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Koch-Funded Oil Rally Calls Global Warming A ‘Hoax,’ Dismisses Oil Spill, And Attacks Democrats

By Scott Keyes on Sep 8, 2010 at 4:30 pm

Beginning last week, the oil industry launched a national astroturfing effort called “Rally for Jobs.” The events, which are being held across the nation, are backed by right-wing billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. They launched a nearly identical campaign last summer that was widely mocked for its obvious astroturfing after it was revealed that 15 of the 21 Energy Citizens events were actually planned by oil industry lobbyists.

ThinkProgress attended one of the rallies yesterday in Canton, Ohio. What was billed as an organic grassroots jobs rally quickly descended into attacks on three things the Kochs most oppose: global warming science, oil safety regulations, and Democrats. One of the speakers, Sgt. Dennis Bartow, called global warming a “hoax.” He was joined by Karen Wright, CEO of the gas company Ariel Corporation, who ridiculed climate change as “questionable science” and referred to pollutants as “so-called carbon dioxide emissions.” Wright went on to rail against “so-called green jobs” that were “dubious” and “phony.”

Other speakers later dismissed attacks on the oil industry’s safety record, particularly in the wake of the Gulf oil spill. Radio host Matt Patrick called the deepwater drilling moratorium “ridiculous” and compared it to a ban on building houses because one caught on fire. Wright “did a quick Google search” on the oil industry’s safety record and openly wondered why Congress doesn’t ban cars because the number of auto accident deaths far exceeds the number of oil industry deaths. Wright also gleefully proclaimed that the oil spill is “all gone,” a claim that is easily dispelled with a quick Google search.

Many of the speakers also rallied the crowd against Ohio’s Democrats in Congress. For example, after telling audience members that he wasn’t going to call out particular politicians nor indict a single political party, Patrick — literally ten seconds later — called out only Democrats by name:

I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’s all one political party or that it’s this politician or that politician. You’ve got some people right now in the state of Ohio that want nothing more than to tax small businesses right out of business. You know who they are. And John Boccieri and Zack Space and Tim Ryan and Betty Sutton and Charlie Wilson, this message is for you. We’re coming after you. Good luck in November!

Of the approximately 400 who showed up for the rally, “most arrived in four buses” that were paid for and organized by oil and gas companies. ThinkProgress caught up with one of the attendees, who confirmed that Marathon Petroleum arranged a bus to bring over 50 of its employees to the rally.

Watch the highlights here:

Climate Progress

Deutsche Bank: ‘Human-Made Climate Change Is A Serious Long Term Threat’

By Brad Johnson on Sep 8, 2010 at 4:19 pm

Global financial giant Deutsche Bank has crushed the climate skeptics in a new paper released today, finding that “human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat.” The bank’s DB Climate Change Advisors, working with the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, reviewed the suite of skeptic claims — that global warming is a hoax, natural, or good for people — and found no evidence to support these contrarian positions. Mark Fulton, Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research for Deutsche Bank’s $7 billion in climate funds, concluded that trusting the skeptics “does not seem a gamble worth taking“:

The paper’s clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the skeptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat. . . .

Simply put, the science shows us that climate change due to emissions of greenhouse gases is a serious problem. Furthermore, due to the persistence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the lag in response of the climate system, there is a very high probability that we are already heading towards a future where warming will persist for thousands of years. Failing to insure against that high probability does not seem a gamble worth taking.

The paper itself, “Climate Change: Addressing the Major Skeptic Arguments,” refutes in short order the top skeptic and conspiracy theorist claims about climate science, including the Climategate smear campaign and purported IPCC errors, much in the style of John Cook’s excellent Skeptical Science website. Of most interest is its treatment of the claim that global warming is good for civilization:

Although adaptation is possible, historical shifts in climate have never occurred under conditions of such high human population numbers. Natural resources and ecosystems are already taxed and further climate perturbation is likely to be disruptive. Climate shifts in the past have frequently been accompanied by collapse of governments or extensive mortality. Increasing population pressure exacerbates the likelihood of pandemics and the destabilization of food-insecure regions can lead to failed states and threats to global security. Humans have survived numerous past changes in climate, but survival of the species is a poor measure of the true consequences and costs associated with adaptation to climate change.

Deutsche Bank is shifting its $700 billion in assets to address the dangers of global warming. “Coal is basically out of the game,” says Mark C. Lewis, Deutsche Bank’s managing director of its Global Carbon Markets desk. Deutsche Bank is financing wind farms in Minnesota, but the United States is largely being left behind. “They’re asleep at the wheel on climate change, asleep at the wheel on job growth, asleep at the wheel on this industrial revolution taking place in the energy industry,” said Kevin Parker, global head the Deutsche Asset Management Division, about the United States government. Deutsche Bank is instead directing investment opportunities in Germany, Italy, Spain and China. Of Deutsche’s $7 billion expressly focused on climate investment, only $45 million is invested in the United States.

Yglesias

Teachers Running Schools

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 8, 2010 at 3:57 pm

B.R.I.C

Winnie Hu reports on a bit of a trendlet toward teachers taking over the management of schools. The article injects some skepticism about the merits of the trend, which is all well-taken, but I think can go too far. The bottom line is that we have a lot of schools that don’t perform well, and we have a lot of ideas about how to improve them that most incumbent teachers think are unsound. So on the one hand we have some dissident teachers going out and becoming leaders of new charter schools. And on the other hand, we have some more traditionally union-aligned teachers saying “we know how classrooms work, give us the authority and we’ll show you how it’s done.”

These both seem like reasonable responses to the situation, and I think wise policymakers will allow—indeed, encourage—both trends to continue. The important thing, however, is to follow up with rigorous measurements of what’s actually happening so that we can shut down failures and allow successes to continue.

Health

Insurers Don’t Think They Should Be Held To Any Standards When Setting Premium Rates

By Igor Volsky on Sep 8, 2010 at 3:45 pm

I made the case against the notion that the health care law is forcing insurers to increase premiums here, but it’s also worth considering what insurers think the government should do about potentially unreasonable hikes. Here is AHIP’s Karen Ignagni, the industry’s top lobbyist, just six days ago on the National Journal’s Expert blog:

As final regulations are drafted in these areas it is critical that they be based on objective actuarial standards that take into account all of the factors that drive up health care costs. [...]

Rates that are actuarially justified should be deemed reasonable. This review should continue to be conducted at the state level because states have the experience, infrastructure, and local-market knowledge to review premium rates. If premiums are not allowed to keep up with rising medical costs, it would put at risk the coverage that patients rely on today.

Insurers would love to be held to no higher standard than “actuarially justified” in setting rates because all that phrase means is that an actuary has looked at the math and said it adds up. It doesn’t account for the fact that a lot of those costs go towards administrative expenses or marketing and it certainly doesn’t mean that this is the appropriate or best possible premium. Insurers on the individual market, for instance, can spend up to 40% of their premium dollars on non-health expenditures but under the “actuarially justified” standard this kind of spending would be acceptable.

Of course, insurers will have to spend more on care and less paperwork as reform is slowly implemented and in the meantime, I suspect many insurers are pulling out all the stops to take advantage of the system — while they still can.

Alyssa

Communities

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Sep 8, 2010 at 3:41 pm

I’m hopping-from-one-foot-to-the-other anxious about the return of Community, which I’ve missed so much so far, and which I have such high hopes for this fall, especially since I think I’m going to stop watching 30 Rock unless reviews suggest a creative resurgence. While I was looking for a particular season 2 promo the other day, though, I found this video of the cast as they found out they were getting renewed:

I’m enough of a grownup not to expect the actors I like to be uniformly, or even slightly, charming people in real life, but this is really rather adorable. And it looks like the show may have even found a way to use Betty White, rather than just making her a random daffy and slightly dirty-minded old lady:

That’s in keeping with the show’s good, specifics-based character development, but it’s still a risk, given that other guest stars, like Katharine McPhee, haven’t worked out tremendously well. And now that I’m done worrying about White, I can start to angst about Jeff and Annie. Hell of a thing to make us wait on all summer!

Politics

Angle On Whether U.S. Will Be Faced With A ‘Revolutionary Situation’: ‘Of Course Anything Is Possible’

By Ben Armbruster on Sep 8, 2010 at 3:29 pm

In at least two separate radio interviews during her campaign for Nevada U.S. Senate, Republican Sharron Angle appeared to suggest the possibility of an armed insurrection against the U.S. government. Saying that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment “was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government,” Angle added, “if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies.”

While her campaign repeatedly dodged reporters’ questions pressing Angle to clarify her remarks, ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Angle in an interview that aired on Top Line today what she meant. Angle at first tried to distance herself from her statement. “I don’t think that is exactly the way I said it,” she said. But later in the interview, Angle didn’t rule out the possibility of a violent revolution:

KARL: And of course Jefferson said the tree of liberty needs to be fed with the blood of tyrants and patriots from time to time but can you foresee us getting in a situation where there is such anger in this country that we’re in a revolutionary situation?

ANGLE: well I think at the conclusion of that discussion I said I hope not.

KARL: But do you think it’s possible?

ANGLE: Well of course anything is possible I suppose.

Watch it:

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent spoke with one of the radio hosts that Angle informed of her views on “Second Amendment remedies.” “The talk show host she spoke to tells me he doesn’t have any doubt that she was floating the possibility of armed insurrection as a valid response if Congress continues along its current course,” Sargent wrote when he first reported on Angle’s remarks in June.

Also during her interview with Karl, Angle denied that she said entitlement programs “violate the First Commandment.” “I don’t think that’s what I said,” Angle replied (it is what she said). “That was a discussion I was having with CBN. We were talking in very Christian terms, that’s what the Christian Broadcasting Network is so you speak the language of the folks you’re communicating with,” she said.

Yglesias

Housing, Income, and Prices

By Matthew Yglesias on Sep 8, 2010 at 3:14 pm

David Leonhardt offers a very useful way to think about the housing market:

I can’t claim to clear up all the uncertainty. But I do want to suggest a framework for figuring out whether you lean bearish or less bearish: do you believe that housing is a luxury good and that societies spend more on it as they get richer? Or do you think it’s more like food, clothing and other staples that account for an ever smaller share of consumer spending over time?

Basically, if you think housing is a staple then today houses look overvalued. If you think housing is a luxury, then today houses look maybe okay. Leonhardt offers plenty of additional text to consider while you ponder this, but let’s ponder his chart instead:

08leonhardtGrfxA-popup

What this makes me think is that we shouldn’t see these staples and luxuries as metaphysical constants. Food is the kind of thing that declines as a share of income except for during the decades-long period when it steadily rose.

What’s more, with housing there’s also the question of land:

For a house whose location has any value — in a major city or a nearby suburb, where a builder can’t simply put up a similar house down the street — the land is a big part of the equation. Over time, Mr. Zandi says, the value of that land should grow almost as fast as the local area’s economic output or, in other words, with incomes.

What I would add here is that policy matters. The value of land in some American urban areas and their inner suburbs appears to be on an upward trajectory. Absent regulation, the main impact of increased land prices in Fairfax County, VA would be to increase the density of housing construction in Fairfax County. The high price of the land would still be relevant to the price of Fairfax housing, but only to a limited extent. Instead, thanks to regulatory barriers to density, higher land prices in Fairfax County mainly drive the construction of new housing in other further-away places. This is an important dynamic in America, but the policies driving it are bad policies. Will they ever be improved?

Me buying a condo in downtown Washignton, DC is in part a bet on the idea that I won’t be very successful at persuading people to allow denser construction in the city.

Health

The Fallacy Of Insurers Hiking Premiums And Blaming It On The Health Care Law

By Igor Volsky on Sep 8, 2010 at 2:50 pm

Despite record profits, CEO pay increases, and ever decreasing medical loss ratio metrics, health insurers around the country are planning on increasing premiums in the small and individual health insurance markets — and they’re pinning the blame on five-month-old health care reform law. The Wall Street Journal’s Janet Adamy has the story:

Many carriers also are seeking additional rate increases that they say they need to cover rising medical costs. As a result, some consumers could face total premium increases of more than 20%. [...]

Weeks before the election, insurance companies began telling state regulators it is those very provisions that are forcing them to increase their rates.

Aetna, one of the nation’s largest health insurers, said the extra benefits forced it to seek rate increases for new individual plans of 5.4% to 7.4% in California and 5.5% to 6.8% in Nevada after Sept. 23. Similar steps are planned across the country, according to Aetna.

Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Oregon said the cost of providing additional benefits under the health law will account on average for 3.4 percentage points of a 17.1% premium rise for a small-employer health plan. It asked regulators last month to approve the increase.

In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Celtic Insurance Co. says half of the 18% increase it is seeking comes from complying with health-law mandates.

Look:

NA-BH825A_RATEH_NS_20100907211302

While there may be some justification in raising rates in response to rising health care inflation (estimated to be 3.2% in 2010), substantiating an increase that comes in the context of record profits and a long history of issuers fudging the numbers to extract maximum increases is difficult. Pinning the increases on the new regulations is just absurd, particularly since the actuaries have estimated that the new policies would only slightly raise premiums by 1 to 2 percentage points. Here is the Urban Institute’s Linda Blumberg:

Those policies that did not include lifetime or annual limits prior to reform should see no premium impact of these provisions. For plans with lifetime maximums of $2 million or higher, removing the limits entirely will tend to increase premiums by less than 1 percent (with the small group impact being smaller than non-group). And according to America’s Health Insurance Plans, the vast majority of individual market plans have limits of $5 million and above, making it highly unlikely that this change will cause a noticeable impact on non-group premiums. Because small group plans tend to be more comprehensive than non-group plans, a measurable impact in that sector of the market is even less likely. [...]

The prohibitions against pre-existing condition exclusion periods for children, including denials of coverage due to such conditions, should have little to no impact in the small group market, which already is required to guarantee issue policies. The federal agencies estimate the effect to be negligible in the group market. Again, the provision will decrease out-of-pocket costs for those who would have had care excluded from reimbursement without the reform. [...]

Estimates of the group premium effect of extending coverage for young adults on parents’ policies are provided in another of the Obama administration’s interim final rules. The effect of this provision can be expected to be small in the group market as well, with estimates ranging from .5 to 1.2 percent of premiums, depending upon the participation assumptions made. With regard to non-group coverage, similar issues arise as detailed for the pre-existing condition exclusion period for children. Carriers are expected to charge the specific families enrolling high-cost young adults in non-group plans significantly higher premiums than similar families with healthier adult children, then there will be little to no impact on the general population of insureds.

Any increases above that amount should at the very least trigger regulatory review. After all, it was just four months ago that independent analysts in California discovered that WellPoint “overstated future medical costs” to justify its 39% premium increases in the individual health market and committed numerous other methodological errors.

Insurers are right to argue that rising health care costs are the primary driver of health insurance costs, but in many markets, should do more than hide behind providers. Issuers must their own leverage to negotiate with hospitals and doctors for lower price, instead of simply passing along increasing costs to beneficiaries. But what’s happening now is an industry effort to maximize profits before the marketplace is substantially reformed in 2014. It’s a situation that screams out for a more robust rate review process — something the administration is trying to encourage through state grants.

Related Posts

Climate Progress

Major analysis finds “less ice covers the Arctic today than at any time in recent geologic history.”

By Joe Romm on Sep 8, 2010 at 2:30 pm

Paleoclimate study: “the Arctic temperature change consistently exceeds the Northern Hemisphere average by a factor of 3-4″

A first-of-its-kind analysis, “History of sea ice in the Arctic” (subs. req’d), by an international team of 18 top scientists led by Leonid Polyak concludes:

[E]pisodes of considerably reduced sea ice or even seasonally ice-free conditions occurred during warmer periods linked to orbital variations. The last low-ice event related to orbital forcing (high insolation) was in the early Holocene, after which the northern high latitudes cooled overall, with some superimposed shorter-term (multidecadal to millennial-scale) and lower-magnitude variability. The current reduction in Arctic ice cover started in the late 19th century, consistent with the rapidly warming climate, and became very pronounced over the last three decades. This ice loss appears to be unmatched over at least the last few thousand years and unexplainable by any of the known natural variabilities.

The key point is that the Arctic loses ice when it is forced to lose ice.  In the past that was driven by orbital changes, and now it is being driven by human emissions.

This Quaternary Science Reviews paper is based on a detailed study of “proxy records from the Arctic Ocean floor and from the surrounding coasts.”  You can find a brief discussion of those methods in the Ohio State University news release here, which explains this is “the first comprehensive history of Arctic ice.”  The analysis “re-examined the data from past and ongoing studies — nearly 300 in all — and combined them to form a big-picture view of the pole’s climate history stretching back millions of years.”

I asked the lead author, Leonid Polyak, of Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center, when was the last time the Arctic was ice free.  He replied:

Read more

Politics

GOP Claims $50 Billion For Infrastructure Is Too Pricey, While Pushing $800 Billion Tax Cut For The Rich

By Pat Garofalo on Sep 8, 2010 at 2:30 pm

This week, President Obama rolled out a plan to invest $50 billion in infrastructure as a way of boosting job creation, which will be (at least partially) paid for by cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies. Republicans immediately criticized the proposal, with even Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), who typically jumps at the chance to approve infrastructure spending, saying he wouldn’t vote for it.

But many Republicans, at the same time that they are claiming that a $50 billion investment in America’s infrastructure is a budget-buster, are pushing to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans. At $830 billion, the price tag for extending that sliver of the Bush cuts is more than 16 times the cost of Obama’s infrastructure proposal:

Rep. Candice Miller (R-MI): Miller “said the Obama administration’s proposal amounts to a second, costly stimulus plan…Instead, she said, the president should quickly support an extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts for all income groups.”

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): We don’t need more government ’stimulus’ spending. We need to end Washington Democrats’ out-of-control spending spree, [and] stop their tax hikes.

GOP Senate nominee Pat Toomey (PA): “Pat opposes more deficit spending and will fight for fiscal responsibility and reducing the deficit in the Senate,” said Toomey spokesperson Nachama Soloveichik.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY): After the administration pledged that a trillion dollars in borrowed stimulus money would create 4 million jobs and keep the unemployment rate under 8 percent, their latest plan for another stimulus should be met with justifiable skepticism…The administration wants to do it again — this time with higher taxes for even more new spending.

These Republicans all support extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest two percent of Americans as a means of boosting the economy. But as The Wonk Room explains, investing in infrastructure provides far more bang for the buck in terms of job creation than extending the Bush tax cuts. Plus, if $50 billion for infrastructure (that will be at least partially paid for) is too expensive, then extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy is definitely unaffordable as well.

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