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.
Science (mathematicians, really) has shown that a zombie attack must be dealt with immediately and aggressively to prevent the collapse of civilization.
To give the living a fighting chance, the researchers chose “classic” slow-moving zombies as our opponents rather than the nimble, intelligent creatures portrayed in some recent films.
“While we are trying to be as broad as possible in modelling zombies – especially as there are many variables – we have decided not to consider these individuals,” the researchers said.
Even so, their analysis revealed that a strategy of capturing or curing the zombies would only put off the inevitable.
But really, was there any doubt? Pack your cricket bats, people.
Certain members of my vast blog readership (aka my mom) have pointed out that I have so far failed to post pictures from my trip to Hawaii. I apologize for the oversight. To be fair, I don’t actually have that many pictures – it wasn’t really much of a vacation, and I didn’t think pictures of the KAHEA office in Honolulu would be all that stimulating. Okay, well, part of the office was very photogenic:
Which just goes to show that social justice activists have the cutest babies ever. I spent most of my time in the office, occasionally sneaking off to Waikiki beach in the evening for a night swim (highly recommended). KAHEA is so grassroots we silkscreen our own t-shirts – yay arts and crafts!
I also went snorkeling at Hanauma Bay Natural Preserve, which was fantastic, although I wish I had taken the guidebook’s advice and gotten there before everyone had stirred up the sand.
The tides were rough and I was by myself so I didn’t get to the outer reef where the sea turtles live, but I saw the most amazing lineup of fishy creatures I have ever seen. I even saw a bunch of humuhumunukunukuapua’a, in a place where it was quiet enough to hear them munching, their little beaks scraping away at the surface of the coral.
I was pleased to see that the park has solar trash compactors:
And of course I took the customary cheesy self-portrait:
And the not-so-customary bird portrait:
And the even less customary mongoose shot:
I am sitting in the observation car of the Coast Starlight, watching southern Oregon pass by. The forests look ravaged. It’s hard to tell why from this vantage point – storm, fire, pine beetles, clearcutting*? My hunch is that it’s probably a combination of the latter two; I don’t think the beetles will be persuaded by my strongly worded letters or media savvy campaigning skills though. People are only marginally better; our lungs are bleeding and dessicating and we’re calling it a sticky cough. You can taste the dust in the air like chalk and ash. Loggers and beetles, humans and insects, autoerotic asphyxiation.
After applying all my yoga skills towards wedging myself into the train seat in something resembling a recumbent position, my eyelids fluttered open to watch the dawn as we rolled over the nonexistent border between California and Oregon: miles of scrub punctuated by patches of exposed rock looking like bread broken by hand. In halflight and halfsleep, I thought I was on the moon. Ate breakfast while passing Klamath Lake. I’ve never seen so many egrets (herons?), picking daintily through the water like animated glass.
* DFW-style footnote: Clearcutting was the whole spark for the path my life has taken, really, a little flame of natural resources management and righteous indignation.
As you may have heard, prominent Harvard professor and literary figure Henry Louis Gates was arrested Thursday, accused of trying to break into his own home. He showed proof that it was his residence, proof that he was a Harvard professor, and understandably became upset that the officer did not immediately leave the premises. Now, look, I understand that Professor Gates is a cranky guy, but he’s nearly sixty and he walks with a cane. Nonetheless the officer felt the need to handcuff him and arrest him for disorderly conduct, holding him for several hours. This is sickening. NO WAY would this have happened to a white professor. The charges have been dropped, but it still turns my stomach.
This, of course, comes on the tail end of the similarly gut-churning Sotomayor hearings, where elected officials repeatedly questioned her ability to pass impartial judgments, primarily on the basis that she is a proud Latina and a woman. You know, it bugs me that she explained away her comments about a wise Latina judge vs. a white dude judge as a misstatement. It wasn’t a misstatement. The ‘richness of experience’ that a wise Latina woman possesses includes an intimate knowledge of the inequalities of power and privilege that corrupt not only the legal system, but this country as a whole. Speaking as a white person, I know how impossible it is to get a full understanding of discrimination and oppression without having experienced it yourself. Unless that white male judge has a saint-worthy empathetic understanding of discrimination, race, and poverty, his powers of understanding will be trumped by a wise Latina woman’s most, if not all, of the time. I wish we as a country – not to mention the Neanderthals in the Senate (that means you, Sessions) – were wise enough to recognize, and act upon, the truth of her original statement. Fortunately, it would take a political gaffe of pretty epic proportions to derail her confirmation, so we’ll soon have a rockin’ new Supreme Court justice and Souter can sleep better at night.
Finally, what kind of total dumbass arrests one of the most prominent activist racial scholars in the country? Especially after he shows his Harvard ID? Man, I hope that guy is stripped of his badge. The stupid! It tastes like burning!
Sarah Palin’s new foe: Google Image Search
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.
from → books, politics