From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. Between the ages of about seventeen and twenty-four I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books….

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts….

– George Orwell, “Why I write”

I joined the new media because the old media have failed us. They have utterly failed to force us to face unpleasant facts (see here).

What I have learned most from the success of my blog, from the rapid growth in subscribers and visitors and comments, along with the increasing number of websites that link to or reprint my posts, is that there is in fact a great hunger out there for the bluntest possible talk. It is a hunger to learn the truth about the dire nature of our energy and climate situation, about the grave threat to our children and future generations, about the vast but still achievable scale of the solutions, about the forces in politics and media that impede action — a hunger to face unpleasant facts head on.

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JR:  Bill McKibben writes me that “since that first day, the police have become professional and humane. The next 340 people arrested have been handcuffed, driven to the police station in a paddy wagon, processed, fined $100, and released. So no one need fear they’ll go through what is described below.  The number of people flooding into DC is growing very fast. Jim Hansen gets arrested Monday, Irene willing.”

by Peter Anderson

Washington’s burly SWAT team, with every imaginable crime fighting gizmo dripping from their 35 pound belts, are an odd deployment of force, when you think about it, to send in to arrest the likes of us.

On my right, as we stood in suits and ties, in front of the White House refusing to move on that hot sunny day in August, was Gus Speth. Gus, now in his seventies, had headed up the President’s Council on Environmental Quality under Carter, and from there ran the UN’s Development Agency and later Yale’s School of Forestry and the Environment. On my left was Rev. Jim Anthol, who is the equivalent to a bishop in the United Church of Christ.

Myself, and the 65 others who stood with them that first day, came in answer to Bill McKibben’s call a month earlier. With lobbying on Capitol Hill hitting a brick wall, Bill’s thrust was to open a new front in the form of civil disobedience against the proposed 1,700 mile Keystone pipeline from the tar sands of Alberta to the refineries at Port Arthur, Texas. A pipeline that would result in massive increases of carbon into the atmosphere, crippling any chance to stabilize the planet’s climate.

Except for a few, none of us had ever been arrested before, and until we saw the manifest failure of our political system to respond to the existential threat to Earth’s climate, we would never have even considered violating the law. For me – like for most of us – the precipitate that galvanized my newfound resolve in the face of a corporate chock hold on Congress was the simple, elemental, drive to protect my children: my three girls, now grown up, and my 14 year old boy who is still a child. Theirs is the generation that, in place of an inheritance, will be left to inhabit an overheated world that my cohort is callously leaving behind as, in a blissful state of denial, we party the night away. We may fancy ourselves “baby boomers,” but we act more like King Louis XV, the one credited for the bon mot, “Après moi, le déluge.”

And, at least initially, this opening gauntlet did not seem to risk too much because, in previous peaceful demonstrations in front of the White House, protesters had been booked and, upon paying a $100 fine, freed. Catch and release the police jocularly call it.

This time, though, someone several pay grades above the front-line park police decided to teach us a lesson by, over the next 52 hours, throwing us into the maw of the DC criminal justice system, which has finely honed the pernicious arts of how to degrade people.

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Add callousness to the list of credits for long-wrong climate science denier Patrick Michaels.

On Friday, Michaels, of the pro-pollution Cato Institute, attacked the supposed ‘hype’ around Hurricane Irene and predicted on Forbes.com:

As TP Green noted last night:

Unfortunately, Michaels’ optimism that the threat of Hurricane Irene was just “hype” was wrong. The American death toll is already 9 lives, as the massive storm tears its way up the Eastern seaboard. Irene had already killed two people in the Caribbean.

Michaels later changed it to “and hopefully kill fewer than the eight people who died in Gloria,” but the original text at Yahoo.com remains the same.

Of course, Michaels, who said last year Big Oil funds some 40% of his work, has long been a fountain of nonsense (see Scientific American editor slams science denier Patrick Michaels for misusing their unscientific online poll).

That’s why when Michaels went up against someone who really knows what he’s talking about, like climatologist Ben Santer, it’s a true mismatch.  Here is the video of last year’s smack down on the Hill, courtesy of Climate Decrocker Peter Sinclair:

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With the threat of Hurricane Irene to millions of Americans from the Carolinas to New England, President Barack Obama has been doing the job he was hired for, overseeing and directing the coordinated response of federal, state, and local government to minimize the loss of life and property from this monstrous storm.

On Saturday, Obama chaired a meeting at the National Response Coordination Center at FEMA’s Washington headquarters, and “convened a conference call with members of his senior emergency response team including Vice President Joe Biden and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, among others.” He also “heard updates on Saturday from governors and emergency management officials in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont.”

Right-wing pundits lashed out at Obama, bizarrely claiming that the President of the United States is engaged in a political campaign when he commands the executive branch’s response to Hurricane Irene:

“How to Politicize a Hurricane,” Koch Industries lawyer John Hinderaker cried, saying Obama “posed for a photo-op today, pretending to have something to do with the potentially-severe weather event.”

Scared Monkeys: “The President left the friendly confines of “Life styles of the Rich & Famous to try and act presidential. However, it seems like more of a shameless photo-op.”

“Fearless Leader “Takes Charge” At Hurricane Command Center…” Weasel Zippers writes. “More like a pathetic photo-op.”

Six years after the Bush administration’s criminal failure to protect the citizens of the Gulf Coast from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, American conservatives are still reeling. One of the prime tenets of the American right — that everyday Americans don’t ever need a strong federal government — was belied by the tragedy of Katrina. Bush put FEMA under the control of an Arabian horse commissioner, Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown, eviscerating the crucial agency and demoralizing its proud public servants. Instead of responding to the warnings of National Weather Service officials or to reports of levee failures and mass suffering, Bush spent five days on photo ops like cutting a birthday cake with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and playing a guitar with country singer Mark Wills, and going to political events to promote Medicare Part D.

Before this year’s billion-dollar climate disasters struck across the nation, Obama rebuilt the tattered Federal Emergency Management Agency into a shining example of how our government serves the Constitutional mandate to protect the public welfare in times of need. Not every president plays guitar and eats cake when the safety of Americans is threatened.

by Michael Conathan

Sustainability is the ultimate buzzword in fisheries and it’s led to the ubiquitous red-yellow-green list as one of the most popular means of trying to present consumers with a simple yet comprehensive way of determining whether or not they should order a certain kind of fish. Yet on the wallet cards that attempt to provide an accurate breakdown, there’s one species that’s never talked about: commercial fishermen.

There’s no question that the number of jobs available in many fisheries declined in recent years, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that this will continue. But unlike other industries in which job loss is driven by economic decline or market contraction, in fisheries, productivity is limited by just one thing: fish. Not enough fish means not enough fishing.

And anything that causes a decline in jobs is ripe for political pressure to end the slide at any cost, particularly in a down economy. Yet here’s the fundamental problem: There’s not a single politician in the world—not a president or prime minister or poobah—who can regulate, dictate, or legislate more fish into existence.

This hasn’t stopped some politicians, though, from pointing fingers in an attempt to score points with their constituents, who understandably blame low catch levels on the regulators who set the limits on how much fish can be harvested. These same regulators are under a legal mandate to set catches at or below levels recommended by scientists based on the best information they can gather.

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