Writing for the Buffalo Beast, Michael Roddy and Ian Murphy have an excellent rundown on some of the planet’s worst enemies right now – people who would make excellent villains in an episode of Captain Planet and the Planeteers – and while I’m being a little sarcastic, these are folks who not only put their own heads in the sand to the damage they, their businesses, and their interests do to the environment and the health of the planet, they also spend tons of money to make sure that you put your head in the sand and keep it there.

What makes the story even better is that The Beast comes up with some scenarios that would be poetic justice for these folks as well. Here are a few of my favorites:

George Will, Columnist

Misdeeds: The errors Will has committed to print over the years are both more numerous and irresponsible than his bow tie collection, for which he also feels no remorse. He claimed in a February 2009 Washington Post column that “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” The Center responded: “We do not know where George Will is getting his information… global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979.”

Corporate teats: The Republican Party, a catchall for corporate polluters, his wife, rapacious swine in general, and anyone who cites Ronald Reagan to justify his massive carbon footprint.

Most egregious lie: “So the column accurately reported what the Center had reported.” Incredibly, the Post backed him up.

Comeuppance: Locked in a large freezer, strapped to a chair directly under a ten-foot icicle and made to write a column. The room’s climate is controlled by a computer program, which checks his column for scientific veracity. The temperature goes down when Will’s right and up when he’s wrong. He either freezes to death or the icicle falls and splits his head open. It’s up to him.

…

James Inhofe, Senator from Oklahoma

Misdeeds: Inhofe thinks that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind,” yet somehow served as the Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee from ‘03 to ‘07. Once called Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton to testify as a key witness. Believes that “scientific consensus” on climate change is a conspiracy perpetrated by greedy scientists to score grant money. Went to Copenhagen as the leader of the Climate Truth Squad, earning big laughs from overseas reporters. Lifetime recipient of Twelve Dumbest Members of Congress award.

Corporate teats: Seven figures from Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Conoco Phillips and anyone willing to pay for his “campaign expenses.”

Most egregious lie: “You know, God’s still up there. We’re now going through a cooling spell.”

Comeuppance: Locked in an outhouse and set on fire.

…

Fred Singer, University of Virginia

Misdeeds: For the last 60 years, Singer’s pimped his PhD credentials to any and every industry in need of phony science. He’s slithered seamlessly from denying that smoking causes cancer to saying that DDT is harmless to “raising questions about and undercutting the ‘prevailing scientific wisdom’” of climate change. Glacier data he later attributed to his wife was denounced as “complete bullshit” by the Glacier Monitoring Service.

Corporate teats: Exxon Mobil, Shell, Sun Oil, Competitive Enterprise Institute, American Petroleum Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Most egregious lie: “55% of glaciers have gained mass in the last 30 years.”

Comeuppance: While addressing yet another denier conference in 2012, the pressure created by an undetected tumor in Singer’s brain triggers an anomalous episode of schizophasia, causing his entire speech to spew forth as an incoherent word salad. Instead of the audience stopping Singer and urging him to seek the immediate medical attention he so obviously needs, they offer him a thunderous standing ovation and an invitation to speak again next year.

There’s so much more hilarity where that came from, too.

[ THE BEAST 15 Most Heinous Climate Villains ]
Source: The Buffalo Beast

Oh, I have to let this article speak for itself. The title is strong on its own, but it’s true – it is ideology that’s holding back a green revolution in this country – there are more technologies and cottage industries and new products and businesses to count, but something is holding them back – something is keeping this entire market from breaking the surface. Let’s take a look at what it is:

American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our “free market” and anti-government attitudes. One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this outdated ideology. Result: other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don’t. So we lose.

Remember how “chips” was a major driver of the economy in the 80s and 90s? Then the Internet drove the economy late 90’s and early 2000s? The world understands that “green energy” is the next big industry that will drive the world economy. Actually, the rest of the world has understood this for some time and has been investing and inventing and innovating and building. Meanwhile over here America’s big oil and coal companies bought themselves a Presidency and an anti-government ideology and a climate-change-denial industry that has cost us 8 years and counting.

Now we’re playing catch-up, and the rest of the world is determined to keep us from taking the lead.

It’s true. I heard the CEO of a coal company in West Virginia in an interview with NPR say, when asked if climate change was real, outright say it’s fake – claiming that it, just like other so-called “scares” in the past, passed over and nothing was made of them (of course, the ones he chose are actually real – like the hole in the ozone layer, which is very much real even today, but the multinational push to stop using CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals managed to keep it from spreading to the point where it’s a serious problem – but even so, remember that your grandparents could go out without sunscreen in the summer. We can’t.) and that if government did manage to pass climate regulations, that we all may as well “teach our children to speak Chinese.”

That’s infuriating, especially since it’s the actions of people like him that may force us to do that anyway, if you think that’s such a horrible thing (personally I think American children could do with a little multi-lingual teaching, but that’s just me – only Americans are truly monolingual.) – the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other industrialized nation in the world is making a push towards clean energy and green technologies, and while they’re in no horrific hurry to turn off their carbon producing industries (although some of them are farther on the forefront than we are) they’re still developing and rolling out technologies and large-scale tests while we at home are still debating the evidence in front of us as if adding up all of the coins in the piggy bank a different way will lead to a different result.

Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, specifically points at the great lengths that the Chinese are going to in order to power and employ their massive lower and burgeoning middle classes with renewable energy, and while it’s not slowing their emissions rate, it could very easily begin to do so quickly, or wind up powering more people at an America-style rate while using a fraction of the fossil fuels we do.

If the United States doesn’t take its rightful place back at the front of the pack in science and technology, especially in the area of energy, we’ll wind up behind the curve, and in another position where we’ll have to buy tech or energy from someone who knows how to do it better than we do, and I don’t think anyone really wants that, from a security or a self-determination perspective. Instead of writing massive checks to OPEC nations, we’ll wind up writing them to the Chinese and the Germans to buy their expertise and their energy technologies.

[ Green Revolution - Ideology Holding America Back ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

Let’s be clear from the outset: I believe the answer to that question is yes. Which is why I am a strong supporter of environmental justice, clean air and water laws and their enforcement, renewable and sustainable energy technologies, and climate protection overall.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m also a scientist – I also believe that unless we stop having so many children as a civilization, we’ll deplete our resources and use more energy than we can sustain; and I say that meaning as a human civilization, not just Americans. But that’s what Fred Branfman, writing for the Sacramento News and Review, is saying in his article “Do Our Children Deserve to Live?”

He proposes that a “human movement” will be required to avert the a global climate crisis, and that what’s going on in Copenhagen doesn’t give him much faith that movement is going to come, or that this meeting will be the turning point. I agree, but I also admit that getting buy-in from the nations of the world takes time- as you can see at home with our own gridlocked energy and climate policies and bils locked up in Congress now.

A strange cloud envelops human civilization as its leaders fail to take the measures to protect it that they themselves endorsed just five months ago. It is oddly fitting that the latest act in humanity’s climate-crisis drama will occur next week in the city where history’s most famous Dane, brooding in his fog-enshrouded castle, failed to act decisively upon the very question hanging over the upcoming conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.

It will not be on the agenda. But whether civilization is or is not to be will be the real question haunting the shadow play about to ensue at the United Nations-sponsored talks.

A child under 13 today can expect to live into the 2080s, by which time civilization as we know it will have disappeared if we continue to fail to reduce carbon emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, and 80 percent by 2050, according to our climate scientists. Although world leaders accept this recommendation, they are presently overseeing a steady increase projected to be more than double the maximum our climate scientists think safe.

The stark figures reveal just how much Copenhagen will fail our children, despite PR efforts to obscure them. The climate scientists’ minimal 25 percent cut would see the United States emitting 3.94 billion metric tons in 2020. President Barack Obama’s 2020 target is 4.99 bmt, only 5.5 percent lower than U.S. 1990 emissions of 5.26 bmt, or less than 1/4 of the minimum 25 percent cut urged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (The United States packages its nonreduction target as a 17 percent cut from the sky-high 2005 level of 5.99 bmt.) The Chinese, according to the Council on Foreign Relations’ Michael Levi, will increase their CO2 emissions by 72 to 88 percent by 2020, i.e., from 6 bmt today to more than 10 bmt. (The Chinese package their increase by pledging a 45 to 50 percent reduction in “carbon intensity,” or carbon per unit of gross domestic product, even though averting disastrous climate change requires reducing CO2 emissions, not just intensity.)

What will occur in Copenhagen thus continues a pattern seen since the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Scientists I spoke with there were anguished that the treaty only sought to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2012. None foresaw that the treaty would be ignored and that world emissions would be 40.8 percent higher (and U.S. emissions 19.8 percent higher) in 2007 than in 1990.

Copenhagen will fail because the great publics of the world have not been involved in the great human questions underlying the technical issues the scientists discuss. It is not only that the conference will fail to protect our young, but that the rest of us will barely notice.

Pretty depressing, eh? Branfman goes into a damning critique of our modern society, and how we’re dreaming and ignoring the entire problem, which I agree with to some extent but I’m not quite as scathing about I don’t think:

We live today as if in a trance, conducting business as usual in times so unusual that they pose an even greater threat than 20th-century wars that killed more than 100 million people. It seems incredible, for example, that nonscientists barely discuss how the human climate crisis undermines so many of their basic assumptions—in philosophy, law, psychology, sociology, economics, the arts and humanities, education and health—about human beings and their society.

If a new “human movement” working beside today’s environmentalists can help more people see that we are the first adults in history to pose the single greatest threat facing our children, however, there is much reason to believe that human civilization can still be saved.

Branfman definitely subscribes to some of the most worst-case climate scenarios, but it’s important to sit up and take note that what he’s describing very well may be our global future if something isn’t done. If everything goes on the way it does now, the best case is that he’s only partially right, and the worst case is that he’s completely and totally right.

[ Do Our Children Deserve to Live? - Copenhagen Won’t be Enough. Only a ‘Human Movement’ can Save Civilization from the Climate Crisis. ]
Source: The Sacramento News and Review

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

Last week when NASA crashed part of the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) into the moon, the Web buzzed with the headline “NASA bombed the moon! NASA bombed the moon!”

Out of their holes crawled the conspiracy theorists and anti-science, anti-tax, anti-everything conservatives, with the former claiming this was some massive plot to destabilize the moon’s orbit (impossible) or have some kind of impact on global warming (impossible) or something similarly nefarious and impossible, and the latter claiming that the $79 million spent on the probes and their instruments are a waste of tax dollars.

Unfortunately, along with the anti-everything conservatives this time came the anti-science progressives: the ones who believe that space exploration and all kinds of science are wastes of money when there are rivers to clean up and people starving here on Earth and people dying of thirst in Africa and so on and so forth, all of which ring with sense but are completely devoid of logic. I found this moronic post at AlterNet that really set me off (as it did a number of the commenters, who rightfully called out the author on having no scientific knowledge of the experiment or consideration of the science behind the experiment and simply knee-jerking against what she perceived based on her own ignorance to be a wasted cost.

The sad thing is that during the Bush Administration progressives clamored and cried for the restoration of science and scientific examination to its proper place in our society, that we should make educated decisions based on the experimentation and observation of those people who have been trained and are knowledgeable in their fields and peer reviewed data, not on gut feeling or anecdotal experience and personal desires.

So let’s break down some of the science around LCROSS.

First of all, “bomb the moon,” “blow up the moon,” etc are all idiotic, sensationalist ways to phrase the experiment – there were no explosives, there was no fireball or massive mushroom cloud or anything else that would be associated with a bomb or explosion.

The other fallacy is that the experiment was entirely designed to look for water on the moon, and that’s only partially true. The launch vehicle broke into two pieces: one impactor that was designed to plummet into the moon and kick up a cloud of debris (for the people who are concerned about how this affects the moon, they should think of a grain of sand flying into a volleyball as an appropriate analogy) through which the second probe would fly and collect data. That second probe would then send its data back to earth before impacting the surface itself. No boom, no cloud, nothing dramatic.

The experiment is almost exactly like Japan’s Kaguya probe that impacted the moon with nowhere near as much fuss back in June. LCROSS was designed to look not only for water in the Moon’s soil, but also to take a comprehensive analysis of the makeup of the moon’s soil. The cheapest and most efficient way to do this without landing a probe to drill and dig into the soil is to do something that would kick up a lot of that soil so you could churn up what’s underneath the dusty surface – and that’s exactly what LCROSS’s impactor was designed to do.

$79 million for a space probe with instruments on it as complex as LCROSS and that would teach us as much about our closest celestial neighbor is a bargain, and in line with some of the most cost-effective experiments NASA has done to date. Even if you took NASA’s entire budget and threw it at some other problem like the environment or poverty, you wouldn’t be able to effectively resolve those problems. We all know that throwing money at issues like drinking water and poverty aren’t exclusively the way to go about resolving them, but there’s more money to be recovered in administrative costs, cost overruns, corruption, and bloat in a number of already present projects around the globe than there is to try and cut science funding that’s actually beneficial to our communities, our planet, and our society.

I’m not going to go so far as to suggest that the search for water on the moon represents some massive boon to humanity or some huge benefit for future colonization plans although those are distinctly possible – the cost of bringing equipment to extract water from the moon’s surface is much lower than the cost of bringing enough water to support a human expedition to the moon – but more importantly this is the kind of scientific experiment that not only tells us more about the universe around us but helps us understand how our own world came to be.

It’s time we started marginalizing anti-science progressives the same way we marginalized anti-science conservatives during the Bush Administration and the Republican reign in Congress. It’s one thing to pervert science into justifying your political ideology, it’s another to claim science is a waste of money when it’s not directly influential to your personal chosen social issue. The latter is almost worse, and is just as despicable. We don’t hear the anti-science progressives complain when NASA launches experiments looking to collect data on climate change, and we don’t hear about the millions NIH spends on new vaccines and treatments because they can be directly tied to something that a number of those same progressives care about.

But when it comes to experiments in all branches of science that may not have a direct impact on today’s problems, even if they’ll yield future impact, these folks crawl out of their holes and complain about the costs. The anti-science progressives don’t realize they’re only a jump away from the anti-science conservatives who would rather the money be funneled into bombs and guns then exploration and discovery. Just like their counterparts who would rather see no money spent on things like space science, environmental science, and biology, these anti-science progressives let themselves be caught up in thinking that the government and thus the world should revolve around the cause they personally champion, ignoring the fact that any and every government, organization, or community is fully capable of focusing on more than one priority at one time, even if they themselves are not.

Making policy decisions based on your gut or some crystal worshipping, lofty gut feeling that we’re all one and all connected would be fine in an autocracy, but in a democracy where the people need evidence that their interests are being upheld, science plays a critical role in making sure that the things we do to our world aren’t harmful, the things we learn are meaningful, and the choices we make matter.

There are still people out there with their heads in the sand, claiming that global warming and climate change aren’t caused or at least exacerbated by human influence, that climate change is a “religion” instead of scientific fact. To these people, the phrase “just because you want it to be the case doesn’t make it so” applies ten-fold. Just because these people don’t want to share responsibility for the damage we’re causing to our ecosystem (ironically, these are the same people who nihilistically and stupidly claim that you can’t “harm” the Earth because there’s nothing we can do to really really damage it that it won’t recover from) doesn’t mean the damage isn’t happening, and doesn’t mean that we don’t need to do something about it now.

The Obama administration recently declassified satellite imagery that the Bush administration had kept under lock and key for years, mostly with the intent of keeping the so-called climate change “debate” alive long enough that they didn’t have to risk their pocketbooks by doing anything about it, and they didn’t want to have to present even more clear and damning evidence in front of the American people that climate change is real, is happening now, and is having a very visceral impact on the environment.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military. The photographs, taken by spy satellites over the past decade, confirm that in recent years vast areas in high latitudes have lost their ice cover in summer months.

The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice – a record loss – were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.

Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery. Ice cover for 2008 was almost as bad as for 2007, and this year levels look equally sparse.

When you talk to the people who live there; who make their livelihoods in those waters, they’ll tell you the same thing. Let’s be clear – weather does not climate make, and the two are not the same thing by any stretch, but there are some disturbing trends that simply can’t be ignored.

The Obama administration is already taking steps to bring science back to its proper place of investigation, observation, and limited recommendation in public life. Now comes the hard part – getting the American people and their elected representatives to garner the guts and will to do something about what the scientific community has been telling us for years.

[ Revealed: The Secret Evidence of Global Warming Bush Tried to Hide ]
Source: The Guardian UK

Oh GM, this is why you can’t have nice things….like an attractive balance sheet.

General Motors Corp Vice Chairman Bob Lutz has defended remarks he made dismissing global warming as a “total crock of shit,” saying his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles.

Sure thing Lutz, that liquid falling on the rest of the world from your office window is fertilizer. Really it is.

All gags aside, it’s amazing that there are still people out there who doubt the credibility of the droves upon droves of scientists and experimental proof worldwide that global warming and climate change are real, extant problems. Then again, it’s not so amazing when those same doubters are often paid to to be doubters. It can’t be reality if I’m paid to think it’s not, can it?

And yes, that sentiment applies to people in Congress as well. I suppose I should have expected as much from General Motors, since they still haven’t shaken the sleep from their eyes to realize that the American people aren’t interested in gas guzzling SUVs anymore and they were the last ones at the fuel efficiency party. These are the same folks who throw more money at their marketing to tell the world they’re committed to environmentally friendly automobiles than they do at their research into the same topic. If it proves anything else, it should prove that companies – especially American automakers, since they seem to have the hardest time with this – put less importance on being green than they do on making everyone believe that they’re green. They’re almost as bad as the oil companies (have you seen the most recent Chevron commercials? Somebody get a shovel!), but it’s a hop, skip, and jump between their respective boardrooms, so there’s no surprise there either.

This is my favorite part though:

In a posting on his GM blog on Thursday, Lutz said those “spewing virtual vitriol” at him for minimizing the threat of climate change were “missing the big picture.”

“What they should be doing in earnest is forming opinions, not about me but about GM and what this company is doing that is … hugely beneficial to the causes they so enthusiastically claim to support,” he said in a posting titled, “Talk About a Crock.”

It’s funny that Lutz really believes that the “big picture” again has to do with his company. Sorry buddy, the “big picture” is about the health, sustainability, and future of our planet, not about your company and what remarkably little GM is doing to be an environmentally friendly automaker. The company is leaps and bounds behind (as has been the case in most areas for the past 20 years) its Japanese and foreign competitors in terms of environmental friendliness and willingness to include public desire for more fuel-efficient vehicles in its lineup.

It’s also entertaining that Lutz is more than willing to speak on behalf of GM when it pleases him, but when he says something that’s a little embarrassing, he’s willing to dangle the straw man of “don’t look at me! Look at the company!” out in force. Sorry Lutz, MBA 101 reminds you that your actions have a direct impact on the company you speak for, and you always speak for your company.

“My thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I make to advance the cause of General Motors,” he wrote.

This from the guy sitting at the company that gave us the Hummer. Credibility, anyone?

[ GM Exec Stands by Calling Global Warming a 'Crock' ]
Source: Planet Ark (courtesy of Truthout)

I’m not really one to follow the “Cult of Gore,” but I have to admit that the man has always been an environmentalist, and certainly has the credentials to be a flag carrier for modern environmentalism. It’s entertaining and telling in its own right that the majority of the attacks against global warming are generally directed at Gore himself, his personal lifestyle, or the things he does and owns, as if those things alone are some kind of irrefutable proof for or to the contrary of the global climate change discussion.

Mind you – the discussion that apparently only continues in the annals of political theatre, and among pundits who are either willing to manufacture the junk science they need to prove their own point, or the folks who have been so misinformed that they now believe themselves experts. Unfortunately for those folks, the scientific debate on climate change is all but over. Climatologists, meteorologists, and geophysicists alike all agree that the climate is changing in an unnatural way that cannot be tied to natural cycles, that indeed human activities on Earth are the root cause, and the effects can be catastrophic for society as we understand it unless we either do something to adapt or correct the damage.

Unfortunately, a number of people are still trying to alter climate data and feed it to politicians on their side to bolster their claims in the public arena, if nothing else:

Research aimed at disputing the scientific consensus on global warming is part of a huge public misinformation campaign funded by some of the world’s largest carbon polluters, former Vice President Al Gore said Tuesday.

“There has been an organized campaign, financed to the tune of about $10 million a year from some of the largest carbon polluters, to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community,” Gore said at a forum in Singapore. “In actuality, there is very little disagreement.”

Gore likened the campaign to the millions of dollars spent by U.S. tobacco companies years ago on creating the appearance of scientific debate on smoking’s harmful effects.

It’s true, and not a comparison that hasn’t been made before. There are ways to maintain our environment without sacrificing technological and economic growth. It just appears that too many people are both too focused on the bottom line and simultaneously too lazy to explore them.

[ Gore: Polluters Manipulate Climate Info ]
Source: The Associated Press

But it goes on from there. Newsweek reports on more of the “pay for false information” racket:

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless. “They patterned what they did after the tobacco industry,” says former senator Tim Wirth, who spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the Clinton administration. “Both figured, sow enough doubt, call the science uncertain and in dispute. That’s had a huge impact on both the public and Congress.”

Just last year, polls found that 64 percent of Americans thought there was “a lot” of scientific disagreement on climate change; only one third thought planetary warming was “mainly caused by things people do.” In contrast, majorities in Europe and Japan recognize a broad consensus among climate experts that greenhouse gases—mostly from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to power the world’s economies—are altering climate. A new NEWSWEEK Poll finds that the influence of the denial machine remains strong. Although the figure is less than in earlier polls, 39 percent of those asked say there is “a lot of disagreement among climate scientists” on the basic question of whether the planet is warming; 42 percent say there is a lot of disagreement that human activities are a major cause of global warming. Only 46 percent say the greenhouse effect is being felt today.

But the activities of the deniers is far more sinister than that. Since the science won’t work in their favor, the gameplan is to skip the laboratory entirely and go straight to the halls of government:

The reaction from industries most responsible for greenhouse emissions was immediate. “As soon as the scientific community began to come together on the science of climate change, the pushback began,” says historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. Individual companies and industry associations—representing petroleum, steel, autos and utilities, for instance—formed lobbying groups with names like the Global Climate Coalition and the Information Council on the Environment. ICE’s game plan called for enlisting greenhouse doubters to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact,” and to sow doubt about climate research just as cigarette makers had about smoking research. ICE ads asked, “If the earth is getting warmer, why is Minneapolis [or Kentucky, or some other site] getting colder?” This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

Shaping public opinion was only one goal of the industry groups, for soon after Hansen’s sweat-drenched testimony they faced a more tangible threat: international proposals to address global warming. The United Nations had scheduled an “Earth Summit” for 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, and climate change was high on an agenda that included saving endangered species and rain forests. ICE and the Global Climate Coalition lobbied hard against a global treaty to curb greenhouse gases, and were joined by a central cog in the denial machine: the George C. Marshall Institute, a conservative think tank. Barely two months before Rio, it released a study concluding that models of the greenhouse effect had “substantially exaggerated its importance.” The small amount of global warming that might be occurring, it argued, actually reflected a simple fact: the Sun is putting out more energy. The idea of a “variable Sun” has remained a constant in the naysayers’ arsenal to this day, even though the tiny increase in solar output over recent decades falls far short of explaining the extent or details of the observed warming.

The above snippets were published in an incredible Newsweek article, posted online by StopGlobalWarming.org, a non-profit dedicated to doing something about global warming and maneuvering past the roadblocks that industry groups and their allies continue to put up, both in the political and scientific arenas. The piece itself is long and full of pertinent information, so I won’t repub the entire post here, but it ends with the best summary I’ve seen in a global warming article in a lon time:

Look for the next round of debate to center on what Americans are willing to pay and do to stave off the worst of global warming. So far the answer seems to be, not much. The NEWSWEEK Poll finds less than half in favor of requiring high-mileage cars or energy-efficient appliances and buildings. No amount of white papers, reports and studies is likely to change that. If anything can, it will be the climate itself. This summer, Texas was hit by exactly the kind of downpours and flooding expected in a greenhouse world, and Las Vegas and other cities broiled in record triple-digit temperatures. Just last week the most accurate study to date concluded that the length of heat waves in Europe has doubled, and their frequency nearly tripled, in the past century. The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century. Snowpack whose water is crucial to both cities and farms is diminishing. It’s enough to make you wish that climate change were a hoax, rather than the reality it is.

[ Global Warming Deniers: A Well-Funded Machine ]
Source: NewsWeek (courtesy of StopGlobalWarming.org)

Every now and again, I’ll get an occasional comment that I flush down the drain with the rest of the spam, usually a conservative web surfer long on gusto and short on intelligence, who rather than taking the time to read and learn something (either from me or the rest of the world) they’ll opt to leave some snark behind as if it’s their personal vindication. There’s a reason I don’t don’t post those when I get them – it’s not often, but when I do I like to refer to the fact that this is a safe space for the reality-based community, and sadly we all know that reality has a liberal bias. This time, the person said something that made me laugh so hard that I literally had to share it; he pointed out that “liberal” is just a word for people “buried in their own self denial.” Seriously, I had to share that one, because it was posted in light of so many recent events that it’s hard to even begin how a conservative could utter those words with a straight face.

It didn’t help that he sought to bolster his lack of point with an article from the infamous Heritage Foundation, a group known to have racists, xenophobes, and other far-right wingnuts on staff and parade themselves as a thinktank – I wonder if their sole reason for existance is to supply talk radio hosts with the manufactured “studies” and “polls” that they like to quote while on the air spouting their quarter-truth nonsense. Even so, I thought the real point was the whole “self denial” thing. So, winghunter, while I rarely find such commentary worth the time and energy of a post, you hit the jackpot. Let’s talk about self-denial, shall we? I think you’ll find it’s not the political left that seems to have a problem with saying one thing and doing something else. Let’s get started.

[ White House Is Accused of Putting Politics Over Science ]
Source: The New York Times

Former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona testified in front of a congressional panel last week that essentially every move he made during his tenure as Surgeon General during the Bush Administration’s early years was watched and advised upon for its political impact. Every speech he wanted to give, every appearance he wanted to make, he was told by the White House that he would mention the president every so often or a certain number of times during the speech, and that his speeches and appearances would be, in part, platforms for the President’s political agenda. When the Surgeon General wanted to publish papers and documents setting health care policy and outlining the science behind it, the White House would step in and make sure that the science didn’t interfere with their political agenda, and if it did, it’d be removed, whitewashed, or simply altered to fit the party line.

Sadly, only the type of conservatives that this Administration embodies would pervert science and twist the facts in order to support their political agenda, or worse, simply remove the facts from public knowledge altogether to keep the American people in the dark about the truth. Control information and you control the populace, after all, and if you keep information like the fact that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t work under your hat, you can continue to rabidly fund abstinence-only programs, make your evangelical conservative base happy, and claim to server the public good when in reality you’re likely doing more harm than anything else. When Carmona attempted to point out that sex ed programs in America’s schools should include a mix of information about contraceptives and abstinence, he was rebuked by the Administration. When he was invited to a meeting about global warming, he expected that he was invited to explain the science to the people in the room. He came, did so, and was never invited back because they had already decided that global warming was a “liberal cause” and was to be dismissed, science or no science.

Dr. Carmona, who served as surgeon general from 2002 to 2006, said White House officials would not allow him to speak or issue reports about stem cells, emergency contraception, sex education, or prison, mental and global health issues because of political concerns. Top administration officials delayed for years and attempted to “water down” a landmark report on secondhand tobacco smoke, he said in sworn testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

He was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he gave, Dr. Carmona said. He was asked to make speeches to support Republican political candidates and to attend political briefings, at least one of which included Karl Rove, the president’s senior political adviser, he said.

And administration officials even discouraged him from attending the Special Olympics because, he said, of that charitable organization’s longtime ties to the Kennedy family.

“I was specifically told by a senior person, ‘Why would you want to help those people?’ ” Dr. Carmona said.

Apparently reality, not to mention science, is a liberal cause – it would seem that the conservatives running the Administration are in a state of self-denial; believing that political will alone can make the world change, and that rewriting some text or refusing to publish a study or scientific report will be enough to alter reality.

[ Republican State Rep. Exposed Himself to Female Employee, Chased Her Screaming, "Suck It" ]
Source: Alternet

The North Carolina Republican that just happened to be the vice chairman of the North Carolina House committee on children, youth and families was forced to resign after a “personal complaint” was filed against him over the alleged “suck it” matter. So a gentleman, who spent his political career telling us what’s decent and indecent, what’s acceptable and what’s not acceptable, and doing his utmost to wedge his own personal morality into public policy apparently has none of his own. I think that counts as living in a state of self denial: “I know what’s right and wrong for all of you, but it doesn’t apply to me.” Typical, frankly.

[ GOP Struggles With McCain's Florida Campaign Co-Chair's Oral Sex Bust, Vitter's Diaper Fetish ]
Source: AlterNet

You know, people’s tastes are people’s tastes, but as a social progressive, I have no problems saying that whatever you prefer in the privacy of your bedroom is your business and I have no intention of enforcing arbitrary moral standards based on one particular belief system on you – partially because not everyone holds the same belief system, partially because what you do in the privacy of your home with a consenting partner is none of the government’s business. But it’s hilarious to watch people like this one, Florida Republican Rep. Bob Allen, the man who tried to pass a “Lewd and Lascivious Behavior Act,” then offered to perform on an undercover officer a sex act that would have violated his own provision. Yet another right-winger living in his own little fantasy world of – you guessed it – self denial. After all, his job is to enforce morality, not abide by it, right?

[ Rudy GOP Pal in D.C. Madam's Little Black Book ]
Source: New York Daily News

Okay, I think we’ve driven home the psuedo-morality point, but between that and scientific suppression, a topic we’ve extensively covered here, I think they’re two absolutely fabulous examples of the conservative right’s own “self-denial.” It’s in light of reading stories like that that I find it incredibly amusing that someone could dare claim that the progressive left is the group that says one thing and does another, and while I’m sure that every politician is guilty of backtracking on their word at some point, for some silly reason it seems to be the conservatives that spout one thing from the bully pulpit of their statehouses and federal offices and then shove their heads in the sand when the truth comes to light, or worse, fail to embody those same morals and ideals themselves. Funny, isn’t it?

[ Arbitrary Justice, Hidden Truth ]
Source: TomPaine.com

Another fabulous example, one that has more to do with the rule of law – or lack thereof – when it comes to the right wing these days. The “Scooter” Libby trial, which was probably the most fair and widely accepted as impartial trial of a political figure in ages, turned out against the conservatives, and the man they chose to be the fall guy and excuse their friends from using the identity of a CIA operative as a political weapon to silence the folks who dared stand up and demand that the American people be told the truth before going to war in Iraq, wound up being sentenced to prison for his crime. The man lied to a grand jury in order to obscure an investigation into the leak of the operative’s name, and he was caught. He was tried, and he was sentenced in accordance with federal sentencing guidelines. The conservatives, somehow believing that the law doesn’t apply to them – again, what’s that? Self-denial? – brought out the torches and pitchforks to claim that Libby shouldn’t have been sentenced so harshly, and accused special prosecutor Pat Fitzgerald of this funny little thing called “prosecutorial overreach,” which is the conservative’s new label for “legal action we don’t agree with.” It used to be “judicial activism,” but we haven’t heard much of that since the Supreme Court started ruling in their favor. Wonder where that went.

Anyway, so Scooter is tried by a jury of his peers, convicted, and sentenced to prison by a judge. The President sweeps in and commutes his sentence, without consulting with the Justice Department or anyone else before making his legal decision, basing his decision on essentially nothing more than his personal opinion and the emails he likely received from his friends. He couldn’t pardon him entirely lest he really show the country that he has no respect for the rule of law, but he may as well have – Libby paid his fine by check and walks away a free man, completely unpunished for his crime, his silence on what he knew and his job obfuscating the truth to the leak, as one congressional Democrat put it, “bought and paid for.” So while we know who outed Valerie Plame, and we know what cabal of conservative warhawks decided that they were going to war, truth be damned – again, in a state of self-denial about their responsibility to the truth and to the American people – they’ll never face justice. Working as intended.

It’s so odd, that the judge in the Libby case, one not known for leaning in any political direction and known very well for following federal sentencing guidelines when handing down his rulings, was perplexed by the President’s desire to step in.
[ Libby Judge 'Perplexed' by Clemency ]
Source: The Los Angeles Times

Meanwhile, while investigating the political firing of US Attorneys from the Justice Department, the President has clamped down on any and all information using the Nixon-esque claim of executive privilege to keep anyone who might know the truth from saying anything. In fact, his executive privilege extends beyond the walls of the White House and the records of the White House and to Republican National Committee email inboxes that – simply by claiming privilege – we now know have information that would show that the President and his political advisers were part of a plan to fire US Attorneys that didn’t share their political beliefs. Similar to what they did with the Surgeon General, but they wanted people who would let Republican scandals like the ones mentioned above slide, but hone in on any Democratic misdoings, rather than upholding everyone to the same standard of the law. Again, the law apparently only applies to them when they feel like it. And now that it’s coming to light, the President claims that the rule of law doesn’t apply to him or his people again, and is telling them not to appear before congress in the face of a subpoena:

[ Miers Warned of Contempt Citation for Ignoring House Subpoena ]
Source: Bloomberg News

[ Miers Refuses to Comply, Contempt Front and Center ]
Source: TruthOut.org

All this in the face of a half-hearted attempt at reconciliation: “Sure, my people can talk to Congress, but only if there’s no record of the conversation so we can’t deny anything later, no oath so we can lie and get away with it, no cameras so the public doesn’t know, and well, no binding reason for us to talk to you or tell you the truth at all. Sound good?” Who’s in self denial, again?

Similarly, we have another example of the conservative bloc deciding that the rule of law applies to everyone but their own:
[ By Their Silence Today, U.S. Senators Condone House of Death Murders ]
Source: Narconews.com

[ Senate Panel Hears Fatal Border Shooting Case ]
Source: NPR News

So let’s set out the story, without any spin (at least for now) and dare to do something that didn’t even happen on Capitol Hill during the hearings into the matter.

Two border patrol agents stop an unarmed Mexican man suspected of trafficking drugs. The man starts to run towards the Mexican border. Two border patrol officers give chase. The two officers draw their weapons and open fire, injuring the man. The two officers then destroy evidence related to the shooting, one of them picking up their spent shell casings in order to conceal how many shots were fired. The two officers fail to report the shooting or the dead suspect to their superiors per protocol. The two men cover up their actions, and are caught. They are tried, and found guilty, and sentenced by the court to 12 and 11 years in prison.

Conservatives rallied against the ruling, claiming the sentences – mandatory per the law, mind you – are excessive, and that these two men were simply doing their duty and trying to apprehend a suspect. It’s amazing, somehow these two men are heralded as heroed by the conservative blogosphere and wingnut activists who want to see the officers go free. They shot an unarmed man in the back while he ran away, and then covered up the evidence, and somehow this makes them role models, worthy of public praise, and worthy of begging the President for yet another set of pardons. Aside from the fact that the man was unarmed, shot while running away, and the police officers didn’t bother to chase for long (the note about the Mexican border is irrelevant – the border patrol can continue pursuit if necessary) and decided to shoot first and think later, somehow this makes these officers worthy of praise. The worst part is that they did think later- they thought to cover up their actions, and that’s a crime.

But not if you’re a conservative – your thought process somehow gets mired in the fact that the man is Mexican, one of those people, and suspected of a crime himself, and somehow that allows police carte blanche to do whatever they choose. Unfortunately, the prosecutor in this case is being accused of – you guessed it – prosecutorial overreach, with even the venerable Diane Feinstein bending to the throngs of pitchfork-armed conservative groups in the hearing on Capitol Hill into the matter. But here’s the clincher for me:

Johnny Sutton, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, strenuously defended his prosecutors’ decisions in the controversial case, which has proven a headache for the White House, the Justice Department and Border Patrol. Sutton himself has been attacked as “Johnny Satan” and as the Mike Nifong of Texas, a reference to the much-criticized North Carolina prosecutor in the Duke lacrosse case who was recently disbarred for misconduct.

“Agents Compean and Ramos crossed the line. They are not heroes,” Sutton said. “They deliberately shot an unarmed man in the back without justification, destroyed evidence to cover it up and lied about it. These are serious crimes.

I don’t think there’s much more to this. Just because he shot someone that the conservatives don’t like – and by that I don’t mean drug smuggler, I very much mean Mexican. (in fact, Republican John Cornyn tried to link this into the immigration debate somehow, which only further proves that there are other issues at play here, namely the racist, xenophobic mentality endemic in the conservative community. “protect our own at all costs,” they’ll say. Something they used to say every time a Black man was lynched or beaten, or when a Black woman was raped by a White man.) And yet, the conservative blogosphere has descended on the issue, outraged.

Somehow the law doesn’t apply to them when they don’t agree with it. No one’s disagreeing that the now dead admitted drug trafficker is a bad man and should have gone to jail, but somehow the rational and the conservative part ways when they get to the point of “but should he have been shot in the back by two border patrol agents who then covered up their shooting.” Amazing. Talk about self-denial.

Meanwhile, Presidential fellatio continues to be an impeachable offense.

But I suppose that’s my self denial coming to the fore, isn’t it?

A story on NPR’s Morning Edition caught my attention this morning, about the plight of Tuvalu; you know, the nation that owns and sells the rights to all of those .tv domain names that you see all over the place.

The island nation of Tuvalu is located in the remote south pacific, made up of a series of coral islands, and the people there live a simple, quiet life, in balance with the nature around them. The first thing, for example, that they did with all of the .tv naming rights was pave the main road, in it’s 5 mile glory. But their way of life is a simple one, and they’re happy with it. However, when the United Nations Security Council took up the issue of climate change as a matter of global security, the people of Tuvalu put the money together required to send an eight person delegation to the United Nations in New York City to testify in front of the UNSC, including a man named Afelee Pita and his wife.

Pita testified that global climate change is a very real and present threat to the security of his people and his country, and that if sea levels rise, the people of Tuvalu will be forced to abandon their sovereignty, their homes, and their way of life to move to other countries, with all of the risks and problems that may entail. He noted that they have already seen the many coral reefs off of their islands begin to die because of the increase in water temperature. They’ve seen changes in fish stocks and habits, they’ve witnessed the changes to their environment already, and they fear what may be to come if the rest of the world refuses to pull their heads from the sand, take off the blinders, and see the world beyond their front doors.

Tuvalu’s situation is not atypical to other Pacific island nations in Polynesia and Micronesia; entire nations and island chains could be swallowed up by rising sea levels while Americans, comfortable in the midwest, “debate” the science around global warming, which is really code for “the science is on the table, I’m just going to cover my eyes, plug my ears, and claim there’s a debate.” While Americans mock the efforts of their peers to educate, inform, and mobilze people to do something about global warming, the livelihoods and lives of animals, people, and now entire nations around the world hangs at a time when we have an opportunity to do something about the problem before we begin to suffer very real and very drastic effects. Sadly, I worry that we may be forced to come face to face with those effects before anyone’s awake enough to do something. So much for an ounce of prevention.

But back to the case of Tuvalu, and their admirable, honorable ambassador:

“The world has moved from a global threat once called the Cold War, to what now should be considered the Warming War,” Pita told the Security Council. “Our conflict is not with guns and missiles but with weapons from everyday lives — chimney stacks and exhaust pipes.”

Tuvalu’s fear is that ocean waters will rise, cyclones will grow more intense, people will be forced to move to other countries, and Tuvalu — along with its way of life — will disappear.

“We face many threats associated with climate change,” Pita said to the U.N. “Ocean warming is changing the very nature of our island nation. Slowly our coral reefs are dying through coral bleaching. We are witnessing changes to fish stocks. And we face the increasing threat of more severe cyclones. With the highest (land) point of four meters above sea level, the threat of more cyclones is extremely disturbing.”

The world beyond our front door. A world with whom we, as much as we fight not to, are inseparably connected. It’s time for us to realize this.

[ Tuvalu Envoy Takes Up Global Warming Fight ]
Source: National Public Radio