Oil Kleptocrat of State; Un-Education Secretary of No-Brainer

Dear U.S. Senators, Please vote no on the nomination of Rex Tillerson for Secretary of State. Exxon Mobil is a global criminal enterprise for the way they have delayed climate action and exacerbated climate change. This is a cynical man who will make America's foreign policy focused on extracting oil and causing wars. Future generations will not forgive the destruction we have caused when we let oil companies run our country and delay us from creating a more sustainable world. Also, from a political perspective, what type of resistance do you think you will be giving the Trump agenda when you green light his picks? Do you think the Republicans will be grateful for your support and your vote? Do you think they will respond in kind and support your issues? Very naive. Have you seen what they did to President Obama? Please follow the lead of your fellow Senator Bernie Sanders. He is showing true leadership in a time of crisis. Also, vote no on Betsy De Vos, the nominee for Education Secretary who wants to privatize our public education system, and create a Christian curriculum that violates the separation of church and state and would be anti-science and anti-climate. We need a secular, science-based curriculum that can help us stop climate change! Please be strong and give hope to progressives!

The 2016 Wendy Davis/ Sandra Fluke Ticket

I searched the Internet and didn't find anyone else saying it, so I'll go ahead and put it out there: Wendy Davis for President/Sandra Fluke for Vice President in 2016! What do you think? The Dems (or Greens) would bring the War on Women right to the Repubs doorstep. Enough defense, let's get on offense! It's really a dare to the Repubs: Go ahead, say it, say what you're thinking. Here we are. Time to enter the 21st century. If you can't handle it, then say so, and vote for your crusty old white men and your token Clarence Thomas drones, but for people who have any cognitive abilities, here is a ticket that is strong and won't back down. Bring it on!

Supreme Court Justice Monty Python's decision in Hobby Lobby

The recent Hobby Lobby court decision is reminiscent of Monty Python in more ways than one. The first, most obvious connection is "Every Sperm is Sacred." Wow, I just watched that again for the first time in 15 or 20 years. Hilarious, but also sad in the sense that there is now a 19 and counting show on TV, and 5 Supreme Court Justices and Rick Santorum would not understand the humor. They take it seriously, and they are kind of mindless drones that had (mis)interpreted some ancient biblical text and then decided to ignore all the ramifications in the real world. Ignoring the fact that there is now no need for unwanted babies when we have modern medical understanding and technology, and denying the access to that for primarily low-income families is just cruel, and that cruelty is ironic considering the holier-than-thou stance that the 5 Supremes and their religious allies take. The ruling also follows Monty Python logic. If corporations are people (if she weighs the same as a duck), then corporations need religious freedom (then she's made of wood), therefore they can deny covering contraceptives (so she floats), and can ignore laws when they feel like it (and is therefore...a witch!! Burn her!!). The parallel is uncanny. And just as Monty Python refers to the "laws of science" when the witch is taken away to be burned, these Supreme Court justices will say they are being originalist, and rail against liberals who want to ban assault weapons. Just goes to show that folks will think anything is logical if they can string any set of words together one after the other.

Eric Cantor: Smirking and Idiotic

Usually this blog has focused on Rumsfeld, who was the smirking-est, most self-congratulatory right-winger out there for many years. And one of the most dangerous, in terms of putting people in harm's way, manufacturing made up crises, and wasting lots of resources. He would gleefully invade countries, resulting in thousands of dead and injured Americans, and wasting trilions of dollars, and think he was so gosh darned smart the whole time! But now there is a new smirker. Watch out for this guy. There he was, giving an interview on CNN, smirking about how he was so clever. Eric Cantor, House Majority Leader, and one of the idiots behind the government shutdown and debt ceiling default debacle, had orchestrated a vote to fund veteran's services and maybe one or two other things. Then when Democrats voted against it, because it didn't restart the whole darn government, and picking and choosing only what Republicans want to fund is stupid, because there are also Democrats in Congress, and you have to work with them, Cantor, Cantor gleefully told CNN, "Oh, the Democrats just hate Veterans." What a douche! Of course, Cantor is not the only idiot in Congress, there are a whole slew of them now, and they have shut down the government and pushed us to the brink of debt default. Ted Cruz is a moron, and I believe we already skewered Paul Ryan. Gilligan! I almost forgot about that one. But Cantor, like these other douches, is so pleased with his own ideological inflexibility. That wouldn't be a problem if his ideology included helping people and the planet. But no, his ideology is to hurt people and the planet. Starting with the most vulnerable. What about science? What about climate change? What about helping people who are poor? Social justice! That is why I an annoyed at these guys. They have a cover story that helps them justify to themselves why hurting people is good for them. Builds backbone, stiff upper lips, pulling up from bootstraps (bullshit!). But that is nonsense, and these guys, like the chickenhawks that Rumsfeld hung out with, are all hypocrites when held up to a mirror of their own beliefs. So, my call to Cantor is (and I'm sure he'll be receptive to my wish list after I trash him online): Fully fund food stamps, restart Head Start after it got defunded by the sequester, get the Repugnicans to stop trying to disenfranchise voters, pass a carbon cap and an escalating carbon price that returns revenues back to people as a per capita dividend, and support health care for all - universal health care - brought to you by a repentant Eric Cantor! Repent! And start helping people, not hurting them, use your power for good not evil. Good luck with your internal transformation. We await your apologies, and we'll see about forgiving you for your transgressions...at some point.

Worried about wet bulb temps

I'm still grieving that we're over 400 ppm CO2. It happened a few weeks ago but it is still sinking in, at least with me. The rest of the country doesn't seem to mind, except for the brave few environmental bloggers. Alert, alert! Yawn. So now I'm reading some depressing societal collapse stuff and I looked up wet bulb temprature, which I heard Jim Hansen talking about not long ago. So here are a few excerpts from a blog: "To function normally, we have to maintain a core body temperature of around 37 °C. If it rises above about 42 °C, we die...for every 1 °C that the global average temperature rises, maximum wet-bulb temperatures will rise by about 0.75 °C (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 107, p 9552)." When will this happen? It depends on climate sensitivity to CO2. It could be within the century. "Most of the discussion has been about the 21st century, but warming isn’t going to stop in 2100 unless our emissions have fallen almost to zero by then, and that would require heroic efforts,” says Sherwood. “If you consider that carbon releases might be a little higher than the most likely value and that the climate might be quite sensitive to inputs of energy, it’s not too hard to get up to 10, 12 or even 15 °C by the 23rd century.” This, along with the paleontologist research into the PETM, the previous thermal maximum that occurred millions of years ago, should be enough to finally shut James Inhofe up, and let Congress start debating solutions to this catastrophic climate trajectory. That is, assuming that facts are meaningful, which is a questionable assumption.

Monetary Reform to facilitate Transition to Steady State Economy

Good comment from Jason Dow on the Post Carbon Institute blog: "The issues as I see it is the macro economic model that the energy system supports is based on constant growth in consumption. It is the primary headwind slowing transition for this model to keep the lights on and to keep people employed must pay their bills from their revenues. So today we have technology capable of reducing consumption yet still not capable of completely taking over. This brings me to my point, when we look at the systemic factors blocking the transition one of the primary pillars is growth, and one of the primary drivers of growth is the way money comes into existence as debt so logically if we can transform money to debt free money,( the government creates credit and spends this into the economy) this has the potential to act as a pressure valve over time to absorb some of the rougher edges of transitioning off consumption based economics towards a steady state economic paradigm where progress is measured by a multitude of factors and not just the gross volume of money changes hands across the economy. So if we want this energy revolution, we will need to revolutionize how money comes into existence that will enable the policies to absorb as much of the shock of the transition as possible for people will not tolerate being thrown into poverty, or mass chaos, we will need a mechanism that allows us to transition from a consumptive based system to a cradle to cradle circular economic system and money will play a fundamental role."

The Five Stages Of Grief In Reverse

Joe Romm has a good post about how the five stages of grief are reversed for people who care about climate change. The typical five stages are: 1. Denial 2. Anger 3. Bargaining 4. Depression 5. Acceptance But actually, climate science activists (a.k.a. climate hawks) experience THE FIVE STAGES IN REVERSE. Climate hawks begin with accepting the science. What else can one do? Science is the reason so many of us survived childbirth and childhood, science has fed the world, science is the reason computers and the blogosphere exist at all. And yes, science gave us our fossil-fueled wealth. I’m a scientist by training, but I just don’t see how anyone can pick and choose what science you’re going to believe and what not. The scientific method may not be always be perfect in single studies — since it is used by imperfect humans — but it is the best thing we have for objectively determining what has happened, what is happening, and what will happen. It is testable and self-correcting, unlike all other approaches. Once climate hawks accept the science, many quite naturally get depressed. The situation is beyond dire, and we aren’t doing bloody much about it, in large part because of the successful efforts of the deniers and delayers. Climate science offers a very grim prognosis if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. After depression comes a serious effort at bargaining. Climate hawks try to figure out what they can do to stop the catastrophe. Taking actions and making bargains at a personal level and a political level — depending on their level of activism. Then comes anger. Once you’ve been at this for a while, you get very very frustrated by how little is happening — by the status quo media, the many anti-science politicians, and especially the deniers, the professional disinformers. Finally, you end up in a kind of denial. It just becomes impossible to believe that the human race is going to be so stupid. Indeed, my rational side finds it hard to believe that we’re going to avoid catastrophic global warming... -end of excerpt- Please note that I appreciate this article by reposting it, and I am trying to be nice to Joe Romm, even though he was not nice to Theda Skocpol. OK, let's be serious, he was a jerk. Oops, I forgot, I was trying be nice, sorry.