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.

Danger: It's More Than Obamacare on the Chopping Block For the GOP

The political blackmail that the GOP is using, that of threatening a government shutdown in order to render the new healthcare legislation toothless by defunding it, has been the headline grabbing news over the last couple of weeks and has only intensified over the last few days. But there is more to the shenanigans that the Grand Old Party is up to.

            The Republicans are now using the mechanism of raising the debt ceiling as a way to give away a wish list to big oil, King Coal, and other industries. According to the New York Times, GOP leaders sent to their rank and file a laundry list of provisions they want attached to the bill to raise the debt ceiling. Besides delaying Obamacare and limits on malpractice, the wish list includes such anti-environmental provisions as giving a green light to the construction of the Keystone pipeline, more offshore oil and gas drilling, more permitting of oil and gas exploration on federal lands, rolling back regulation on coal ash, and blocking the EPA’s new regulations on greenhouse gas production.

            Wow.

            Politically, the GOP controls the House, but that is only due to some ingenious Gerrymandering that some of the states were recently able to pull off. The party of Lincoln has failed to gain the popular vote for the presidency in five of the last six elections, and the one win for the GOP was for a sitting president, George W. Bush, who barely won. This isn’t the only time that the Republican Party has become a loser. Things were so bad for them in the seventies after Nixon’s disgrace and resignation that they considered changing the name of the party.

All these latest giveaways to business and industry that the GOP is trying to work into the debt ceiling deal are, of course, all about campaign donations and money. But what they are proposing is so extreme that I sense a crazed sort of nihilism that wants to pull in and destroy what is good and great about this country while this political party experiences what may be a death spiral.

A Speech on Climate Change That I Can Believe In

While I have criticized the president before for his lack of action on global warming, I applaud the speech he made yesterday. It is a stance on climate change that I can believe in. While the GOP has delivered to the moneyed interests exactly what they want, a Congress that is legislatively stalled during a Democratic presidency, this speech, and the resulting actions that Obama promises by his administration, is all the president can do.

            He gave us what the second Bush administration denied us, an unequivocal statement on what the science is telling us about CO2 and our warming world. It’s a sad comment on our politics and a testament to the power of the energy companies and their ability to obfuscate the facts at hand, that long after the science has been concluded we have to wait years, decades really, for our president to make such a statement. But I guess it always works that way. “Separate is note equal” is a pretty simple and obvious observation, but it took generations after Emancipation before the Supreme Court made that ruling on civil rights.

Mostly by restricting emissions from power plants, president Obama’s proposed set of rules and regulations could reduce our country’s greenhouse gas emissions in the next seven years by close to 20 percent of 2005 levels.

            Of course, the coal companies don’t like it. Fox News is, predictably, not pleased. And Mitch McConnell has said that the president’s proposed course of action on the climate is a “war on jobs” and “tantamount to kicking the ladder out from beneath the feet of many Americans struggling in today’s economy.” What I’d like to know from Mitch McConnell is why, if he is so concerned about American’s having and keeping jobs, has he gotten in the way of any effort to help the economy recover after the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression?

            Over at Appalachian Voices, they rightly applaud the president, even urging him to do more. Executive Director Tom Cormons had this to say:

The president’s plan represents a good first step toward a 21st Century climate and energy policy for America. It’s essential that his administration implement one of the centerpieces of that plan–strong controls on power plant emissions.

Beyond what he spoke of today, there’s more the president must do to build a robust clean energy economy and ensure that heavily impacted areas like Appalachia don’t get left behind.

The devastating practice of mountaintop removal coal mining has no place in a 21st Century energy plan, nor in a positive environmental legacy for this president.

President Obama must stop industry from pushing the costs of doing business off on communities and our environment, while doing more to invest in energy efficiency and renewable sources particularly in Appalachia and other regions that have borne the brunt of a fossil-fuel economy.

For example, the administration’s plan to provide up to $250 million in loan guarantees to rural utilities to finance job-creating energy efficiency and renewable energy investments is a great start. Compare this to the $8 billion in the president’s plan for loan guarantees supporting fossil fuel projects, and its clear that we need to see a much stronger commitment.

Such investments will go far to create the jobs, economic security, and environmental health for these areas, consistent with President Obama’s goal of fulfilling a moral obligation to future generations.

Cormons is correct, and the warming of the planet and the devastation of Appalachia from out-of-control surface coal mining are most certainly linked. I’m willing, however, at least for now, to cheer president Obama for his actions on the climate.

Forget the Fiscal Cliff. We Are Approaching a Climate Cliff

At a time when we have the knowledge and ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions, this is more bad news. It seems that, instead of taking note of the evidence and heeding the warnings from scientists, we have been pumping ever more CO2 into the atmosphere.

            To no great credit of our own, the greenhouse gas emissions of the United States dropped by two percent. This is not so much because we are building windmills and installing solar panels on our rooftops, but more because the recession is still strangling the economy. Unemployed folks are not commuting to jobs; fewer products being built and shipped; construction of houses and buildings has been curtailed. All these things create carbon dioxide.

            But while we have been stuck in a recession other countries like India and China are growing richer. They are increasing industrial production, and more and more of their citizens are doing things that Americans take for granted—buying lots of stuff, eating more meat, and driving cars—that increase global warming. China’s output of greenhouse gasses is up by ten percent.

            We are now making more than 1,200 tons of greenhouse gasses every second. It is almost a certainty that the target of keeping global warming to two degrees centigrade will be impossible. It runs against my gut feelings of how to work with this problem, because it is treating the symptom of the disease rather than the causes, but we really have to start working on geoengineering projects. I don’t believe we have any other choice right now.

Good News: Federal Appeals Court Rules That the EPA Has the Authority to Regulate Greenhouse Gasses

The ability of the EPA to regulate the gasses that are warming our world was affirmed today in a Federal Appeals Court decision that ruled that the agency was “unambiguously correct” in its use of existing law to curb global warming. Several states and greenhouse gas emitting industries had challenged the move by the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate CO2 and other global warming gasses.

            I’m certain that this decision will be appealed to the Supreme Court and, considering the present rightward political leaning of the Court, this may only be a temporary victory for people and the planet. It is nonetheless good news. 

Should Environmentalists Vote for Barack Obama?

This coming national election should environmentalists vote for Barack Obama? Obama’s campaign is counting on green voters to support him this time around, as they did in 2008.  The Obama campaign has, predictably, set up a website, Environmentalists for Obama, that touts the environmental work that the president has achieved. The President even makes an appearance on his own environmental behalf.

It is true that the administration has set forth extremely high gas mileage standards. By 2017 cars will need to have an average mileage of over 50 miles per gallon. Given the current state of technology this is doable, and the administration deserves credit for pushing for it.

            And yet there are so many areas in which the administration has fallen flat when it comes to protecting our air, water, and land. Regulations that were loosened during George W. Bush’s time on the White House that gave the mountaintop removal coal companies an almost completely lawless free ride in Appalachia have not been changed by the Obama administration. And as I noted in a previous blog, the Obama administration wants to ease the protections for endangered species.

            And now the administration is turning its back on the polar bear. Because the CO2 that comes out of our tailpipes and factories is melting the ice on which the polar bears live, their survival as a species has become quite dicey. No polar ice = no polar bears. But the administration has issued a new rule that exempts activities outside the range of the polar bear from any restrictions that may protect the bear, even though those activities have been shown to harm the habitat of the bears.

Polar bears in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Photo credit: Susanne Miller, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, April 17, 2012 

OK, I admit that there are lots of complications to this. Restricting greenhouse gasses and thus protecting the bears here in the United Sates may not have any bearing on what India, China, or Uruguay does. We could do a very fine job of protecting the polar bears, and because the rest of the world, or at least a portion of it, continues to pump CO2 into the atmosphere polar bears will go the way of the passenger pigeon.

            The oil and gas industries, which are most likely the forces behind the new rule, appeal to a type of environmental isolationism, saying that it “makes no sense to require someone building a bridge in Florida to compensate for threats to polar bears at the top of the globe.” I would be a little sympathetic to this outlook had these same voices made similar arguments to that someone in Florida when it came to supporting or fighting in a war in Iraq, which is at the other end of the globe, too.

            The Fish and Wildlife Agency may have a point that regulating CO2 to protect the bears could lead to a flood of lawsuits, but we don’t know that for certain. I admit that I don’t like to spend a whole bunch of time inside a courtroom. But what would you rather have, a full docket of lawsuits or melting ice sheets and drowning polar bears?

            So for environmentalists, what do we do at the polls this November? Barack Obama’s record on the environment is mediocre at best. But there doesn’t seem to be any push for the environment coming from Romney. As a matter of fact, the GOP, with Newt Gingrich calling for the elimination of the EPA and Romney walking back his earlier acknowledgement that we are warming the planet, seems to be actively hostile to the environment. Is that our choice? Mediocre or bad?

February 3, 1973 Richard Nixon signs the Endangered Species Act. If we only had presidential candidates like Nixon today.