Dylan Ratigan: “We have this unholy alliance between business and state, that allows the energy companies to effectively either use off balance sheet accounting, like the Pentagon, to secure energy resources, or off balance sheet accounting like environmental costs that none of which are reflected in the cost at the pump, or for that matter, coal, or whatever the fuel source is.”

MSNBC and radio talk show host Dylan Ratigan has spent this week looking at why our nation’s broken energy policy threatens the future of America. He’s talked with former CIA director Jim Woolsey on the implications for national security and Texas tycoon T. Boone Pickens about the limits of the global oil supply. In an interview for his podcast, he conversed with yours truly about the environmental consequences of our broken fossil-fuel economy. I told him what I believe are the biggest environmental threats we Americans face:

The essential threat that we don’t have any system to deal with right now and that threatens genuinely global civilization is essentially the carbon loading of our atmosphere and our oceans. So global warming, ocean acidification, those are not just threats that are changing our health today, but because there’s no system to handle it, that’s one of the biggest reasons that I have to put it at the top of the list. Of course, if you’re a citizen living in a coal hollow in Appalachia or you’re someone downwind of a power plant in a city, then the fact that even though there are laws on the books to protect the health of the people and the water there, the fact that those laws are not being enforced probably ends up being the key threat for those people.

Listen here:

“The more we can identify the same problem and address that core problem, which is this unholy alliance between business and state, effectively, in our country, whether it’s the healthcare companies or the energy companies, we might be able to begin to solve some of these problems,” Ratigan remarked.

“Unless we get off this carousel, it’s not like these changes will just stop,” I concluded. “Every decade will keep on changing and getting worse in less predictable ways that we just don’t simply understand.”

Listen to the full interview and read the transcript at DylanRatigan.com.

Is Boehner using Tea Party to employ Nixon’s ‘Madman’ strategy?

In the end, Boehner agreed to a package of $38.5 billion in cuts, a significant victory for a man who said his goal was to extract as much as possible from the federal budget. He also won limited victories on a handful of policy riders attached to the bill. But Boehner was forced to abandon some major demands, including Planned Parenthood, restrictions on the Environmental Protection Agency and efforts to restrict Obama’s health reform bill.

The budget deal was a limited victory for Obama, who showed that he could insert himself in the process and craft a bipartisan deal that maintained the EPA’s clean air act authority.

But strategically, Boehner would seem to have done better.  He controls only “one-half of one-third of the government,” as he often says, but he “managed to make the most of that limited leverage “” both in forcing President Obama and the Democrats to come more than halfway on his party’s demand for spending cuts, and in making the absolutists in his own ranks accept the principle that compromise is part of governing,” as the Washington Post put it in today’s front-page story.

He may be making use of Nixon’s “Madman theory” of negotiations, exploiting the “craziness” of the Tea Party, which does give him some dealmaking leverage, at the expense of messaging clarity and public perception.

Before discussing that, let me make two points.  First, the short-term deal cuts clean-tech programs (and one can assume that the full-year package will have cuts in both clean energy and  in environmental programs — but see below on how Dems avoided deeper cuts here).  Here’s some of what I was sent on a short-term deal’s $2 billion in cuts:

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In early May, ClimateProgress will bring on a new blogger/journalist, as I noted last week (see “What would you like to know about clean energy?“).

But his task won’t merely be to report on clean energy.  I’m hoping we can do some investigative reporting, too.  I’d love your suggestions for areas worth exploring.

The kind of work that is done in this area is best exemplified by Lee Fang, at ThinkProgress, who was done ground-breaking reporting on the tentacles of the Koch-topus (see stories here).

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A cyber-penny for your thoughts … and links.

A group photo of students at the 2009 Power Shift conference in 2009 in Washington, DC.

On April 15 an estimated 10,000 students will converge on Washington, D.C. to make their demands known for a clean, sustainable future.

They’ll be taking part in Power Shift 2011, a conference that brings youth activists together from around the country to bolster grassroots efforts on environmentalism, sustainability, and climate change. The four-day event will include workshops, keynote speeches, and lobbying events that will educate and inspire the next generation of leaders in the green movement.

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