Mary Bono Mack Should Be Burned in Effigy and Voted Out of Office

That’s the screaming headline at screaming right-wing blog Red State.  The article asserts, “she should now be targeted”:

… we beat her and her husband at the polls.

Yes, you heard me. We can get at Mary Bono Mack in two ways “” her district and that of her husband. He should feel the heat just as much as her.

“Feel the heat” for voting to support efforts to stop global warming — yes, irony can be so ironic. Greenwire via the NYT explains the source of the latest ideological purity test of the ever shrinking GOP, “Conservative Ire Rains on 8 Republicans Who Voted for House Climate Bill.”  For CP readers, these folks are heroes:

The eight Republicans are Mark Kirk of Illinois; Mike Castle of Delaware; Mary Bono Mack of California; Dave Reichert of Washington; John McHugh of New York; and Frank LoBiondo, Leonard Lance and Chris Smith of New Jersey.

But not to the defacto leader of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh:

“This is an outrage. This is something that everybody who voted for this thing needs to be sent packing….”

I always thought “small is beautiful,” was a motto of the environmental movement but apparently it’s the new motto of the Republican Party, along with Gingrich’s “I am not a citizen of the world!” and, of course, “Drill baby, drill.”

And then we have top conservative blogger Michele Maglalang aka Michele Malkin, once called by a newspaper “an Asian Ann Coulter,” to which she responded “I’m not Asian, I’m American, for goodness’ sake. I would take the comparison to Ann Coulter as somewhat of a compliment.”  She put this poster on her website:

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The NRCC, the Republican Party campaign committee tasked with electing more House Republicans, announced today that it will be running television and radio ads against Democratic members of Congress who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation passed last week. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.”

Media Matters Action has noted that both of these claims are patently false. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day.

Not only does the NRCC stand in defiance of reality, it is going against the tide of public opinion. A new Pew poll found that a super majority of 78% of Americans want the U.S. to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide that cause global warming and 72% of Americans support the core principles underlying clean energy legislation. The same poll found that even 66% of Republicans want the U.S. to curb carbon emissions.

One of the targets of the NRCC ad campaign is freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). Perriello’s district already contains at least ten businesses in either the clean energy or energy efficiency industry. Not only would clean energy economy legislation realign market incentives to help these businesses expand, it will new spur investments and bring more jobs to the area. Virginia is projected to gain at least 45,000 jobs and a net increase of $3.9 billion in clean energy investments.

While NRCC strategists assume they can dupe Perriello’s constituents with fear mongering ads laced with lies, the right-wing base is harnessing the same NRCC misinformation to demonize Republicans who also voted for the bill. A recent post on the popular right-wing blog Red State calls upon readers to burn Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), one of the 8 House Republicans to support clean energy legislation, in effigy. Organizers of the anti-Obama tea party protests are also coordinating a harassment strategy — in similar fashion to their treatment of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) — against the 8 House Republicans.

As the NRCC suppresses the truth in a vain attempt to elect more Republicans, they could be fueling more defections from the party.

The signs of global warming are everywhere.  Coming back from my Vail conference to Denver, the driver pointed out to me the shocking devastation the state is now experiencing from the pine beetle, devastation anyone who lives in the West can see.

The so-called paper of record ran its second major story in less than a year on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Beetles Add New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” by Kirk Johnson.  And like the early piece, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West,” by Jim Robbins, it’s a great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds.

So we have the national “liberal” media, like the NYT and NBC, blowing this story, while the local, conservative media get it right, see “Conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests” and “Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.”

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as an April 2008 article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is underinformed (see “NYT‘s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat“).

This new piece made the crucial connection between the beetles and the record-breaking forest fires that the West have been experiencing — but missed the equally crucial connection to global warming.  On the one hand, that also isn’t surprising since three years ago, the NY Times blew the Wildfire Story.  On the other hand, had reporter Kirk Johnson bothered to spend even one minute on Google he would have uncovered the tragic feedback that would have made his story complete — global warming leads to more bark beetles, which kills more trees, which leads to more fires, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, which leads to more global warming!

The NYT did get the grim, superficial facts of the story right:

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In the first half of his Sunday interview after the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Obama said he was confident the Senate will pass the climate and clean energy bill.  He also asserted “My strong belief is that innovation and technology are going to accelerate our process beyond these targets, and that we’re going to look back and say we can do even more.”

Then Obama invited Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner to chime in (transcript here).  Here is the rest of the interview:

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High cost and delays are standard operating procedure for new nukes around the globe (see “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour” and “What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases”¦“).  The same is true in the nuke-friendly land up north:

Ontario Puts Nuclear Upgrade Plans on Ice

Two years into a $20-billion nuclear upgrade project meant to replace aging reactors with next-generation technology, the Ontario government put the entire process on hold Monday, citing excessive cost and uncertainties involving the ownership status of the sole Canadian bidder.

“Emission-free nuclear power remains a crucial aspect of Ontario’s supply mix,” Ontario’s minister of energy and infrastructure, George Smitherman, said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the competitive bidding process has not provided Ontario with a suitable option at this time.”

As he told reporters, “We’ll know the right price when we see it and we ain’t seen it yet.”

… To date, Areva is the only nuclear company to have sold a third-generation reactor, to the Finnish electric utility.

And that hasn’t gone so well (see GOP wants 100 new nukes by 2030 while “Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns”).

‘Green jobs’ pitch swayed just enough coal-state lawmakers

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(The following is the first in a multi-part series on the Supreme Court’s recently-concluded 2008-2009 Term)

No one fared worse before the Supreme Court this Term than the Earth.  The justices heard five environmental cases, and they sided against defenders of the environment in every single one.  Among these cases, the Court upheld a Bush-era regulation that placed costs to power plants above destruction of aquatic life; it absolved from liability a chemical company that allowed pesticides to spill into the environment for years; it erected new obstacles to environmental organizations challenging federal environmental policy; and it upheld a mining company’s plans to dump literally millions of tons of mining waste into a pristine lake.

Two of these cases in particular highlight the Court’s disregard for laws intended to protect the environment:

• A New Loophole For Polluters (Coeur Alaska v. Southeast Alaska Conservation Council)

Using a technique known as “froth-floatation,” a mining company in Alaska plans to extract new gold from a mine that has been closed for decades, but this technique would produce approximately 4.5 million tons of “slurry,” thick waste-product laced with toxic elements such as lead and mercury. Even worse, the mining company’s intends to dispose of this waste by dumping it into a nearby lake, a plan which would eventually kill all the lake’s fish and nearly all of its other aquatic life, decrease the depth of the lake by fifty feet, and flood the surrounding 40 acres of land with contaminated water.

Although federal law forbids “[t]he use of any river, lake, stream or ocean as a waste treatment system,” the Supreme Court created a massive new exception to this law. Under Justice Kennedy’s decision in Coeur Alaska, pollutants are exempt from this law so long as they have “the effect of . . . changing the bottom elevation of water.” In other words, polluters now have a free hand to dump whatever they want into pristine waters, so long as their waste products are solid and significant enough to reduce the depth of the lake, river or stream. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent, such a reading of federal law “strains credulity” because it allows “[w]hole categories of regulated industries” to “gain immunity from a variety of pollution-control standards.”

• Placing Profits Before The Law (Entergy v. Riverkeeper)
  

Power plants’ cooling systems collectively remove more than 214 billion gallons of water from the nation’s waterways every day, in the process killing over 3.4 billion aquatic organisms per year. The Clean Water Act requires that EPA regulate these cooling systems based on “the best technology available for minimizing adverse environmental impact.” During the Bush administration, however, EPA ignored this direction and instead employed a skewed cost-benefit analysis in deciding how to regulate. As a result, power plants were allowed to forgo the advanced technology required by the plain language of the law in favor of cheaper but far less protective measures.

Ignoring the law’s plain language, Justice Scalia’s decision in Riverkeeper upheld the Bush administration’s action.  As Justice Stevens explained in dissent, Congress determined that the costs of requiring power plants to pay for environmentally friendly technology “are outweighed by the benefits of minimizing adverse environmental impact” when it enacted the Clean Water Act, but the Court substituted the Bush Administration’s judgment for that of the law.

Notably, Riverkeeper reversed a Second Circuit decision by Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a hopeful sign that President Obama’s nominee for the high Court does not share her future colleagues’ willingness to rewrite environmental legislation to benefit big industry.

Judging by emails and comments, many progressives and enviros seem to be under the misimpression that a much tougher climate bill was politically possible.  I myself was under that misimpression for a while.

Now, in fairness to myself (and others), one serious scenario does exist for a tougher climate bill being politically possible — but that involves a very hands-on Obama, which so far hasn’t been his style for passing legislation (see “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010“).  Also, his advisors are almost certainly telling him to soft-pedal climate science — a serious mistake, since it essentially gives the deniers free reign to shape half of the debate.  I will blog on that shortly.

Outside the DC beltway, much of what goes on in this town is seen as some form of crass, enigmatic sausage making.  Well, as someone who has lived here for over 15 years, that’s precisely what it is.  And it always bears repeating that given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”

Even then, you must contend with the fact that a key part of this new Democratic majority is built upon votes from districts that are relatively moderate if not conservative, people who voted Democratic not so much because they endorse the progressive platform, but because they finally saw the ever-shrinking Republican Party for what it is — a rigidly-ideological movement hat has no solutions to offer for the many problems facing the country, problems that in fact stem from the few times the public mistakenly handed them the keys to the Hummer.

I would also add that in my one year as an American Physical Society Congressional science fellow advising a conservative Democrat from Florida in 1987-1988 — a pre-Gingrich time that was in theory much more conducive to bipartisanship — I never once saw a single member cast a vote purely for the national interest, except when that vote had no bearing whatsoever on their district.  And even then, every vote was still primarily a political calculation, and if their support wasn’t needed for passage, members almost automatically asked for a pass on any vote that could conceivably get them in any trouble in their district.

So how did we actually get a majority to vote for the first major environmental bill in two decades, a bill that is easily demagogued against politically — see this misleading but brutal GOP ad already whipped up against one Dem –  but whose major environmental benefit is decades in the future?

The Politico explains in “Chaos, arm-twisting gave Pelosi win,” excerpted below:

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Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.This Center for American Progress post, by Senior Fellow Andrew Light, Senior Policy Analyst Julian L. Wong, and Fellow Samuel Charap, was first published here.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States. on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia””both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue””explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia, like the United States, is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America’s top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world’s most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

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