Month: March 2020

Republican Consultant: We Built this Moment

Washington Post:

Stuart Stevens is a writer and Republican political consultant who has advised a pro-Bill Weld super PAC in the 2020 election. His book about the Republican Party, “It Was All A Lie,” will be published next month. 

Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.

But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.

Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.

Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party “must stop being the stupid party.” By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer.

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Why COVID is like Climate Change

Legendary climate scientist Ben Santer is in self-quarantine with symptoms, has been tested and waiting for results (America, right?)
Meanwhile he is writing on the parallels between Covid19 and climate change.
Excerpt here:

Ben Santer in Scientific American:

On day five I was tested for the novel coronavirus. I drove to the parking lot outside my doctor’s office. While still seated in the car, a masked and suited nurse practitioner listened to my breathing, measured my temperature, blood pressure and blood oxygenation, and took swabs of my nasal passages. The exam and test took less than five minutes.

I don’t have the results yet. I should get them soon. It will be good to know what I am dealing with. Knowing one’s adversary is always helpful.

While sequestered in my apartment, I’ve thought a lot about how complex systems respond to big perturbations. That’s part of my job. As a climate scientist, I study the atmospheric and ocean responses to different “forcings”—things like massive volcanic eruptions, large changes in the sun’s energy output, or a doubling of atmospheric CO2 levels. I use computer models to analyze how such shocks ripple through the climate system. What characteristic patterns of climate response do they generate? How long does it take for the climate system to return to the pre-shocked state? Are there cases when the system doesn’t spring back?

The novel coronavirus is a major perturbation to complex human systems of governance. Here are a few personal thoughts on “lessons learned” from the U.S. response to this viral perturbation.

Lesson 1: Scientific ignorance can be fatal—particularly if ignorance starts with the U.S. president and trickles down from there. It was scientifically incorrect for President Trump to dismiss the coronavirus as no worse than the seasonal flu. It was scientifically incorrect to advise U.S. citizens to engage in business as usual in the face of a pandemic. Dissemination of such incorrect information by the commander-in-chief helped to spread the novel coronavirus in America. Ignorance served as a potent disease vector.

Lesson 2: The president of the United States failed to accept responsibility for the administration’s chaotic response to the virus. The shortage of reliable tests for the “foreign” virus? Not his fault. Shutting down the White House National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense? Not his decision. The quarantined passengers on a cruise ship off San Francisco? Not his problem. In the Trump administration, the buck never stops at the top.

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Viral Denial: More Parallels with Climate Change…

It will never change. There will always be an audience that wants to be lied to, and someone willing to lie to them.

TPM Muckraker:

The same people who brought you climate change as a hoax think the same about the novel coronavirus.

A think tank influential in the world of climate science denialism pivoted in the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic from its normal slathering of posts contesting the science of global warming towards something more current: contending that COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, is no worse than the seasonal flu.

The group also is saying that the U.S. health-care system could cope with anything the coronavirus would throw at it.

The American Council on Science and Health has produced article after article pointing out that winter is a deadlier season than summer (“this may seem counterintuitive, given how much the media hypes summer heat waves”) and calling former Vice President Al Gore “demented.”

It’s been going on for a while. Back in 2005, the group published an article criticizing the “consensus science” of global warming, while in the late nineties the think-tank deemedworries about climate change “disputed hypothetical events.”

The group has had a variety of funding sources from over the years, including more than $900,000 from the right-wing John M. Olin Foundation and around $600,000 from the F.M. Kirby Foundation.

But apart from money sourced from the conservative donor network, what’s interesting about the think-tank is how it shifted so quickly to dismissing coronavirus as yet another example of junk science.

In the past six weeks, the non-profit has pivoted towards denying COVID.

The flu is “far deadlier” than coronavirus, reads one story. That echoes the remarks of another noted climate change denier, Rush Limbaugh, who compared the pandemic to the common cold. Another one claimed that the country’s health care system was ideally suited to handle the surge of a pandemic, noting that Ebola never spread widely in the U.S.

What’s extra notable about these writings is that their authors have been interviewedabout coronavirus in major, mainstream news outlets like the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, New York Magazine, and others.

Young Republicans Pushing Party on Climate

Above, Keira O’Brien, President of Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends, testifying before the US Senate last year.

Christian Science Monitor:

The red sign on the red-draped table reads, “Stop Socialism. Unleash Capitalism.” For an exhibitor at America’s largest annual conservative shindig, it’s a slogan as truism, as ubiquitous as U.S. flags and Make America Great Again caps.

But the actual political messaging by Young Conservatives for Carbon Dividends (YCCD) borders on subversive. At its booth, sandwiched between the Federalist Society and a pro-Electoral College group, smartly dressed students make the case for Republicans to accept mainstream climate science and support a carbon tax as a capitalist solution.

For a party whose titular head, President Donald Trump, rejects the established science and has torn up regulations that restrain carbon emissions, that sounds like a tough sell. And a tax is still a tax, even if the revenue is to be returned in full to taxpayers as a dividend. 

But when Elise LaFleur, a politics senior at Catholic University of America in Washington, drops by the YCCD booth, she comes away impressed. For her generation, global warming isn’t a hoax but a reality to be faced, the sooner the better. 

“It’s a conversation we need to be having,” she says. “Conservatives do care about the climate.”

From college campuses to Washington think tanks, the ground is shifting beneath the feet of a party that has long sought refuge in climate obfuscation. Republicans’ fitful efforts to correct course – and hold onto voters concerned about climate – have largely been eclipsed by President Trump’s regulatory bonfires and cheerleading for fossil fuels. But GOP lawmakers in Congress have begun to support various proposals aimed at limiting emissions, including a carbon dividend plan backed by banks, manufacturers, and energy companies.  

“The question is not whether or not you view climate change as an issue that requires a solution, but what is your policy and how do you intend to reduce carbon emissions?” says Ryan Costello, a Republican and former U.S. House representative who lobbies for the dividend plan.


You may notice pollster Frank Luntz in the foreground of the the video above.
Here is his full statement to Senator Schatz’ hearing.


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Music Break: “Bat & Pig” – Contagion Soundtrack

Vox:

Contagion is both horrifying and a little comforting; the scientists do eventually find and release a vaccine, and even though a lot of people die, most of the world’s population manages to survive. World war doesn’t break out. It’s both a horror film and not the worst-case scenario.

But watching Contagion in 2020, what’s most striking about the film isn’t really the central virus itself — or at least it wasn’t for me, though seeing the rising coronavirus fatality count has been heartbreaking. What’s most striking, and what I hope iTunes renters are taking note of, is a different kind of virus, a parallel outbreak for which Alan Krumwiede (played by Jude Law) is patient zero.

Alan Krumwiede is a kind of character who still felt a little fantastical, as I recall, in 2011. He’s a blogger, a conspiracy theorist, a “freelance journalist” in the mold of Alex Jones, with 12 million devoted fans and a penchant for the spotlight. To his audience, Krumwiede peddles various theories about the virus, such as the idea that it’s been genetically engineered. He goes on national television to accuse CDC director Dr. Ellis Cheever (Fishburne) and the entire government apparatus of conspiring with Big Pharma to suppress a simple homeopathic cure, called forsythia, in order to profit off a vaccine.

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