NEWS FLASH

Rep. Maloney Calls For Greater Scrutiny Of Fracking | Given the recent expiration of New York state’s moratorium on deep natural gas drilling and the expectation hydofracking will begin outside of the New York City and Syracuse watersheds, ThinkProgress asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) how she felt about the prospect of having hydrofracking in her state. She said, “it hasn’t been explored deeply enough to ensure the safety and well being of people … I feel that it’s untested and many of the studies show that it’s dangerous. I don’t think we should be following policies that are dangerous to the health and to the environment of our country.”

– Sean Savett

NEWS FLASH

Obama: House GOP Would Rather Destroy the U.S. Economy Than “Ask Anything of Corporate Jet Owners, Oil & Gas Companies” and the Rich |  

Last night, House Speaker John Boehner bailed on negotiations with President Obama on a debt ceiling deal.  In a hastily-arranged news conference, Obama angrily explained the problem:

“If you do not have any revenues, if you have no revenues at all, what that means is more of a burden on seniors, more drastic cuts to education, more drastic cuts to research, bigger cuts to services for the middle class. It doesn’t ask anything of corporate jet owners, oil and gas companies, and people like me, who’ve done very well.” Republicans, he said, were demanding “a package that would effectively require massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and domestic spending, while not asking anything from the wealthiest of this country.”

“If that’s their only answer it’s going to be pretty difficult to figure out where to go.”

Obama was willing to go too far, but Boenher wouldn’t budge.  We knew the GOP would rather destroy a livable climate than let their pollutocrat backers suffer any reduction in profits — but  at least in that case  you could argue that some in the GOP were so anti-science they didn’t know what they were doing (see John Boehner says on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical”).

But the GOP has been told by their Wall Street backers that  failure to raise the debt ceiling would be an economic catastrophe.  The House GOP is too enthralled to the Tea Party extremists — backed by the  billionaire polluting Kochs — to care.

Below are earlier comments from our previous Facebook commenting system:

Paul Magnus

I think we can start referring to the GOP now as the GOFP.

July 23 at 11:12am

Ben Lieberman

Welcome to the GOPacalypse–watch as a political party sets out to destroy the national and international economy, financial and the global climate.

July 23 at 12:10pm

Rob Honeycutt

The irony in this is, if the GOP forces the US into default, the amount of money their wealthy backers are going to lose in the markets is going to FAR outstrip the taxes they want to avoid.

July 23 at 12:45pm

Peter S. Mizla

Oh yes, the GOP protecting the rich elite. Screw the rest of the economy for the rest of us. When will the American public wake up to these Robber Barron’s.

July 23 at 12:48pm

Jonathan DeLong

Sadly, I think it will take a major catastrophe for many people to wake up and realize the damage being done, but by then it will be too late. We can only wait and see what happens.

July 23 at 1:39pm

Peter S. Mizla

Its too late now. Emissions must pick in 2015 and begin to decline.
Perhaps a mega heat wave with thousands of people dying might begin to wake up this country- I just do not know. The climate is showing increasing signs of violent instability-

July 23 at 6:54pm

Roger R. Hill

I’m convinced the debt and world economy are secondary to a hell bent track to the Apocalypse so they can be saved – the data is there.

July 23 at 1:17pm

Greg Carbin

Roger, I think this has been part of a Conservative Republican plan all along. Bankrupt the government into non-existence and oust a Democratic President as an added bonus. I can only hope it backfires on those wacko right wing extremists or else I’ll be moving to the Republic of Vermont where the sky is blue and the land is green and most of the political leaders share those colors!

July 23 at 7:02pm

Jim Thurston

Well, that’s the view from the far left. The far right think Obama has been purposely hurting the economy since he became president. Somewhere in between lies a vision without conspiracy theories, hatred, lies, and foaming ideology.

July 24 at 10:19am

Charlie Taplin

everyone pay there fair share, I mean everyone!

July 25 at 6:27am

Judi Dickerson

Craig, i agree with you. I think Bush and Co. knew that their tax cuts would create a huge shortfall and thus create a crisis which would demand draconian cuts. They could also privatize everything once they destroyed the federal government. The tragedy is that real people are suffering because of their trickery but Teapublicans just don’t care.

July 25 at 12:26pm

Roger R. Hill

Jim that would be acceptable to me — that is the “in between”. But the no compromise my way or the highway right wing are holding everyone hostage on their principal ideology and ready to run the world economy into the toilet for a second time in just 3 years. For example Dylan’s student loans are on adjustable interest rates, do we lock in because ideologues want to play games? These are extreme by definition, there will be major blow back and it will come with social unrest, think about that. You play with fire you get burned!

July 26 at 8:39am

catman306

I’ll bet that just about now those Koch brothers are wondering how to stop the hideous monster that they created during the past 20 years. (I’m referring to the tea party, a necessary clarification since they have created several other hideous monsters during that time.) The simple fact is that they lose money if the country collapses into third world status as the economy collapses. They’ll still be king of the hill but the hill will have shrunk considerably. No one wants that.

July 23 at 1:42pm

Jeffrey Davis

I’ve long suspected that our plutocrats would rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven — their model of freedom resembles the South American variety. In other words, they do want that.

July 24 at 9:32pm

Paul Magnus

Climate Portals

The New Austerity and the EROI Squeeze « Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy.
steadystate.org
The government of Minnesota has shut down thanks to a $5 billion budget gap. Wisconsin public employees have been de-unionized so their salaries and benefits can be cut to close a budget gap. New Jersey just missed shutting down as a Democratic legislature and a Republican governor agreed that au.

Climate Portals Worldwide, the average EROI of oil is down to 20:1 from its original value of 100:1 eighty years ago…. Even more troubling than oil’s 20:1 global average is the figure for new oil, just 5 to 1. It takes a lot of energy to drill five miles under the ocean and pump crude back to a refinery, or to cook tar sands to extract a usable fuel. The energy wellspring at the heart of our economy no longer gushes a torrent of wealth; it’s a smaller, much-diminished stream.

Climate Portals Wind and other renewable energy sources offer returns in the seventeen-to-one range — still a nice income flow, but nothing like the flood we once got from oil.

July 23 at 4:05pm

Paul Magnus

“(The conservative notion that private philanthropy will increase if government takes a smaller bite of the total economy is mostly wishful thinking; the rising overhead costs of energy — the increasing energy cost of energy — will shrink the economic pie as a whole, no matter where we make our slice between the public and private sectors).”

July 23 at 4:07pm

Paul Magnus

“Beyond the wrangling between the deficit reducers and the Keynesians, like Paul Krugman, who warn (correctly) that deficit reduction during a recession will only make the recession worse, there lies another deficit, one that no one is talking about: the deficit we’re currently running in our country’s environmental account. We’re drawing down natural capital to cash it out as wealth, which means we’re spending a capital stock — healthy ecosystems — as if it were income. Worse, we borrow money against the prospect of being able to do this forever. That, too, simply isn’t going to happen.”

July 23 at 4:09pm

Paul Magnus

“We’ve begun to recognize that we can’t borrow infinitely against our financial future. At some point we have to recognize that we can’t borrow infinitely against our environmental future, either. We’ve got to learn to budget ourselves to the level of economic activity that can be supported and maintained by current solar income instead of running that account in the red. We’ve got to stop counting on continued drawdown of finite stocks of fossil fuel and stop counting on paying our current expenses by borrowing against the continual expansion of our economy’s ecological footprint.”

July 23 at 4:10pm

Paul Magnus

Left over oil should be used to build a sustainable future before its too expensive….

“There is some room for hope. It is possible to have a decent civilization founded on the rates of return that renewable energy offers — and unlike the EROI of oil, those rates can be expected to increase with time and technological development. Solving the EROI squeeze means committing ourselves to building the infrastructure we need to capture current solar income and run our economy on renewable, non-carbon-based energy. Every unit of fossil energy we use to do anything else commits the United States and the planet as a whole to a lower, more straitened standard of living in the future.”

July 23 at 4:13pm

Paul Magnus

“If we want to see an America of crumbling concrete and weed-filled vacant lots, an America too poor to repair its buildings and bridges, too poor to educate its young to the highest standards, an America that has become a fallen, impoverished power, we need only continue as we are: burning fossil fuel, ignoring climate change, and refusing to invest in the renewable energy infrastructure we need for a sane, rational, steady state economy.”

July 23 at 4:14pm

Sonni Will

The POTUS isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know!

July 23 at 4:42pm

Joan Savage

The Koch Industries aren’t publicly traded; they are not on Wall Street. The Kochs might play their way through foreseeable national and international nosedives and make a killing buying up vulnerable companies. The GOP that support them should stand for Gullible Old Party, as the Kochs take care of business first.

July 23 at 4:46pm

Paul Magnus

They are just plain evil…

July 24 at 12:54am

Becky Sisk

Is their motive anarchy? chaos? Just because they want Obama to fail? Their ethics are appalling!

July 24 at 9:20pm

Paul Magnus

Lets go America…. lets get something done now….

Make Way for the Radical Center… American Elect
http://www.nytimes.com/201​1/07/24/opinion/sunday/24f​riedman.html?smid=fb-nytim​es&WT.mc_id=SR-SM-E-FB-SM-​LIN-MWF-072411-NYT-NA&WT.m​c_ev=click

July 25 at 1:45am

NEWS FLASH

Scientist who asked Romney about coal pollution responds: ‘Romney cannot pick and choose’ | In the 1970s, while working as a scientist and consultant at Arthur D. Little, Inc., Anthony Samsel was part of the team that developed the initial techniques and methods for air quality sampling for the Environmental Protection Agency. Last week, he attended a Derry, NH, town hall with Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. In answer to Samsel’s questions about the issues relating to EPA regulations and coal-fired power plants, Romney stated: ‘We have made a mistake, is what I believe, in saying that the EPA should regulate carbon emissions. I don’t think that was the intent of the original legislation, and I don’t think carbon is a pollutant in the sense of harming our bodies.’”

In a blog post at the Mother Nature Network, the retired scientist responds: “All power plant emissions are regulated by the EPA. Mr. Romney cannot pick and choose which ones he thinks are important for them to regulate and which ones he and industry wish to control. That is clearly not in the interest of public health and a conflict of interest for corporate agendas. The Clean Air Act of 1970 (CAA) has a 40-year track record of using sound science to save lives, protect human health and safeguard our environment.”