Posts Tagged ‘Waxman-Markey’
Politics Wednesday!
Politics Wednesday!
* Ben Smith at Politco dreams the dream: Franken ’16?
* More good news: God’s told Joe the Plumber not to run for office.
* But bad news: Glenn Beck guest Michael Scheuer says America’s only hope is a massive terrorist attack. Don’t miss Beck nodding sagely towards the end. Adam Serwer says it well:
But understand, this is not unpatriotic. You can wish all manner of horrors on this country, but as long as these horrors might serve a specific political agenda, you’re not being unpatriotic. Unpatriotic is a public health-care plan. Unpatriotic is a judge modifying sub-prime mortgage loans to keep a roof over someone’s head. Unpatriotic is phosphate-free detergent. Patriotic is wishing for a terrorist attack on the United States.
Patriotism is dead, long live patriotism.
* TPM and Washington Monthly tackle the EPA SUPPRESSION!!!!! “scandal” that’s been making the rounds; turns out a hobbyist working on non-climate matters for the agency decided a memo no one asked him to write prepared in his spare time should be published alongside recommendations produced by actual experts in the field. Fox News, naturally, agrees. Inhofe (R-Jupiter) has gone further, demanding Monday a criminal investigation.
* Also in climate news: Thomas Friedman says Waxman-Markey is very, very bad and we should support it. For what it’s worth Kevin Drum agrees.
Defining Treason Down
Defining treason down to include weak-tea environmental reforms. If this be treason…
Climate Change vs. GDP
Nate Silver demolishes a new talking point that climate change will only reduce global GDP by 5% in one hundred years. Taking that very questionable assumption at face value, Nate writes:
Let’s see how much of the world we can destroy before getting to 5% of global GDP. The figures I’ll use are IMF estimates of 2008 GDP, for all countries bit Zimbabwe where the IMF did not publish a 2008 estimate and I use 2007 instead.
Zimbabwe, indeed, is the first country on the chopping block, whose 11.7 million greedy bastards consume a whole 0.0196 percent of the world’s output — a global low of just $55 per person. After that, we get to destroy Burundi, The Congo (the larger of the two Congos — the one that used to be called Zaire), Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Eretrea, Malawai … do you really me to go through the whole list? You do? … Malwai, Ethopia, Sierra Leone, Niger, Afghanistan (big problem solved there), Togo, Guinea, Uganda, Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Nepal, Myanmar, Rwanda, Mozambique, Timor-Leste, the Gambia — we’ve only used 0.27 percent of GDP to this point, by the way — Bangladesh (which has 162 million people), Tanzania, Burkina Faso, Mali, Lesotho, Ghana, Haiti, Tajikistan, Comoros, Cambodia, Laos, Benin, Kenya, Chad, The Soloman Islands and Kyrgyzistan. Next up is India, which, while growing, still consumes only 2 percent of world GDP. Then Nicaragua, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Mauritania, Pakistan (another problem solved), Senegal, São Tomé and Príncipe, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, Yemen, Cameroon, Djibouti, Papua New Guinea, Kiribati, Nigeria (another pretty big country — we’ve now got only about 1.4 points of GDP left), Guyana, the Sudan, Bolivia (our first foray into South America), Moldova, Honduras, the Philippines, Sra Lanka, Mongolia, Bhutan and Egypt.
At this point, we’ve used up 4.4 points of GDP. Indonesia is next on the list of lowest per-capita GDPs. But unfortunately we can’t quite fit them into the budget so we’ll spare them, opting instead for Vanauatu, Tonga, Paragua, Morocco, Syria, Swaziland, Samoa, Guatemala, Georgia (the country — not the place where they have Chik-Fil-A), the other Congo, and Iraq. Skipping China, we then get to Armenia, Jordan, Cape Verde, the Maldives — and another big bunch of skips follows here since we’re very low on budget — Fiji and finally Namibia. Collectively, these countries consume 4.99997 percent of the world’s GDP. There’s absolutely no budget left for anyone else — not even St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which would be a great band name, BTW.
So, we’ll have to settle for just these 81 countries, which collectively have a mere 2,865,623,000 people, or about 43 percent of the world’s population.
Friday Already?
* Michael Jackson and SF: Michael Jackson “cameo” in Back to the Future II. (And here’s a real cameo from Men in Black II.) io9 remembers Captain EO.
* At right, of course, there’s a panel from Persepolis.
* NASA thinks it’s solved the 1908 Tunguska mystery.
* Happy birthday to the toothbrush.
* ‘How Wall Street Will Ruin the Environment’: Robert Bryce at The Daily Beast slams Waxman-Markey.
In short, given its length and complexity, the cap-and-trade bill would be better named “The 2009 Lawyer-Lobbyist Full Employment Act.” Proponents are ignoring the fact that Enron (remember Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay?) desperately wanted caps on carbon dioxide because they saw huge profits in being able to trade carbon allowances. And now Congress wants to give Wall Street traders—the same pirates who helped engineer the financial meltdown—a mandate that requires a massive new trading business that has the potential to be gamed in the same way that Enron gamed the California electricity market? Hello?
* And Wired has a detailed look at swine flu hysteria, just in time for the outbreak at Duke.
Thrusday Roundup
* In the Safford v. Redding case that got so much attention around the time of the Sotomayor nomination, the Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 that strip searching a thirteen-year-old girl on the word of another student in search of ibuprofen is unconstitutional. Clarence Thomas was the lone dissent, issuing a Cassandra-like warning of the plague of pills in underpants that is sure to follow. If we will not strip search our thirteen-year-olds, I ask you, who will?
* ‘Seeking a tougher climate bill, green groups set eyes on the Senate.’ So, giving up then.
* If anything it’s amazing Tim Burton waited this long to do Alice in Wonderland.
* My “Haloscan is broken” AskMe went completely unanswered. Haloscan remains broken. Situation dire. Hope lost.
* Some screenshots of Fox News party-ID follies. From Cynical-C.
Wednesday Night MetaFilterFilter
Wednesday night MetaFilterFilter.
* NASA climatologist James Hansen, recently arrested at an anti-mountaintop-mining demonstration in West Virginia, says we’re almost too late to stop climate change. I wonder about that “almost.”
* Nate Silver considers the legislative strategy at work in the upcoming Waxman-Markey vote.
* Mapping relationships in the X-Men Universe.
* An early Christmas present for my father? Corzine trails badly in New Jersey.
* Lots of talk lately about Robert Charles Wilson’s anti-Singulatarian Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Here’s an interview at io9 that takes up that angle, while Cory Doctorow highlights this blurb:
If Jules Verne had read Karl Marx, then sat down to write The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he still wouldn’t have matched the invention and exuberance of Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock.
* Dancing plagues and mass hysteria. Via MeFi.
* How complexity leads to social collapse: some intriguing historical exploration from Paul Kedrosky. Also via MeFi.
* Roger Ebert explains how Bill O’Reilly works.
O’Reilly represents a worrisome attention shift in the minds of Americans. More and more of us are not interested in substance. The nation has cut back on reading. Most eighth graders can’t read a newspaper. A sizable percentage of the population doesn’t watch television news at all. They want entertainment, or “news” that is entertainment. Many of us grew up in the world where most people read a daily paper and watched network and local newscasts. “All news” radio stations and TV channels were undreamed-of. News was a destination, not a generic commodity. Journalists, the good ones anyway, had ethical standards.
In those days, if you quoted The New York Times, you were bringing an authority to the table. Now O’Reilly–O’Reilly!–advises viewers to cancel their subscriptions to a paper most of them may not have ever seen. In those days, if the wire services reported something, it probably happened. Today the wire services remain indispensable, but waste resources in producing celebrity info-nuggets that belong in trash magazines. Advertisers now seek readers they once thought of as shoplifters. If nuclear war breaks out, the average citizen of a Western democracy will be better informed about Brittny Spears than the causes of their death.
Discussion (where else?) at MeFi.
Wednesday 2
Wednesday 2.
* My North Carolinian readers should consider sending a letter expressing their displeasure to the offices of our senator, Kay Hagan, who as Facing South reports is currently one of the major stumbling blocks for health care reform.
Sen. Kay Hagan
521 Dirksen Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Phone: 202-224-6342
Fax: 202-228-2563
You can contact her via email at her web site, but a snail mail letter is still best.
* Climate Progress analyzes the concessions made to Collin Peterson to get Waxman-Markey to the floor this week. Kevin Drum and Yglesias has more, as well as a teaser for how much worse the Senate version will be.
* Also from Yglesias: (1) a post on Asimov’s novel The Gods Themselves that intrigued me enough to drop everything and read the book and (2) a report that the Iranian soccer players who wore green in solidarity with the protesters have been banned from the sport for life. The Gods Themselves, I can report, is a great read: in addition to the environmental allegory Yglesias highlights there’s also some really intriguing queer sexuality stuff in the “how aliens have sex” section—very rare for Asimov—and a nice Star Maker-style cosmology regarding the origin of the universe and the fates of planets that don’t solve their energy crises. I think Asimov’s probably right that it’s his best book.
* Squaring off on the suckiness of Transformers II. In this corner, Roger Ebert:
“Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.
And in this corner, Walter Chaw:
The worst summer in recent memory continues as Michael Bay brings his slow push-ins and Lazy Susan dolly shots back to the cineplex with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (hereafter Transformers 2), the ugliest, most hateful, most simple-minded and incomprehensible assault on art and decency since the last Michael Bay movie.
* And your webcomic of the day: Warbot in Accounting.
Worse by the Day
Chris Bowers at Open Left has an update on the unbearable suckiness of Waxman-Markey. This is how bad the bill is before it hits the Senate.
Tuesday Links
* Today, we are all already losers: Ed McMahon has died.
* TPM is reporting that Waxman-Markey may go to vote in the House this week after all.
* Beautiful demolished train stations.
* The dizzying fall of MySpace.
* Graphical Overview of Same Sex Marriage Debate, v. 1.3.
* What was once the most secret British government document is released to the public on Tuesday. The Government War Book, used during the Cold War, set out in great detail exactly what would happen in the days before nuclear weapons were fired. Much more here. Via MeFi.
Monday Late Night Politics
Monday late night politics.
* Strange things are happening in South Carolina, where Governor Mark Sanford has been missing for four days. Reports are that the governor has made contact, but the governor’s office won’t confirm that’s true. (UPDATE: The governor’s office is now saying that Sanford is on the Appalachian Trail, a mere 2000 miles long.)
* Waxman-Markey Watch: In the comments Alex drops an A-bomb to describe one of the key antagonists on this bill, Colin Peterson. Apparently the bill is unlikely to be debated this week. Yale e360 had a roundup of opinions on Waxman-Markey that’s worth reading, with Climate Progress providing a roundup of the roundup. Krugman (also via CP) had a recent column on the bill, too, coming out in favor of it.
* Mexico has decriminalized small amounts of drugs. Good.
* ‘Eco-Friendly Meat Could Begin With Mini-Cows.’ Gross.
* Dystopia is now: Bill Simmon takes a good, hard look at reports that Lancaster, PA, will soon be putting in so many security cameras that it will take a volunteer Stasi comprised of local busybodies to watch them all and determines that this may be the least worst alternative for our privacy-robbed future. Frankly I think Bill’s got this one wrong: open-source surveillance is a police state, just one with slightly better branding. Call me Sisyphus Q. Luddite if you must but I don’t think panoptic surveillance is some historical inevitability; it can and should be resisted, not embraced.
* And Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a reality check regarding Martin Luther King. (NB: He’s already walked the post back.)
More on Waxman-Markey
Debate over the relative merits of a carbon tax versus this bill’s cap-and-trade model has mostly given way to concerns about whether the legislation, sponsored by representatives Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), lines the pockets of polluters with little to show for it. The most it would cut carbon emissions by 2020 is 17 percent below 1990 levels, nowhere near the 25 to 40 percent reduction sought by scientists and international climate negotiators. The Sierra Club has withheld its endorsement in hopes of improving the bill before a final vote—it wants to prevent polluters from receiving tradable emissions permits for free, preserve the EPA’s authority to independently regulate carbon, and better fund energy efficiency and clean energy—but Fahn and other environmentalists are skeptical that lawmakers will listen. “From my perspective,” he says, “the prospects of strengthening it to where we’d want to support the ultimate version are growing slim.”
Mother Jones has some good coverage of the fight brewing over Waxman-Markey, including a checklist of what the bill will actually accomplish:
Cap and Trade
The Good
Ambitiously caps emissions at 68 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 by creating a market in tradable emissions permits
The Bad
By 2020, the cap will have cut emissions by only 4 percent
The Ugly
Only 15 percent of the tradable emissions permits will be auctioned off by the government; the bill hands out another 50 percent of the permits to the fossil fuel industry for free.
Kevin Drum calls this fight an example of “the circular firing squad,” but he’s wrong. It comes down to this: if the bill will make it harder to pass real carbon legislation later, then we shouldn’t pass it; if it will make it easier, we should. Or, as Harkinson puts it:
Given that almost all environmental groups agree that Waxman-Markey is far from ideal, the ultimate question is whether passing an imperfect bill now is better than holding out for a better one later. Those who advocate for an incremental approach point out that the US needs to bring something to the table in the next round of international climate talks in Copenhagen this December. On the other hand, Pica argues that improving massive bills like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act took decades, “and by that time we will have carbon-loaded the atmosphere to such a degree that it may not be worth improving anymore.”
Monday Politics!
Monday politics!
* Žižek’s recent lectures on “Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture” are now online as MP3s. Some video here.
* How much will Waxman-Markey actually cost? Only about $175 per household. But does it really matter how much it “costs” when the alternative is worldwide disaster? The real problem with Waxman-Markey is that it costs too little, because it doesn’t do nearly enough. (Or much of anything.) See the Breakthrough Institute’s analysis for more. (UPDATE: Wound up doing another post about this up the page.)
* Emboldened by polls that show public backing for a government health insurance plan, Democrats are moving to make it a politically defining issue in the debate over the future of medical care. (Via Benen.) I’ve never seen the Democrats “emboldened.” I wonder what it’s like.
* Meanwhile, Krugman points Cassandra-like to our sudden but inevitable betrayal by “centrists” in the Democratic caucus.