Security Theatre
One in Three "Obama Czars" Has Congressional Approval
Published September 13, 2009 @ 10:43AM PT
In the wake of Van Jones' departure from his White House green jobs role, some critics of the Obama administration are conflating their objections to Jones with other avowed worries -- such at the supposedly excessive number of appointees in the Obama administration who are not subject to Congressional oversight.
But a little digging into the facts reveals that there's much less to this "czar crisis" than these reports would have us believe.
There are three dozen or so advisors and appointees being singled out by commentators on Fox News (as documented here by Media Matters), as well as CNN's Lou Dobbs and punditocracy figures like conservative blogger Ilya Somin, as evidence of Obama administration intent to grab extra-Constitutional powers for the executive branch, and evade Congressional oversight.
[[Data point: Dobbs has proven himself susceptible to being spun by misinformation on global warming in the recent past.]]
Lately on the SGW comment boards these "czars" are inflaming a lot of debate. Let's unpack the two essential falsehoods in this supposed controversy -- one overt and one more subtle.
First, the fears:
Change.org member Kevin M. started an action calling for overthrow of "Obama's czars," and posted in the comments:
I don't care what color of skin you have or what party you are from but when [you break] the United States Constitution you should be punished. i don't think he is going take over the world as you people may think that i think ... I'm talk[ing] about the Czar's because they didn't go through congress....
Next: the subtle lie debunked, after the jump.
Inhofe Watch: Oklahoma senator's torture denial
Published September 03, 2009 @ 04:24PM PT
Senator Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) is the Congressional standard-bearer for global warming denial.
(And the recipient of hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from the oil, gas, and utility industries.)
Yesterday, he demonstrated that his is an equal opportunity capacity for self-delusion, when he told constituents at a town meeting that there has "never been a case of torture" at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
If only this were true. But it's just as accurate as Senator Jim's claims about global warming, which is to say not accurate at all. The the Center for Constitutional Rights, International Committee for the Red Cross, and the CIA itself have all documented the use of torture by American interrogators against detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
It's unlikely that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder would have bucked the wishes of his boss, President Obama, and appointed a prosecutor to investigate abuses of detainees by the CIA, if there were no case to be made.
What's this got to do with global warming? It goes to credibility.
Questions for American Petroleum Institute's @janevanryan #ACES #ec09
Published August 21, 2009 @ 11:33AM PT
UPDATE, Tues., Aug 25: I've posted Jane Van Ryan's answers.
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UPDATE, 20:48 ET: Jane Van Ryan has responded, via Twitter, that she'll look over my questions and post answers online. Thank you, Jane. Stay tuned, readers...
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August 21, 2009
Jane Van Ryan
New Media Advisor
American Petroleum Institute
Dear Ms. Van Ryan,
I noticed you using Twitter, today, from an energy industry-backed political rally in Lima, Ohio. (I see you're blogging about these rallies, too.)
API's members have such a huge role in the nation's energy and climate policies. The oil and gas industry has already spent $55 million lobbing Congress, According to CNNMoney. It's on track to beat 2008's record-setting $83 million in lobbying expenditures.
Given how much influence this kind of money can buy, I'm encouraged to see you out in the social media scrum, where you can take questions directly from the public and the press.
Since you were tweeting from your mobile phone in Lima, however, it's very possible that you missed my messages. So the salient bits of our not-exchange are reposted below.
I hope you can look them over and get back to me soon with answers.
Best regards,
Emily Gertz
Journalist and Editor
twitter.com/ejgertz
The Long, Lame Tradition of Reactionary Astroturfing
Published August 18, 2009 @ 06:47AM PT
Political reactionaries and some sectors of the health care industry have allied against health care reform. A collaboration with very similar characteristics will, according to reports, soon be turning out crowds at fake grassroots rallies to stop energy policy reform and action on global warming, as well.
For an entertaining preview of what's coming down the pike for climate and energy, consider this flashback to 1961. In this ad, "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine," the Gipper encourages citizens to write their legislators in opposition to the creation of Medicare:
The doctor begins to lose freedom. . . . First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then doctors aren’t equally di vided geographically. So a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him, you can't live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it's only a short step to dictating where he will go. . .
All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do.
... [If Medicare is enacted], one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.
"During the 1960s, conservatives regularly claimed that Medicare would destroy the doctor-patient relationship, interject government into every-day decisions and undermine personal freedoms," writes Wonkroom. The media and politics accountability blog created this video to demonstrate how Sarah Palin evoked these simply-not-truths from Reagan during the presidential campaign last fall.
Reactionaries are echoing them now, to try and derail health care reform.
When it came to imagining the future, Ronald Reagan and his conservative allies were zero for zero on accuracy. Medicare was enacted. Free market capitalism survived and flourished (and crashed, and flourished, and crashed, and...). World socialism has near-totally disintegrated, while Western democracy has, with some bruising, continued steadily to this very day.
The predictions, as well as the effort to evoke fear in the public, are not new -- and they're not improved with age.
Declassified Images Reveal Extreme Arctic Ice Melt
Published July 26, 2009 @ 08:05PM PT
Above: Beaufort Sea images, showing retreat of sea ice between 2001 and 2006. More info below.
Just hours after a mid-month request from the National Research Council, the Department of Interior released over one thousand spy images of the Arctic and other locations in the US. The Bush administration had classified the images and kept them from the public and federal scientists.
The newly declassified images document such a startling retreat of Arctic sea ice, that the UK's Guardian newspaper calls them "the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide":
The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
One particularly striking set of images - selected from the 1,000 photographs released - includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.
The photographs demonstrate starkly how global warming is changing the Arctic. More than a million square kilometres of sea ice - a record loss - were missing in the summer of 2007 compared with the previous year.
Nor has this loss shown any sign of recovery.
Here's the image that the Guardian's talking about:
Kudos to Julia Whitney at the Mother Jones Blue Marble blog, Dan Vergano at USA Today's Science Fair blog, and Deborah Zabarenko at Reuters, for being right on top of this story earlier in July. As Zabarenko notes, the images are at a resolution of 1 meter, an enormous improvement over earlier images with resolutions of 15 to 30 meters.
"These are one-meter resolution images, which give you a big picture of the summertime Arctic," Thorsten Markus of Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center told Reuters. "This is the main reason why we are so thrilled about it. One-meter resolution is the dimension that's been missing."
Especially given the failed late Feburary launch of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory (it crashed into the Southern Ocean a few minutes after takeoff, due to rocket failure), these images should be an enormous boon to researchers trying to figure out how fast global warming is progressing, and better understand what the future might look like.
Whitney writes,
The higher definition pictures reveal small features with big impacts on warming—like dark melt pools on top of the ice that absorb light and heat. These images will vastly improve the accuracy of forecast modelling.
Scientists were expecting the request for the Arctic images to be declassified to take months—at least.
But apparently someone in Washington digs science and actually understands something about climate security and the perils of thin ice.
The Arctic ice cap plays a major role in regulating the global climate. Without that ice reflecting the sun's heat back into space (an effect that's called albedo), the heat is instead absorbed by the water, which in turn melts more ice, which leaves more open water to absorb more heat, and so on. (Dr. Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, recently called this an Arctic ice death spiral.) All of which is contributing to raising the average surface temperature of the entire Earth.
That ice is also crucial habitat for polar bears, walruses and Arctic seals. Without it, it seems likely they would ultimately go extinct in the wild.
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Images courtesy US Geological Survey
Beaufort Sea - 73N, 150W
This region has been the site of many field studies since the International Geophysical Year 1957/58. The ice in this region is the most studied and best known. It has been the locale of many studies of the surface heat budget, as well as submarine sonar cross sections.
Arctic ice is retreating; a trend overlain with considerable year to year variability. This site is near the edge of the ice pack. In the 24 hour darkness and cold of winter, any open water freezes quickly. In summer, as shown here, ponds of meltwater form on the surface. These dark pools absorb more of summertime's solar radiation than does the surrounding ice, enhancing melting. Pond coverage monitored over time contributes to estimates of surface reflectivity that are needed to model the response of sea ice to changing climate.
Palin's Higher Calling? Fame, Fortune via Global Warming Denial
Published July 14, 2009 @ 02:32PM PT
Does Sarah Palin understand global warming, why it's happening, and how to slow it down? In the wake of her opinion piece in today's edition of The Washington Post, in which she rehashes several false arguments against carbon cap and trade, as well as other parts of the clean energy legislation in front of Congress, we don't really know.
But those aren't the right questions to be asking, really. The real question is how far she will advance her political ambitions on the exhaust of global warming denial.
Naturally, according to Palin, America's energy security and national security will be ensured only if we drill, baby, drill. (It won't.) Charitably, she's displaying her storied grasp of factual information and public policy details. But it's equally likely that Palin's embracing the "cap and tax" crowd for the cynical purpose of walking an easy path to political fame and personal fortune.
(Which isn't to say she shouldn't be debunked. Media Matters has done a fast, good job of clearing the fog from around Palin's op-ed on federal climate and energy legislation, which is chock-full of misinformation. And let's recall that in an interview last summer, Palin did deny the reality of global warming. "A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location," she said. "I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.")
Give the woman credit: By applying her charisma, sex appeal, and will to power to national energy policy, Palin has made a crafty move. Here's why:
- First of all, she'll bring a surface gloss of expertise to energy security issues; she was governor of oil and gas-stoked Alaska for two and a half years, right? And before that sat on an important state oil and gas board for all of 11 months. It's sufficiently plausible believability to keep her narrow base of conservative supporters in tow. (Although keep in mind that for this crowd, the facts ultimately don't matter, and Palin understands that.)
- This same veneer of energy security acumen may entice a few fellow politicians (who might otherwise opt to keep Sarah Barracuda and her swirl of crazy at arm's length) to use Palin to advance their own anti-climate/clean energy agendas.
- Second, skepticism toward carbon cap-and-trade markets has a ready audience among libertarian and some independent voters, the only arenas where Palin has any potential to expand her base. These voters have been made wary of the House energy and climate legislation (softened up, so to speak) by the flood of disinformation preceding Palin onto the scene.
- Third, Palin -- demonstrably no slouch when it comes to identifying a free meal -- has surely noticed that there's a lot of money to be made in professionally opposing cap and trade, which goes hand in hand with organized global warming denial. ExxonMobil alone gave millions to such groups between 2002 and 2005. Last year, as the UK's Telegraph newspaper reported a couple weeks ago, ExxonMobil gave gave $75,000 to the National Center for Policy Analysis, $50,000 to the Heritage Foundation, and $245,000 to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.
Opponents of the Obama administration's plans for expanding clean energy and fighting global warming are probably thrilled to have Sarah Palin's pearly whites smiling in their direction. But the reality-based world can take heart by remembering that Palin's bright light has often overexposed matters she and others hoped would remain in the dark.
So pay attention as Palin embraces energy and climate policy as her "higher calling." Her presence may ultimately prove as helpful to the global warming denialists as it was to the McCain campaign, and her loyalty as true.
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Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:01AM PT
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