On Trial: Peabody Energy's Bankrupt Climate Change Denial

If you’ve scanned the headlines for Peabody Energy, in the last few months, the story is that one of the largest companies comprising King Coal is now going through bankruptcy. But there is a curious development that I came close to overlooking, as it seems that the U.S. press is concentrating more on Paul Ryan and Donald Trump than it is on some of the legal and civil actions around climate change.

            In something of a Scopes Monkey Trial for the 21^st century, in which truth and science are put on trial against big money and anti-science, science and truth have won. The case was to determine if the state of Minnesota could continue to use its “social cost of carbon,” which is set quite low, or adopt the higher federal cost estimates.

            Peabody Energy was involved in the case because the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the costs to society because of the damage of carbon pollution, affects their bottom line.

            Peabody Energy relied on the tactics that are useful to sway portions of public opinion. But as this case showed, their reliance on obfuscation, setting unrealistic requirements of proof, and cherry picking data, falls apart under facile scrutiny.

            Peabody has just been in some hot water with the Securities and Exchange Commission for not fully disclosing to their shareholders the risks that climate change poses to their business.
            We know that Peabody faces financial bankruptcy. With the coal giant are we seeing intellectual and moral bankruptcy as well?

Possible Prosecution of Exxon and Possibly Falling Short

This is a great development. While the story was broken over a month ago, the headlines today tell us that Eric Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general has launched an investigation into Exxon looking into allegations that the oil giant misled their shareholders and the public on the risks that global warming posed to the corporation’s business. Even the Wall Street Journal, which has ties to the global warming denial industry, printed the story.

            The corporate headquarters of Exxon in Irving, Texas acknowledged receiving the subpoena for internal documents, some of which go back 38 years, related to Exxon’s climate change research and business decisions.

            If Exxon actually knew of global warming and its dangers and paid off front groups to work at denying those hard facts, it may very well be the greatest wrong done to the world by a corporation. So it is a bit of an irony that the wrongdoing Exxon may wind up having to pay the piper for is that of their responsibility to their shareholders. Schneiderman is investigating Exxon under the Martin Act, a broad New York state law that allows for prosecution of companies for financial fraud, which includes the act of misleading stockholders.

            I don’t deny the importance of investors being properly informed of their financial risks when they put their money in a company like Exxon. After all, people rely on their investments to finance their children going to college or provide for a good retirement. But the people who are going to suffer the most from global warming are farmers whose lands may be hotter and drier and subject to more severe weather, coastal inhabitants who will have their beaches and bay fronts submerged under rising tides, and people who live on Pacific Islands, whose homelands may be lost to rising oceans.

            Isn’t there any law that can hold Exxon responsible for these people?

Only Sane Presidents, Please

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Believe it or not that is what the Constitution requires of the person who shall be the president of our country. You just have to be born a citizen and be 35 years old.

Although the president is commander in chief of the military, military service is not a requirement. At the time of the drafting of the Constitution, most of the new states restricted enfranchisement to property owners, yet that requirement is not imposed on the president. The holder of the highest office in the land could be indigent for all practical purposes and still reside in the White House.

            We have amended the Constitution for various reasons, but we have not added any further requirements on the presidency in over 200 years of our history. Considering the track records of some of the poorer performing presidents, this is perhaps surprising.

            So maybe it’s time to enforce some requirements on the person who is the commander in chief and leader of the free world. I suggest the following to be the 28^th Amendment:

The President must be sane.

OK, pretty simply stated. As with any other law, there will be some working out of the details in subsequent laws and court rulings, but the general gist of the amendment is that you cannot be crazy or spout off crazy ideas. This would obviously exclude folks who get winnowed out in the elective process already, such as white supremacists and guys who still live in their parents’ basements at the age of 46.

            This amendment, if it were already adopted, would disqualify all the GOP candidates running forthe 2016 election. I’ve lost track of the number of them, but apparently all of them are crazy enough or seem to be crazy enough to think that global warming is a myth or something that we shouldn’t do anything about.

 

Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin and crazy photo from Wikipedia

You don’t think that the GOP candidates are crazy? OK, global warming is our greatest threat. The Grand Old Party candidates say it either doesn’t exist or we shouldn’t do anything about it. That’s crazy!

 

Carly Fiorina, ousted CEO of Hewlett-Packard and crazy photo from LifeNews.com

OK, they aren’t totally jump out of the boat crazy, a present threat to themselves or others. But if any one of these folks attains the highest office in the land, that person will pose a threat to millions of folks all over the world.

            Maybe we could fast track this amendment before the election. That doesn’t sound crazy, does it?

            

Rand Paul, Senator from Kentucky and crazy. He's also the one who says that mountaintop removal is "just missing a hill here or there," which is really crazy

House GOP: We Don't Like the Science, So We Will Stop the Scientists From Doing Science

Keeping this country from developing adequate climate change law and policy works on many fronts. I often blog about the global warming denial industry. This comprises mostly the “think tanks” like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute who promulgate obfuscation and misinformation about climatology and the science that shows that we are warming up our world with our power stations and automobiles.

            And then there is politics and such as what just occurred in Washington. By a party line vote of 19 to 15—with all Democrats opposing and all GOP members supporting—the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology passed an authorization bill that seriously cuts NASA’s budget for studying climate change. The bill would slash NASA’s Earth Sciences budget by more than $300 million resulting in a reduction from one fifth to one third of the division’s budget.

            The only way to describe this is Big Crazy. I don’t know what else to say.

The Heartland Institute To Pope Francis: Don't Believe the Science of Global Warming

I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of embarrassment when I read about this. Apparently the Heartland Institute, possibly the most rabid of the conservative “think tanks” when it comes to denying the existence of global warming, is sending a contingent of its folks to Rome to, in their eyes, set the pope straight about climate change.

            The American organization sponsors an annual bizarro world version of the UN’s IPCC, in which they bloviate as best they can about conspiracies, money-grubbing climate scientists falsifying data, and imaginary cooling trends. They even call their get together the International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in the hope, I image, that the initials are close enough to fool people into thinking that they are the same as the UN’s IPCC.

The Heartland folks are on their way to Rome as they anticipate the Pontiff’s upcoming encyclical. The pope is expected to say that, given our present situation, reducing greenhouse gasses has become a moral imperative.

The pope is called upon to be gracious to those who seek his audience, so Pope Francis will meet with the representatives from the Heartland Institute. But they should already know that the pope receives some of the best council when it comes to science. OK, the Church really blew it with Bruno and Galileo, but that was over 300 years ago. Things have changed since then.

            Years ago, when scientists were uncertain if other factors besides CO2 might mitigate the warming effects of our release of greenhouse gasses, the Heartland Institute could gain some traction in the news and opinion pieces. But since that time they have painted themselves into an intellectual corner, and now they are quite stuck.

Pope Francis is expected to say that reducing greenhouse gasses is a moral imperative.

And they are now desperate. Until now global warming has been something scientists studied; it has been an issue for which governments and politicians have made laws and created policies. It has been something that most people ignored, too.

But with this his encyclical, Pope Francis takes global warming into our spiritual realm, a place where the Heartland Institute does not go. The “think tank” can have success with some folks as they sow doubt, and they can have even more success as they lobby Congress and make their large campaign contributions. But the pope, particularly this pope, holds great influence over his Catholic Church, as well as a great deal of the rest of the Christian world. With his upcoming encyclical, climate change becomes part of our spiritual lives, the subject of homilies from the pulpit, and a concern of our prayers. It goes from an abstract thing to something quite human.

In their campaign to keep us from addressing climate change, with this latest development with the pope, the Heartland Institute should know that they no longer have a prayer.

Keeping West Virginia's Children Ignorant About Climate Change

Once again West Virginia Board of Education is trying to weaken the science standards when it comes to global warming.

This started in December of last year, when board member Wade Linger, who has said that, “[w]e need to look at all the theories about [climate change] rather than just the human changes in greenhouse gases,” and that he doesn’t believe that global warming is a “foregone conclusion,” had language inserted in the state’s science standards that portrayed climate change as something that is doubtful and debatable. His suggestion, that “and fall” followed the word “rise” in the sixth grade science standard, was adopted. Other changes included the following:

Original ninth grade science requirement: “Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.”

Adopted version: “Analyze geoscience data and the predictions made by computer climate models to assess their creditability [sic] for predicting future impacts on the Earth System.”

Original high school elective Environmental Science requirement: “Debate climate changes as it [sic] relates to greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Adopted version: “Debate climate changes as it relates to natural forces such as Milankovitch cycles, greenhouse gases, human changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and relevant laws and treaties.”

Other Board of Education members also expressed views that were skeptical about the reality of global warming. After the Charleston Gazette reported on the adopted changes, however, scientists, West Virginia residents, and educational and environmental activists pressured the Board of Education to correct the standards to be more in line with the accepted science on the subject. Linger’s changes to the standards were withdrawn. That was back in January.

            While not a word-for-word revamp of his original science standards changes, Linger’s latest move is very similar to the ones he proposed last December. We will see what sort of backlash this latest move generates.

            Members of the West Virginia Board of Education might simply be avid listeners to Rush Limbaugh and other AM radio folks who deny global warming. Or these changes to the curricula might be due to pressure from King Coal. The coal industry already has a big influence on the curricula of eastern Kentucky schools with their Coal Energy and Resource (CEDAR) program. This video below gives an idea of what CEDAR is all about. Watch it and try to tell me it is not indoctrination:

Those tons and tons of coal that are mined in Appalachia turn into tons and tons of CO2 when they are burned in power plants and factories. The coal industry knows this. They know that children who fully grasp this connection will not likely be supporters of their industry when they grow up. So it’s best to keep them in the dark on what the science says about coal and a warming world.

ALEC Denies That We're Causing Global Warming, But They Don't Want Folks To Know That They Deny Global Warming

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) has been around since the eighties. They draft and support business friendly legislation. As part of their mission, they have received money from oil companies, such as Exxon, to deny the existence of climate change.[1]

            They have been a big part of the global warming denialist industry, but suddenly they don’t want folks to know that they are in the denialist industry. ALEC lawyers have sent letters to Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters telling them to immediately “cease making false statements” and “remove all false or misleading material” that may suggest that the conservative organization has any doubt about climate change.

            Common Cause and the League of Conservation Voters certainly do call out ALEC for its global warming rhetoric. You can check out instances of where the do so here (League of Conservation Voters) and here (Common Cause).

            And ALEC really does, at least in a gobbledygook sort of way deny that we humans are causing global warming. The following is from ALEC’s Position Statement on Renewables and Climate Change:

Climate change is a historical phenomenon and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions. ALEC will continue to monitor the issue and support the use of sound science to guide policy, but ALEC will also incorporate economic and political realism. Unilateral efforts by the United States or regions within the United States will not significantly decrease carbon emissions globally, and international efforts to decrease emissions have proven politically infeasible and unenforceable. Policymakers in most cases are not willing to inflict economic harm on their citizens with no real benefit. ALEC discourages impractical visionary goals that ignore economic reality, and that will not be met without serious consequences for worldwide standard of living.

OK, nowhere in this statement do they come out and deny that we are making a very warm world with our power plants and automobiles, and I guess that ALEC’s lawyers could stand up in a court and expect to convince a judge or jury that this statement does not deny that climate change is real. But to me it’s obvious that such statements as “the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions,” reveal their intention to keep their obfuscation going.

If all of ALEC’s money came from the fossil fuel industry, they could brush aside the organizations that point out their denialism, but other companies, such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have left ALEC because of its stance on global warming. Even British Petroleum left ALEC because of its denialist position.

So ALEC wants to have it both ways. They want to serve their supporters who want them to deny that global warming is happening. And they want to bring back Google and Yahoo into their tent as well. So they are left in the very awkward position of denying their denial.

The world keeps getting warmer and my head keeps spinning.

---

[1] Lee, J. S. (2003, May 28). Exxon backs groups that question global warming. New York Times

Maybe It's Time to Talk About Geoengineering, and Maybe We'll Do Something About CO2

I’ve only blogged about geoengineering once or twice. My feeling has been that it is an inevitability. Most folks know of and are concerned about global warming, yet we still keep electing politicians who make no promise of reducing our carbon output. We even elect politicians who are hostile to the idea that climate change is even real.

Senator James Inhofe calling Climate Change a hoax on the Senate Floor

We elect individuals like this to Congress. Who is to blame? 

So nothing gets done. In the meantime the world warms. I see things going from bad to worse until desperation sinks in somewhere, possibly India or another powerful country with a lot of land giving way to a rising sea, and that government will start shooting sulfate aerosols into the air to cool things down. We will then have crossed the threshold from inadvertently rearranging the dynamics of the atmosphere to intentionally manipulating the atmosphere.

Most folks, me included, have a very natural reaction to these ideas, that they remind us of the workings of some mad scientist. We see Vincent Price or Bella Lugosi in a black and white B movie crazily using his evil genius to despoil an innocent world.

Atomic supermen? Or sulphate aerosols. You decide. 

Lex Luthor, Superman won't let him geoengineer the world.

So are you scared now? Are you sufficiently freaked out by the idea of scientists taking a monkey wrench to the atmosphere to cool down the world that we’re warming with our power plants and automobiles? It seems that this is the real irony of geoengineering. Climate change freaks out some folks, but not all that many. And there are folks who aren’t freaked by it at all or deny that it’s happening. But geoengineering freaks the bejesus out of everybody.

At least that seems to be the conclusion of a study by Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project, a group of scholars who looks into how people’s values influence how they process information and assess risk. I won’t go into the details of the study. You can find it here, published by the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and there is a Grist article about the study here. I’ll just sum up that the study found that if you have folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for stricter controls on carbon emissions, it only made folks more entrenched in the beliefs they had before, whether they thought of global warming as a threat or were skeptical or doubtful.

If folks read about global warming and scientists advocating for geoengineering, then skeptics were open to the reality of climate change. Also, those who believed in global warming were left more ambivalent after reading about geoengineering.

 

Pumping sea water into the atmosphere, one proposed geoengineeering idea 

Besides cluing us in, once again, to the reality that people are quirky and don’t behave predictably, what does this study tell us? I think we all feel that if we talk more about geoengineering, then it will normalize the idea, making all that much easier to consider and make us complacent about reducing our CO2 emissions. But maybe if we started to include the topic more in our discussions, it might be a way to loosen the skepticism of a good number of people. And it might get them to sign on to reducing our emissions and adequately dealing with global warming, instead of waiting for somebody to come along and start making atomic supermen to suck up carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

What do you think? Should we talk about geoengineering, even though we don’t want to do it?

Or we could throw these giant parasols into orbit Good idea, or scary?

West Virginia Leaders in Washington Sing the Same Old Tune

West Virginia leaders sing the same old tune

It seems that in Washington things remain quite the same,

with the law makers from West Virginia continuing to toe the line for King
Coal. Once again, this is from Ken Ward, who knows way more about West Virginia
and coal than I ever could, and his Coal Tattoo blog.

Just Google "Global Warming" and Get a Wealth of Misinformation

I heard this show on the radio yesterday morning, Public Radio’s To the Point. Oren Olney, the host of the show, lets people talk instead of yelling at each other. How cool is that? On the show Olney and his guests said that despite the nearly unanimous consensus as to the science of climate change, the American public is increasingly skeptical about global warming. People just don’t believe in climate change the way they used to, despite the increasing evidence.

            Wow. I knew that a large portion of our population remained skeptical. But that portion of our population is increasing? What is happening? Is the warmer air making us stupider? Is there some ratio between sea level and intelligence? As the oceans rise, do our IQs go down?

            As a possible reason for this increasing doubt Olney brought up the subject of “climategate,” that supposedly revealed nefarious ways of some climate scientists. But differing investigations into the whole affair, eight in all, found no evidence of fraud or misconduct in this “scandal.” And this all happened back in 2009, long ago enough for folks to reassess the continuing science that comes in on our greenhouse gas problems.

            A couple of the guests on the show, Michael Brune of the Sierra Club and Michael Mann, the Pennsylvania State Professor of Meteorology who developed the “hockey stick” graph to display the sharp rise in recent global temperatures, talked about the global warming denial and delay industry. Right after they mentioned this, I did a Google search on the news of global warming in the past 24 hours. Here is some of what I got:

            Among the first ten search returns were three articles that depicted a skeptical view of global warming. Over at Forbes, Larry Bell, who has written skeptical pieces on climate change for the magazine for some time, has Miss Global Warming Yet? If Not, Just Wait And You Might that actually warns of a global freeze.

            Sawing an old horse from the GOP and big business that the media are biased on the issues, a site called NewsBusters claims that, on the issue of global warming, the media are also biased in favor of covering climate change. Why this bias would exist, no one knows. Once again, these folks use the canard that the press must always present an opposing view, no matter how crazy that view is, in order to exemplify “balance.”

            And there was this one from the most peevish person on the planet. John Stossel who says something about Bill Nye the Science Guy. I couldn’t open the video, but well, I’m pretty certain that John Stossel is not saying anything particularly complimentary about Bill Nye the Science Guy.

            With such nonsense being brought up on a global warming Google search, the way a lot of people get their information, no wonder so many people are in the dark on global warming.

Big Surprise: Academic Investigation Finds a Large, Well-Financed Movement to Deny Climate Change

This is one of those academic papers that shows scientific proof that water flows downhill or that the sky is indeed blue that leaves you thinking, “Well, duh, who didn’t know that?”

Published in the journal Climate Change, Robert J. Brulle has given us a glimpse of the huge and sophisticated industry that has grown up to deny the existence of global warming. Using IRS data, his paper Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations uncovers close to a billion dollars a year that organizations and businesses such as the Koch Affiliated Foundation and Exxon Mobile give to “think tanks” such as the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, and the American Enterprise Institute to deny and obfuscate the issue of climate change. Not only is the money involved in this enterprise of denial astounding, but the magnitude of the enterprise is huge as well. Brulle found more than 130 institutions that fund what he calls the climate change counter-movement (CCCM). And besides the Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, there are 19 other organizations that receive funding to spread the word that the planet is not warming and the seas are not rising. He has also found a trend of some of the larger organizations and businesses of concealing their donations to the “think tanks” by funneling the contributions through donor directed philanthropies.

            Let me stop myself there for a moment. A common strategy of these “think tanks” has been to deny the science and evidence of global warming. In light of the ever-growing evidence of climate change, the strategy of denying or denigrating the science of global warming has changed for some of these organizations. Some of them are not denying global warming, but they are still throwing cold water on the idea of doing anything about it. So Brulle’s identification of all this money financing “think tanks” as a counter-movement, rather than simply a denial movement, is apt.

            Brulle may actually underestimate the power and extent of the CCCM. Left out of his analysis are the politicians who hold sway and influence the thinking of their constituencies and who hold bogus hearings that are in tune with the CCCM. Larger still in influence are the talk radio, whose millions of listeners hear hours and hours of CCCM talk.

            As I said above, Who didn’t know that? Who didn’t know that there was a well-financed program to delay efforts at controlling global warming? But Brulle’s paper is necessary. If there is an effort to deny climate change, there is also an effort to deny the denial. We need his investigation of the CCCM. 

From Crooks and Liars: GOP Holds 'Factual' Climate Hearing, Says Scientists Know It's All a Hoax

GOP Holds 'Factual' Climate Hearing, Says Scientists Know It's All A Hoax

Somehow or other I’m not finding references to this in the more standard press websites. This is from Crooks and Liars, a mostly liberal website. Maybe it’s just that most of the press realizes that this sort of thing is not newsworthy.

            It is nonetheless disquieting that such outlandish shenanigans go on in our nation’s capital. While cities, counties, and other local government agencies are working to reduce carbon emissions, the GOP has a hearing on climate change in which almost all of the witnesses are skeptical or downright hostile to the science of global warming. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. This is the institution that brought us the witch hunts of the House Un-American Activities Committee and filibusters, one going on for 24 hours, of basic civil rights legislation.

            I wouldn’t mind so much if our elected representatives opposed measures to limit greenhouse gasses or to make progress on climate change, if they were to simply acknowledge the truth of the matter. “Yes, our waste from fossil fuel is warming the planet, but I don’t care,” is still a crappy attitude, but at least it’s honest.

Dear Cato: Climate Action Delayed Is Climate Action Denied

It might be easy to imagine that the folks at the Cato Institute aren’t as bad as some other “think tanks” that work at the denial of the science that reveals and explains the phenomenon of global warming. After all, right up front, on their web page on global warming, they clearly say, “Global warming is indeed real, and human activity has been a contributor since 1975.”

OK, before we go any further, the part about 1975 is a little weird. Does the Cato Institute demarcate the start of our warming of the globe to when “Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting” hit the airwaves? Or do they want to pin it on the start of Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign? The Cato Institute has never liked Jimmy Carter.  Just to be clear, we’ve been warming the world since we started burning fossil fuels, more like 1750 instead of 1975. But I’m not going to ding them for being off by about 225 years.

            The rest of the sentence is something that seems incredibly reasonable coming from a “think tank” that was started in part by Charles Koch and whose purpose is to support oil industries and an economy based on the extraction and use of fossil fuels. They acknowledge that global warming is real and we’re part of the problem. Wow! How reasonable. These folks sound like they’ve done their homework and are willing to follow through and do their part to reduce carbon emissions.

            That’s the way it seems until you read the rest of what Cato has to say:

But global warming is also a very complicated and difficult issue that can provoke very unwise policy in response to political pressure. Although there are many different legislative proposals for substantial reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, there is no operational or tested suite of technologies that can accomplish the goals of such legislation.

Fortunately, and contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding climate change, there is ample time to develop such technologies, which will require substantial capital investment by individuals.

Where do I start with this? Global warming is “very complicated.” OK, I guess it is. What does that have to do with reducing carbon emissions? In some cases it might be complicated, and in others it might be quite simple. The other red flag here is the use of the word “provoke,” which can simply mean to stir to action, but also carries the connotation of inciting anger and rashness, and here in this case insinuates that climate policy may not be well thought out or poorly designed.

And while the phrase about “no operational or tested suite of technologies” that can accomplish the goals of climate change legislation has a germ of truth to it—we are, after all, on untested territory here with global warming. We have never tossed up tons and tons of carbon in the air and substantially warmed the entire earth—that does not mean that we should not work to remedy the tight spot that we’ve put ourselves in. I could cite a hundred examples of the past, from Columbus to Neal Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, to illustrate that although we sometimes find ourselves in uncharted territory, we can still be successful in our efforts.

And renewable energy, hybrid cars, and other technologies that are to help us reduce or mitigate climate change are only part of the solution. A lot of economists will tell you that the easiest way to bring about reductions in greenhouse gas emissions is a carbon tax. A carbon tax can be simple, designed to be fair to the poor and lower classes, and be quite effective in making all of our carbon footprints smaller and smaller.

As the Cato Institute wraps things up, they swerve into outright falsehood when they say that there is plenty of time to develop the technologies to stave off global warming. This is risible. We have pushed the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere up to 400 ppm, the planet is sufficiently warmed, and we are seeing some of the consequences of the forcing caused by all this new carbon dioxide in the air. Glaciers melt, the oceans rise, and our weather patterns are changing.

The Cato Institute tries to come off as being responsible and reasonable, acknowledging our contributions to climate change. But they are as bad as any of the organizations or industry hired guns who deny the link between our carbon emissions and a warmer world. They remind me of the “responsible voices” who claimed that they themselves were not racists yet were quick to caution Martin Luther King that he was asking for too much too quickly.

In his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King clarified what was at the core of this delaying tactic. In the letter he wrote, “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’ It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’”

And so it is with Cato. Their “ample time” is the same as the racist “Wait.” Saying that we should take our time to work on climate change means that they don’t ever want to work on climate change. Their “ample time” rings in the ears of Alaskan natives loosing their towns and homes; it rings in the ears of Filipinos whose homes and villages were ravaged by Haiyan; it rings in the ears of all of us whose food, water, and safety is jeopardized by global warming with piercing familiarity.