Those of you who know Michael Gerson primarily as a man who was willing to write outrageous lies about Iraq's nuclear program, in order to make carpet-bombing Baghdad seem like self-defense, may be shocked to learn that he has a softer, more tender side. He worries about children, and puppies, and snowflake babies, and human-animal hybrids, and the emasculation of religion by dime-a-dozen graces like humility and mercy. Which just goes to show that no one is all bad.
In a new column, Gerson worries about stem cell research, which is nothing but a way-station on the road to Auschwitz:
Biotechnicians have been freed from the vulgar moralism of the masses, so they can operate according to the vulgar utilitarianism of their own social clique -- the belief that some human lives can be planted, plucked and processed for the benefit of others.
This is potent stuff. Note the careful distinction between "vulgar moralism" and "vulgar utilitarianism," which may or may not be two different things. And the alliteration, which is always a sign of deep moral seriousness. And the implicit understanding of Lysenko's great truth that "a class enemy is always an enemy, whether he is a scientist or not." Above all, note the portrayal of scientists as the equivalent of the "greys" in UFO lore, who represent a cold, alien, parasitic intelligence with a sinister fixation on genetic engineering and hybridization.
The effect is wasted on me, since I don't care to be lectured on vulgar utilitarianism by the guy who came up with the line "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"; killing foreigners for fun and profit doesn't become moral just because you forged God's signature on your permission slip. But as crackpot scapegoating goes, it strikes me as fairly impressive. It might even inspire some freedom fighter to shoot a bunch of people at his local mall, which seems to be the gold standard for conservative rhetoric these days.
So far, so good. If we get sentimental enough about innocent life — and what life is more innocent than one that exists solely as potential? — then no one can call us a bloodthirsty nation. No one who frets over unborn babies can be brutal or heartless, and anyone who dares to suggest otherwise needs a serious ass-kicking, at the very least.
Now, Katherine Sebelius is Catholic and supports abortion rights, which makes her a hypocrite, obviously. But there's more here than meets the eye, according to Gerson:
It is probably not a coincidence that Obama has chosen a Roman Catholic -- Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius -- to implement many of these policies as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Obama has every right to a pro-choice Cabinet. But this appointment seems designed to provide religious cover. It also smacks of religious humiliation -- like asking a rabbi to serve the pork roast or an atheist to bless the meal.
Right. 'Cause if you want "religious cover," it makes excellent sense to publicly humiliate the person who's supposed to provide it. That's Machiavellianism we can believe in!
We've ascertained that Sebelius disagrees with the Catholic Church, while Gerson disagrees with the Sermon on the Mount. Which means it's now time to x-ray the so-called conscience of the liberal God-hater:
Some say they will not impose their private religious views on others. But moral beliefs about human dignity are not religious dogmas such as transubstantiation or the Trinity. They are assertions about the nature of political justice.
They're not dogmas, see, but assertions based on...on...on transcendental fact. Which means it's A-OK to impose them on other people, by force of law if possible, and by force if not. At the same time, the unwillingness to impose such "assertions" on other people has nothing at all to do with "moral beliefs about human dignity," so there's no reason to defend it as a principled stance, despite its manifest contribution to the development of Teh Greatest Country Ever.
And besides:
Removing the transcendent basis for human rights would also remove the central argument of the Declaration of Independence and the primary motivation for American social reform from abolition to the civil rights movement.
Gerson recognizes slavery and segregation as injustices, to his credit. But the idea that these injustices were justified by "moral beliefs about human dignity," and that this is exactly what made overcoming them such a difficult and gruesome endeavor, doesn't seem to have occurred to him. The average anti-abolitionist had no more regard for the human dignity of slaves than Gerson has for the human dignity of Iraqis, or his correligionists have for the human dignity of gays. Political oppression and murder rarely suffer for lack of a transcendental basis. Honestly, I thought everyone knew that.
Being as you, dear reader, are an ivory tower elitist with a closet full of buttplugs and abortion pills, you might argue that the environment and healthcare are also "pro-life" issues. No way, says Gerson.
It is true that nearly every political issue concerns the preservation of human life. But not every issue concerns the definition of the human community -- who we count as one among us, and who we cast beyond our protection.
Sometimes I wonder if writing columns like this one is some new form of Satanic rite, to replace reading the Lord's Prayer backwards. Of course healthcare and environmental issues have to do with "who we cast beyond our protection," and of course Gerson has no problem booting inconvenient human beings into the outer darkness, for the sake of money or personal righteousness (assuming there's a difference).
If developing life is merely protoplasmic rubbish, it has the legal claims of a cyst or a toenail. But if a politician believes life is sacred, the destruction of more than a million lives a year cannot be merely one issue among many.
If this is the fundamental question, I can address it easily. No American politician believes that all life is sacred. Gerson doesn't believe it. Sebelius doesn't believe it. Obama doesn't believe it. Bush didn't believe it. No one who has ever been president of the United States believed it. You'll see an atheist connoisseur of child pornography elected president — an admitted one, I mean — before you see a believer in the unqualified sanctity of life elected to the city council in the most Christian town in the country. Anyone who truly does believe this, and makes a serious effort to live according to that conviction, will be treated by Gerson and his ilk like a mad dog.
The main reason public figures claim to believe this is because it makes them and their constituents feel better about the mercenary cruelty of the culture and country in which they live, which is why the most highminded "pro-life" rhetoric amounts to little more than grotesque self-flattery (as well as an attempt to define the human community to exclude nonconforming women, and cast them beyond "our" protection). As always, sentimentality and political violence go hand in hand, and a mawkish preoccupation with "innocent life" justifies any crime we wish to commit. Which is why Michael Gerson will probably never have to worry about being out of work.
The world-renowned economist and humanitarian Bjorn Lomborg has blundered into an argument with an actual climate scientist, with entertaining results. After calling on politicians to be guided by the "careful" work of the "hugely respected" IPCC, Lomborg cites IPCC author Stefan Rahmstorf's views on sea level rise as proof that consensus ≠ agreement.
Stefan Rahmstorf argues that sea level rises will be much higher than those anticipated by most researchers. Rahmstorf is a well-established, serious researcher on climate change who holds a minority view on the rise in the sea-level — the IPCC's estimate is an 18cm to 59cm rise by the end of the century. I mentioned him to make the point that meeting with like-minded colleagues does not somehow create a new global scientific consensus.
In his response, Rahmstorf labels me a "spin-doctor" who is "fooling the public". Often, such strong language can belie poor arguments. In this case, I believe that is the case.
Lomborg's proof essentially consists of evidence that sea level fluctuates, along with a bit of finger-wagging to the effect that "one cannot pick the timeframes to fit the argument."
Rahmstorf is correct to note that the levels are no longer dropping — which they were from 2006 to early 2008, the data available at the time of my article — but curiously seems disinclined to explore why the rise over the past four years (2005-2008) has been half the previous rise at 1.6mm/year. The inescapable point is that sea levels are not escalating out of hand – if anything, they are doing the exact opposite right now.
Rahmstorf's entire response is priceless, but here's my favorite part:
Lomborg argues that 18 years could be too short for a robust trend comparison because of decadal variations in trend – but the 42-year period analysed by IPCC yields the same result. And it is telling that he then goes on to draw an "inescapable" conclusion about a slow-down of sea level rise from just four years of data. This is another well-worn debating trick: confuse the public about the underlying trend by focusing on short-term fluctuations. It's like claiming spring won't come if there is a brief cold snap in April.
Why does Lomborg cite the trend since 2005? Last October, he cited that of the previous two years. Why now four years? Because the trend of the past two years (2007-2008) is now + 3.7 mm/year? It is even worse. The trend since the beginning of any year of the data series varies between 1.6 mm/year and 9.0 mm/year, depending on the start year chosen. Using 2005, Lomborg cherry-picked the by far lowest. He's done this before, see for example his recent claim that the globe is cooling.
Fortunately for Lomborg, the intrepid climatosophical discoverologist Greg Pollowitz has his back. Citing recent icy conditions at Lake Huron, Pollowitz establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that spring won't come if it gets cold in March.
Pollowitz also complains that it's "odd that the Greens look at Prince Charles as some sort of visionary on global warming, yet on other aspects of his life he is widely ridiculed."
Although I've devoted many years of my life to enviro-fascism, I've never encountered anyone who sees Prince Charles as any sort of visionary, online or off. Maybe it's the title that turns people off, or the somewhat unfair public perception of Britain's royal family as an anachronistic gaggle of inbred halfwits. It's also puzzling that not thinking world climatology has been subverted by Marxists would qualify anyone as a "visionary."
But whatever, as the kids say. Apparently, the Prince stands accused of exploiting public credulity by peddling some sort of snake oil that will make everything OK if you'll just believe in it. I leave it to the reader to decide whether he sounds more like the IPCC, or Greg Pollowitz.
Robert Knight asks his readers to imagine Dr. Frankenstein "jumping for joy" over Obama's lifting of certain restrictions on stem cell research, the objectively horrific outcome of which is linked in some bizarre way with Dr. Al Gore's Global Warming Theory:
[S]cientists can kill human embryos for medical research, create and distribute abortion pills without any public input, and systematically shun any contrary information.
If they have any questions about how to do this, they can consult Al Gore’s followers, who have been frantically plugging leaks in their global warming dam as fast and as effectively as the proverbial Dutch boy. What, they found a new arctic ice floe the size of California? What, a cooling period is underway as sunspots wane? Pay no attention!
As bad as this sounds, Knight has only stumbled onto half of the conspiracy; I have it on good authority that Obama has suppressed damning research into the carbon footprint of human-animal hybrids. Is it time to panic? My sources say yes!
Bill Steigenwald interviews George Will on his recent heroic stand against eco-pessimism, that crimson sin for which the penance is either eco-optimism, or simply not giving a fuck about anyone but yourself. Here's Steigenwald's account of the debate:
[Will] and his editors at The Washington Post were blasted with thousands of angry e-mails, most of which challenged Will's assertion that global sea ice levels have not been dramatically reduced by man-made global warming, as environmentalists claim, but are essentially the same as they were in 1979. Will, who had used data from the Arctic Climate Research Center as his source, also was accused of multiple inaccuracies by The New York Times' Andrew Revkin.
Note that Steigenwald uses the authority of the ACRC to give Will the necessary scientific gravitas, even though it was the ACRC who objected to Will's misuse of their data in the first place. It's kinda dishonest, I guess...but if you'd tell a lie to prevent a box of kittens from being thrown into a furnace, you'll have no trouble understanding why Steigenwald lies to protect George Will from the wrath of his own sources.
As for the interview itself, suffice it to say that Will is glutinous with self-approbation, and Steigenwald absolutely cannot get enough of him. If that's your idea of an edifying discourse, have at it. I won't wait up.
Finally, there's distressing news from the Heartland Institute's conference on climate change. As you may know, ExxonMobil has reduced its funding for this important anti-environmental thinktank. But HI president Joseph L. Bast says they're only doing it to make themselves look better. Take that, warmists!
Worse yet, Richard Lindzen has launched an untimely attack on the science of glowball warming. Which is a shame, 'cause it's one of the few subdivisions of climatology that any layperson can master, simply by walking outside on a nice day.
Dr. Lindzen...criticized widely publicized assertions by other skeptics that variations in the sun were driving temperature changes in recent decades. To attribute short-term variation in temperatures to a single cause, whether human-generated gases or something else, is erroneous, he said.
Maybe he can come up with some catchy slogan, like "it's not the sun, stupid," and e-mail it to Robert Knight.
S. Fred Singer is also trying to impose ideological uniformity on these freethinkers, instead of letting a hundred Pollowitzian flowers bloom:
S. Fred Singer, a physicist often referred to by critics and supporters alike as the dean of climate contrarians, said that he would be running public and private sessions on Monday aimed at focusing participants on which skeptical arguments were supported by science and which were not.
“As a physicist, I am concerned that some skeptics (a very few) are ignoring the physical basis,” Dr. Singer said in an e-mail message. “There is one who denies that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which goes against actual data,” Dr. Singer said, adding that other skeptics wrongly contend that “humans are not responsible for the measured increase in atmospheric CO2.”
Or as Polyakov put it back in 1939, "We must object to the attempt to universalize Mendelism which exists, but on the other hand, to throw Mendelism off the books and declare it pseudoscientific I consider impossible and incorrect."
Still, I approve of the effort. If the IPCC and allied scientific organizations can manage to maintain iron discipline over tens of thousands of scientists, Lindzen and Singer should have no trouble convincing roughly 500 economists, oilmen, and retired orthodontists to toe the party line.
And if not...well, perhaps some use can be found for them regardless. Op-eds don't write themselves, after all.
The water gardens, Fed By the Vains of current Fluid - that skim the rubber sponge plants That wave as the palms in a strong Breeze The ghostly sea roses of Yellow, long - and Short growing thick stems. The thousand Branch Wildly growing sponges - midst the stuBy sprouts, The sea stars - the ugly strange carved trees, thousand Unnamed Flower Beds - large covered rocks with slimy Moss, the Shelly Bottom - and suken marines - share The Heaven - with Fish and Dendrodoris denisoni - That occupy the deep Waters
The Obama admininstration has reversed an insane BushCo decision on the Endangered Species Act:
The rule change, which was made final in mid-December last year, left it up to government agencies to decide on their own whether new dams, logging or mining operations posed a threat to endangered species or their habitat.
The rule also said that a project's impact on climate change should no longer be a factor when taking into account its impact on wildlife. The Bush-era changes amounted to rolling back the clock on 35 years of protocol.
The Senate has taken further action in defense of the ESA:
In the waning days of the Bush presidency, the administration pushed through two species-related rules, one that scaled back scientific reviews for endangered species and another that limited protections for the polar bear specifically. The Obama administration wants to undo those rules, and congressional leaders have stepped up to help, adding language to an omnibus spending bill that gives the admin 60 days to withdraw the rules. The House passed the bill with that language last week.
But earlier this week, Alaskan Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R) and Mark Begich (D) -- no fans of polar-bear protections -- introduced an amendment that would remove that language. On Thursday, their fellow senators voted down that amendment 52 to 42.
Obama has also pledged to change how government contracts are awarded:
President Barack Obama plans to change how government contracts are awarded and who can earn them, a move his aides say would save taxpayers about $40 billion a year by making the process more competitive.
Obama will sign a presidential memo Wednesday that changes government contracting procedures, an administration official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the decision before it was announced.
In Washington DC, activists shut down the Capital Power Plant:
Today, climate activists from across the country braved a snowstorm and freezing temperatures to successfully block and shut down the Capitol Power Plant in Washington, D.C. Thousands of people of every age and race participated in the action, the largest act of peaceful civil disobedience on climate change in U.S. history.
A company in Oakland, CA has come up with an interesting new solar panel:
The panels snap together, so people will be able to buy just one to start and add more later on if they like. The solar inverter, which converts the direct current (DC) electricity from the panels to alternating current (AC) electricity that can be used in the electric grid, plugs right into a wall socket.
One of the biggest problems with solar panels is the high cost. Before rebates, the price can easily exceed $30,000 to outfit a residential roof. J'neva began asking who really wanted to have solar power and realized it was the 20-something generation--people who typically have smaller budgets but aspire to live greener lifestyles. Most of the interested customers she knows over 30 are looking to spend $2,400 to $4,000 on panels; folks in their twenties will spend much less.
A Swedish city has given up most uses of fossil fuels:
The city of 60,000—and its surrounding 12-town region, with a quarter-million people—has traded in most of its oil, gas and electric furnaces for community "district heat," produced at plants that burn sawdust and wood waste left by timber companies. Hydropower, nuclear power and windmills now provide more than 90 percent of the region's electricity.
A "cash for clunkers" program is doing well in Germany:
The idea is simple: local governments offer cash incentives for people to get their old, low-mileage, high-emissions cars off the road in exchange for buying new, inherently more efficient cars....
While globally car sales are tanking, the BBC reports German car sales are actually up 22 percent right now due to the help of this program which offers a 2,500-euro incentive for participating. In fact, Germany just had its strongest February car sales in 10 years!
The New York Times has been floating the theory that because incandescent bulbs generate heat, switching over to CFLs will require more central heating, which means more greenhouse emissions. There are many problems with that idea; Lloyd Alter mentions the biggest one:
Does it seem logical to burn fossil fuels to make heat that boils water that makes steam that turns turbines that generates electricity that gets transported long distances to simply turn it back into heat? No.
Coal fired electrical plants generate between 200 and 230 pounds of CO2 per million BTUS, whereas natural gas releases 116 pounds per MMBtu. So burning that bulb for heat generates twice as much CO2 and we haven't even accounted for transmission losses.
Geologists are mapping rock formations that may be able to absorb excess CO2 from the air:
The report, by scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey, shows 6,000 square miles of ultramafic rocks at or near the surface. Originating deep in the earth, these rocks contain minerals that react naturally with carbon dioxide to form solid minerals. Earth Institute scientists are experimenting with ways to speed this natural process, called mineral carbonation. If the technology takes off, geologic formations around the world could provide a vast sink for heat-trapping carbon dioxide released by humans.
A new program in Washington state helps victims of domestic violence use technology safely:
"Domestic violence is built around control, not anger, and an abusive partner often limits a woman's access to information and support. Monitoring computer activity is one of many ways to control a spouse. In a shelter a woman needs to keep her identity secret, but a fax number can be tracked to her location. Abusive partners also can track their victim's cell phone calls or can use a keystroke logger on a computer to intercept and read e-mail. This program shows women ways in which they might be monitored and steps they can take to prevent being stalked and tracked."
An anti-gay adoption agency has stopped doing business in New York:
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Wednesday that Arizona-based internet companies Adoption Profiles and Adoption Media have stopped doing business in New York.
The Attorney General’s announcement follows a complaint filed last year by Lambda Legal on behalf of a New York gay couple who were barred from posting their on-line adoptive-parent profile solely because they are a same-sex couple. The complaint said that the companies were violating New York laws prohibiting such discrimination.
Papua New Guinea has created its first nature reserve:
Unique in structure, the park is owned by 35 surrounding indigenous villages which have agreed unanimously to prohibit hunting, logging, mining, and other development within the park. The villages have also created a community organization that will oversee management of the park.
In related news that will probably be of interest to Bryan Finoki, conservationists are discussing the fascinating idea of a nomadic sanctuary:
Getting protected areas drawn on a map is hard enough...Establishing one that moves or adjusts with changing conditions — a roving [marine protection area] — will be harder still.
But some are already thinking about how to design MPAs that still function as climates change. Maybe they’re bigger, say scientists, or spaced like stepping stones so species can hopscotch to higher latitudes. Perhaps they’re not tied to a geographic location at all, but follow conditions scientists know are important.
New technologies for tracking marine species and people, and more sensors to monitor conditions at sea now make what was once impossible at least theoretically possible. Questions of governance and human bureaucracy are the greater challenge, scientists say.
In Brazil, deforestation has dropped by 70 percent:
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell to 291 square miles (754 square kilometers) in the November 2008-January 2009 window, a drop of 70 percent compared to the year earlier period when 976 sq mi (2,527 sq km), said Environment Minister Carlos Minc.
A decrease in forest clearing had been expected. Economic turmoil, which has reduced the availability of credit, and collapsing commodity prices — especially beef and soy — have undermined the main drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. Minc also credited government efforts, including increased vigilance and new loan policies, for the decline.
Researchers have identified a more efficient way of fertilizing Chinese crops:
[A]verage fertiliser use — around 600 kilograms per hectare — can be cut by 30—60 per cent, with farmers retaining the same yields.
By efficiently recycling manures and crop residues, and rotating crops with nitrogen-producing leguminous plants, it is possible to reduce reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers....
I may have blogged on this before, or not...but either way, here's a merry-go-round that doubles as a water pump:
We all know kids have boundless amounts of energy and a need to play - so why not channel some of that energy into much needed rural infrastructure? That was the brilliant idea behind the PlayPump: a humanitarian design project that consists of a water pump hooked up to a small village merry-go-round. Access to clean drinking water is a huge concern in developing regions of the world, and now the PlayPump system is bringing clean water into the hardest hit regions of Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has been installed in rural villages and primary schools, so that kids can have fun while pumping all the clean, potable water that their families need.
Are you a business (or person) that frequently mails envelopes inside of envelopes in order to get a customer to ship something back or for reply mail? Seems kind of like a waste of envelopes, eh? Well now EcoEnvelopes has come up with a solution - a USPS approved "eco-indicia" stamp that is bi-directional. Considering that over a billion reply envelopes are sent in credit card, bank statements, utility bills and other reminders, reusing the same envelope saves more than just paper.
But for really, really obvious ideas, nothing beats this:
Every day, 500,000 gallons get sucked up from a limestone basin in northern Florida by the Nestle Water Co. Every hour of each of those days, the water fills 102,000 plastic bottles at a nearby bottling plant. Nestle, and the 22 other bottled water companies in Florida, make a profit anywhere between 10 and 100 times the cost of each bottle. So how much does Nestle pay for the water it drains from the state's natural resources? Nothing. Oh, excuse me — the company had to pay a one-time fee of $150 dollars for a local water permit. The water they use isn't even taxed a single cent — but the Governor's looking to change that, big time.
In an attempt to correct this free reign, water supply depletin' madness, Republican Governor Charlie Crist is proposing a 6 cent per gallon state tax on all water usurped from aquifers by commercial water bottlers — a tax that could land $56 million in state coffers its first year in effect alone, according to the Miami Herald.
There's lots of medical news this week. Children's exposure to lead has dropped dramatically:
In a stunning improvement in children's health, far fewer kids have high lead levels than 20 years ago, government research shows -- a testament to aggressive efforts to get lead out of paint, water and soil....
Federal researchers found that just 1.4% of young children had elevated lead levels in their blood in 2004, the latest data available. That compares with almost 9% in 1988.
A doctor in Canada is distributing unused prescription drugs to the homeless:
Dr. Jeff Turnbull, chief of staff at the Ottawa Hospital in Ottawa, acknowledges the practice is controversial but says it is one way to ensure that homeless people get the medication they desperately need.
He and Dr. Ron MacCormick, an oncologist in Sydney, N.S., want provincial governments to establish regulations that would guide doctors who want to recycle unused prescription drugs that would otherwise be thrown out.
A combination of existing drugs may be effective against drug-resistant tuberculosis:
Blanchard's team tested whether administering clavulanate might make TB vulnerable to other antibiotics — and found a combination that in laboratory tests blocked the growth of 13 different drug-resistant TB strains.
The combo: Clavulanate to drop TB's shield, plus a long-sold injected antibiotic — meropenem, part of that penicillin-style family — that then attacks the bacteria.
Researchers have unraveled the workings of C. difficile:
Professor Julian Rood from the Department of Microbiology and lead author, microbiologist Dr Dena Lyras, made a major scientific breakthrough which allowed mutants of the superbug to be made. They then identified which of two suspected toxic proteins was essential for the bacterium to cause severe disease.
A new discovery published online in the FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org) shows that cellular mechanisms used by the blind mole rat to survive the very low oxygen environment of its subterranean niche are the same as those that tumors use to thrive deep in our tissues. The net effect of this discovery is two-fold: first the blind mole rat can serve a "living tumor" in cancer research; and—perhaps more important—that unique gene in the blind mole rat becomes a prime target for new anti-cancer drugs that can "suffocate" tumors.
A pair of deadly tropical viruses turn out to be susceptible to the common drug chloroquine:
The researchers, based in Weill Cornell's pediatrics department, were surprised by their discovery that chloroquine, a safe, low-cost agent that has been used to combat malaria for more than 50 years, is a highly active inhibitor of infection by Hendra and Nipah.
"The fact that chloroquine is safe and widely used in humans means that it may bypass the usual barriers associated with drug development and move quickly into clinical trials," says Dr. Anne Moscona, professor of pediatrics and microbiology & immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College and senior author of the study.
Scientists have reconstructed an ancient musical instrument:
[A] team based in Salerno and Catania, Italy, has reconstructed the “epigonion,” a harp-like, stringed instrument used in ancient Greece. With data from numerous sources, including pictures on urns, fragments from excavations and written descriptions, the team has been able to model what the instrument would have looked and sounded like. Their model has become sophisticated enough to be used by musicians of the Conservatories of Music of Salerno and Parma in concerts.
I'm tired of sitting indoors, so you'll forgive me if I wrap things up in a hurry.
Over at Grist, Ken Ward says that environmentalists are in denial, and it's driving them crazy, which is why they haven't made more progress on climate change:
If we accept the worst, or precautionary assessment, then U.S. environmentalists have perhaps a year to avert cataclysm, and nothing we are doing now will work. We are dealing with this terrible situation in a very ordinary and human way: by denying it.
Our denial comes in a variety of forms: we believe that President Obama can and will solve the problem; we ignore Jim Hansen's assessment and timeline; we concentrate on our jobs and organization agendas and pass over the big picture; we focus on the molehill of climate policy rather than tackle the mountain of climate politics; we assess our efforts by looking back on how far we have come and do not measure the distance still to be traveled; we scrupulously avoid criticizing each other, lacking conviction in our own courses of action and not wishing to invite criticism in turn; and we are irrationally committed to antique approaches that are self-evidently inadequate.
That's one way of looking at things, and there's surely some truth to it (though the idea that environmentalists, or leftists generally, "scrupulously avoid criticizing each other" is so bizarre that it calls Ward's overall judgment into question).
Although Ward makes some good points, he seems to me to be mired in typical rationalist oversimplification: If something terrible is happening, and we're not doing everything in our power to stop it, the problem must be that we can't truly accept that something terrible is happening. Otherwise, we'd act rationally, in our own self-interest, and do something about it. That's just common sense!
Caught in a bind, we act unconsciously to ease our psychological burden in two ways: (1) by reducing the sources of conflict, and (2) by avoiding, rejecting or denigrating new information that would increase dissonance.
Plausible or not, this theory doesn't provide an actual explanation for the "failures" of environmentalism. There are countless internal and external obstacles to effective action, no matter which serious global problems you're talking about, which makes it kind of silly to single out "denial." Having a good grasp of the problems can lead to apathy, too. Or to wallowing in the pleasures of the apocalyptic sublime. To some people, disaster may seem like the only conceivable path to social change. To others, it's a sort of justice, at long last.
Freud claimed that dreams are "the guardian of sleep"; in the same way, the function of most political rhetoric is to avoid responsibility, or at least to push the lion's share of it onto someone else, which amounts to the same thing. If this is correct, then Ward's invocation of the Awful Truth may not serve as a wake-up call, but as an invitation to doze a little longer. "Realism" can be a strategy for avoidance, too. Anything can.
I agree with Ward that it's difficult to think of catastrophe per se, without the consolation of blaming someone else for it, or aestheticizing it, or being "proved fucking right," and without a secret hope that we'll actually survive to see the transformed landscapes that fascinate us in apocalyptic books and movies. It's hard to think about it not because disaster on this scale is unthinkable — we're actually very good at picturing the worst that could happen — but because of the unbearable burden of responsibility it places on us, as individuals, to accomplish the impossible. It's not the scale of the threat people are balking at, in my opinion; it's the scale of the commitment. And nothing Ward proposes changes that, as far as I can see.
Which is not to imply that he proposes anything particularly concrete. After affirming that "we are the custodians of the only true solution," he suggests that we should convene "a general conference of environmental leadership to consider what to do," and perhaps even "experiment with new approaches." (Great idea! And this time, let's not "scrupulously avoid criticizing each other." Let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend!)
I know very well that hope is not a plan. But it's also true that hope is a measure of our openness to change. Most Americans didn't lift a finger to end slavery, either, but the fact that doing so became first thinkable, then desirable — even if only from the comfort of an armchair — was not entirely irrelevant to the larger struggle that continues today. It's not enough, of course; nothing is. But it's necessary.
In saying all this, I'm ignoring the central fact that Ward himself ignores: countless people are doing what needs to be done, selflessly, in defiance of the perfectly rational fears that hold the rest of us back. And that effort is not made ridiculous by its probable failure, any more than its success would be made ridiculous by the eventual death of the sun.
And that's what bothers me about Ward's position. The "unrealistic optimism" he's complaining about is all we have, really. He concedes as much when he says that "the odds of success are vanishingly small." In that situation, optimism is unrealistic by definition, just as it is in most other really serious human endeavors. It's crazy, in a word. It always has been.
Ward seems to feel that we've been failing to communicate the necessity for change for many years now. He seems to think that what was missing, all that time, was the right message...as though there could be a "right" message, or a "sane" one, when it comes to turning society upside down.
This is why, when Ward worries that environmentalists are going crazy, I'm inclined to suggest that they're not yet crazy enough. If it's sane to fixate gloomily on "the distance still to be traveled," in whatever time remains to us, then stark insanity may be our only hope.
(Illustration: "The Collapse of the Tower of Babel" by Cornelisz Anthonisz, 1547.)
Last Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and seven White House cabinet members traveled to Philadelphia to kick off the inaugural gathering of President Obama's Middle Class Task Force. The task force will convene monthly in cities across the country to confront the problems faced by average Americans. It's an admirable goal....
Still, the middle class may have a better shot at making ends meet than at influencing the Middle Class Task Force. That's because no member of the Middle Class Task Force is actually middle class.
Worse yet, they're not even interested in getting input from the middle class...unless it comes from people who are able to go "online," and "surf" the "web":
While middle class Americans are invited to submit questions and ideas through the task force's website, AStrongMiddleClass.gov and tickets for the Philadelphia meeting were distributed to labor and environmental groups, the task force did not accept questions from the audience.
Okay, so maybe this callous plutocratic task force is seeking a certain amount of middle-class "influence," through some kind of impersonal computerized punchcard system that only a PhD could master. But that only makes matters worse, amirite?
And besides, these people are so goddamn smug with all their talk of progress, and helping people, and stuff.
In Philadelphia, the task force members and panelists spent a long time congratulating one another one on their good intentions before turning to the meeting's single topic: green jobs. The stimulus package bestows $500 million for green job training programs, $6 billion in loan guarantees for green industries, and $5 billion for a weatherization assistance program that could save homeowners up to $350 per year on utilities. Van Jones, president of Green For All, made an impassioned plea to "give young people the chance to put down that handgun and pick up a caulking gun." Greg Nelson, official Middle Class Task Force liveblogger, commented on an argument between representatives from Portland, Los Angeles, and Philly, who tried to out-green each other for the title of most environmentally friendly city.
A veritable Walpurgisnacht, you'll agree. It's like the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove and a Skull and Bones hazing rolled into one; the only thing missing is Henry Kissinger prancing around in the nude with a lampshade on his head.
It may seem as though this narcissistic, cyber-elitist task force has a few ideas that could possibly benefit the middle class, sort of. But what if those ideas don't work? And what if they do work, but only to an extent that is not yet known? What do we really know about anything, when you come right down to it? Why does every dialectic take refuge in negation, without founding it dialectically and without even being able to establish it as a problem? And more to the point, who threw the overalls in Mrs. Murphy's chowder?
The task force didn't specify the number of jobs it hoped to create in the green sector, or how much of an impact the programs are expected to have on the middle class as a whole. Annie Tomasini, Biden's deputy press secretary, says the Philadelphia meeting was just "a listening session" and that the task force will not actually make any decisions regarding green job creation. They'll have to go back to Washington to do that.
And that, remarkably, is where the article ends.
This appears to be the latest MO for AP writers: present a snapshot of a process that has barely begun, and compare it unfavorably to whatever outcome the process is intended to accomplish. If part of the process is to decide what ought to be accomplished, and how, so much the better, because this proves that nobody knows anything and all is darkness.
Be sure to tune in next week, when Suddath blows the whistle on Martha Stewart: she says she's making a cake, but all we see is some sort of unappetizing yellowish mess in a bowl. She calls it "batter," and maybe it is. But what if it isn't? Remember, too, that cakes sometimes fall, or burn. This one may not, granted, but it's also true that some people don't like cake, while others like it perhaps too well. Isn't she being rather imperious on the one hand, and rather irresponsible on the other?
Some say "yes," and some say "absolutely." Time will tell who's right. But for now, it seems very likely that no good can come of any of this.
(Illustration: The inaugural gathering of President Obama's Middle Class Task Force. Photo courtesy of AP.)
Maggie Gallagher, whose deep and abiding interest in our sex lives is strictly professional, has a new column entitled "The Child Pornographer Next Door."
In one of those surprise twists for which she's famous, it turns out that the child pornographers in question are themselves children, whose activities with sexual partners of their own age is...well, not shocking, exactly. And not titillating, either (that'd be a dead giveaway).
Predictable, maybe?
Six high school students from Greensburg, Pa., were charged with possessing, manufacturing and distributing child pornography this month after nude pictures of several underage girls were confiscated from one of the boys' phones. The three 14- and 15-year-old girls who sent the self-made child porn and the three 16- and 17-year-old boys who received it were arrested.
There are legitimate concerns here. One of them is that these kids — the girls, especially — may be humiliated, victimized or even physically attacked. The problem is, arresting them as "pornographers" accomplishes two of those cruelties right off the bat in the name of protecting them, and may make the third more likely.
The line between protecting children and pathologizing or criminalizing normal sexual behavior is not all that thin, in my opinion, but most people who share Gallagher's outlook couldn't find it if their lives (or, more realistically, the lives of their children) depended on it. As always, the most sensible methods of addressing these problems tend to be opposed tooth and nail by the people who make the biggest issue of them: if a sex-ed class that dealt honestly with the question of self-made porn were so much as proposed, it'd be listed on Rapture Ready before the day was out. (And feminism is responsible for our current bumper crop of girls gone wild, so it's clearly of no use whatsoever.)
Not surprisingly, Gallagher's description of these events is sicker and more disturbing than anything of which the children stand accused. As usual, she treats female desire as tepid and devious, and male desire as uncontrollable. That way, you always know who's to blame when the inevitable happens:
The sexting craze underlines the way the creation of pornography has been equally democratized -- in this case right into the hands of suburban 15-year-old girls pathetically trying to attract or keep the attention of porn-jaded boys.
Why do girls act like this?
Good question! Girls don't want sex per se, you see; they want something else, and they use sex to get it. Which is what makes them contemptible, as opposed to merely bestial.
Oddly enough, whenever Gallagher worries herself over porn or sex, the "shocking" cases she cites tend to be shocking precisely because they portray the stark reality of her own view of male-female relations, minus the pietistic soft focus and the baby fetishism. The consequences for women of the "traditionalism" she promotes in her columns are routinely seen in porn, God knows, and constitute one of its main selling points.
But that's a discussion for another day. Now that we've learned all we need to know about boys and girls and sex, it's time to get serious and make some tough choices:
Right now we have a decision to make: Is underage porn (these aren't really children) a crime or not? If so, how do we treat girls and boys who engage in it "for fun" and not for profit?
I think Gallagher has answered her own question, here and elsewhere: Boys will be boys, and girls who give in to them will be pathetic sluts (unless it was their idea, and they enjoyed it, in which case they'll be dirty sluts). A stern dose of public humiliation would seem to be in order, too...if not for their sake, then for ours.
Here's the punchline; bear in mind that it comes from a firm believer in the transformative power of sexual fearmongering:
If the thought that their fellow students, their teachers, their employers, their college admission officials, the entire football squad, their mothers and the local district attorney may well see these cell phone photos is not enough to discourage teens -- then we really have a problem on our hands.
No kidding. Obviously, we need a lot more funding for abstinence programs!
Some ideas are so stupid that they can prevent you from realizing how stupid they actually are.
Normally, I dismiss out of hand the idea of a multi-decade international socialist plot to convince people that a) CO2 is a greenhouse gas; and b) there's no magical force field that prevents local emissions from having a cumulative global effect. But perhaps it'd be worthwhile to assume, for a moment, that the conspiracy theory is true.
What has this enormous, well-regimented cabal accomplished since 1991, when an NAS panel claimed that "greenhouse warming poses a potential threat sufficient to merit prompt responses"?
Not much, I'm afraid. It scored a bit of a coup by getting Algore, the inventor of global warming, into the White House for eight years. But its hopes were dashed when the Clinton administration passed virtually no meaningful climate legislation. It didn't cap emissions, nor did it ratify the Kyoto Protocol. It had a perfect excuse for authoritarian overreaching delivered to its doorstep on a silver platter, and it couldn't even be bothered to issue an imperial edict banning wood stoves or gas-powered leaf blowers or SUVs.
More to the point, the Warming Cult hasn't even managed to impose an understanding of the basic facts on the American public. And I'm not talking about the "fact" of AGW, by any means; I'm talking about elementary matters like the difference between weather and climate, or the fact that North America's winter is Australia's summer, or any other grade-school knowledge that would give the average citizen a fighting chance of understanding the issue at hand.
If we had a really effective global conspiracy, the latest effort by conservative pundits to establish the proposition that it's winter in America would've been met with gales of laughter and a blizzard of pink slips. Instead, an untold number of Americans nodded sagely when presented with clear proof that seasons exist, and felt themselves superior to all the scientists whose blinders force them to overlook the really salient issues:
Echoing a Drudge Report headline from the previous day that read, " 'Largest public protest of global warming' ever in USA faces DC March snowstorm!" Fox News hosts Neil Cavuto, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity each suggested on March 2 that, in Cavuto's words, a "massive snowstorm," which recently hit the East Coast, calls into question the scientific consensus on "global warming."
Media Matters goes on to explain, dutifully, that weather is not climate. What they fail to mention is that local weather is not national weather; it was sunny and warm in many parts of the country on March 2, and severe to exceptional drought conditions continue in California, the South, and elsewhere. They also don't mention that national weather isn't global weather. (It's supposed to hit 91°F in Kuala Lumpur tomorrow...in winter, no less! Maybe Algore is on to something!)
Trillion of dollars are at stake in this conspiracy, as well as the right to rule the globe with an iron fist. And yet the entire well-laid plot is in danger of unraveling, because no one thought to remind the average American citizen that it can be cold in one place and hot in another at the very same time.
I'm being flippant, of course. But this is actually a real problem. There are plenty of people, on the left particularly, who simply expect everyone to kowtow to scientific authority whether they understand its simplest concepts or not. Honest confusion ends up getting ridiculed, with the result that people become resentful and dig in their heels. Never mind AGW for a moment; the fact that Beck and Hannity can spout peabrained gibberish like this and be applauded for it would be tragic even if there were nothing more serious at stake than people's rudimentary understanding of the world in which they live.
If the idea of AGW as an elitist plot is so appealing to so many Americans, maybe it's partially because so many people who actually do understand the issues enjoy feeling superior to those who don't. If so, that's kind of obnoxious, given that people on the left ought to be aware of the forces that have crippled our educational system, instead of simply blaming the victims.
Blaming Hannity and Beck would be acceptable, natch, as would launching them headlong into the sun. But I'm sorry to say that the Warming Cult has tended thusfar to coddle dissenters. Nonconforming scientists should be languishing in a new Gulag as we speak. Instead, they wax fat and sassy, secure in the knowledge that a single sentence from them outweighs the official position of every major scientific organization on earth. In essence, their oppression is of the type that a diner at Citronelle suffers when asked to extinguish his Gurkha Black Dragon.
Worse, even though the media is owned and operated by eco-socialist one-worlders who know that doomsday predictions sell papers, conservative politicians who deny AGW enjoy instant access to a respectful, if not fawning, MSM, while a conservative politician who calls Rush Limbaugh "incendiary" is obliged to issue an immediate self-criticism.
This amounts to doing things exactly backwards, in my view; it's no wonder our cardboard-grey dystopia is so many years behind schedule.
Meanwhile, power-drunk communist madmen control China, North Korea, and Venezuela, and all we got was this lousy increase in emissions. And the People's Republic of Canuckistan has decided that exploiting Alberta's tar sands is more exciting than destroying capitalism.
I could go on, but you get the idea. As diabolical socialist plots go, this whole thing is a bit of a washout, and we'll be lucky if we're reduced to shivering in moss-lined caves by 2050.
The recent defeats suffered by movement conservatism have forced some of its leading lights into an agonizing reappraisal. Something went wrong, and while most of the blame can be placed squarely on ACORN, the media, and activist judges who failed to acknowledge that Obama was hatched in Kenya from some Soviet test tube, the possibility that conservatism itself must change, for once, can't be ruled out.
Unfortunately, a lot of people seem to think what's needed is a mass purification and a return to First Principles. They see a country that's 51 percent female, and blessed with plenty of blacks and Latinos and gays and poor people and city dwellers and voters under forty, and they conclude that the best way to regain power is to intensify their efforts to insult and demonize all those demographics.
This was the great theme of CPAC, where the really exciting speakers upheld the bedrock principles of our democratic republic by arguing that anyone who doesn't agree with Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter is a total fag, and vowed to double down on race-baitin', homo-hatin' insanity until the rest of the country joins them out of pity or terror.
What's needed, according to this line of thought, are more effeminate singsong voices with which to mock any plausible proposition from the Left, more deft detournements like "porkulus," and more dim-bulb mantras like "drill baby drill!" And above all, more Palin, more Jindal, and more Joe the Plumber, 'cause admitting that the public's rejection of these fantastically weird characters may've had some justification would be tantamount to admitting that Reagan was not the most popular president ever, or that Atlas Shrugged got a bit tedious in spots.
Other, more genteel voices feel that the timeless principles of conservatism are being submerged in a flood tide of identity politics and adolescent name-calling; they prefer to draw people's attention to the self-evident virtues of Western Civilization, and demolish their foes with quotes from G.K. Chesterton. The usual tactic here is to plant the conservative flag on something admirable like the Enlightenment, or logic, or self-reliance, or the unwillingness to rape children, and present that as the still-beating heart of the movement. The fact that these are not actually conservative ideas — and that really existing conservatism has not done a very good job of upholding them, precisely because it'd shatter into its constituent atoms if it ever made an honest effort to do so — is a mere detail.
These people live in a dreamworld. The plain fact is that when you strip conservatism of its cheerful Social Darwinism, in which "market forces" are conflated simultaneously with natural selection and God, you're left with little more than masculine and nationalist insecurity. The confusion that arises when you try to impose a coherent plot on conservative sentiment is demonstrated by the following ideological Gordian Knot: People are basically evil, but evil is basically good because of the aggregate power of individual self-interest to bring about the best possible social outcomes. "Do-gooders" are basically bad, because they're secretly self-interested and therefore hypocritical, and also because doing good, unlike pursuing your own self-interest, inevitably has "unintended consequences" that will make your efforts come to worse than nothing. Meanwhile, Americans, who are basically good, are accordingly passionate about doing good in the world, which means that any gruesome consequences that arise from our missions of mercy should be judged charitably, given what we all know of our essential decency.
All that's required to prevent these propositions from annihilating each other like the Kilkenny cats is to say, "Fuck you, we do want we want," as some conservatives, to their partial credit, actually have. But other conservatives, to their own partial credit, find that this doesn't satisfy them emotionally (and might not win elections, either). And so we're treated to the improvisatory and yet eversame spectacle of modern conservative philosophy, which is like watching an amphetamine-dosed spider try to build a web between a pair of whirligigs.
I'm not arguing that a principled, intelligent conservatism isn't possible, or that it isn't clinging to life at this moment, like some rare amphibian on a mountain surrounded by clearcut rainforest. The question is whether such a conservatism can actually win elections, without any help from corporatist sideshow attractions like Limbaugh and Malkin and Coulter, and without coded appeals to racism and blatant appeals to sexism and homophobia.
The situation is similar to what we've seen happen with the Minutemen: there are undoubtedly people patrolling the border who are not race-obsessed lunatics, but the very nature of the problem, as defined by the movement, brings race-obsessed lunatics out of the woodwork and gives them undue power and influence. A truly non-racist border patrol group would look nothing like the Minutemen (it probably wouldn't be patrolling the border, just for starters, and it certainly wouldn't be as appealing to the Right). In the same way, a really principled conservatism is likely to find itself friendless and alone, because the power structure into which existing conservatism fits demands instant gratification, ethics that are as flexible as Silly Putty, and plenty of red meat for the yokels.
Which brings us to the concerns of a conservative blogger at New Majority.com, who attended CPAC and reacted as a reasonably intelligent and sensitive person must:
All day, the message I got was this: The movement enjoys being hated by its enemies, more than it cares about its own goals....
CPAC is just unpleasant. And it is not just the elites flattening the ambitions of the people, it is the people dumbing down their own elites. Well-adjusted people, even if they feel alienated from certain parts of American society don't wish to be hated by society. People who want to advance some goals, want more responsibility, not less. I hate that CPAC seems to give credibility to Adorno: that conservatives have defective personalities.
I agree with this, of course. People on the left have been saying for years that conservatives would eat a plate of dogshit if Hillary Clinton told them not to. The movement has been rallying around Bush for so long, and with so little justification, that it's become second nature for them to rally around a useless cipher like Joe the Plumber, on the theory that anyone liberals think is stupid and ridiculous must've been sent by Heaven to rejuvenate the GOP and smite its enemies. Modern conservatism is a bit like a cargo cult, in that regard.
But the blogger misunderstands Adorno, and in doing so displays the same taste for victimhood that has turned conservatism into a source of merriment for people who find its absurdities more pleasant to think about than its victims. Adorno believed that all of us, not just conservatives, have defective personalities: there's no right living in a wrong life. What he set out to do in The Authoritarian Personality was to outline the nature of a specific defective personality.
The methodology has rightly been criticized, as has the tunnel-vision focus on right-wing authoritarianism. That said, we've just lived through eight years in which we heard a gospel preached of total submission to a unitary executive, and total war against a hydra-headed enemy that comprised everyone from Osama Bin Laden to Nancy Pelosi to Hans Blix to atheists to climatologists to the guy across the street with a peace symbol on his car. We were told to respect theologically and scientifically empty superstitions like intelligent design, to prefer faith and "common sense" to evidence we don't like, to view empathy as treason and negotiation as surrender, and to reject the effeminacy of "nuance" in favor of dick-waving Manichean bluster. And through it all, we were also expected to worry ourselves over what kind of consensual sex grown adults were having in the privacy of their own homes, which is something for which no sane and sexually secure person has any time or inclination. To all of this, Adorno's response would've been, "Well, duh."
That being the case, to worry that CPAC might give people the impression that movement conservatives are batshit-crazy sociopaths is like complaining that Jonestown made the public unduly suspicious of authoritarian death cults.
All the same, I'm sympathetic to this blogger's concerns. And I agree with Atrios that a functional, non-crazy conservative party — one that actually respects "individual liberty," instead of using it to justify beating up on queers and paving over the nation's wetlands — is in everyone's best interests.
The problem is, when you imagine even the most timid accommodation to reality that movement conservatism might make in order to adapt and improve, it seems like sheer fantasy. I mean, can anyone imagine Michael Steele standing before the nation and admitting that there's more hard evidence for AGW than there is for a worldwide conspiracy to falsify decades of scientific data and research in service of eco-Stalinism? Or Bobby Jindal acknowledging that whatever faults Canada's healthcare system may have, the fact remains that it costs less than ours, and delivers better outcomes? Or Rick Santorum conceding that perhaps gay citizens should, after all, have the same legal rights as straight ones?
You might as well ask these good men to suck cock at high noon on the Capitol steps. They'd probably find that suggestion a lot more tempting, come to think of it.
It may just be a failure of my own imagination, but trying to conceive of a conservative movement that doesn't look very much like the one we have right now is a bit like trying to picture a four-sided triangle. I'd find it very hard to recognize a conservatism that had given up on micromanaging people's sex lives, promoting racial and gender-based hatred, treating the regulation of asbestos and DDT as crimes against humanity, and redistributing the nation's wealth upwards while expecting to be thanked for it.
And I assume that most rank-and-file conservatives now living would find it even harder.
(Illustration: "There is no end to the road of revolution; render new services in the struggle against arrogance and complacency" by unknown artist, 1971.)
Show us the sun slowly Lead us step by step from star to star Gently let us learn how to live again. Or else Ceratosoma amoena Or the filling of a bucket at the well Could break open our pain so lightly sealed And wash us away.
The Supreme Court has reinstated a law that forbids people who were convicted of domestic violence to possess guns:
The opinion was a defeat for gun rights supporters, who had challenged groups fighting domestic violence over which ex-felons should be allowed to buy and keep firearms.
The conservative response was swift and incoherent:
"Why are men with clean histories except for one domestic dispute punished like hardened criminals who mug strangers on the street?" wrote Phyllis Schlafly for the conservative Eagle Forum, which filed a legal brief with the high court supporting Hayes. "The answer is that the feminist agenda calls for domestic-violence laws to punish husbands and fathers above and beyond what can be proven in court under due-process procedures."
As Owen Josephus Roberts said to Pierce Butler, "Boo fucking hoo."
A new study confirms what all sane people already knew:
By providing millions of young and low-income women access to voluntary contraceptive services, the national family planning program prevents 1.94 million unintended pregnancies, including almost 400,000 teen pregnancies, each year. These pregnancies would result in 860,000 unintended births, 810,000 abortions and 270,000 miscarriages, according to a new Guttmacher Institute report.
Absent publicly funded family planning services, the U.S. abortion rate would be nearly two-thirds higher than it currently is, and nearly twice as high among poor women.
Publicly funded family planning services are highly cost-effective. More than nine in 10 women receiving them would be eligible for Medicaid-funded prenatal, delivery and postpartum care services if they became pregnant.Avoiding the significant costs associated with these unintended births saves taxpayers $4 for every $1 spent on family planning.
It looks as though Obama will rescind BushCo's last-minute anti-contraception ruling:
The Obama administration is moving to rescind a federal rule that reinforced protections for medical providers who refuse to perform abortions or other procedures on moral grounds, an official said Friday.
A Health and Human Services official said the administration will publish notice of its intentions early next week, and open a 30-day comment period for advocates, medical groups and the public.
Spain is taking steps towards reforming its insane abortion laws:
The government proposes to change the law to make abortion unconditionally available, but only up to a fixed stage of the pregnancy, as is the case in most European countries, which generally settle on a 12-week limit.
The Supreme Court has squelched a plan to trade credits for mercury emissions:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday effectively snuffed an industry-backed effort to allow the buying and selling of mercury emission credits, a plan critics derided as a multimillion-dollar giveaway to polluters.
The high court decided not to hear a Bush-era appeal, letting stand a lower court's ruling against the mercury trading concept. Public health and conservation groups said the Supreme Court's decision is important to South Carolina and other states with significant mercury contamination problems.
Thanks to a reversal of policy under the Obama administration, the UN has reached an agreement on reducing mercury pollution:
"This is great news for reducing mercury pollution around the world, and shows a commitment from the Obama Administration to international environmental issues," said Susan Egan Keane, policy analyst for NRDC.
For too long we've heard the regulation nay-sayers use the excuse that whatever restrictions and regulations we introduce will only hurt the U.S. economically because China and India will not do the same. This mercury treaty shows the reality: If the U.S. acts first, then China and India will follow.
This bodes well for carbon legislation. The U.S. must act first on carbon regulation. China and India will follow our lead.
Incidentally, a staggering amount of China's emissions are based on Western demand:
Thirteen-and-a-half percent of China's 45 percent rise in greenhouse gas emissions between 2002 and 2005 can be attributed to export production for Western countries, reports a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters. In other words, outsourcing of manufacturing by American and European firms accounted for a larger share of carbon dioxide emission growth than rising domestic consumption in China (which made of 7 percent of the figure).
There's more news on the EPA's looming regulation of CO2:
President Barack Obama's climate czar said the Environmental Protection Agency will soon determine that carbon-dioxide emissions represent a danger to the public and propose new rules to regulate emissions of the greenhouse gas from a range of industries.
Carol Browner, special adviser to the president on climate change and energy, said in an interview Sunday that the EPA is looking at a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that requires the agency to determine whether carbon dioxide endangers public health or welfare. And the agency "will make an endangerment finding," she said.
It sounds as though they'll be issuing some important "new" findings about soot, too:
Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking,” a federal appeals court said Tuesday.
The court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its standards for the pollutants, fine particulates, which are linked to premature death from lung cancer and heart disease and to other health problems including asthma.
When the agency embraced the standards in 2006, its own scientific staff rejected them as too lax. In Tuesday’s ruling, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the agency “did not adequately explain” why the standards were adequate.
Speaking of soot and CO2, the Obama administration has withdrawn Bush-era leases for oil-shale development in the desert West:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday reversed the Bush administration's move to open up tens of thousands of acres in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming to oil-shale development, the latest in a series of energy policy overhauls out of his department.
Salazar -- who as a senator was the most vocal opponent of the Bush administration's drive to open the region to shale development -- announced that the DOI is withdrawing the leases on federal land that were made available on Jan. 14, at least for now.
The EPA budget proposal would restore excise taxes on oil and chemical producers to replenish the Superfund Trust Fund for hazardous-waste cleanup. The Superfund tax, which expired in 1995, would be reinstated sometime after 2011 “after the economy recovers,” according to the budget request. It would raise an estimated $6.6 billion by 2014.
I'm all for it, but I think we should call it a "savings account." How could anyone object to that?
Meanwhile, a communist front group calling itself the Institution of Mechanical Engineers is calling for adaptive response to climate change:
A report by the UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers will next month call for governments to accept that climate change is now inevitable. Strategies must be put in place now to protect our infrastructure from its worst effects, alongside existing efforts to reduce emissions, it will argue.
Obama has appointed a well-qualified gay man to direct national AIDS policy:
President Barrack [sic] Obama on Thursday named Jeffrey S. Crowley, Senior Research Scholar at Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute, to be director of the Office of National AIDS Policy....Crowley has spent the last fourteen years working to improve access to health and social services for people living with HIV/AIDS, people with physical and mental disabilities, low-income individuals, and other vulnerable populations.
You can find more info on recent administration appointments here. Most of them strike me as excellent. I'm also impressed that Hillary Clinton has named Michael Posner as assistant Secretary of State:
Posner has a 30-year history involved in human rights work, with a focus on refugees' rights, the protection of and justice for torture victims as well as strengthening accountability for war crimes. He also helped found the Fair Labor Association, which promotes corporate accountability for working conditions in the apparel industry.
The Colorado state senate has approved a domestic partnership bill:
Despite a heated debate in which one Colorado state senator linked homosexuality to murder, the Senate has approved a domestic partner bill.
The legislation would make it easier for unmarried couples in Colorado, including gays and lesbians, to make medical decision for incapacitated partners and leave property to their partners.
The stimulus package will apparently improve COBRA health plans:
Since the bill was passed in 1985, the rule was, employers had to inform you of your right to extend your insurance after you leave. A right, mind you, that would cost you your entire premium, often to the tune of $400 a month or more. Now, thanks to the stimulus, employees’ premiums will go down by 65%.
Besides being a huge saving to those already enrolled, it will also likely increase the number of people who sign up in the first place....
Which reminds me...I didn't watch Bobby Jindal's response to Obama's stimulus speech, for the same reason that I wouldn't follow up a glass of Chateau Lafite Rothschild 1904 by licking dried vomit off the sidewalk. But what I've heard of it, and heard from other Republicans since, brings a few thoughts to mind.
First, when you're reduced to sneering at volcano monitoring, it's a sign that you've been relying too heavily, and for too long, on public stupidity. Second, the positive reponse to Obama is not actually a function of his race, and it's therefore non-transferable to other men of color; genuflecting before gibbering oddballs like Jindal, and chanting "you be da man" at Michael Steele, will not bring your political apotheosis any nearer. Third, Obama may indeed turn out to be a pitiless Islamo-Hitler, but for now, people like him because he sounds like an adult and he gives them a certain amount of hope for the future. That being the case, prancing around screaming dingbat taunts like "porkulus!" is not an effective way to counter his proposals.
I offer this advice gratis and free of charge, in the sincere hope that it will not be taken. In other news, Al Gore, Sean Penn, and Susan Sarandon all agree that eating dogshit is stupid and dangerous. So don't do it, okay?
While we're on the topic of research that Republicans assume will sound like a waste of money to ignorant people, it seems that studying fruit flies actually has practical implications. Go figure!
Mayor Bloomberg intends to make part of midtown Manhattan car-free:
The city plans to close several blocks of Broadway to vehicle traffic through Times Square and Herald Square, an experiment that would turn swaths of the Great White Way into pedestrian malls and continue Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s effort to reduce traffic congestion in Midtown.
In related news, San Francisco is still considering restricting traffic on Market Street.
A new type of window glass could reduce the need for air conditioning:
The electrochromic windows and skylights sense the change in surrounding temperature, and respond accordingly to save energy. If it's warm, the windows darken to keep the building cool. When it's cool, the windows appear clear again. The technology aims to reduce the need for air conditioning, which is notoriously energy-inefficient and increasingly costly.
I don't normally cite individual green homes here, but this ranch in New Mexico is too gorgeous to ignore:
The home is constructed using traditional rammed earth construction and Autoclaved Aerated Concrete, both of which help the home naturally respond to environmental conditions. A storm and gray water collection system help the family conserve and efficiently use water both inside and outside for native landscaping. The home itself is very energy efficient, and is powered by a pole-mounted 4.5 kW photovoltaic system with battery storage as well as a solar hot water heating system.
On a somewhat larger scale, PG&E plans to generate 500MW of solar power in California.
Pacific Gas & Electric Co. said Tuesday that it would spend $1.5 billion of ratepayers' money to add 500 megawatts of photovoltaic power in California, one of the largest such deals in the country.
Plans call for the San Francisco utility to invest at least half of that in solar panels placed on commercial rooftops and on ground-mounted modules that PG&E would own and operate. The other half is earmarked for long-term contracts with private-sector solar companies.
Tom Philpott recommends a daring new method of cooking pasta:
Turns out, you don't need "lots of water" for pasta -- two quarts will do....
Moreover...you can put the pasta in the water before it boils; while it's cold, in fact...The more water you use, the more energy it takes to reach and maintain a boil. So less water means less energy -- and, well, less water wasted.
Like other frogfish — a subset of anglerfish — H. psychedelica has leglike fins on both sides of its body....Each time the fish strike the seabed, for instance, they push off with their fins and expel water from tiny gill openings to jet themselves forward. That and an off-centered tail cause them to bounce around in a bizarre, chaotic manner.
Mark Erdman, a senior adviser to the Conservation International's marine program, said, "I think people thought frogfishes were relatively well known, and to get a new one like this is really quiet spectacular....It's a stunning animal."
The world's rarest cheetah has been photographed for the first time:
“This is an incredibly rare and elusive subspecies of cheetah and current population estimates, which stand at less than 250 mature individuals, are based on guesswork,” says Farid Belbachir, who is implementing the field survey. “This study is helping us to turn a corner in our understanding, providing us with information about population numbers, movement and ecology.”
Photo by Farid Belbachir
And a new species of butterfly has been found in the UK's Natural History Museum:
The Magdalena Valley Ringlet, from the Madalena valleys in Colombia, was uncovered by curator Blanca Huertas after she compared its unusually hairy mouthparts with a recently-found wild specimen.
“The collections here are a treasure trove to be explored,” said Huertas, whose find had hidden in the collection for 90 years.
A bull is saving Kenya's drylands by teaching other cows to eat invasive prickly pears:
During the drought of 1999 - 2000 grassy fields were reduced to bare earth and cows had nothing left to eat were dying of starvation leading to widespread famine. The story goes that one farmer persuaded his bull to eat the leaves after he had burned off the thorns. Opuntia are 80% water and if one can get past the thorns, the plant is quite nutritious . The other starving cows watched the bull and then followed suit thus saving the herd and the farmer who has never looked back. The thorns are burnt off using wood from another nasty invasive species, Prosopis juliflora - making this an eco-friendly project all round.
As part of RAE’s rehabilitation of Baringo’s drylands, and to make multiply the value of mwalimu bull to other farmers RAE bought the bull and during droughts, Mwalimu goes from one homestead to another teaching herds of cattle how to eat Opuntia, thereby saving hundreds of cattle and people from starvation.
“This is basically a dynamo which is being driven as a result of friction between the ground and the blocks. The small yellowish blocks (these are covered by rubber in the real commercial product) rotate as you pull it. They are designed to rotate even on bumpy run even roads. We have tested it on moist lawn and have worked. It is very smooth so much that you basically don’t feel any disturbance as you move along.
At normal walking speeds we have gotten more than 2 watts which is more than enough for running cell phones or radios. I envision that people will attach this to themselves and walk with it - or even attach it to an ox-cart, a skating board, bike, etc.”
The public will have open access to data from a new ecological monitoring system:
Since 1991 raw data from Hubble have been made publicly available for use by professional researchers, educators, and citizen scientists via an online catalog.
"The public can access [the data] and do their own research," said Hubble spokesperson Ray Villard. "They paid for it. They deserve it."
A similar open-access model is key to the National Ecological Network Observatory, or NEON, a new program set to be up and running by 2016. NEON will link together already existing field stations across the U.S. that are using planes and orbiters, ground-level sensors, and human-run labs to monitor activity in the wild.
Whole Foods has banned unsustainably harvested palm oil from its products:
America's largest organic grocer has announced its products will no longer use palm oil sourced from unsustainable producers, reports the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an activist group that has led a campaign against destructive palm oil production. The move adds pressure on the palm oil industry to develop an effective and credible certification system for palm oil.
Scientists researching muscular dystrophy have made an important discovery:
After genetically correcting the mice with the new dystrophin gene, Duan's team discovered that the missing nNOS was now restored in the dystrophic muscle. The mice that received the new gene did not experience muscle damage or fatigue following exercise.
"With this new discovery, we've solved a longstanding mystery of Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy," Duan said. "This will change the way we approach gene therapy for DMD patients in the future. With this study, we have finally found the genetic material that can fully restore all the functions required for correcting a dystrophic muscle and turning it into a normal muscle."
