Comments billofrights has made

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, 7 months ago 1 Response

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

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

Great interview: hurdles we must face

This was a great interview - direct and deep at the same time. The characterization of the Bush Administration ("It's a public relations operation with a hidden agenda") is one of the best I've seen.

Now to that hidden agenda: beneath the smiling (most of the time)certainty of Reagan and G.W. Bush is that hard right agenda, the core of which is "lower taxes, less government" to condense it the way George Lakoff does.  Yes, we may be seeing Republican and business defections on global warming and energy, and we should praise and encourage both, but what still unites Republicans as diverse as Dick Cheney, Christine Todd Whitman and John McCain is this anti-tax, anti-government attitude.  It is still a huge obtacle to progressive change on inequality, full employment and the shift away from the fossil fuel economy.  Lester says the market is not signaling the proper cost of nuclear and fossil fuels - he is corrent, but the way we think about markets is itself deeply politized - just think about the metaphors of the "Golden Straightjacket" (Thomas Friedman) and the "Washington Consensus."  Even a centrist Democrat, like Clinton's chief economic advisor, Gene Sperling, a very bright man, seems unaware of how deeply politicized the judgements of markets are (re: his recent debate at EPI with Jeff Faux).

Living in the Metro, DC area, its hard not to see the price we are paying for these tax and government attitudes on traffic congestion and sprawl control.  Weep for rural Virginia and those stuck on the beltway, because even progressive groups on sprawl haven't had the visiion or daring to propose new Metro solutions or land protections in the heavy winds of very adverse ideology.  Hence the Beltway solution is privatized toll lanes.  

The paralysis of policy imposed by this anti-tax and government ideology has become a moral straightjacket at a time when we need great flexibility in our tools to confront the problems Lester discusses so clearly.  On An interview with the founder of Worldwatch and Earth Policy Institute posted 3 years, 8 months ago 7 Responses

BUSH ENERGY SIGNAL: INCOHERENT RESPONSE

Veteran Bush observers have learned to be cautious about confusing the "compassionate cover" from the brutal conservative ideology guiding his main policy currents.  I suspect the independence from Middle East oil line is meant to give a reassurance signal that we will not be constantly intervening there to protect oil supplies..err...I mean bringing democracy to the region... a signal that is at odds with a good part of the stubborness of the rest of his speech, and the dangers of retreating from the world.

I doubt Bush intends anything substantial or sustained about alternative energy sources.  What worries me more is the inability of the environmental, progressive and Democratic Party responses to educate the public and come up with a compelling new direction.  

The Apollo Alliance's New Apollo Project would seem to be the most promising start (www.apolloalliance.org) because it would re-direct the more than $37 billion in annual energy subsidies that now go to the old fossil fuel based system, and put almost a decade's worth of that money, $300 billion, into new energy directions and greater energy efficiency.  Although alternative energy and the Middle East were mentioned in the formal response given by new Virginia Governor Timothy Kaine, it was only a brief reference towards the end of his speech - and the Apollo Alliance didn't get a plug, so people who haven't heard about it didn't learn that night.  So even though two books by Democratic mainstream players, Gene Sperling's "The Pro-Growth Progressive" and Stanley Greenberg's "The Two Americas both mention the project - it couldn't make it into the formal Democratic response for a national audience.  

Not that the new Apollo Project is not without its critics or difficulties, as witnessed by the environmental groups that have failed to sign on because it doesn't deal with a new regulatory program for global warming gases or a carbon trading system like the McCain-Lieberman bill.  And Ross Gelbspan's book "Boiling Point"  also delivers some compelling and responsible criticism of its limitations.  

Over at the Center for American Progress, John Podesta's think tank laden with former Clinton administration officials, they were pushing for a vastly reduced subset of Apollo's ambitious agenda of new jobs and investments with their Agriculture, Energy and Trade policy forum on Dec. 6th, 2005.  I questioned Gayle Smith about the possibility that this more limited emphasis on trade, ag and bio-fuels might not undercut the Apollo's scope - on the premise that whenever Congress if offered a smaller, more focused direction it usually choose that over the tougher more ambitious one - she indicated that it didn't hurt Apollo but ran on parallel policy tracks. We'll see.  While this confrence's emphasis was hard to argue with in its specifics, my take is that it will only undercut Apollo on the very practical ground that Apollo needs national introduction and focus if it is to have a chance.  

And, after all, the Apollo Project's design and vision of jobs and alternative energy comes from, at least in good part, the rethinking of the environmental "community's" failures on global warming and energy, which gave rise to the publication of the essay the "Death of Environmentalism," rightly given much coverage in Grist.

As part of the critical dialogue about that essay, Ken Ward made the excellent point that the environmental grant funders have never approached the $magnitude$ or focus that would be needed to begin to persuade large portions of American Society that we are at a perilous point that requires enormous changes in policy direction.  Despite the enormous amount of global warming/energy information available on hundreds of web sites, our progressive story does not reach most Americans because it is not in major media channels....citizens have to seek it out.  

The Bush new direction teaser ought to be a painful goad,  a reminder to environmentalists, progressives and the Democratic Party that we don't have the coherence, magnitude or commitment yet to take the good initial directions of Apollo home to the majority of the American people.

William R. Neil Rockville, MD

thomas friedman and oil depedency

I think green progressives can use all the help they can get to change national energy policy - even if it comes from Thomas Friedman.  And even if he didn't give the New Apollo Alliance's program a plug.  Therefore, I cut out the column and placed it inside the jacket of Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point for future reference.

It's not easy for me to praise Friedman, especially after having just finished his latest book on globalization: The World is Flat.

Consider the ironies: Friedman, in nearly a thousand pages of his two books on globalization (the first being The Lexus and the Olive Tree) has been a very modest, cautious green, tangential only,  to the main thrust of his work, citing examples of groups that work with business and within the confines of his "Golden Straightjacket."  So taking on a crucial portion of global business on energy does make one sit up and take notice.  People do read Mr. Friedman, and he is not shy about telling his audience how well The World is Flat is selling (most recently at a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress in mid-November.)

Since I see Mr. Friedman as a market "utopian," who demands a "New Market Man," (and greatly at odds with more traditional "conservative" views of human nature) who will change jobs countless times, be perpetually, until death, upgrading his educational skills and be infinitely flexible and creative at the workplace, and who will hesitate to take that second cup of coffee in the morning before work, knowing full well that in India and China that hungry competing worker is already in the home stretch of a 16 hour day....this same Mr. Friedman who celebrates a world of constant change and uncertainty...a reflection of the Divine market itself...finds now that a very successful (in narrow efficiency terms) portion of this global market - energy industry - is very resistent to change...to wean itself from the old carbon/oil ways... How could this be?

Could it be the very aura of divinity that Mr. Friedman confers upon the market, that has allowed the most "dead-end" folks to have placed themselves at the very center of a very uncritical administration, the least likely folks to question a major industry with roots in a certain state whose history is so closely entwined with them?  Could we really expect this current administration to critically examine the views of Exxon/Mobil on global warming and fossil fuels, given their economic success and business page reviews?  

To move this country off the old carbon dependencies, we will need to see the market as a useful tool, not a "divine" institution, and Friedman's previous market worship has conveyed, ironically, a free pass to a segment of industry that is going to make not just the US, but the entire globe, pay an enormous, yet to be calculated cost.  

William R. Neil Rockville, MD