Hakuna Potato

Warthog and suricate or meerkat from the photorealist Lion King that opened this week. Terrible as the cartoon was, this one has to be far worse. 

My kids were Disney-aged through the string of animated hits of what I guess were the Katzenberg years, Little Mermaid through Pocahontas, and I saw them all, some repeatedly, in addition to reading the book versions aloud, and mostly really hated them for various reasons, especially the disloyalty to the sources—they seemed to me to be working to destroy the sources, from Hans Christian Andersen to colonial history of Virginia, and replace them with perverted simulacra.

For instance in the case of Beauty and the Beast, Mme de Beaumont's Enlightenment fable of falling in love on grounds of moral affinity rather than being distracted by the superficialities was transformed by changing the character of the Beast. In the original he is a Beast because of the completely arbitrary malice of a wicked fairy, but unfailingly kind, generous, and self-effacing, which is why the Beauty comes to love him and the enchantment is overcome. Disney makes him into a cruel person who is bestified by a very judgmental fairy, as deserved punishment, and he becomes handsome again because he's making an effort to be nicer. The moral of the story turns out to be that if you're ugly it's probably your fault because you were mean to some old lady, and serves you right.

But the one I hated the most was The Lion King, for really political reasons at first.

Literary Corner: Mr. President, tear down those hotels!

A year ago, Ishaan Tharoor at Washington Post was using the most famous windmills in European literature as a metaphor for Mexico (I think that's the Mexican flag in upper left, though the color process has made the green bar awfully blue), and our president's other fantasy enemies, but no, he's really got a serious issue with literal windmills!

Which goes back at least in part, as is well known, to his long war with the Scottish government over his golf course and resort near the village of Balmedie in Aberdeenshire, which he bought in 2006 under what he believed or claimed to believe were assurances from then chief minister Alex Salmond that no wind farm was going to be constructed within sight of the course (the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds opposed both the proposed wind farm and the golf course, but Salmond helped Trump out with the permitting for the latter, I assume in the name of job creation). But by the time the course was ready to open in 2012, the wind farm had been more or less decided on, and Trump was threatening to back out of his own commitment (Salmond would be "known for centuries" as "the man who destroyed Scotland", he threatened, and when RSPB withdrew its objection to the energy project, since the number of birds killed by wind turbines is minuscule compared to the vast numbers that die or are never born because of the effects of fossil-fuel energy production, he said it should change its name to "Royal Society for the Killing of Birds"). But the threat was empty, like most of his threats, and he opened the place anyway, and lost his last appeal, during the presidential transition, as it happened, in December 2016.

So we know he never forgives or abandons his hope for revenge at all costs against those who give him a defeat, whether it's the NFL thwarting his longing to own a team or Mrs. Clinton not inviting him to her daughter's wedding, and that ought to be enough to explain his feelings about wind power, but I can't help feeling it's somehow more than that, that windmills truly creep him out in some irrational way, as you could hear in the tone of his remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee on Tuesday, where the tone mounted to the macabre, with a childlike hardness, a little Christina Rossetti:

What "environmental" means

You know those coastal élites who think it's funny to be preoccupied with cow farts and the like? I guess they just think the 40% of all US land that's devoted to agriculture, as Purdy notes, producing 9% of our carbon emissions (in the very conservative EPA figures), is just flyover country. Seriously, those people love to talk about the "heartland" and their deep connection with the rural population, but they don't really believe it exists outside of their sentiments. Photo via University of Minnesota Extension. 

Another approach to the thing I wanted to say about the Green New Deal from Jedediah Purdy-Britton in the Times ("The Green New Deal Is What Realistic Environmental Policy Looks Like") and its roping of everything from indigenous rights to combating monopolies into the same structure:

this everything-and-the-carbon-sink strategy is actually a feature of the approach, not a bug, and not only for reasons of ideological branding. In the 21st century, environmental policy is economic policy. Keeping the two separate isn’t a feat of intellectual discipline. It’s an anachronism.

Because all these factors are literally built in to the situation:

Our carbon emissions are not mainly about the price of gasoline or electricity. They’re about infrastructure. For every human being, there are over 1,000 tons of built environment: roads, office buildings, power plants, cars and trains and long-haul trucks. It is a technological exoskeleton for the species. Everything most of us do, we do through it: calling our parents, getting to work, moving for a job, taking the family on vacation, finding food for the evening or staying warm in a polar vortex. Just being human in this artificial world implies a definite carbon footprint — and for that matter, a trail of footprints in water use, soil compaction, habitat degradation and pesticide use. You cannot change the climate impact of Americans without changing the built American landscape.

So the proposals to retrofit buildings, retool transportation and build a clean-energy system are simply ways of tackling the problem where it starts. They are public-works projects because large capital projects — especially ones that, like highways, involve widespread public benefit — have always required public money. They are jobs programs, unless robots do the work, so the jobs might as well be good.

The deeper point is that any economic policy is a jobs policy. The oil and gas sector provides at least 1.4 million American jobs, more if you believe industry estimates, and depends on public subsidies and infrastructure. You might say that producing the disaster of global climate change has taken a lot of economic policy and produced a lot of jobs programs. Reversing direction will take the same.

And so on. It's kind of what "environmental" means, isn't it?

Paradise Paved

Bison hunters bringing hides to market, Taylor County, TX, sometime around maybe 1870, via TexasBeyondHistory.

A huge landmark moment in media coverage of climate science occurred yesterday, but nobody seems to have noticed it, including the writer who did it, David Leonhardt ("Harvey, the Storm that Humans Helped Cause"), in The New York Times:

The daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico last winter never dropped below 73 degrees. You can probably guess how many previous times that had happened: Zero.

This sort of heat has a specific effect on storms: Warmer weather causes heavier rainfall. Why? When the seas warm, more moisture evaporates into the air, and when the air warms — which has also been happening in Texas — it can carry more moisture.

The severity of Harvey, in other words, is almost certainly related to climate change.

Yes, I know the sober warning that’s issued whenever an extreme weather disaster occurs: No individual storm can be definitively blamed on climate change. It’s true, too. Some version of Harvey probably would have happened without climate change, and we’ll never know the hypothetical truth.

Not sure what the "hypothetical truth" is doing in that sentence, actually. I'd say the hypothetical truth is what we do know, and what we'll never know is whether it's wrong.

But that sober warning is no longer regarded as quite true, is the thing. I can't remember where I first saw it, sometime in the last few months, but the science is now there; the new scientific consensus is that, while you can't blame a particular extreme weather event on human-caused global warming, you can blame that for the extremity, within certain probability limits.

Bret and Butter: Update

Also, Stephens has a truly nasty private-school bully's smirk. Photo via Daily Wire.

Finally got around to reading Steve's terrific take on the Bret Stephens premiere performance, and found something I could have used for a unifying close to my own piece:

He's still telling readers that they're wrong if they accept the scientific consensus on global warming. He's still arguing that advocates for a strong response are tyrants drunk with power. But he's trying to sell this argument to people who believe the science, so he's conceding some of their points. 

That's it in the terms of Vincenz's parable of the Hasidic cart driver: as Stephens distracts us with this elaborate painting of the environmental movement as totalitarian, the 100% hooligans who will never acknowledge any merit on the part of the freedom-loving opposition, what he's actually accomplishing is billing himself as 55% right, the pleasant antagonist we'll be happy to surrender to. Not me! #NeverBret!

Bret and Butter

Update: Now with a newly improved paragraph somewhere near the bottom!

The "butter" in the headline refers to the oleaginous tone with which Stephens tries to lull or perhaps lubricate the reader into acquiescence in his revolting project.

Klezmer band from Munkács, Hungary, in the Subcarpathian Rus' region, between the wars. From the World Holocaust Remembrance Center at Yad Vashem.

Rectification Central welcomes Bret Stephens, late of the Wall Street Journal, to the pages of The New York Times, and his maiden effort, "Climate of Complete Certainty", which showed up online Friday afternoon. Shorter:

Hillary Clinton thought she was 100% right or thereabouts in the presidential election last November, and yet she didn't win. In the same way, global warming crusaders think they're 100% right, but there's a chance they could be wrong. Even the liberal Andrew Revkin agrees people would take it more seriously if you'd admit it might be trivial.

Yes, it's pretty dispiriting. It seems a lot longer than it really is, too, perhaps because it wanders so widely, and starts off with a rather lengthy epigraph:

#MarchForScience

Pictures from Saturday, where I had the opportunity to meet up with our friend the Big Bad Bald Bastard, an actual scientist by training, and help defend our community against the plague of ignorance and vicious profit-seeking.

Central Park.

People really were chanting, "What do we want? Science! When do we want it? After peer review!" I'm so glad I'm a nerd.

"Shame! Shame!" outside the Trump International at Columbus Circle.

"Science doesn't care what you believe, Carol!"

We felt good about it.

And another TPP of the hat

Debris at Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais, after the dam collapse. Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters via The Guardian (which along with a number of sources spells "Rodrigues" without its second r).

Erik Loomis reports, and there's more information and pictures at greenpeace, on a dam collapse in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, on November 5, releasing millions of cubic feet of mining waste, mud poisoned with arsenic, lead, chromium, and other heavy metals—more than "25,000 Olympic swimming pools"—into the mining community of Mariana, where it has killed at least 17 people and displaced hundreds more, and that's just the beginning:

The mud surged through rural communities and into the Rio Doce, the major river in southeast Brazil. Since November 5th, it has been slowly working its way downstream — contaminating the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of people and turning protected forest and habitat into a desert of mud. The tragedy will continue to spread over 500 kilometers as contaminants from the sludge make their way towards the Atlantic coast, eventually endangering the Abrolhos National Marine Park. 

Loomis notes,

Brazil has issued a preliminary fine of $66 million and that will no doubt be higher in the end. But Brazil has also gone straight ahead with its modernization program that includes cutting down the Amazon for cattle ranchers and allowing mining companies to do basically whatever they want to. The government might act in a time of crisis like this, but it’s opened itself to resource extraction as its path to modernization, whether the government is right or left... It would be nice if the voters held [president Dilma] Rousseff accountable, but given the power of the mining companies, it’s unlikely that there are going to be any successful anti-mining political movements.

And it suddenly occurred to me that in a better world there might be something that could be done in a case like this.

Spiritual Pron

Rudolph Valentino and Gloria Swanson in Sam Wood's Beyond the Rocks (1922), via TheLoudestVoice.

Shorter David Brooks, "Fracking and the Franciscans", June 23 2015:

Pope Francis, author of a new encyclical on the protection of the natural environment, is the kind of ideal human being I've been talking about who radiates goodness, generosity, humility, spiritual awareness. What an idiot, huh?

As with the largely leftist cast of The Road to Character, George Eliot, Dorothy Day, Frances Perkins, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Brooks wants us to admire the Pope's deep spirituality while ignoring everything he thinks. Wonderful man, but unfortunately stupid on geological, biological, economic, and political issues; you should listen to a smart guy like Brooks, otherwise known as a narcissistic blowhard, instead.

Mind the Gap

Floating around in my drafts file is a Times business column by Eduardo Porter, discussing the (lack of) progress in talks toward next December's Paris climate change agreement, a problem, of course, with corralling the world's two largest greenhouse gas producers, China, and the United States, into a worthwhile pact. For example,

What if every other advanced nation, as a way to encourage energy efficiency and spur investments in alternatives to fossil fuels, agreed to put a price of $25 per ton on carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere? As a tax, that would add some 22 cents to the price of a gallon of gas, something few American politicians — fearing public anger — are yet ready to consider.

According to calculations by William Nordhaus, an expert on the economics of climate change at Yale, the United States, on net, would gain $8 billion a year by benefiting from everybody else’s efforts to slow down the Earth’s warming without having to exert any effort itself.

But then, what if the other nations had some mechanism for pushing the US into less anti-social behavior?

if the other advanced nations had a stick — a tariff of 4 percent on the imports from countries not in the “climate club” — the cost-benefit calculation for the United States would flip. Not participating in the club would cost Americans $44 billion a year.

This is a great idea in my view, but it also sounds "Draconian", as Porter says; it's an idea for using a trade agreement to interfere with the sovereign ability of the United States to do whatever the hell it wants. What's the progressive position on that, Senator Warren?

My position is I don't really care about the sacred sovereignty of the United States in a context like this. At all. Like the original progressives negotiating a League of Nations in Versailles in 1919 while the conservatives back in Washington conspired to make sure the US would not take part in such a thing, I would like to see the US give up some sovereignty in return for some international progress.

Which brings us to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, sort of. Why would we trust the US government better than a hammered-out body of international regulation? On the basis of what experience?

White House Fool Report: Hostile Working Environmentalism

Speaking of the president's negotiating skills, I was poking around the Wikileaks documents on the Trans-Pacific Partnership environmental negotiations the other day, trying to figure out exactly how upset I'm supposed to be and why, and saw something, I think, that I'm not hearing about from any of the commentators, which is that the most hateful provisions of the draft agreement are things the US negotiating team is committed to getting rid of.

That is, on the one hand the posted draft agreement (from Salt Lake City, November 2013, and thus presumably superseded by now, more than a year and a couple of rounds later) is, as Wikileaks says,

White House Fool Report: Thanks, Obama

All our political rhetoric derives from a time when the experience of representative democracy as people had it was quite different from today's, in a two-part division of power between the hereditary executive and his appointed representatives and a relatively weak legislature elected by men mostly of property (the judiciary, appointed out of the gentry and largely unpaid, belonged to the Crown, though it became increasingly able to act independently as the 18th century went on).

So we think of our representatives as "closer" to us when they're chosen by a more local electorate, state legislators as representing us more than federal ones and more than executives, House members more than Senators, and so on, and we worry about the danger that the president will act as a monarch or even "emperor", and look to the Congress, "representatives" of the "people", to defend us against tyranny.

But things look a lot different than they did in 1787, and it's really time to start thinking of the possibility of the federal government protecting us from the tyranny of the state capitols, and the presidency as a bulwark of defense against the abuses of Congress.

Greetings, Earth Day

Just in time, the Times did something for Earth Day, and I heard about it from Gomez at Atrios:

Hipster fairy? Herbert, by Paulina Cassidy.

The Environmental Protection Agency again is raising objections to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. 

The EPA said that despite more than four years of study, the State Department still has not done sufficient analysis of the project's environmental impact.

Yes, it seems that what's been going on all this time with the Keystone is one of those Village turf wars: the EPA has the expertise to decide just how much of a disaster the pipeline is going to be, but State has the authority to make the decision—because it will cross the international border, apparently making it a Foreign Affair. And the EPA is raising its tiny, tinny, morally and scientifically authoritative voice. I want to believe it will make a difference, I want to believe it will make a difference, I want—clap your hands, children! This sometimes works!

Climate hope and climate change

Updated 9/24/2012
(Not really updated; I just wanted to pretty it up before inviting some friends over.)

I twitter-follow the Heritage Foundation, just by way of being able to say I don't shut my ears to thinking outside my comfort zone, and of course in the hope of some cheap laughs, but they really surprised me today:

The Second Coming of Cap and Trade?herit.ag/NiRlEJ
— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) September 9, 2012

It turns out that they've been hearing rumors that healing the planet is still on the agenda. Carol Browner, the former EPA head, told a panel during the DNC  that

court victories have created momentum that might make industry-specific cap-and-trade plans more palatable than the prospect of facing new regulations. Though comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation might be off the table for now, Browner said that dynamic opens opportunities for piecemeal progress on cap-and-trade. (The Hill)

Naturally, Heritage is somewhat cool (globally cool?) to this prospect:

Such talk is certainly bad news for the energy and manufacturing sectors, which have borne the brunt of Obama’s regulatory hyperactivity. But revived prospects for cap-and-trade might well hearten the environmental lobby, which has criticized President Obama for (supposedly) ignoring global warming despite his declaration that the 2008 election “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Landing puffins on Matinicus Rock, Maine. Photo by Steven Kress.

That quote is getting to be quite a Republican favorite, by the way;  Romney specifically called it out for mockery in his convention speech:

President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. MY promise...is to help you and your family.

In fact, President Obama neither declared that it had been done nor promised to do it. Rather, he expressed the pious hope that we might someday see that it had been done:

...generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. (Barack Obama, St. Paul, June 3 2008)

To Republicans, the notion of slowing the rise of the sea level is ridiculously grandiose, like King Canute, because they can't grasp the simple science of it. But you can see from the context that Obama doesn't think of it as any harder in principle than providing health care or pulling the troops out of Iraq, and of course he's right.

When the Heritage writer starts listing what the administration does on behalf of the environment so people will recognize what a horror it is, the "environmental lobby" may indeed find it "heartening" (allowing for the distortion in the way the costs are calculated—of course most of these measures will have a net positive effect over the long run):

• his regulatory record bespeaks allegiance to drastic and unwarranted cutbacks in emissions of carbon dioxide—the supposed source of looming environmental cataclysm ["drastic"? "unwarranted"? "supposed"? just the facts, please, I can do my own adjectives];
• the consulting group ICF International estimates that 20 percent of America’s coal power plants could be retired as soon as 2020 because of the Administration’s regulatory actions [is that all? never mind, it's a start];
• the EPA’s newest mercury and air toxics rule alone could cost as much as $100 billion per year, according to the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council [or $9.6 billion per year according to the EPA, but what's a 900% exaggeration among "industry insiders"?];
• Whether the President overtly pursues a costly cap-and-trade scheme remains to be seen. But there’s no question that his Administration is aggressively imposing regulations that have much the same effect—i.e., inflating the cost of fossil fuel energy in order to reduce some of the disadvantages of solar and wind power [one can only hope].

Yippee! I want to shout. Sign me up for some of that!

Arctic tern. Photo by Carsten Evergang/PA Wire, The Irish Times.

Request for signatures

The Australian government is contemplating plans for a marine reserve of a million square miles, but they need expressions of international support; you can send one through the very international Avaaz, at http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_coral_sea_4/?vl.

Image from Supergreenme.

Green and bear it

While the strictly human stories may be more interesting, and easier to follow, we shouldn't forget that our planet is very sick. I've been waiting for somebody to put up a New Year's wrap-up of the environmental news; this, from Huffington Post, looks like the best we can do, and it isn't really enough.

What I wanted to say is that the horrors of war and want, the things that grab us the hardest, belong each to its own generation, and then it's over. Who really cares about the dead of Austerlitz or Shiloh or even Verdun today? But the planet is for many, very many generations, perhaps all the generations to come....

That's me on the right...

Update 1/1/2012

This by Joe Romm at ThinkProgress is the kind of story I had in mind, but I missed it when it came out December 21.