Month: November 2016

Washington’s Carbon Tax: Don’t Let Perfect Derail the Good

I-732 is the designation of the Carbon Tax initiative on the Washington State ballot, that has drawn surprising resistance from some folks that should know better.

UPDATE: Grist:

I-732 has split the environmental community, as we reported last week. Some climate activists and scientists like James Hansen support it as a way to make polluters pay and start fighting climate change. Others, like Jones and Klein, oppose it, arguing, among other things, that it’s a “corporate giveaway” because it would lower a manufacturing tax.

Many corporations don’t seem to appreciate the gift, though. Koch Industries has donated $50,000 to the No on 732 campaign. In total, manufacturers, utilities, oil industry groups, and other big business interests have pumped more than $1.3 million into a campaign to defeat the measure, much of it in the last few weeks.

Never thought we’d see Naomi Klein and the Koch brothers on the same side of anything — but, hey, stranger things have happened the epic election cycle of 2016.

If someone’s throwing you a life preserver, you might not want to dither about the color.

Wake the hell up, people.  Remember “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between Al Gore and George Bush”?
Same impulse that demonized Obama, Gore, and now Hillary – might torpedo Washington’s experiment in carbon pricing.

Naomi Klein in The Nation:

The backers of I-732 are running on a pessimistic platform of “just do something,” preying on the real urgency that so many of us feel in the face of the climate crisis. But sometimes “something” is worse than nothing, especially if it will stand in the way of better proposals down the road.

A paltry, revenue-neutral carbon tax simply cannot deliver the massive green energy investments and community-driven solutions we all need. Science-based climate action means an unprecedented, rapid, and decisive shift to renewables; a truly equitable carbon tax can play an important role in spurring the transition, but it won’t work unless we make the polluters pay, and put their immoral profits to work repairing the damage they have knowingly created. The way to do that is to mobilize the broadest possible coalition—led by the front-line communities who stand to benefit most from building a cleaner and fairer economy.

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” I-732 proponents like to say. It sounds good, but it is not what opponents of this initiative are doing. “Perfect” is not on the table—we lost that option when climate action was delayed for decades. So much time has been lost, in fact, that now we have just one shot to get the policy right. And that means we can’t let the politically difficult be the enemy of the scientifically and socially necessary.

 

Continue reading “Washington’s Carbon Tax: Don’t Let Perfect Derail the Good”

The Weekend Wonk: Climate Denial and the Road to Fascism

trumpputinclimate

Wikipedia:

Anti-intellectualism has been used by totalitarian dictatorships to oppress political dissent. Perhaps its most extreme political form was during the 1970s in Cambodia under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, when people were killed for being academics or even for merely wearing eyeglasses (as it suggested literacy) in the Killing Fields.[2][citation needed]

During the Spanish Civil War and the following dictatorship, General Francisco Franco‘s civilian repression, the White Terror campaign, killed an estimated 200,000 civilians, heavily targeting writers, artists, teachers and professors.

For years, as a young man, observing the imposition of brutal dictatorship in Cambodia, for instance, I wondered how totalitarian regimes could find support for persecuting, even imprisoning and killing, scientists, teachers, doctors, the very educated classes that civil society relies on to sustain itself.

I have my answer now.

Reuters:

Wildfires crackled across Siberia this summer, turning skies ochre and sending up enough smoke from burning pines to blot out satellite views of the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal.

To many climate scientists, the worsening fires are a consequence of Siberia getting hotter, the carbon unleashed from its burning forests and tundra only adding to man-made fossil fuel emissions. Siberia’s wildfire season has lengthened in recent years and the 2015 blazes were among the biggest yet, caking the lake, the “Pearl of Siberia”, in ash and scorching the surrounding permafrost.

But the Russian public heard little mention of climate change, because media coverage across state-controlled television stations and print media all but ignored it. On national TV, the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out.
–

Russia’s official view appears to have changed little since 2003, when Putin told an international climate conference that warmer temperatures would mean Russians “spend less on fur coats” while “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that”.

The president believes that “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia,” says Stanislav Belkovsky, a political analyst and critic of Putin. “That is why this subject is not topical for the majority of the Russian mass media and society in general.”

 

 

If you have not seen yet, drop everything, grab coffee and watch video above. I’ll wait.

Infowars:(I’ll not give them a link but you can google if you wish)

Russian President Vladimir Putin says global warming is being used as an economic weapon against his country.

He characterized climate change as a “fraud” used to prevent Russia from tapping its vast oil and natural gas reserves.

Greenpeace claims 85 percent of CO2 equivalent emissions in Russia come from its energy industry.

According to a political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky, Putin believes “there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries, including Russia.”

NPR:

With just days until the election, some Senate Republicans are suggesting that when it comes to the Supreme Court, eight is enough. Eight justices, that is.

For the first time, some Senate Republicans are saying that if Hillary Clinton is elected, the GOP should prevent anyone she nominates from being confirmed to fill the current court vacancy, or any future vacancy.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Climate Denial and the Road to Fascism”