Don’t the Republicans ever get tired of their own shameless hypocrisy? A lot of the rest of us are sure tired of it. It’s time for the Dems to focus their messaging on why the Party of Never-if-a-Democrat-proposed-it is no friend of the people.
I offer these as a gift to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and its supporters.
Why do Republicans support socializing the costs of billionaires’ mistakes and misdeeds while privatizing their profits? Why should working folks have to pay to clean up their mess when billionaires don’t even pay taxes on much of their wealth?
Why do we pay so much more for health care, for university education, for prescription drugs, for so much else–and get less for our money than most other countries? Why did Republicans hold all three branches of government and come up with nothing to address these crises?
If we want to free the world of power-mad dictators and thugs like Putin, we need TRUE energy independence from renewable sources like solar, wind, small-scale hydro, and geothermal–so Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other countries can’t push us around because of our dependence on fossil fuel. That’s also our way out of the carbon crisis.
If you want to halt fuel-cost-related inflation, ditto. That will lead to better health outcomes, too.
Green energy will continue to create good, well-paying jobs right here in the US–and by the way Biden has presided over the longest steady growth in employment since 1939.
If expulsions of immigrants at the border due to fear of COVID–which are against both international law and human decency–aren’t warranted for Ukrainians, there’s no justification for their use to keep Black and Brown people out. Don’t accede to Republicans’ racist demands to hold COVID prevention/protection/treatment funding hostage to keep this cruel, illegal, and discriminatory policy in place.
Stop defending domestic terrorists! January 6 was an attempted coup, an attempt to blow up our democracy. Even Republican Secretaries of State admit that the 2020 election was the most fraud-free in history and that Biden won honestly (something we can’t say with certainty about Trump in 2016, since the Republicans blocked recounts in three crucial swing states). And yet you refuse to discipline even the most blatant seditionists in your ranks! Doesn’t democracy mean anything to you anymore?
Why are you, the party that claims to believe in freedom, passing laws that take “cancel culture” to levels approaching those of early Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia? How dare you make it a crime to teach or read honest history! How dare you try to suppress the speech rights of whole classes of people! How dare you try to roll back women’s reproductive rights, the right of people of color to vote, and the right to live without fearing violence because of who you are, what way you worship, or what you look like? Stop trying to grasp at your fading power OVER others and focus on your power TO do good in the world (hint: oppressing others is not doing good in the world)
Why was it OK to refuse to even hold a hearing on Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland because nine months before the election was “too close to the election”–while Barrett was rushed through just weeks before?
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Palmer W. Cook
It’s not often you hear a self-professed liberal Jewish feminist open her talk with ten minutes praising the Pope. But that’s how Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, and several other groundbreaking books, began her talk at Mount Holyoke College last night. While acknowledging a litany of areas where she and Francis have profound disagreements—among them same-sex marriage and a woman’s right to control her own body—she thanked him publicly for his attention to the planet in peril and its dispossessed people, saying he was a great example of what environmental leadership looks like right now.
And for Klein, those two areas—helping the planet and replacing poverty with abundance—are forever braided together. “Climate change is an accelerant to all the other issues going wrong…It’s not about saying climate change is so big that it trumps everything else. All are equally urgent, and we don’t win by pitting these issues against each other.” We win, she says, by joining forces to demand holistic approaches that simultaneously solve climate heating, create jobs and economic opportunity, and remediate ism-based oppression—by “connecting climate change with a broken economic model”—a concept she calls “intersectionality.”
(This is a message particularly dear to my own heart, and thoroughly integrated into my forthcoming 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World as well as my own talk, “‘Impossible’ is a Dare.”)
The impacts of climate change, she notes, often fall most heavily among the very poor countries, and the very poor residents of rich countries. Oil refineries, coal plants, and high asthma rates tend to be found in low-income communities, often with high concentrations of people of color. Rising floodwaters will inundate poor, tiny island nations first. “It’s not just about things getting hotter, but about things getting meaner. More militarized, more racist,” as we see in the response of countries like Hungary to the Syrian refugee crisis. Which she sees as climate-related, noting that the Syrian civl war followed the worst drought in Syria’s history. Climate change, she says, is also a women’s and a feminist issue; the impacts hit women disproportionately as well.
So her challenge to climate activists is to turn “disaster apartheid” (e.g., the detestable official response to Hurricane Katrina) into “energy democracy.” And that includes making sure that the communities hit hardest are first in line for improvements that meet their needs.
Hurricane Katrina, which inspired Klein to write The Shock Doctrine and begin her climate study that led to This Changes Everything, was a perfect storm combining “heavy weather and a weak and neglected public sphere.” She points out that by the time Katrina made landfall, it had been downgraded from a Category 5 hurricane to a mere tropical storm. The levees should have withstood the onslaught, if they hadn’t been allowed to fall into disrepair.
While the world looked on with horror as “FEMA couldn’t find New Orleans,” and “prisoners were abandoned, locked in their cells as the waters were rising,” evacuees were given one-way tickets out, and the elites seized an opportunity to remake the city as a wealthier place, with 100,000 fewer poor blacks, even tearing down public housing projects undamaged by the storm, to replace them with high-end condominiums.
Quoting Black Lives Matter leader Alicia Garza, Klein says it’s time to “‘make new mistakes’…we can’t demand perfection but we can demand evolution.”
Examples of the old mistakes we shouldn’t keep making:
“Projecting messianic fantasies onto politicians” and becoming disappointed when they fail to save us
Believing we can solve all our problems with market forces (she cites the recent Volkswagen fuel emissions tampering scandal as an example of why that doesn’t work)—or with technological fixes, which include not only wonderful new green energy systems but also environmentally catastrophic technologies like fracking (“the oil companies have figured out how to screw us sideways”), tar-sands oil, and massive pipelines such as the Keystone XL
“Building a movement entirely of upper-middle-class white people and wondering why people of color don’t join”
“Tearing other people to shreds” in bouts of anger disguised as political purity
Thinking that any one of us can do it all ourselves
Noting that fossil fuel companies will work extremely hard to protect their enormous profits and will try to win the public by pointing out the lifestyles of luxury fossil fuels have allowed us, Klein says we won’t win by trying to educate fossil-fuel billionaires like the Koch brothers. Furthermore, “we cannot look at this without looking at who burned what, when. Fossil fuels have allowed us to live the fantasy of a life apart from nature. But the response from the earth, though slow in coming, says there’s no such thing as a one-way relationship, and you were never the boss! We could see this as a cosmic demotion—or as a gift.”
But we do have many victories to celebrate, including Shell’s decision this week in the face of strong opposition from environmentalists to withdraw from arctic drilling…China’s major reduction in coal development and initiation of carbon cap-and-trade—due to public pressure even in that repressive society—when only a few years ago a new coal plant was opening every week…the 400,000 new jobs Germany has created in shifting 30 percent of its energy from fossil and nuclear to solar and wind (to name a few). “As I talk to people, the biggest problem is that they think they can’t win. But we are winning, as part of a global movement.
And just as the shock of the Great Depression economic collapse created space for New Deal social reforms, so the climate catastrophe, coupled with the current collapse of fossil fuel prices, with the price of a barrel of oil plummeting from $100 to $50 in three months, could catalyze transformation: “integrated holistic solutions and a road map. There’s a progressive tradition of using these shocks to build….a moment where we can do things that weren’t possible before. We can shut down bad projects and bad policy. We can win a moratorium on all arctic drilling. It’s easier to bring in a bold progressive carbon tax…the political goal has to be a polluter-pays principle…the mostr sustainable route is weaving together the yes and the no.” She delighted in recent progressive electoral victories in Alberta (long controlled by tar-sands-loving right-wingers) and in the UK, where the Bernie Sanders-like Jeremy Corbyn has just become head of the Labour Party. Also in Alberta, she took hope from a conference that brought together union miners from the tar sands, environmentalists, and many other sectors and emerged with a progressive manifesto.
Before a brief Q&A, she closed her formal presentation with a clarion call to optimism AND action:
We need to move from a society based on extraction to one based on caring, including a guaranteed annual income. Caregiving jobs are climate change jobs. We must expand the caring economy and contract the careless economy. 2016 is a leap year; we add a human-created day in deference to the earth’s rotation. That’s an increased opportunity to build a much better world. We will be told it’s impractical. But $2.6 trillion has been divested from fossil fuel.
Quoting a woman leader in Nauru, a tiny Pacific Island being lost to climate change after a catastrophic history of exploitation by First World economies (Klein chronicles the sad tale in This Changes Everything), she continued,
“If politics are immovable, let’s change the politics.” Now is not the time for small steps. Now is the time to leap!
This one really had me scratching my head; it’s one of the most bizarre arguments for nuclear power I’ve ever seen. Just because one plant managed to avoid a problem that brought several plants at Fukushima to collapse, how is that any kind of justification for the technology?
Here’s what I wrote in response:
I find Dr. Clark’s argument particularly puzzling: that a different nuke didn’t not fail during the earthquake/tsunami that clobbered Fukushima s not even relevant. I don’t know of ANYONE who would argue that every nuclear power plant will have a catastrophic failure. The argument against nukes boils down to two areas:
1. ROUTINE nuclear power plant operation is unhealthy, inefficient, does NOT solve the carbon problem (because the fuel cycle has many carbon-intensive and environmentally destructive components, starting with mining the uranium and continuing through milling, processing, transportation, creating the fuel rods, transporting again, actually running the fuel through the reactor, aging of the waste, transportation of the waste, etc.), causes thermal pollution, and releases radiation into the environment.
2. The potential for CATASTROPHIC FALURE is constant, and the industry’s safety record is abysmal. Although there are a relatively small number of nuclear plants operating in the world, at least a dozen have had major failures (including, ironically, the Fukushima plant the summer before the tsunami–as well as others you never heard of, like Windscale, Enrico Fermi, and Browns Ferry), and hundreds have had serious safety issues).
Here’s a very brief and far-from-complete list of the problems: Huge creation of carbon, huge safety risk, chance of wiping out a large area, need to store the waste completely isolated from the environment for a QUARTER OF A MILLION YEARS–which we have no clue how to accomplish, btw–risk of sabotage, risk of structural failure (especially on older nukes that have been embrittled by decades of high-intensity radiation, uranium mining that’s just as destructive to the environment as oil drilling etc., centralized power generation with all its problems, risks, and wastage…
I applaud the bureaucrat who built the higher seawall at Onagawa–that was a good decision. But I fail to see how that in any way justifies this corrupt and very dangerous industry that does nothing to solve our environmental problems and could make them quite a bit worse.
It seems we’ve escaped complete catastrophe at the six failed reactors in Japan damaged in the earthquake and tsunami—for the moment, But it was (and may still be) pretty dicey.
Two of the reactors had to be cooled with seawater, in a last-ditch effort to prevent catastrophic meltdown. Those reactors probably can’t be used to generate electricity ever again. And the chance that the other four will return to service is probably pretty low, considering the extensive damage, high levels of radiation, etc., not to mention the risk of further damage in future quakes.
Thank goodness this happened in Japan, the country with probably the best earthquake-related building codes in the world (imagine what would have happened if a nuke had been sitting on earthquake fault during last year’s quake in Haiti—shudder!)
But here’s my question: WHY in the name of creation are we still hopelessly, haplessly, playing with nuclear fire? Did we learn nothing from the Chernobyl disaster? Or the barely-contained accidents at Three Mile Island, Browns Ferry (Alabama), Enrco Fermi (Michigan) and other near-calamities at nuke plants not only in the US but around the world? The nuclear industry’s safety record is horrible, and as Chernobyl proved, we don’t always get lucky with containing the damage—and when we don’t, large areas are rendered uninhabitable for decades.
Back in 1979-80, I had a monthly column about the dangers of nuclear power. I devoted two of my columns to the possibility of accidents resulting from earthquakes, and that information was taken form commonly available sources (even in the pre-Google era). More than 30 years later, we appear to have learned nothing. And earthquakes are only one of a dozen or more very compelling reasons NOT to use nuclear power. Some of the others include terrorist threat, waste disposal issues that need to be addressed for a longer timespan than human history, the problem (with US nukes of sharply limited liability in the event of an accident), diversion for bomb-making…and perhaps most shocking, the lifecycle analysis that shows that by the time you count the energy and fossil footprint of mining, milling, processing, transporting, running the reactors, reprocessing, waste storage and transportation, etc., you don’t actually create very much energy. One study I saw even claimed it was a negative number! (And another study showed that renewable energy is two to seven times as effective in reducing greenhouse gases.) For this very dubious benefit, we’re putting our own and every future generation at enormous risk???
Here’s my call to action:
IMMEDIATE world-wide shutdown of any nuclear power plant within 100 miles of an active earthquake fault and entombment in the most solid possible barrier
Phased shutdown of remaining N-plants over perhaps six months
The Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico shows a number of lessons. Taking them to heart, as individuals, as business people, and as a country, will be crucial. First, four specific lessons from this disaster. Points five and six address our long-term energy future.
1. It is absolutely essential to have tested remedies in place in case of catastrophic failure. BP’s throw-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-see-what-sticks approach would have been laughable, except that it was sickening. It became clear very early on that the company had absolutely no clue how to contain a large oil rupture. You don’t make those experiments after the failure, but well in advance—before you ever deploy any potentially dangerous and highly disruptive technology—you’d darned well know how you’re going to deal with an emergency. And those solutions will have been tested and demonstrated to work. BP clearly had no clue that working a mile underwater was different than working on the surface, and should never have been allowed to operate.
2. Don’t give the fox the keys to the henhouse. Government oversight was spotty, at best, and that led to a situation where BP was allowed to override the good judgment of its own engineers. Enforce the rules we’ve enacted to protect our people and our planet. BP so obviously neglected its responsibility to public safety and environmental responsibility that I wrote a post back in May wondering whether there was a good case to bring criminal charges agaisnt the oil giant.
3. When you take massive shortcuts with safety, when you cut corners in the name of short-term profit, the financial consequences are often more severe than doing it right in the first place. BP will be spending tens of billions of dollars that it could have easily avoided, by spending a few hundred thousand dollars upfront on safety equipment, and by heeding the warnings of engineers who said before the accident that their path was unacceptably risky.
4. Even redundant safety devices can fail. We saw this with the Titanic, with Three Mile Island, and with Deepwater Horizon. Engineers are not always skilled at anticipating how different systems interact, and what happens to a system downline from a system failure.
And now, at the federal policy level…
5. Deepwater Horizon is a wake-up call to move away from centralized, polluting energy technologies. The risk of gathering so much energy in one place is significant, and when catastrophes happen, they happen BIG. There are a dozen reasons why oil (and fossil fuels generally) cannot be the long-term answer. And there are a dozen reasons why nuclear should never have been deployed in the first place, of which catastrophic accident is certainly one. A major nuclear accident would make Deepwater Horizon seem like a leaky neighborhood sewer pipe. There are still parts of the Ukraine left uninhabitable by Chernobyl, 24 years ago—and even that was not as severe as the worst-case accident. We MUST change our economy over to non-polluting, renewable, decentralized technologies such as solar, wind, small-scale hydro, geothermal, and of course, conservation/deep-energy-efficiency retrofits.
6. This should be obvious, but apparently it’s not. All deep-sea offshore drilling needs to be shut down until the appropriate safety measures are in place so that Deepwater Horizon is not repeated. It’s a lot harder to put the genie back in the bottle than to keep it in to begin with. Long-time environmental activist and Green consultant’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green.
Here’s an open letter to Barack Obama, which I give permission to be reposted, circulated, reprinted, as long as the attribution remains intact.
President Obama, what happened to the bold young senator who understood that our future is not with fossil fuels, and not with nuclear? Our future, if we are to have a future, is in lowering our carbon footprint far beyond the puny standards you set out in Copenhagen, to the shock of a whole world willing to go much deeper. Our future is not in any way reliant on nuclear power…but it is very much aligned with protecting our environmental heritage, something to which you’ve dealt yet another crippling blow today.
On issue after issue, you disappoint. You sold us out on health care, on militarism, on controlling Wall Street, and now again you’ve sold us out on yet another energy issue (at least the third one).
President Obama, do NOT take our votes for granted. I wrote months ago that we would “have your” back if you pushed for the progressive agenda, the change you promised to bring. By the same token, we will desert you if you continue to desert us. Do you really want to align yourself with Sarah “Drill, Baby, Drill” Palin?
Sometimes, the lesser of evils, is still too evil to support. I do not believe you’re an evil man, but your policies, while not based in the malice and trickery of your predecessor, are getting too evil for me to go along with them.
