“Rejecting Science”: How Global Warming Deniers Rule The World
For multiple days already this summer, the interior of the country has cooked underneath a bowl of hot air. As that heat wave wore on, a freakish storm erupted from Chicago to Washington, D.C., bringing winds that resembled the edge of a hurricane. And in what has become a summer ritual, wildfires are raging not only in the western United States but in parts of the eastern U.S., too.
If global warming is a hoax, it is a strangely powerful one, hoisting global temperatures to record highs, melting the Arctic ice cap, and threatening agriculture and ecosystems across the planet. So how did scientists make that up?
They didn’t, of course, despite the insistence of powerful Republican leaders that your frying lawn is a figment of your imagination. It’s hard not to notice that it’s hotter than it used to be.
This year, indeed, has brought the United States the broad spectrum of weird weather that climate scientists have warned about for years. That includes drought conditions across two-thirds of the country.
“This is what global warming looks like at the regional or personal level. The extra heat increases the odds of worse heat waves, droughts, storms and wildfire. This is certainly what I and many other climate scientists have been warning about,” Jonathan Overpeck, professor of geosciences and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona, told The Associated Press.
Still, of all the debates that rage like wildfires across the political landscape — taxes, health care, immigration — climate change gets precious little attention. Now that Republicans such as Mitt Romney have shifted their stances to line up with hard-core climate change skeptics, Democrats have given up. President Obama hasn’t made it a priority for a long time.
Yet climate change is the issue that worries me most when I think about my child’s future. No one can predict with any certainty how a warming planet will affect the global economy, stores of food and water, or even the spread of disease. Certainly, the world can expect even more conflict over scarce resources since scientists predict that the poorest countries will be hardest hit. It sounds as though we are bequeathing to our kids a very troubled planet.
This would be a difficult issue to tackle — both technologically and politically — even if the modern industrialized nations were all in agreement about what needs to be done. Emerging powers such as China are loathe to be lectured to by countries they believe were free to pollute their way to wealth for a century or so. Moreover, many scientists warn that the Earth is heating so rapidly that huge difficulties may be unavoidable.
But even in this country, we are nowhere near agreement that human-caused climate change is real. The Republican Party has become, among other things, an assemblage of flat-earthers, rejecting science, spreading climate illiteracy and bashing environmentalists.
As recently as the administration of George H.W. Bush, the GOP used to take human-caused global warming seriously. The rejection of climate science probably began when an influential constituency, moguls from fossil-fuels-related industries, began to complain about the focus on their plants and products. As several books, including Joseph Romm’s “Hell and High Water,” have pointed out, industry executives started a public relations crusade to persuade voters that the science on climate change is uncertain.
Decades into that campaign, skepticism toward anthropogenic global warming is part and parcel of Republicans’ DNA, expected of its politicians and grafted onto its voters by the right-wing media machine, including Fox News. Recently I watched in disbelief as a young, well-respected GOPer whom I know insisted on a cable news show that climate change is a hoax intended to “make Al Gore rich.”
Somebody please tell my power company, which is sending me huge bills for my air-conditioning use, that this is all a hoax. If Gore will just admit it, perhaps I can have a summer without fear of heat stroke.
By: Cynthia Tucker, The National Memo, July 7, 2012
“Unprepared To Lead”: Romney To Look Abroad For Foreign Policy Credibility
When it comes to presidential candidates and foreign affairs, there are basically two kinds of candidates: those who point to their vast experience (Biden, Kerry, H.W. Bush) and those who point to their vision and instincts (Obama).
Then there’s Mitt Romney, who doesn’t quite fit into either camp.
During his first presidential campaign, Romney struggled badly on foreign policy and international affairs, arguing, for example, that it was “entirely possible” that Saddam Hussein hid weapons of mass destruction in Syria prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion.
But the inexperienced former one-term governor has had four years to read, get up to speed, and shape a coherent vision. How’s that going? Not at all well.
But don’t worry, Romney has a plan.
Mitt Romney’s campaign is considering a major foreign policy offensive at the end of the month that would take him to five countries over three continents and mark his first move away from a campaign message devoted almost singularly to criticizing President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy, sources tell POLITICO.
The tentative plan being discussed internally would have Romney begin his roll-out with a news-making address at the VFW convention later this month in Reno, Nev. The presumptive GOP nominee then is slated to travel to London for the start of the Olympics and to give a speech in Great Britain on U.S. foreign policy.
Romney next would fly to Israel for a series of meetings and appearances with key Israeli and Palestinian officials. Then, under the plan being considered, he would return to Europe for a stop in Germany and a public address in Poland, a steadfast American ally during the Bush years and a country that shares Romney’s wariness toward Russia. Romney officials had considered a stop in Afghanistan on the journey, but that’s now unlikely.
So, the candidate whose foreign policy experience has been limited to missionary work in France and stashing cash in the Cayman Islands hopes to gain some credibility by heading abroad.
At the surface, there’s nothing especially wrong with this idea, but there is a problem lurking below the surface: what is it, exactly, Mitt Romney is going to say about foreign policy that will be coherent and sound? Or more to the point, how will the candidate choose between the arguments presented by his advisors, most of whom disagree with one another?
About a month ago, the New York Times reported that many members of Team Romney disagree with one another — and at times, even the candidate — about foreign policy, and occasionally, Romney’s own advisors have no idea what he’s trying to say. Last week, Reuters had a similar article, reporting that Romney’s foreign policy advisors are constantly at odds.
The same day, the NYT added that the diplomatic crisis surrounding Chen Guangcheng was seen as an opportunity for the Romney campaign, but they couldn’t get their act together, and couldn’t even agree on what the candidate’s position should be.
Fred Kaplan took stock of what we’ve learned thus far and concluded that Romney is a “foreign policy lightweight” whose ideas “range from vague to ill-informed to downright dangerous.”
Is Romney an extremist? Or, in keeping with the GOP approach to politics in general these days, has he simply calculated that it’s best not to agree with Obama on anything? Either way, one thing is clear: He is not a serious man.
Observers can certainly pick their favorite evidence of Romney’s foreign policy ineptitude — my personal favorite was his profound ignorance during the New START debate — but the point is the Republican candidate seems wholly unprepared to lead on the global stage.
In fact, it’s not even clear if he cares about the subject at all. Inexperience need not be a disqualifier, if voters are given reason to believe there’s a sensible vision and sound judgment that undergirds a coherent set of positions. But Romney hasn’t even met this low threshold, preferring instead to pull together veterans of the Bush/Cheney administration — some of whom have no credibility whatsoever — who’ve been left to argue amongst themselves and leak to the press about their frustrations.
I realize foreign policy probably won’t shape the 2012 race over the next four months, but for a guy who’s supposed to embody “competence,” Romney doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, July 6, 2012
“Turning America Into One Big Pottersville”: Obama Can Really Hurt the GOP By Focusing On Its Radical Economic Plan
Three years ago, two years ago—heck, six months ago—I and a lot of people I know thought: Surely the jobs situation will have picked up as we round the clubhouse turn toward Election Day. I envisioned Barack Obama at the Democratic convention, being able to claim… something fairly modest, but something: three straight months of 200,000-plus-jobs growth. Some kind of hook for an upbeat narrative.
Well, it looks like it ain’t gonna happen. Obama will be able to make some claims, and he damn well better make them without apology or fear of how the 48th Street Fantasy Factory will spin them. But the story isn’t good enough, so there’s but one alternative: convince people that Mitt Romney and a Republican Congress will make things worse. In a rational world, that wouldn’t be too hard, because except for Ronald Reagan’s second term, making things worse is all Republicans have ever done since Nixon. But our world isn’t rational, and Obama is going to have to confront that fact in a huge way or risk being sent to the showers early.
It’s amazing, first of all, the importance now of these jobs numbers. Partly it’s because the economy is bad, true; but partly it’s also the blog-and-tweet, more-faster-now political culture. Romney was having an awful week—and, by the way, still did have an awful week. Those issues—the mandate confusion, Bain, the offshoring, the million-dollar IRA—aren’t going anywhere, and they’ll resurface. But obviously, they had to be relieved up in Boston when the 80,000-jobs number came out Friday morning. Big conversation changer.
It’s the third straight month of anemic growth, and the economists seem to agree that it means we’re not going to be seeing the bulls run any time soon. A decent unemployment picture—say, 170,000 jobs a month being gained, which might, by election time, have gotten the jobless rate back down below the 7.9 percent it was when Obama was sworn in—augured for one kind of Obama fall campaign. Emphasize that we’re finally getting out of the woods first, and bash Romney second.
But the treeline is still on the far horizon. So Obama and the Democrats’ No. 1 job is clear: tie all the Republicans together—Romney, congressional Republicans, and George W. Bush—and warn people about how much worse things could be.
Romney is Bush on steroids. His tax plan is far more extreme. He wants to give millionaires an average—average!—tax cut of $250,000. The same plan would add $3 trillion to the deficit over a decade. Haven’t we tried this before, and didn’t it help lead—along with massive deregulation, which Romney also promises to pursue—to the biggest meltdown in 80 years?
The radical tax plan and its affect on the deficit hasn’t stopped Romney from backing “cut, cap, and balance,” a congressional GOP plan that calls for a Balanced Budget Amendment! Imagine that chutzpah. It’d be as if I torched all my neighbors’ azaleas and then demanded we form a block-beautification committee. Cut, cap, and balance is so extreme, so ludicrous, that 35 GOP senators—a pretty hardened assemblage, you’ll agree—haven’t signed it. It’s out there in Tea Party land.
Want more hypocrisy? Glad you asked. Cut, cap, and balance requires gargantuan and immediate cuts to the federal budget. But remember what Romney told Time magazine in May?: “if you take a trillion dollars, for instance, out of the first year of the federal budget, that would shrink GDP over 5 percent. That is by definition throwing us into recession or depression. So I’m not going to do that, of course.”
Then there’s the Ryan budget and assaults on Medicare. The fact that Romney has no actual jobs plan beyond letting the free market work its magic… It’s just endless. Complete and willful vacuity. Vacuity as a matter of principle. Almost virginal vacuity, as if intercourse with facts were somehow deflowering, leading to a lapsarian state of loss of ignorance. Nothing adds up at all. No attempt is made for things to add up. Except, of course, for those core items that Romney and the congressional Republicans will agree on: cut taxes for the rich, deregulate as much as possible, and re-wreck the economy.
It’s so bad it’s almost hard to believe. I mean this literally. Via Kevin Drum and Jon Chait, I note this nugget from Robert Draper’s New York Times Magazine piece coming up Sunday. The Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA Action, did some polling on Romney. Here’s one thing they found, and place your hand below your jaw, so you don’t hurt yourself as it hits the table: “For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan—and thus championed ‘ending Medicare as we know it’—while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”
There’s some word beyond “perverse” for that—a politician benefiting from the fact that his plans and commitments are so radical that voters simply can’t believe he’d pursue them. That isn’t the only perversity at work here. As Greg Sargent noted on his blog Friday, you might think that when the jobs picture is unsatisfactory, the political debate would be about which candidate has better policies. But instead, it’s a “referendum on Obama.” This is dumb, especially when the other guy is running on such a nest of contradictions and obfuscations. But it’s how life is. I get that. Even so, it shouldn’t stop Obama from making it a co-referendum on Romney and the GOP. Obama’s Bedford Falls may have problems, but the GOP’s Pottersville—no General Motors, no Chrysler, no health care for 32 million, no public investment at all, no regulation of banks, and all the rest—is an ugly place where we don’t want to live.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 7, 2012
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