It’s a sickening day offshore today. It’s a day to fight back today. It’s a Mario Savio kind of day.
Fight back how? Start here: 1,000,000 Strong Against Offshore Drilling
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From an analysis by the Center for American Progress on agriculture’s future:
U.S. agriculture is a critical bridge between global warming challenges and solutions. Our agricultural and forest lands sequester 246 million metric tons of carbon annually, absorbing 13 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. And the Congressional Budget Office has suggested that this number could rise to 50 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions with the appropriate incentives.
The analysis shows how clean energy will add income to U.S. farms, through carbon offests, power co-generation, and next-generation bio-fuels. While of course climate change will take income away through all the obvious dynamics such as drought, water shortages, season dysfunction, and unremitting fossil-fuel price increases.
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We know that the information stream is poisoned – now Greenpeace brings to the surface some of the corporate poisoners who are pouring $millions into the think tanks, legislators, TV networks and talking heads who deny climate change. Nice interactive map of the conspiracies too.
Greenpeace has released the report “Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine” to expose the connections between these climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts. The Koch brothers, their family members, and their employees direct a web of financing that supports conservative special interest groups and think-tanks, with a strong focus on fighting environmental regulation, opposing clean energy legislation, and easing limits on industrial pollution.
Use the interactive map to trace out the linkages between payments made and assertions published, and see how deliberate the lies are.
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I and millions of other supporters of this Obama moment in history have been puzzling over the strange events of the last few months. We’ve seen health care reform abandoned by a party and president both elected with a clear mandate to pass it.
As I wrote last time, William Greider explained early in the game that Democrats were probably too bought, with too much money, for them to embrace their classical values.
Now Glenn Greenwald takes this to its obvious conclusion, and nails the Democrats – both party and president – as playing a deliberate game of deception.
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A year ago William Greider spelled out very clearly the dilemma faced by the Democrats, namely: can they return to their historic values against the corruption of money that has saturated them in the last three decades?
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Reversing climate damage and restoring the biosphere will not happen from the greatness of governments, but from the persistence of people.
I think this excerpt from Leonardo Di Capricio’s 2007 film The 11th Hour says more eloquently than I could ever write what’s wrong with our nation’s great institutions, and the direction we must point our efforts in now.
The 11th Hour: The forces blocking change
And since I hate it when people provide links and don’t say what’s in them, let me throw a bit of transcript your way…
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Two compelling stories from Simon Johnson in two days.
(1) He says the Republicans eagerly await the next round of election money from Wall Street players ready to take revenge on politicians who have tried to reform them.
(2) Then he says the crisis in Europe will be too much for U.S. banks – credit will tighten, forget recovery.
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Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
If the Democrats can’t use the majority that a number of different interests joined together to give them – if they can’t even pass desirable legislation at the national level – then what good are they to the environmental cause?
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There’s more good commentary on the old America, the one that’s broken and needs to fix itself.
Two commentators, both of whom have spent time in China recently, have come back to worry on the bone that everyone seems to be chewing now, asking: is America in permanent decline, or can it be fixed?
I noted recently that the political process is broken, and it’s a theme we’ll see more of as the country comes to terms with what Obama’s first year has shown us. I think in 2009 we saw a great president get weighted down to a crawl because Congress and his own administration was captured by lobbyists.
We’ve seen obstruction to change, and a lack of will to change, that serve at least to show us how paralyzed the systems of government have become.
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I’m trying to stay away from working with the old economy, especially since I declared for the new economy, but good commentary deserves mention. Kevin Drum has a beautifully written article explaining in completely clear terms how Wall Street managed to walk away unscathed from the global disaster it left the rest of us buried under.
It’s the kind of piece you can send to any of your friends and they will see a light breaking as they read it. The article, Capital City, has this to say: “A year after the biggest bailout in US history, Wall Street lobbyists don’t just have influence in Washington. They own it lock, stock, and barrel.”
But Drum’s story is not about economics, it’s about politics, and more precisely about political lobbying. The finance lobby has quite simply captured the entire U.S. government, and to a large extent it’s taken over the media and popular culture as well.
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Here’s a simple story told well, about a tiny piece of the new economy. Laid-off steelworkers find good jobs making windwills for renewable energy.
I sometimes wonder what’s so hard to grasp about the trillions of dollars in revenues waiting for the smart entrepreneurs in our new, sustainable economy.
It’s really pretty simple: there is great bounty given to us in our original world. We only need to learn how to spend creatively, contributing back to the bounty, and we can live here forever.
Merry Christmas 
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I’ve studied a broad spectrum of commentary on the passage of the health care bill, and I side squarely with Jonathan Chait in calling it a triumph. Not for what it comprises in its messy compromises today, but for the strategic gateway it opens to the future. History will smile on it.
Chait best explains all the reasons why the bill constitutes what he calls “the most significant American legislative triumph in at least four decades.” Read the piece in the New Republic: And the Rest Is Just Noise.
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The uncaring way we treat the place, do we humans even really belong here, on this Earth?
I recall another good point Ray Anderson made in his book, Mid-Course Correction. He cited the case of the Fraser firs of eastern Tennessee, heritage forests from the last ice age, ravaged and reduced to almost nothing now by a species of insect accidentally introduced from Europe, against which the trees have no defense.
Anderson’s chilling point quotes the Forest Service report that as an exotic species, the parasite has no natural balance developed for its new ecological niche, and thus will kill its own host, and then die.
To me this sounds a lot like us, here.
Maybe those theories are correct: we ARE descended from aliens after all. If so, they were probably fleeing a ruined home planet.
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Ray Anderson reflects on the 15 years passed in his effort to transform a billion-dollar carpet manufacturing operation, from a petro-intensive resource “plunderer” into a zero-footprint, eternally sustainable company.
It’s looking good – he’s 60 percent of the way up that mountain he talks about, and he and his people can now see the top. They know they’re going to get there.
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With “only” 11,000 workers fired last month, the job-loss slide may be easing, or it may be a seasonal stall in shedding employees. The new year will tell.
Much may depend on fiscal policy. Economists agree that most of the 2.8% growth in the third quarter is a result of the stimulus. As I’ve said before, more stimulus would work wonders right now.
Meanwhile, where is reasonable security of tenure, and strategic job-holding for willing workers? Only in sustainability – that third economy I mentioned the other day.
Others agree that green job creation is a miracle profit center waiting to explode.
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