Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change September 30, 2019September 29, 2019 It matters who’s in charge. From the New York Times last year: Editor’s Note This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it. And oh, look! Borealis Exploration sells Share Assets to Borealis Holdings. A corporate housekeeping non-event that we have 10 years to deal with, as I understand it. For now, no action required.
Post-Presidential Leadership September 27, 2019September 26, 2019 I continue to support the Clinton Foundation. (Also: the Carter Center, the Obama Foundation, and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project . . . though not the Trump Foundation or whatever world-healing efforts George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Dan Quayle may be leading.) Here’s why. Three minutes. Want to see the full whistle-blower report, that Lindsey Graham and Bill Barr don’t find troubling and that Trump finds potentially treasonous? Click here. [Russia has invaded a U.S. ally that desperately needs our military aid to defend itself; Congress appropriated that aid; the President instructed that it be suspended without explanation to Congress and then asked that ally’s president to do him “a favor”; the transcript of that phone call was deemed so potentially damning it was removed from the computer that ordinarily stores such transcripts; the “favor” Trump asked was for that ally’s president to meet with Trump’s attorney general (who used to be the nation’s attorney general, but not anymore) and with his demented personal attorney (famous for locating New York’s emergency response center inside New York’s previously-attacked prime target) to try to gain personal political advantage in the 2020 election.] With footnotes: nine pages long. The 448-page Mueller report detailed collusion (though not conspiracy) . . . and obstruction of justice that more than 1,000 Republican and Democratic former federal prosecutors labeled criminal and that may have been the reason conspiracy could not be proven . . . but it was, as the kids say, “tl;dr.” Oh, well. Have a great weekend.
Vacation On The Moon September 26, 2019September 25, 2019 When I started writing these posts in 1996 — at $500 a pop for the first three years — I took no time off. Hey: $500 for a half hour’s work? Do you even begin to know how money motivates me? Once the money stopped, I found myself working harder on them — some perverse thing about doing it because I “wanted to” versus doing it because I had committed to. But I did feel entitled to take, occasionally, what I used to call “Andy days,” though rarely if ever more than one every month or two. And I reserve the right to do that again. This in fact is sort of one of those days. But it’s a chance to offer you two things. First, the story of how the $500 a pop stopped, 20 years ago. Second, part II of my pal Bryan Norcross’s wonderful remembrance of the moon landing. It should have posted July 20, on the 50th anniversary, but got crowded out. (Part I, which I did manage to post timely, remembered the mission’s launch.) It is so uplifting . . . and a call, by implication, for America to work together on great projects again, and to exalt science, as administrations pretty much all the way up to, but ending with, this one, always have. (This one suppresses and defunds science; fires scientists en masse; exits the Paris Climate Accords.) Whenever you’re reading this — perhaps a few days from now, because it’s just too damn hot to write anything, or this fall or winter, because I suddenly remembered, two frozen margaritas in, that I had it in reserve — remember: If we can get out from under the Russian attack designed to make us hate each other, we can come together to do great things.
Finally September 25, 2019September 24, 2019 Cort: “At your invitation, I stand ready to set up my Fundraising Page and start inviting all of my friends and acquaintances to donate to the DNC. But I haven’t done it yet, because I am so profoundly concerned about what our party is NOT doing in Congress. Call me picky or stingy, but I need to feel like our party in Congress is living up to its obligation to us before I step out and obligate myself and my friends to our party. Is it too much to ask that our party give me a reason to believe, and fundraise? What is it going to take for Speaker Pelosi to get fired up, inspire her caucus, and lead a robust Impeachment inquiry? Seriously, WTF is she waiting for?” → I guess she was waiting for a Trump-appointed Inspector General to find a whistle-blower report to be “urgent and credible.” The invitation still stands! Bill McDonald: “I think you’ve gone as far as you can with the book of Hitler’s speeches. There are so many reasons to disfavor Trump which are better grounded, I think you undercut your persuasiveness by repeatedly citing this one.” → I hear you! But by coincidence, within hours of your note, one of your fellow readers sent me this remarkable book review which I find myself incapable of not sharing. In small part: . . . In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019—an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority—is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies. Neuborne doesn’t make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation. “Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.” A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says. “Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.” . . . The review goes on to detail 20 points of comparison. You’re surely correct that it won’t persuade Trump supporters. But it’s of engrossing interest nonetheless (if you ask me), and might even motivate some of “our” folks to chip in, and/or try fundraising themselves. (Why should I have all the fun?)
Greta Thunberg Meets Barack and Trevor September 24, 2019September 23, 2019 A minute with Barack. Nine with Trevor Noah. But really most powerful of all — if you watch nothing else — these three minutes with Ms. Thunberg speaking directly to us. Even though she doesn’t come from a s—hole country (she’s Nordic!), Republicans are too smart to fall for her pitch (though every other country in the world has signed on). She’s just 16, for crying out loud! If climate were truly the crisis virtually all the world’s scientists claim, surely Trump and his “best people” (whether acting, fired, in jail or under indictment) . . . working with Moscow Mitch and Snowball Jim . . . would be working to protect our future. No? I mean: if you can’t trust Trump and McConnell, whom can you trust? And what’s the big deal about 500-year floods, anyway? They happen all the time. The rain that fell on Texas the other day? My pool was deeper than three-and-a-half feet.* What would have been impressive: the equivalent amount of snow. Now that might have gotten Republican attention: Houston under 46 feet of snow.** Watch Greta. *Until it got washed away at high tide under a full moon this past December. **On average, thirteen inches of snow equals one inch of rain — so, 46 feet.
To Review September 22, 2019October 3, 2019 He is a: Liar Racist Sociopath Fascist Russian asset Who loves autocrats, obstructs justice, and kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. → If you doubt any of this, click the links for substantiation. About 40% of us have bought the notion that it’s all fake news. Want to help get the country back on track? Read these: OVERALL STRATEGY PUSHBACK – AND ANSWERS WHAT YOUR MONEY GOES TO FUND HOW YOU CAN HELP
These Really ARE The Good Old Days September 20, 2019September 20, 2019 But first: On recycling/reusing (from Tuesday) . . . two delightful NPR Planet Money podcasts: WHY we recycle. (It started with a funny story and the mob.) And, more to the point, SHOULD we recycle. (Oh, God. It turns out: maybe not.) You are allowed one reusable water bottle. And one SodaStream. No plastic bottles or aluminum cans. On Borealis . . . everything I know I already told you Monday. Now that they have funding, it’s kind of silly the stock is $8 — a $40 million market cap for a company that might save the airlines billions each year. But as always: only with money you can truly afford to lose. And now, as summer yields to fall: Putin is winning in so many ways. “Technology is about to upend our entire national security infrastructure.” These are the good old days. I count my blessings quarter hourly. Have a great weekend!
Everybody Knows September 19, 2019September 19, 2019 This review of “Where’s My Roy Cohn” — opening tomorrow in New York and LA, and 100 other screens in the weeks to come — is almost lyrical . . . and is as compelling as the film itself. “Everybody knows that the dice are loaded,” sang Leonard Cohen, who died the day before Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, which he had confidently predicted. “Everybody knows the fight was fixed / The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.” It’s hard to imagine a phrase more evocative of our era. Everybody knows that at least 22 women have accused the president of sexual misconduct, everybody knows that he lies compulsively, and everybody knows that he lacks the basic mental fitness for office. Everybody knows that the president is a racist and a xenophobe who draws fervent support from outright white nationalists. Everybody knows the seas are rising, and everybody knows it’s going to get much worse. Everybody knows, too, that the grotesque qualities embodied by the president are widespread among the Manhattan elite that tolerated and nurtured him, from the real estate sector to the tabloid press and from NBC to Fox News. Just like everybody knows that Jeffrey Epstein was a pedophile, and everybody knew it when he was hosting VIPs at his Upper East Side mansion and on his private jet. Everybody knows that after his apparent suicide, most of his elite associates will escape any justice. That’s how it goes. This is the unspoken, and perhaps unintended, takeaway from Matt Tyrnauer’s new documentary, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, whose title is borrowed from Donald Trump’s reported exclamation after finding his then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions insufficiently loyal and ruthless. Tyrnauer, to judge from the quotes that he uses to frame his story, wants to cast Roy Cohn—the crooked New York lawyer whose sordid career was a common thread linking Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and eventually Trump—as the personification of evil. The word “evil” comes up a lot, and it certainly fits Cohn, with his dead eyes and manifest lack of empathy or scruples. Cohn, we’re told repeatedly, established the now-familiar playbook for all of the nastiest figures in American public life: Sidestep legitimate inquiries, always go on the offensive, attack the press, demagogue against minorities, make headlines, break laws, win at all costs, and shamelessly taunt the losers. Trump was merely his protégé. [10 paragraphs follow] Other reviews: “A rollicking, salacious documentary, fast and furious.” — Chicago Tribune “A haunting yet fair and humane portrait of an infamous figure.” — PARADE Not included in the film is this tidbit that comes from one of his cousins. It seems Roy’s mother Dara — a force — “over-shared” in front of her little boy the information that one of his testicles had not descended. I share — perhaps overshare — that with you because it’s hard not to wonder how deeply embarrassing he may have found that, and how it may have scarred him. Roy and I attended the same high school — he, 20 years before me — and though he must have been a lot smarter (he graduated from law school at 20), we shared a terrible secret: we liked guys. He would go on to deny that to his death; I would go on to blab it to the world — even the Vice President of China. Of course, I was oblivious to all this when, just turned 7, I watched my mother watching the Army-McCarthy hearings on our black and white TV. It had to be the most boring thing ever. Only now, after watching “Where’s My Roy Cohn,” do I realize those hearings stretched on for 36 days (!!!) and that the entire event seems to have been precipitated by then 23-year-old Roy’s love for David Schine. It’s crazy. How he, who was gay (and J. Edgar Hoover, who was gay), could have carried on their witch hunts, not just for communists but for homosexuals. “What a world.” Yet as the film makes clear, Roy had lots of fans and friends, straight and gay, from the mafia to the Oval Office (Nancy Reagan called to thank him for getting her Ronnie elected president). Two of them — exceptionally bright gay lawyers not mentioned in the film — were close friends of mine. “How can you be his friend?!” I would ask every time they told me some crazy funny story about Roy. They would just laugh and say, well, yes, we know, but he’s so amazingly smart and generous and fun. I met Cohn only once, at a large brightly lit gay party in Miami in the mid-80s. It was as brief as it was disconcerting. I grew up admiring the FBI, not the mob-connected. Now we have a President — Cohn’s protege — who’s long himself been mob-connected and whose enemy is the FBI. What a world. If you get these posts by email, you missed yesterday‘s on account of — sorry –“technical difficulties“.
God Save The Queen; The Queen Save The U.K. September 18, 2019 Following up on Monday . . . Paul deLespinasse: “Here is my take on Brexit, which also supports a second referendum, perhaps initiated by Queen Elizabeth II.” It makes so much sense.
Better Than Recycling September 17, 2019September 15, 2019 I have a July 4th party with a lot of red Solo cups. I don’t recycle them; I rinse and reuse all summer, and the next. No one has died yet. Don’t recycle: reuse. Fresh Direct used to deliver groceries in nine million recyclable cardboard boxes a year. Last year they switched to these reusable bags. Don’t recycle: reuse. (Better still, of course: don’t use at all. I.e.: Don’t buy what you don’t need.) Here’s the argument. Our well-intentioned recycling, they say, is not very effective. On a related note . . . Why DO Republicans hate renewable energy? . . . All one has to do is look at the sixty-seven recent environmental regulations that the Trump administration is rolling back. Or the fossil fuel appointees of the current administration. All it takes is a look at the actions by special interests and the results in states around the country. The Simple Case for Renewable Energy . . . The amount of sunshine striking the earth for one hour has the potential to power the earth for a year. The costs of solar and wind have dropped dramatically over the last ten years. Wind is now cheaper than coal in $ per kilowatt hour and solar is reaching parity with natural gas. More than that, it is clean. “Who want’s the alternative, dirty polluting fossil fuel?” We have come to a point when the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. Our proverbial car is in the garage with the motor running and the door closed. We have reached the limits of our atmosphere and water, and can no longer use them as garbage dumps for carbon without huge and catastrophic consequences. For example, The Guardian reports, “Artic ice melt could trigger uncontrollable climate change at global level.” . . . Lastly, renewable energy is now creating more jobs than fossil fuels. Solar energy jobs are growing 12 times as fast as the US economy. . . . “Right now, clean energy jobs already overwhelm dirty fuels in nearly every state across America,” Sierra Club executive director, Michael Brune, [has] said. “These facts make it clear that Donald Trump is attacking clean energy jobs purely in order to boost the profits of fossil fuel billionaires.” . . . According to a recent Pew Research poll approximately 86% of Americans want more wind and solar. This includes voters identifying themselves as conservative or right leaning. . . . . . . A report by The Rolling Stone, The Koch Brothers’ Dirty War on Solar Power, says, “… the birth of Solar poses a grave threat to those who profit from burning fossil fuels. And investor-owned utilities, together with Koch-brothers-funded front groups like American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), are mounting a fierce, rear-guard resistance at the state level – pushing rate hikes and punishing fees for homeowners who turn to solar power. Their efforts have darkened green-energy prospects in could-be solar superpowers like Arizona and Nevada. But nowhere has the solar industry been more eclipsed than in Florida, where the utilities’ powers of obstruction are unrivaled.” . . . In support of these actions, in 2016, utilities, coal and oil companies have more than 1770 lobbyists on Capital Hill and spent $275.8 million to get over $37 billion in subsidies as well as favorable laws. Globally, this number is much higher. The IMF reports the oil industry may receive up to $5.3 trillion in subsidies globally. . . . Not included on the negative cost side of any equation are the hidden costs of climate change running to hundreds of billions of dollars. Consider the increased costs from recent hurricanes and California wildfires as one example. . . . [Many, many, many more paragraphs follow — which may be forgiven, as what’s at stake here is the habitability of our planet.] We are all connected. Savor the earth. Hobie, L. Hobart Stocking → Long-time readers may recall this 2007 post touting solar energy (but suggesting — with tons of caveats — shorting First Solar, then $281, now $64) . . . and harkening back to the solar-energy cover story New York Magazine let me write in 1974. We’ve been at this a long time. And have come a long way! My electric bill at the beach this summer has run $12.88 a month (a base administrative fee), for zero kilowatts supplied. The sun did the rest. Oh! And can I say one more thing as summer winds down? Did you click that red Solo cup link above? It’s a lot more fun than you might imagine.