Barack, Your Climate Rhetoric Needs Work

I can't claim to be fully objective when it comes to Barack Obama, who is one of the best speakers I've ever heard, perhaps the best. But perhaps my fandom will make the following point a little sharper.

Mr. President, when you speak about the climate, you really haven't found your way. When you speak of terrorism, and the "false choice" between security and civil liberties, we thrill to your idealism. When you speak of the hard times we face, and challenges we must meet, we admire your sobriety, and your insistence that we are all in this together; red states, blue states, rich, poor, white, black, native and immigrant. When you allude to the criticism you often hear from your beautiful and accomplished wife, we understand your humility.

But when you speak of the climate, you haven't found an effective voice.

On June 3rd, in a speech marking your victory in the Democratic primaries, you said that "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." 

The phrasing was widely mocked on the Right, and with justification. It over-reached and over-promised. We can hope that an Obama administration will slow the inexorable rise of greenhouse gas emissions, and that such will mark the high-water mark for sea level rise, but the numbers say no.

In your Inaugural address, you declared that "With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the
nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet."

This somewhat less grandiose statement seemed to go over a little better, but it's a poorly mixed metaphor — how does one roll back a ghost? And if climate change is a ghost, is it really necessary? 

Mr. President, this is not to imply that you don't know the subject. Your answers to questions on the campaign trail show that indeed you understand.

"There's no reason we can't do the same thing on climate change that we did on acid rain," you said in New Hampshire. "You remember everybody said it couldn't be done, it's too expensive, it's going to cost too much? But year after year we reduced those pollutants, and you don't hear much about acid rain any more. Because when we decide to tackle a problem, it gets solved. But we've got to make a decision collectively. As a people." 

This is the crux of the matter: our willingness to act, or, in Al Gore's phrase, our ability to find the political will. And, to be fair, some climate advocates admired the boldness of the inaugural address.

I disagree. As long as the climate issue is made part of the energy issue, it will be enslaved to the rise and fall in energy prices. Nothing will be done when gas prices are perceived to be too high, as we saw last summer, and the issue will be ignored when prices are low, as we see now. Given the division on the issue among the public, may I suggest, Mr. President, that you will need to find a better metaphor with which to inspire that political will on climate, because what you have said so far just isn't working.

Let America Be America Again

From artist Steve Brodner's wonderful blog…by which I mean both the art and the poem by Langston Hughes he quotes…

BAM for Blog


Lincoln said, “We must disenthrall
Ourselves  and then we shall save our country.”
Meaning, snap to, pay attention
Lest you lose your moment to act.
But of all the days of my life
This might be the one to enthrall.
To stand for an hour, transfixed, awed, engaged
By a movement to greatness.
Where we can feel the transcendence
Of the past toward the mature moment
Of finding in ourselves the capacity to create,

To make new, to be brilliant.

Today let us stop and consider
How we didn’t stop growing,
How we thought and acted anew,
How we challenged ourselves,
And, unlead, WE lead
And found a way forward,
To bring a young man
To the Capitol steps
This electric and enthralling morning,
And seek in him a reflection
Of the greatness in us.

Let America be America Again

LANGSTON HUGHES 1938

Morning in America, Part II

Nice to see that on the morning of the inauguration, Toles chooses to speak out on an enviro issue. And really, can anyone today deny that Ronald Reagan made a huge mistake when he took out (see here) the solar energy panels Jimmy Carter installed on the White House?

We call it "alternative energy," but all that means is that it's not energy from fossil fuels. We're a little crazy, you know…

Morning in America, Part II

Fleet Foxes: Best of 2008

If there's one new group that made every "Best of 2008" list I saw, it was the Fleet Foxes. Via the resourceful Aquarium Drunkard, here's a knock-out live set from the Netherlands six weeks ago,

The group was opening for Ben Folds.

Sorry, but who?

Or you can see them on Letterman, featuring a mandolin. After he actually hears them, you can tell even Dave is impressed.

Cork: Get the Real Thing — Here’s Why

Tree scientist Nalini Nadkarni in her excellent new book Between Earth and Sky explains cork trees and the cork industry, and in a quiet scientific way mentions why you should want the real stuff in your wine bottle. 

She writes that the cork industry has evolved over hundreds of years, and supports a substantial industry of cork orchardists. The trees are in no way harmed: in fact, it takes forty years before a tree can produce cork suitable for wine bottles, and trees usually live for centuries. The cork also supports:

….many species of birds, insects, and animals, including the endangered Iberian lynx and Iberian eagle, and provides wintering grounds for Europe's crane population…if synthetic corks replace natural corks, the demand for cork from these trees will plummet, and owners may well replace native oak forests with pine and eucalpytpus plantations to produce wood pulp for paper. Conservation groups are educating consumers to demand real cork over synthetic cork, and supermarkerts are being pressured to label the type of cork being used so that customers can make an informed choice.

Speaking of renewable, here's a photo from Ernst Schade of a cork forest in Portugal via the inexhaustible flickr. Echoing Nadkarni's explanation, the photographer mentions that the number on the bark of the tree means that it was harvested in 07, and so won't be harvested again until 2017.

Cork Tree near Marvao

Tom Friedman, Cut to Shreds

Matt Taibbi is the writer as slasher. When you finish with one of his pieces you feel a little light-headed, as you might feel if you were a tough guy, and had just rolled some local thug. But the thing is, in Taibbi's case, the thug (be it Bush, Palin, or Erica Jong) always seems to deserve the mugging. So it feels good, in a slightly sick, pro-wrestling sort of way. 

Taibbi's latest effort, in which he tears the hypocritical Tom Friedman to shreds, is, as they say in Hollywood, very funny. Which is true of Friedman, too, but Friedman doesn't realize it.

First Taibbi begins with Friedman's often ludicrous rhetoric:

Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even
if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the
“illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what
you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster
Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping
and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember
Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your
steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving
without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s
analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

"The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First
of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly,
what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging
when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does
that even begin to make sense?

Then he moves on to a more substantive complaint, that Friedman has remade himself as an environmentalist, when his lifestyle is all about chewing up the planet:

To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as
a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone
else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international
capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t
pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly
irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of
American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden
fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the
very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new
book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics
Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such
total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire,
General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this
year alone.
So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What
the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last
ten years humping have been blown to hell.

Color me unimpressed that he
scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited
wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly
reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out
with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as
Friedman might say, “Better two cell phones than a fish in your
zipper.”

And for a funny cartoon version of the same argument, called How Green Was My Mustache, see the cover of the New York Press here. (And by way of contrast, here's a disappointingly uninformative profile from The New Yorker of the same famous mustachioed opiner…they're better than that.)

EXCITING HOUSEKEEPING NOTE! SEARCH FUNCTION NOW WORKS!

Thank you, Google, and thanks esp. to Typepad, for finally figuring out the problem with the search function, which for literally years I've been trying to get to work on this site, but NOW IT DOES!

Really. Check it out (and tell me if I'm wrong). But I've tried via two different computers and browsers and have found that if you type a name or detail into the search box (for instance, say, La Nina, or Kelly Redmond, or The Host) that Google will instantly return a list of posts. Occasionally the post you want may not show up at the very top of the site for that particular day, but usually it does, and if you scroll down, you will find it on the list, without having to go elsewhere. Nirvana!

This is not as routine as it might sound on the intertubes. Major sites (notoriously, The Los Angeles Times) and bloggers still cannot always manage this crucial surfing trick. I'm so happy I could yell (but on the Internet, no one can hear you yell unless you post it).

I'm going to spare you that and just grin. Over five years I've covered a lot of ground on this site, and often myself have wished I could track down this post or that post. Now you can too…

Climate Change and the Press: Panel Discussion at Meteorologists Convention

Wednesday at the American Meteorological Society convention in Phoenix, a distinguished panel convened by Bud Ward discussed how the press has handled — or muffed — coverage of climate change. Ward recently published a short book on a series of workshops he pulled together over the last couple of years for high-level journalists and scientists, in which they struggled with these very issues. (His book Communicating on Climate Change is available for free at the Metcalfe Institute, either on-line or in the "cellulosic version.")

As Ward mentions in the paper/book, it became apparent that coverage of the issue did improve in recent years, as journalists became aware of what panel member Tom Rosenstiel called the danger of "false balance," which apparently has become a term of art for reporters.

Yet even as coverage in that sense has improved, the press itself has been devastated by new technology and generational change, and coverage of the issue has dropped as papers have cut their pages and their staff.

Tom Rosenstiel, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times (who wrote what sounds like a must-read book for journos, called The Elements of Journalism, and who now heads up a non-profit Project for Excellence in Journalism for the Pew Center) in no way minimized the threat to serious reporting. Pete Spotts, a veteran reporter and editor for the Christian Science Monitor, highlighted the opportunities available in blogging (but didn't tout his new blog Discoveries, so I'll mention it for him).

Given the chance, I had to ask these once-ink-stained-wretches about the future for free-lance writers such as myself. Rosenstiel suggested that as papers cut reporters, opportunities could arise for free-lancers who developed a speciality and made a name for themselves as individual writers.

But perhaps most encouraging was the dry-witted Larry O'Hanlon, from the Discovery Channel's on-line side, who spoke of the time he was a free-lancer ten or so years ago, and the Discovery Channel cut back. He said he and his peers compared it to an extinction event, in which all the big, established creatures were "wiped out and there were only small furry critters running around." (More prosaically, he explained that staff members were laid off, but free-lancers were only "reduced.")

This combination of responses, along with some encouraging words from Ward in his summation, gave me an emotional lift. And I must report (since no one else will) that the panel smiled when I gave them my own hard-won definition of the difference between reporters and bloggers:

A reporter expects to get paid; a blogger hopes to get paid.

A Real — and Popular — Poet: Inger Christensen, RIP

We've had some discussion lately of poets, real and otherwise, beloved and otherwise, which is why I must link to a fascinating tribute to Inger Christensen, a poet revered in Denmark, who just died.

Fascinating because Christensen was both hugely popular in Denmark, probably more so than any poet in our language except perhaps Bob Dylan, and a dauntingly structural poet, who based some of her work on mathematical ideas.

Sounds off-putting, doesn't it?

But in her case, as in Auden's, the limits of her self-imposed structures apparently opened up her writing. The obituary in the New York Times quoted one stanza from her long masterwork called "it" that was painted on a street in a run-down part of town, and survived for decades:

A society can be so stone-hard

That it fuses into a block

A people can be so bone-hard

That life goes into shock

How many people do you know for whom that has happened?