Climate Sunday-- Climate Change Won't Wait

Bill McKibben addresses in an op-ed this Sunday whether President Obama is willing or able to take on climate change--my guess is that the answer is politically complicated, but I think the president "gets it". 

Check out the whole op-ed here.  McKibben makes a great point regarding the differences between other political moments and the climate change issue:

Societal change usually happens slowly, even once it's clear there's a problem. That's because, in a country as big as the United States, public opinion moves in leisurely currents. Change often requires going up against powerful, established interests, and it can take decades for those currents to erode the foundations of our special-interest fortresses. Think civil rights, gay marriage, equal rights for women. 

Even facing undeniably real problems — say, discrimination against gay people — one can make the case that gradual change is the best option. Had some mythical liberal Supreme Court declared, in 1990, that gay marriage was now the law of the land, the backlash might have been swift and severe. 

With climate change, however, there simply isn't time to waste. It's not a fight, like gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It's a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices or damages the coal industry in swing states. It couldn't care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China or made agribusiness less profitable.

One of the major problems that Obama's presidency has had is that whenever he takes anything on, the right-wing goes screaming. I think it drastically impairs the ability to have a reasoned discussion on anything, no matter how manifestly important it is, and he downplays both rhetorical and policy-related emphasis to prevent, I don't know what to call it, besides "psychotic fugue from reality" in those on the other side of the issue. I do hope, however, that in just the way Obama circumvented Congress to accomplish at least parts of the Dream Act, he will find ways of going around them on this issue as well. (I know, I'm showing my advanced certificate in Applied Obamabotics, but the whole "having a second term to work with thing" has got me hopeful.)

Maybe Those of Us on the Outside Should do Some Changing--

That, folks, was Sen. John McCain sarcastically deriding a bill intended to help veterans get jobs. It's kind of weird for him to do that.  But it isn't surprising anymore. The atmosphere in Washington is frankly abysmal:

Barring a burst of productivity in the lame-duck session in November and December, the 112th Congress is set to enter the Congressional record books as the least productive body in the post-World War II era. It had passed a mere 173 public laws as of last month. That was well below the 906 enacted from January 1947 through December 1948 by the body President Harry S. Truman referred to as the “do-nothing” Congress, and far fewer than many prior Congresses have passed in a single session.

And for that reason, when President Obama makes the case that Washington needs to be changed from the outside--I'm appreciating what he's talking about.  It's not just watching what's going on right now--it's thinking about what we could be dealing with if we, the voters, don't make some changes down there.

One of the most compelling arguments I've heard on the subject comes from Elizabeth Warren, who makes the case that keeping Sen. Scott Brown may mean getting a climate change denialist like Sen. Inhofe as head of the Environment Committee.  See, that would be a real problem. You can't say it wouldn't happen. After all, the GOP put Michele Bachmann on the House Intelligence Committee even though she's a credulous boob--they have a funny sense of humor. Or rather, disdain for whatever constitutes effective, informed, rational government.

I am reminded of this particularly by Woodward's recent book regarding last year's debt ceiling crisis, The Price of Politics. I think Woodward gets a bit wrong (I'm not the only one) regarding what the president could even do to make more happen with the great, dysfunctional mess that a desperately polarized Congress had become. But he at least does remind me clearly of what did happen.

Olbermann either resigns or is fired from MSNBC.

I really don't know what to make of it all. I could just decide to blame Comcast, or whatever. But I think I'll leave his sign-off as is, 'cause really, that's all I concretely have got.

Transcript of the main parts:

Strangely unremarked--a Senator passes.

I haven't much to say about the passing of Senator Byrd. I wish I was moved to eloquence and could touch with some kind of authority on the journey of a man who apparently moved from being nestled within the bosom of the Klan, to one day endorse the man who has become our first African-American President.

But I'm not. I am not, because he changed with the times, and I can not tell how much that change was with him, or how much it was to continue serving the people.

I could remark on the passing of time, on his longevity in office, on his passionate stand against the Iraq war.

But that doesn't move me as it should either. Other men have lasted a long time in office--Strom Thurmond, Ted Stevens. Other senators at other times have taken noble but ultimately futile stands--and sometimes it's necessary. Oh hell, yes, it is.

It strikes me cold that the passing of one public service should--strike me so cold. That the only thing I can really feel moved to say definitively is that, after a period of time, no Republican will even bother saying, "But Democrats have Senator Byrd, who was in the Klan..." as if that somehow shifted everything in history upon a fulcrum, where the support of segregation for too many years by the sophisticated Buckley Republicans, and the Jew-counting of Nixon, Fred Malek, et als, the suburban bigotry of Pat Buchanan, and the Bircherite "boy"-calling flat-headed stupidity of Jeff Sessions, weren't all supposedly called into balance by one frail old dude who used to be in the KKK when he was really young and dumb.

Yes. Just like I found myself cursing myself out that at least Chappaquiddick died with the late Lion. That's our political discourse.

Not that I don't pitch lowballs myself, and all, but still....