasons, and people from New Orleans to Karachi have paid for that profligacy. The path to hope and redemption will not be easy or painless, but it can be found.

Under President Obama, domestic oil production’s at an eight-year high. So why is Big Oil attacking him? Because he’s fighting to end their tax breaks. He’s raising mileage standards, and doubling renewable energy. In all these fights, Mitt Romney stood with Big Oil, for their tax breaks, attacking higher mileage standards and renewables. So when you see this ad, remember who paid for it and what they want.

Because of Citizens United, the spending by Koch-funded front groups on this election is practically unlimited, especially as the oil industry pulls in $200 million more every time the price of gas goes up a penny.

John Fullerton

Fullerton isn’t a traditional environmentalist. Rather, he learned about the scope of the climate crisis after retiring from JP Morgan in 2001, and reflecting on the state of the global economy in the wake of the 9/11 attacks:

I don’t have a particularly green background. I discovered it as a systemic crisis. I’m completely prepared to bet my life that the solution lies in looking at nature.

As related in the first post from his interview with ThinkProgress Green, Fullerton discovered that the global carbon-based economy is sitting on a $20 trillion bubble of unburnable fossil-fuel reserves, a potential economic crisis that dwarfs the collapse of the housing market.

Below, Fullerton talks about a hopeful path forward, where the financial industry is key to an economy based on “growing well-being instead of material throughput”:

We are in the process of an evolutionary if not revolutionary change in how we structure the economy. We’re going to need to redefine well-being. There have been people working on alternatives to GDP for twenty years now. “uneconomic growth.” We need to shift into growing well-being instead of material throughput. When people are adolescents, they’re physically growing. When they mature, they read books, go to yoga, increasing their growth in ways that don’t mean physical consumption. We’re on the proverbial rat race, and it’s not buying anyone well-being and happiness. There’s a hopeful scenario in front of us.

This maturation of capitalism, from consumption-based growth to the growth of happiness, will require a global shift of capital investment. This means, Fullerton argues, that finance is the “critical lever” to building resiliency:

Our premise is that finance is the critical lever to shift the course of the economy. The real investment decisions we make today will be the bridge to the economy of tomorrow. Interfering at the level of real investment flows is a real inflection point. There’s a zillion different examples of how we can shift the economy to be more resilient and less input intensive. For example, we can can choose to invest in resilient agriculture systems rather than trade-driven production.

A key area of immediate interest for the Capital Institute is the largely unregulated commodity markets, where global capitalism — multinational corporations, esoteric financial instruments, and hedge funds — increasingly control the use of the raw materials of civilization, from food to energy:

One of our focus areas for this year is the physical nature of commodities that are becoming scarce. You add to it this speculative capital looking to get ahead of these trends and you have the opportunity for some real problems. That’s a very serious issue and it’s the beginning of how markets break down and don’t solve the problem all the economists think they have, when you have non-substitutable goods. The market can’t solve that problem.

How does the tremendous shift away from a fundamental market failure begin? It boils down to understanding that all investment has a long-term impact, Fullerton says:

There’s a whole space called impact investing. The harder part is figuring out how to choke off the investment in the bad stuff, like expanding the tar sands dirty oil production. Investor-speak is to be long in what’s going to go up. People should want to increase resiliency in what’s going to be a turbulent time.

Fullerton and his Capital Institute is far from alone in the challenge of redirecting markets to serve the long-term goals of society again. Think tanks and academic groups such as Demos, the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the New Economics Foundation, and others are leading the vanguard of alternative economics. In June, the New Economics Institute will be hosting Fullerton and many other leading sustainable capitalists at the Strategies for a New Economy conference at Bard College to brainstorm a hopeful future grounded in the real world.

“The Island President” opens this weekend in New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, and next week in Washington DC and San Diego.