This is Binky, my car. Binky makes me do happy-cheese hands.
Binky is a 1998 Honda Civic who gets 30-35 MPG, and according to the smog check she emits no NOX and hilariously trace amounts of every other pollutant they test for. Oh Binky, my Binky, we will explore the wilds of California and the Western US together.
However, all cars have a dark side, not least of which is being monster climate change machines. The more immediate concern, however, is paperwork. So, here was my day:
1:30 get up, flail about
2:00 go to DMV to register car title
4:00 exit DMV, go to Berkeley Parking office which closes at 4:30 and doesn’t open again until Monday.
4:15 arrive at Berkeley Parking. Feel very proud of self.
4:45 get mousemeat for Thorstein.
5:00 Christmas shopping
5:45 get home, decide to take a nap because Christmas shopping is, you know, exhausting
9:30 pm wake up from “nap”.
I really haven’t had a full night of sleep since finals started two weeks ago, and I think my body is angry.
I would love to make this longer, but I have an EPIC FINAL PAPER due in 3 1/2 hours. Here is what you need to know:
- Things have gone a little crazy in Copenhagen.
- Civil society has been severely restricted from entering the conference venue (ie. only one out of 20 people is allowed in), and have effectively been banned on Friday, which is the final day of high level negotiations.
- Friends of the Earth, which in my opinion remains the “big ENGO” most closely connected to the grassroots, has been banned from entering the venue at all as of this morning. FYI, in my experience (and I’ve been to a few of these things), this is unprecedented. And totally at odds with the UNFCCC’s ostensible commitment to civil society participation and, oh, I don’t know, functional democracy.
- 350.org has called for a climate justice fast to be taken by individuals, for 24 hours, starting at any time on Thursday. I think this is a great action, and maybe when I turn my paper in I will tell you why in more detail. Let me just say now that I am participating, I think you should too, and i think you should tell all your friends. Take the time to think about the way climate change is going to cause worldwide food scarcity and famine. Pray.
- 350 is also asking you to call heads of state: check out the handy list and the call tool.
Go go go – YOU CAN HELP, SO DO IT.
(FYI: keep an eye on things at 350.org, It’s Getting Hot in Here, and Grist)
I could swear I just heard a spot on All Things Considered which was about the role of regional greenhouse gas cap-and-trade programs, which specifically used the term ’subnationals’. Then I had a little nerdgasm because the specific geeky field that my research deals with (the role of subnational units in climate politics and policy) was on NPR! That makes it real! That makes it a term which people might someday understand when I talk about it! Now I can’t find the piece listed on the website, because you know I would link it here. I swear it happened. My research, it’s real.
It worries me that I’m so excited about this. Because I’m really, really excited.
Meanwhile, my knitting has hit a roadblock. In September, I started knitting Evelyn Clark’s Swallowtail Shawl. It’s a beautiful, elegant pattern which does the magic trick of looking disproportionately impressive in relation to the amount of effort it requires. Because I had gorgeous skein of wool/silk lace yarn from A Verb for Keeping Warm and I didn’t want to be left with 300 unused yards, I up-sized the pattern. A lot. The inevitable has now occurred. 10 rows from the end, and I’m out of yarn.
There is a solution to this problem: I wrote a pathetic email to the wondrous Kristine Vejar of AVFKW (did I mention I love their yarn? I really love it.) and she said she would work on getting me another skein, because they don’t have the colorway in stock. (Do you think Berocco would do this? Cascade? No. Sustainable local businesses are made of win.) But it forces me to wait, when I was so into the project I was working on it feverishly for weeks, falling asleep tangled in my circular needles.
I’m okay with this. There is a place in my life for knowing that even though I’ve worked so hard, and done something to the best of my ability, gratification is just going to take a little bit longer. I have decided to take pleasure in the delay. This is, really, what knitting is all about. Taking the slow approach to life. Making it by hand. Making it beautiful, and knowing that the time you spent working on it is part of its beauty. A piece of hand knitting is filled with the experiences that were its creation. It’s profoundly human in this way.
And maybe it’s because I see everything through the lens of climate change (see above), but there’s something in this for social movements. Nothing that’s really significant is made overnight, not something that’s going to last. This is not to say that there is a lack of urgency: we’re on a deadline here. There is no place in social movements for thumb twiddling. But I think there is danger in the instant gratification of action for action’s sake; the times in between are when we learn, when we become creative, when we sleep, when we dream. There is a place for waiting.
So, my first response to the headline below and its accompanying picture was, naturally, “Maybe that’s because Clinton can spell.”
Truly, I wish I could tell you that you could soon be picking up a self-pitying Sarah Palin-penned epic about the travails of lipstick, but alas, this is a glorious confluence of google image search, mild illiteracy, and some very, very clever cover art.
(By the way, you can go back to the original page to check whether it’s still there. As far as I can tell, it’s been up for 12 hours and nobody’s caught the error. If you take a closer look at my screencap you’ll notice the caption is “the cover of Sarah Palin’s new book”. One would hope the copy editors will be, shall we say, going rouge.)
Nonetheless, it warms my single payer, public option, terrorist fist jabbing cockles to see such an appropriate comeuppance, however small. Palin’s political philosophy is built on all kinds of illiteracy: geographical, political, factual, logical, mathematical, ethical, biblical… not to mention she’s part of the general Republican assault on public education. How nice to hope that she might back down a little, at least when it comes to commonly misspelled words.
Did you know that the EPA had a most wanted list?
How cool is that? Raul Chavez-Beltran, I’ve got my eye on you. You too, Dennis Feron. And especially you, Mauro Valenzuela. Granted, I blame the company for lax practices, but duuude, you killed 110 people.
Should you see any of these people, the website has a convenient web form that you can fill out to report their location. Go EPA!
So apparently there is a new book out from the authors of Frekonomics, which claims that (1) the threat posed by global warming is overhyped and (2) the solution is geoengineering (e.g. shooting sulfate into the atmosphere). Let’s set aside the fact that these claims are both WRONG. If you want more info, as well as a thorough debunking of the book’s claims, read Joe Romm’s piece on Grist (it’s also cross posted to Climate Progress).
My question is this: how long will we have to expend energy debunking the claims of people who are, well, either stupid or wilfully contrarian in the face of overwhelming evidence (read: stupid)? I kind of feel like it has gone far beyond the point at which it’s still a good use of our time (‘us’ being the climate change movement, community, whatever). Like moon landing deniers or 9/11 truthers, these people will keep saying stuff that’s just obviously wrong. What we need to do is start pushing them to the fringe. It’s just stopped being credible, and I almost feel that spending time arguing it down lends it credibility. But maybe I’m just so sick to death of everyone having to repeat the same arguments over and over again I’m losing perspectivel. It is, at best, a pain in the ass and, at worst, a dangerous waste of time.
Teaching, reading, learning, bathing snake (long story), running around, knitting, musicking, more running around, doctor’s appointments, teaching, reading, noting, walking out, campaigning, running around, not blogging. Soon though.
Okay, so I’m finally feeling an irrepressible need to weigh in on the whole Van Jones thing. Mostly cause I got a bunch of hostile/abusive twitter comments from a bunch of people I don’t even know. This (1) pissed me off something awful, and (2) made me realize that this is how it happens. This is how they hounded out Van Jones – the most mainstream environmental justice leader in the country, this is how they’re taking over our national dialogue, this is how they’re going to tear down everything that I believe in and leave me living in a soot-stained land full of people dying of poverty and preventable disease.
I wasn’t even going to write a response to this after Josh Russell wrote such an excellent piece, not to mention the extensive coverage over at It’s Getting Hot in Here. But anger makes me stupid, and distracts me from all those other things I ought to be doing. People, it’s time we take a stand.
First, try reading this Gawker piece about Jones’ resignation and the “right-wing information delivery process”. Be sure to watch the ‘assholes’ video – put together to scare conservatives, mind you – if you haven’t seen it before, and be sure to pay particular attention if you are a Jew, a woman, a black person, or know the racial connotations of the word ‘uppity’.
And for both his activism and his charm he was rewarded with a White House job with the Council on Environmental Quality. He was tasked with making sure stimulus money for green jobs actually went to green jobs. And he’s a great person to have in this administration—he is a genuine environmentalist and the only special interest he’s beholden to is poor people. He is the sort of person we were all praying Obama would bring with him to DC, instead of Larry Summers.
No shit.
To understand why and how he’s being demonized, we have to look at the way information and misinformation makes it way from crazy blogs to crazy pundits to crazy citizens to, suddenly, the non-crazy regular media.
The “why” is simple: he is a genuine left-wing liberal with a White House job. He is black. He used to be radical, and probably still has radical sympathies (you know, caring about poor black people and all that). He is, in other words, fucking terrifying, if you frame his story right.
To understand how this fundamentally decent human being has been painted as the next best thing to Stalin, please take the time to read the whole article, maybe with a cup of tea and a breath mint because it will make you a little bit vomity in your mouth.
Here’s the thing: the information delivery process of the left will never be as effective, as cutting, as devastating, as the right’s. This is why: WE DON’T LIE. This is the problem. (Let’s set aside the whole race-baiting issue, I can’t even deal with that right now.) They win because they lie, and people aren’t smart enough to see it. Or rather, I think the vast majority are smart enough to see it, but have been so effectively trained not to ask questions, that it becomes impossible for them to find their own truth, and they rely on freaky-eyed McCarthyesque zealot lunatics like Glenn Beck to do it for them.
I don’t know how to counteract the lying. Trying to have an intelligent conversation with people who think communists are hiding under the bed (and in the government! oh noes!) and genuinely believe that the Drug Czar is part of some Russkie plot… is probably a lot like having a conversation with a die hard 9/11 Truther. Funny, probably, interesting, maybe, but also a waste of time. The trick, I guess, is to find the people who are happy to ask questions, who really want to know what’s going on, but have so far been too sleepy to do it. People on the left, proud liberals, those who want peace and justice and think that no-one should have to die because they cannot afford healthcare, or go bankrupt because they are sick, in other words, the YOU of my subject line, it is time to get up and do something. We can counteract hate and division and bigotry with tolerance, we can counteract lies with truth. And patience, probably. The bad guys won this battle, yes, it’s true. But the war of ideas – the struggle to heal our country – is so far from over. And we’re going to fucking win.
Cross posted from It’s Getting Hot in Here
In a recent editorial article for the academic journal Climatic Change, Jon Barnett argues that the current debate about climate change and security is missing the point. Everyone following the news knows the story by now – global warming leads to resource scarcity, and resource scarcity leads to war. Barnett, one of the world’s foremost researchers on climate and security, cautions scholars and activists against making such simplistic assumptions.
A major problem with the popular discourse on climate wars is that it is excessively general, and poorly if at all informed by evidence…. what is passing as research on climate conflicts is not good social science either: it eschews evidence, most of it ignores the large body of research on the causes of conflict generally and on so-called ‘environmental conflicts’ in particular, and very little of it is peer-reviewed.
While there is evidence that resource scarcity does increase the likelihood of violent conflict, correlation is not causation. The current assumption that climatic stress leads to war takes no account of social and cultural responses, to say nothing of international aid and cooperation. Worse still, taking an oversimplified view of conflict related to environmental stress, such as the violence in Darfur, could inure us to the reality of war crimes and atrocities.
Moreover, Barnett points out one more major factor in the discussion of climate security: the military establishment, which has no particular interest in promoting peace. The army is in and of itself a major greenhouse gas emitter – Barnett estimates the U.S. military’s total emissions in 2006 at 1% of the global total. Yet their interest in co-opting the discourse around climate change is more insidious than protecting their desire to emit. Countries which are already powerful through military means need a narrative of conflict to maintain their status on the international stage:
These countries require discourses of global disorder in order to justify their security and trade policies, and their security and defence agencies require problems to justify their continued existence in a world where the threat of war has diminished since the end of the cold war. They seem to be appropriating the dangers of climate change to serve these institutional agendas. That these agendas are inimical to a sustainable world where there are deep cuts in emissions and considerable action on adaptation is obvious.
It is clearly time to adopt a view of climate security which puts peace at the center of the discussion, rather than war. Moreover, it is our job as activists and organizers to expand our scrutiny to include anyone, including the military and the arms trade, whose interests stand at odds to human security and social justice.
turn hate into love
Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church of Hate – those most spectacularly un-Christian of “Christians” – are coming to the Bay Area! (Oh, hatemongers, what will you think of next?) Why am I excited about this? Because it’s a great opportunity to raise some money for GLBT equality, that’s why!
Four of the locations which are being picketed (Lowell High School in San Francisco, Gunn High School in Palo Alto, Jewish Community High School in San Francisco, and George Washington High School in San Francisco) are using this as an opportunity to raise money for their gay-straight alliance clubs through Phelps-a-thon. You can pledge money based on how many minutes the Westboro clan are picketing outside, or make a flat pledge. Trust me when I say that this is the most fun you can have through Paypal.
Also, they’re not coming to the East Bay (I think) so hopefully I won’t have to breathe the same air as them. I’m crossing all my fingers and toes that they stay away from the easy targets like Berkeley and stick to telling children that god hates them.*
* NB: sarcasm.
from → commentary, cranky