billofrights’s Recent Comments

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  weak bills, daunting situation

  I agree with National Environmental Trust's John Stanton that the growing public awareness and the more drastic circumstances now supported by the science call for stronger, not weaker legislation.  I believe that we are going to find that the feedback loops are going to increase the levels of CO2 and other GHG like methane faster and with more dire consequences even at the mid-level scenerios of temperature change that have been projected by mainstream reports: ocean current disruptions, melting permafrost over tundra, and extreme weather events.

   It turns out that Ross Gelbspan was right in "Boiling Point." The worries over feedback loop effects were also laid out very well in Jeremy Leggett's underappreciated "The Carbon War," first published in 1999.

  Poor Apollo Alliance seems to be falling more and more out of the picture to shape a sharper overall national energy and jobs legislative thrust.  

  National Wildlife Federation's Larry Schweiger had once suggested, at the big Pew conference in the summer of 2004, that the level of existing subsidies in the old carbon industries (oil, gas, coal, and nuclear) were on the level of $30-40 billion per year.  Eliminating them and targeting them in the directions we want, the Apollo directions, would seem to be logical.  Is that called for in any of the bills?  On Spring brings a new crop of climate bills in Congress posted 3 years, 6 months ago 1 Response

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  Debate on New Apollo Project

  Along the lines of the Mann-Beinecke conversation, how about one on the wisdom and status of the Apollo Alliance's New Apollo Project?

  Given the changing poll numbers on dependence on foreign oil and the threat posed by global warming, how is the major policy proposal called the New Apollo Project doing?  

  Hint..Hint...When new Democratic Governor Kaine in VA gave the Democratic State of the Union response, he tantalizingly approached the policy area in his reply...but... no mention of the Alliance....and of course, the original list of supporters had many very prominent environmental groups missing and...Bracken Hendricks, former Ex. Director at the Alliance has gone to John Podesta's Center for American Progress, where an Apollo "Light," focused on alternative fuels grown in America's breadbasket (mostly red states) seems to have the policy momentum...

  William R. Neil Rockville, MD

  On Two leaders -- one mainstream, one radical -- debate over green movement posted 3 years, 7 months ago 6 Responses

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  Mann-Beinecke Conversation

  Thanks for Grist hosting this conversation - we would like to see more between grassroots people and the mainstream, big-enviro groups.

  What caught my attention was the way Ms. Beinecke drifted past the issue raised about the nature of transportation in the LA region.  Mr. Mann suggests there is a tension between the light-rail Metro system, which I hear is very expensive, and, according to him, not going to serve the needs of the urban-suburban poor, whereas clean bus vehicles will.  There is the suggestion, not explicit, that his groups and NRDC may be backig different mass-transit alternatives for the region - though this is an inference on my part.  But the dialogue didn't clear this up.

  I live in the Metro-DC area, which has its own nightmare auto congestion problems on the infamous beltway(495) and roads such as 270.  The metro-DC area also has one of the nations more successful rail systems - Metro and MARC - but guess what: it has no permanent source of funding amongst its Virginia, Maryland and DC components, and it has seen very little expansion over the past two decades.  Smart-growth groups in the region seem very hard pressed to offer alternatives to major new highway expansions - new toll lanes on the beltway in VA and MD, built and funded entirely by the private sector, ala Texas, - and a $2.4 billion 18 mile stretch of new East-West highway called the ICC- also toll - largely in Montgomery County, which is very controversial and I oppose.

   What's missing from the major DC groups is the funding for studies about large scale expansion of Metro to serve the suburbs, both poor and middle class. (there is a development driven line expansion from Tysons corner VA to Dulles Airport) - very much a VA matter though)

  Environmental Defense has helped on a less sweeping, incremental set of improvements to counter the new road idea of the ICC - which has been helpful to opponents of the road, but I can't find the studies or the vision to counter the private sector driven toll lanes that are being offered to solve the region's gridlock.

  And there are echoes of the rail-bus debate in the background here too, with additional bus service being proposed by some progressives to solve local problems, and Democratic candidate for Governor O'Malley has said that Republican Governor Ehrlich has been opposed to large scale rail proposals and has offered more incremental bus improvements so solve local problems.

  If we can't get "vision" with all the resources at the disposal of big environment's home turf and suburban affluence in the MetroDC area, where are we going to find it? (Metro, Atlanta?).  

  William R. Neil Rockville, MD

  On Two leaders -- one mainstream, one radical -- debate over green movement posted 3 years, 7 months ago 6 Responses

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  Rabbi Lerner's Interview

  I am a progressive who welcomes a revival of the "religious left," or more broadly a "spiritual left."  Therefore I pay close attention to folks like Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner, and I have written my own long essay touching on these topics, and the future of the Democratic Party called "The Great Moral Inversion: How the Republican Right Disabled the Democratic Compass" (moral compass, that is.)

  I have heard the Rabbi discuss his new book in person and my copy is on the way, but my sense is that his call for a different bottom line - the values pursued by our institutions and individuals - run into a secular fundamentalism as powerful as the religious fundamentalists on the Right, called the Washington Consensus in international economics, and by author Thomas Friedman "The Golden Straightjacket."  In essence, our economic life is in a dramatic race to the bottom on wages, benefits, pensions, driven by the goal of narrowly defined efficiency: the most production for the lowest cost. Michael Lerner's view, and I think it is similar to Jim Wallis' on the Evangelical left, is for a new social contract based on minimum standards of human dignity, including material dignity, based on their definition of Chrisitanity (Wallis'that Christianity should put the poor and outcast first, not last) and Lerner's broader spirituality, which is still Judeo-Christian based.  

  That this is a very difficult re-orientation is shown by Wm F. Buckley's attack on the progressive Catholic Bishops who pushed their 1986 Pastoral Letter on the Economy - which I think both Lerner and Wallis could live with very easily - as could most secular progressives.  Buckley told the Bishops to stay out of economics!  (But not out of bedrooms).

  I think the great irony of the rise of the Religious Right that both Lerner and Wallis want to counter is that's Right's great comfort in the material American economy, its uncritical embrace of what it costs to family lives, private lives, the environment, and to living by one secular material code for five days of the week and by other values for three hours on Sunday and in brief spurts of charitable works.  

  If we are to have a new social contract, and a better environmental one, we will have to draw upon the values these two religious progressives are promoting, realizing that many (not Evangelicals) on the Religious Right are able to strictly confine their "nurturing" values to the private and charitable spheres.  

  So there are plenty of great debates we're not having, the main one between a new version of the Social Gospel, and a new social/enviornmental contract, and that branch of Protestantism (joined by Conservative Catholics and many neo-liberals Jewish folks)who would like to keep ethical judgements out of the economic-environmental arena.   Lerner, Wallis and environmentalists should not underestimate the width of the chasm that separates these two camps, both claiming grounding in the same Judeo-Christian sources.  On Rabbi Michael Lerner calls on environmentalists to develop a spiritual vision posted 3 years, 7 months ago 6 Responses

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  Rabbi Lerner's Interview

  I am a progressive who welcomes a revival of the "religious left," or more broadly a "spiritual left."  Therefore I pay close attention to folks like Jim Wallis and Michael Lerner, and I have written my own long essay touching on these topics, and the future of the Democratic Party called "The Great Moral Inversion: How the Republican Right Disabled the Democratic Compass" (moral compass, that is.)

  I have heard the Rabbi discuss his new book in person and my copy is on the way, but my sense is that his call for a different bottom line - the values pursued by our institutions and individuals - run into a secular fundamentalism as powerful as the religious fundamentalists on the Right, called the Washington Consensus in international economics, and by author Thomas Friedman "The Golden Straightjacket."  In essence, our economic life is in a dramatic race to the bottom on wages, benefits, pensions, driven by the goal of narrowly defined efficiency: the most production for the lowest cost. Michael Lerner's view, and I think it is similar to Jim Wallis' on the Evangelical left, is for a new social contract based on minimum standards of human dignity, including material dignity, based on their definition of Chrisitanity (Wallis'that Christianity should put the poor and outcast first, not last) and Lerner's broader spirituality, which is still Judeo-Christian based.  

  That this is a very difficult re-orientation is shown by Wm F. Buckley's attack on the progressive Catholic Bishops who pushed their 1986 Pastoral Letter on the Economy - which I think both Lerner and Wallis could live with very easily - as could most secular progressives.  Buckley told the Bishops to stay out of economics!  (But not out of bedrooms).

  I think the great irony of the rise of the Religious Right that both Lerner and Wallis want to counter is that's Right's great comfort in the material American economy, its uncritical embrace of what it costs to family lives, private lives, the environment, and to living by one secular material code for five days of the week and by other values for three hours on Sunday and in brief spurts of charitable works.  

  If we are to have a new social contract, and a better environmental one, we will have to draw upon the values these two religious progressives are promoting, realizing that many (not Evangelicals) on the Religious Right are able to strictly confine their "nurturing" values to the private and charitable spheres.  

  So there are plenty of great debates we're not having, the main one between a new version of the Social Gospel, and a new social/enviornmental contract, and that branch of Protestantism (joined by Conservative Catholics and many neo-liberals Jewish folks)who would like to keep ethical judgements out of the economic-environmental arena.   Lerner, Wallis and environmentalists should not underestimate the width of the chasm that separates these two camps, both claiming grounding in the same Judeo-Christian sources.  

  William R. Neil Rockville, MD

  On On spiritual environmentalism posted 3 years, 7 months ago 6 Responses