From NOW on PBS--Power Struggle. More available here.

This is what I hate having to explain to my relatives and friends abroad in Europe about politics in the US. We know that global warming is a fact. We know that our actions, if they didn't cause global warming, definitely exacerbate it. We know that we must reduce our dependency on oil, for both ecological and political/strategic reasons. And yet, what we are able to do is hampered so predictably by the Republican party:

Here we go again. James Inhofe, the most prominent climate change denier in the United States Senate, has concocted a new and innovative strategy to thwart the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. To wit, he and his Republican colleagues on the Environment and Public Works Committee have worked up a plan to simply not show up for next week’s markup:

But Boxer cannot hold the markup unless at least two Republicans show up, and EPW ranking member James Inhofe (R-Okla.) signaled that he has unanimous support among the panel’s minority members to boycott the session until they get more data on the legislation from U.S. EPA and the Congressional Budget Office.

Inhofe said he will wait for Boxer to file an official notice of the markup — expected today — before responding with his own declaration of the GOP’s markup strategy.

“As soon as we find out what her announcement is and what she wants to do, we’ll have our response,” Inhofe told E&E last night. “We’ll have our unanimous expression ready.”

Sadly, this is a continuation of the GOP’s longstanding strategy of delaying clean energy legislation:

• As Chairman Markey shepherded his American Clean Energy and Security Act through the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Republicans employed multiple parliamentary tricks to — as Politico put it — “nitpick the bill into legislative oblivion.” Brian Beutler called these nefarious stall tactics, and noted that Democrats responded by hiring a speed reader.
• Last year during the debate over the Climate Security Act, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell demanded that the entire 491 page bill be read on the floor of the United States Senate. A strategy memo was leaked at the time detailing the Republican strategy for delaying the bill as much as humanly possible.

While this Republican obstructionism is not necessarily surprising, it is especially egregious this time. Here are a few things about this episode that struck me:

1. Despite the fact that Senator Inhofe has been working to orchestrate this obstruction for a week now, Republicans are pretending the effort is being led by the two moderate Republicans on the committee. Politico handled the stenography.

The Politco, acting as a mouthpiece for the Republican Party? Say it isn't so!

Can you imagine how much further we'd get in this country if we didn't have so many idiots in office?

The Bobblespeak Translations: What Obama really said yesterday on Meet the Press. Later in that hour, David Gregory actually did his job...for once

Prairie Weather: The most important health-care document released this week was not Sen. Max Baucus's Healthy Future Act. It was the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2009 Employer Benefits Survey.

Calculated Risk: Senator Dodd pushing new bank regulatory plan

skippy the bush kangaroo: Environmental news

The Washington Note: Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might be Obama's Khrushchev

Rising Hegemon: Conservatives and Porn

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Sean Hannity devoted to the entire hour of his Fox News show Thursday to a special reported titled "The Valley That Hope Forgot," all about the water crisis in California's San Joaquin Valley that many right-wingers -- including Sean Hannity -- are blaming on the diversion of water to maintain the fishery on the San Joaquin Delta.

It's actually a classic case of resource juggling: Giving water to the farmers in drought years might keep farmed produce turning, but it would destroy the fishery that supplies millions of fish -- and not just the delta smelt -- to the oceans and ultimately to our food supply. For the time being, the fish have won in the courts. Moreover, there are signs the water is returning to the valley on its own, since the recent drought appears to be subsiding.

Still, Hannity was more interested in demagoguing than in producing an accurate portrait of the situation, let alone helping find a resolution. He blamed the high unemployment rate in the San Joaquin Valley on the lack of water for farmers, and blamed that solely on the delta smelt lawsuits.

Near the end of the show, he had on his usual Intended Liberal Victim, for whom he could reserve such deep journalistic questions as "And I just want to know: How did you get your priorities so screwed up in life? What happened to you?"

But the Intended Victim, a fellow named Zeke Grader of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, actually bit back, pointing out how callous and indifferent Hannity was toward the plight of the people on the coast who have traditionally made their livings by fishing salmon, both commercially and recreationally.

Judge for yourself, but it seemed to me Grader got the better of this exchange. Hannity was left to sputter insults at Grader instead of actually addressing his main point: That defending the fishery is a matter of defending people's livelihoods, too. It's not fish vs. people; it's people vs. people.

Doug Obeggi at the Natural Resources Defense Council has a good piece explaining why the whole "delta smelt" claim is a red herring:

First, Endangered Species Act protections for delta smelt aren't just about a tiny fish. Nor are those protections only about protecting the Bay Delta estuary, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, home to migratory birds on the Pacific Flyway, to magnificent salmon that migrate past the Golden Gate Bridge through the Delta, and to numerous native fish and wildlife.

Moreover, as local economists have pointed out, the recession, not the lack of water, is the cause of the economic downturn in the San Joaquin basin.

And what about the California/Oregon coastal fishermen? The folks whose salmon catch we depend on for food just as much (if not more) than we do produce from the San Joaquin? Well, because of previous mismanagement of the river, the salmon fishery from the Central Valley has seen an unprecedented collapse -- forcing a halt to the California salmon fishery generally.

A California commercial fisherman named Mike Hudson wrote a piece describing what life has been like for people in his line of work:

I’m pretty proud of doing a good job at it.

At least I was until two years ago, when excessive water diversions from our rivers and Delta totally destroyed our industry. In 2004, the Bush Administration issued new permits to allow the Delta pumps to export more water. And as these water exports increased, salmon numbers collapsed. So commercial fishermen, recreational fishermen, Tribes, and environmental groups like NRDC joined together and sued to invalidate those permits, and we successfully won better protections for California's endangered salmon and other fish.

The damage was already done. Thousands of commercial salmon fishermen like myself are now out of work. Our boats stay tied to the docks along the entire California coast all the way into Oregon while tens of thousands more good jobs are lost in businesses that surround our fishing industry. Closing the salmon fishing season affects everyone from processors laying off their fish cutters to marine fuel docks and commercial tackle shops closing their doors. How do you think the local grocery store in Bodega is doing now that all of a sudden 100 hungry commercial fishermen don’t stop by any more to purchase groceries for their next trip and thousands of recreational anglers don’t come to their community any more because there’s no salmon to be caught? Not good.

The Department of Fish and Game estimated that the closure of our commercial salmon fishery cost the state 279 million dollars and nearly 2,600 jobs in 2009, and that’s a conservative estimate at best.

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This week only, our readers can download, free of charge, Greg Palast's film, "Big Easy to Big Empty: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans." Or donate and get a signed DVD. Watch the 1-minute trailer...

Who put out the hit on van Heerden?

Ivor van Heerden is the professor at Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center who warned the levees of New Orleans were ready to blow — months and years before Katrina did the job.

For being right, van Heerden was rewarded with ... getting fired. [See Katrina, Four Years Later: Expert Fired Who Warned Levees Would Burst]

But I've been in this investigating game long enough to know that van Heerden's job didn't die of natural causes or academic issues. This was a hit. Some very powerful folks wanted him disappeared and silenced — for good.

So who done it?

Here are the facts.

Dr. van Heerden has lots of friends, mostly the people of New Orleans, those who survived and cheered his fight to save their city. But he also has enemies, many of them, and they are powerful.

First, there is Big Oil. More than a decade ago, van Heerden pointed the finger at oil drilling as a culprit in threatening New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with flooding.

"Certainly he was critical of what the oil companies did to the coast," Louisiana engineer HJ Bosworth told me. "Seeing what kind of bad citizens they were. Dozens and dozens of pipeline canals just carved the living daylights out of the coast just to find some oil."

Well, we need oil, don't we?

True, but Bosworth, who advises Levees.org, a non-profit group that birddogs hurricane safety work, explained the connection between flooding New Orleans and oil drilling quantified by van Heerden's research. "Takes a million years to build (the protective coastal marsh); once you carve it up, it's just like bleeding a wild animal, hang it up, carve some holes in it, and the juice just drains out of it. Saltwater and tide invade. You make [the state] susceptible to flooding from coastal and tidal surges."

So I was amazed to learn that, shortly after van Heerden, wetlands protector, was given the heave-ho by LSU, a group calling itself "America's Wetland" gave the university a fat check for $300,000.

After a little digging, I found that it wasn't really "America's Wetland," the group with the oh-so-green name and love-Mother-Nature website, that provided the money. One-hundred percent of the loot, in fact, came from Chevron Oil Corporation. Chevron had merely "green-washed" the money through "Wetlands."

Was this Big Oil's "thank you" to LSU for canning van Heerden? The University refuses to talk to me about van Heerden's firing ("It's a confidential personnel matter").

Bosworth notes such a grant to the University "doesn't come without strings attached." And this "Wetland" grant appears to have some tangled threads. LSU will monitor the coast's environment, guided by a committee of what the school's PR office describes as "experts" in coastal infrastructure and hurricane research. But the school is pointedly excluding its own expert, van Heerden. Instead of van Heerden, LSU announced it will rely on representatives from Chevron — and Shell Oil.

You can't challenge Shell's expertise on coastal erosion. The Gulf Restoration Network has calculated that the oil giant, "has dredged 8.8 million cubic yards material while laying pipelines since 1983 causing the loss of 22,624 acres."

Shell too is a sponsor of "America's Wetland."

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Former Vice President Gore and Senator Warner testified on the American Clean Energy Security Act of 2009 this morning before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) lived up to her reputation as an ultra partisan hack by attacking Al Gore's motives on climate control. Not a wise move, as she elicited snickers with her transparent attempt.

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Last night at 8:30 was Earth Hour when everyone around the world was supposed to turn out their lights for one hour in order to raise awareness of the climate crisis.

But throughout the wingnut blogotubes, they decided to turn on all of their lights as a too-clever way of canceling out Earth Hour. Here's another wingnut who's offering a list of suggestions for how to go about doing this. Utterly brilliant suggestions like:

8. Burn tires

Smart! Your neighbors will enjoy the fumes and odor coming from your hillbilly bonfire.

24. Leave your oven open

And maybe climb in.

34. Turn on your air purifier

Yes. You're going to need it when your house fills with fumes, gasses and stink from your open oven and burning tires in the yard. Incidentally, if the air is so clean and unpolluted, why the air purifiers?

A couple of years ago, there was a website where you could pay to have a tree ripped out of the ground in order to cancel out the purchase of Carbon Offsets. I'm happy to report that the website no longer exists. Awww. I wonder why.

I have a few more suggestions for any wingnuts who might want to cancel out Earth Hour.

1. Just burn a stack of money.

2. Write a check for $100. Send directly to hostile Middle Eastern Islamic petro-governments. (Don't forget to dot your "i's" with little hearts.)

3. Fill up your SUV with gasoline. When your tank is full, proceed to fill up the passenger compartment, too.

4. Why only an hour? Leave all your shit on for a month! Enjoy your bills.

5. Buy a carton of smokes. Smoke all of them in your backyard while using your burning tires as the world's most awesome hillbilly lighter. When your hair and face accidentally catch fire, your burning flesh and hair will cause more delicious pollution! Once you're good and sick from the fumes and smoking an entire carton of cigarettes and, you know, burning your face, pass out on top of the burning tires.

Even if there wasn't any consensus on the causes and effects of the climate crisis (and there is), what's the point of counteracting Earth Hour? Take the science and environmentalism out of the equation and we still have a pretty serious energy crisis. Don't the wingnuts remember their ridiculous "drill baby drill" chant? That was a response to there being not enough affordable fuel to go around. But whatever -- crank up your utility bills if it'll make you happy, wingnuts. It's your money.

(Cross-posted at BobCesca.com)

January 26, 2009 C-SPAN

I can't even describe the sheer awesomeness of this site where pieces of coal are singing Christmas carols about clean coal! And you get to put hats on them, and scarves - you'll love it, too. (Thanks to Dr. S. from Redsoxville.)

December 08, 2008 C-SPAN
Senator Barbara Boxer, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, talked about a plan for short-term economic recovery and long-term prosperity. She focused on the need to mobilize the nation for energy independence and to rebuild critical infrastructure. See more CSPANJunkie Videos here

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MSNBC's Contessa Brewer yesterday was discussing George W. Bush's plan to let the EPA rule against cleaning up perchlorate from Americans' drinking water, even though its toxic effects are well documented.

Even John Feehery, the "Republican strategist" brought on to explain this last-minute ugliness, admitted:

Once again, I don't know the specifics of this particular one, but it doesn't really sound good, does it, Contessa?

Brewer later returns to Feehery and asks:

Brewer: John, do you think there should be some shame in a president doing something like this? It reminds me of the big scandal that erupted when Clinton was leaving office with all the pardons. You know, why are you gonna do something in your -- the very last few weeks that just ... makes you look bad?

Simple answer: Because George W. Bush doesn't care what you think. He never has.

If you want more information on Bush's vandalism of the American political landscape on his way out the door, check out the Pro Publica site with a complete rundown.

Its first entry is on perchlorate:

At Issue: Perchlorate is a chemical component of rocket fuel that can contaminate water both naturally and, more frequently, through improper disposal at rocket test sites, military bases and chemical plants. Cleaning it up would cost billions of dollars. But the contaminant has been linked to thyroid problems in young children, pregnant woman and newborns, leaving critics concerned for the developmental health of those most vulnerable to the chemical's effects.

Here's the EPA's official justification:

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Robert Redford talks to Rachel Maddow about the Bush administration sneaking through changes to land leases and environmental regulations on election day this year hoping no one would notice. For more you can read Redford's post at the Huffington Post Americans Rejected 'Drill, Baby, Drill'--Bush Should Respect Our Choice.

Maddow: You've got a lot of experience in this field. You've been fighting on behalf of wilderness protection since the early seventies. Do you think these last minute lease plans are really serious? Do you think they'll get away with it?

Redford: Well I don't know, I think they're serious because they've been serious all along. I mean, look, Bush's policies have been a, environmental policies have been a disaster. But that's no surprise when you look at the history of what he's done since he came in. So I think they're totally serious. Whether it's going to work or not I think is going to depend on whether the public wakes up to what's really going on that's going to affect their own personal interests.

Here you have if you look at the Bush administration's cynicism and it's also been devious because when, whenever they couldn't get a bill passed legitimately they would go behind our backs. And when you stop and think about thirty years, thirty years of hard work to get certain protections passed into law like clean water, clean air, the Environmental Policy Act, those were acts to protect the American public and the land that we claim we cherish.

Well he's tried in his eight years to undo just about every one of those laws. And we stop and think it all began with Cheney doing a behind the closed doors energy policy designed with energy companies. You can pretty well see where it was all going to go, so it's pretty cynical and it's, it's in my opinion it's criminal in the sense that what are we going to have to give to our children and theirs if we tear up everything for short term gains that are tied to non-renewable energy sources? I mean do the math you've got non-renewable energy sources which are oil and gas and coal. You've got renewable energy sources which are now totally viable, safer, cleaner, better economically. What are we going to invest in?

[snip]

The thing that really is awful, I mean really, really deeply awful what it's doing behind the American public's back, the cynicism of designing a plan like this, putting out oil leases, gas leases, coal leases in 360,000 acres that surround national parks and monuments and canyons and rivers is pretty devastating in terms of the pollution and the economics of it and so forth.

The fact that they would do that on election day when everybody was distracted by the election and set a date for Dec. 19th, and the sister agency, this came through the BLM, okay, so the sister agency, which is the National Park Service wasn't even told about it. They went behind their backs so they could jam it through, so obviously there's a plan that Bush goes out and as he goes out the door he'd like to give us one good kick in the tail on his way out. This to me is the most cynical, very dangerous and as you said Rachel, that once it's done, it's intractable so I'm mad, the American people are mad and we can stop this. I mean President-elect Obama has a plan to go in a forward direction. Not a backward direction like Bush's planning. So just as the guy is coming into office this guy tries to sneak one past us before the guy can even take office. Pretty cynical and I hope it's stopped. It should be stopped.

Maddow: I know there's a thirty day public protest period which ends the first week in December which is coming up very shortly. Do you think that that public protest, that form of public official protest would help stop this lease sale?

Redford: Well look I'm just this one voice in the wilderness, I mean excuse the pun, but I mean I'm just one voice out there but I'm glad to go on this show simply to say if we pull together the American people get up, now and contact their local official and say we don't want this. This is our land. It's not his land. It's our land. It's our heritage and you're going to trash it for some short term gain that's going to destroy some of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth? I think the American people will stop it and can stop it but they're going to have to act fast because these guys are trying to pull an end around.

While progressives everywhere are basking in the knowledge that liberal Democrats now control two of the three estates of the federal government, it is worth remembering that despite the voters' mandate, the Right still controls (barely, by a one-vote margin) the third: namely, the Supreme Court. And the right-wing Federalist Society dogmatists now sitting on the court are not only capable, but extremely likely, to wreak havoc with that mandate.

We received an unpleasant reminder of that reality this week:

The nation's need for Navy sailors to practice using sonar to guard against enemy submarines "plainly outweighs" any legal requirement to protect orcas and other marine mammals, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, turning back environmentalists' efforts to restrict sonar use during naval training exercises.

Quoting a 1907 statement by President Theodore Roosevelt -- "the only way in which a navy can ever be made efficient is by practice at sea" -- the high court's five-member conservative majority said lower courts had improperly restricted naval exercises off Southern California.

But the justices in the majority stopped short of endorsing a Bush administration attempt to justify using a controversial White House waiver to justify the exercises.

When the lower court's ruling was announced earlier this year, it appeared to be a significant win for environmentalists, not to mention the cetaceans affected by these tests. It was also a win for the rule of law, considering the Bush administration's egregious lawbreaking in attempting to foist these tests on us.

But the court took care not to address that issue:

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I know all eyes are on Denver, but I thought we needed a little reminder that there's a whole world out there outside of Colorado and it's not such great shape.  Sadly, with John McCain in office we're not likely to put it on a better track either.    Greenpeace: 

Increased temperatures due to global warming have combined to create news of three separate climate disasters in different parts of North America. But while news of these disasters emerged in the past week, several states and Google announced major new investments in the clean energy technology necessary to solve the climate crisis and prevent even worse global warming. Meanwhile, President Bush and Congress were touting false solutions, like offshore oil drilling, that will only accelerate the climate crisis.

"These three events add up to a planet in deep trouble," said Greenpeace Global Warming Campaigner Melanie Duchin. "But while states and companies are responding to the climate crisis, the Washington politicians are just spraying offshore oil on the fire."

What three things, you ask?

1. Sea Ice at Second Lowest Level Ever; Polar Bears at Risk of Drowning as Ice Melts

2. Greenland Glacier Breaking Up, Threatening Sea Level Rise

3. Fay Dumps 26 Inches of Rain on Florida

That's one seriously miffed Mother Nature.  And as we lose more polar bears to drowning out in open water due to ice melting, what has the Bush adminstration done?   Pressure Congress to open up more off shore drilling leases and tried to gut the Endangered Species Act, of course.  Credo and the Wildlife Action Center have teamed up with an action letter you can sign to ask lawmakers to not allow Bush to dismantle the Endangered Species Act.

  Who knew Nancy Pelosi was such a straight-shooter? When Wolf Blitzer tries to pin part of the blame for the current energy crisis on the Democratic Congress, Pelosi shoots back by saying her House did everything it could to institute a sensible energy policy, only to have "run into a brick wall" in the form of Senate Republicans -- you know, the ones who broke the filibuster record for a full term last year.

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"The price of oil is... is attributed to two oil men in the White House and their protectors in the United States Senate."

While it might be easy (and typically accurate) to blame everything on President Bush and Vice President Cheney, I don't think it's unreasonable to lay the current crisis at the White House's doorstep. Sure, there are some uncontrollable market forces at work, but both Cheney and Bush are oil patch guys; it would be the height of naivete to assume that they would have an energy policy that didn't benefit Big Oil.

From Day One, Dick Cheney was plotting how to take over Iraq oil fields. Before the war, it was obvious to everyone that the invasion or Iraq, and the instability it would caused in the region, would only drive prices up further. For all the lip service President Bush pays to his commitment to renewable energy, the fact is spending has been on the stagnant since the mid-1990's.

What we really need is a leader with the wisdom to acknowledge the magnitude of the problem and the courage to tackle it head on. "Green Screen" John McCain is clearly not that leader.