Climate Clownishness

When it became apparent that either President Biden was likely to lose the 2024 presidential election or the Democrats would never be able to overcome the sluggish economy and keep the White House with a different nominee, John Kerry, President Biden's special envoy for climate-change issues, was on the PBS NewsHour explaining why a future Republican President, whom most people assumed would not be Donald Trump, would honor the Paris Climate Agreement, which President Biden had had the United States rejoin in 2021 after Trump had pulled the U.S. out of it.  Kerry explained that the business sector would advise such a hypothetical Republican President to remain in the climate accord because it was good for business and good for the economy.

Fast forward to 2025.  Trump returned to power, he pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement ten minutes after taking office to the thunderously vocalized approval of F-150-owning MAGA cultists present, and a good deal of the business sector capitulated to Trump's entire economic agenda.  (And I no longer watch the PBS NewsHour.) This became apparent - no, blatantly obvious - when former Volkswagen of America president Scott Keogh, now heading up Volkswagen's Scout SUV subsidiary, announced that Scout would instead develop gasoline/electric hybrid systems rather than the electric-only vehicles Scout had been created to develop.  And, while only a year ago, clean energy sources like solar power and wind power were the wave of the future, the major energy policy upheaval Trump perpetrated as soon as Biden (and Harris) was gone now envisions a future of more oil and gas - which only satisfies "public" utilities overcharging its customers for electricity and gas, Vladimir Putin, Russian energy oligarchs, American legacy oil and gas companies, and startup oil and gas companies like Phoenix Energy, which just went public and has been insufferably running ads on YouTube - which, thankfully, can be skipped. 

It is in the milieu of this brutal reality that European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EC's new policy toward climate change.

Von Der Leyen announced that the European Commission would focus on controlling and fighting carbon emissions from fossil fuels rather than going after fossil fuels themselves.  This is like conservatives on a local school board who believe that rap is a detriment to America's musical heritage (and it is) deciding to censor rap by banning it from student events and school campuses rather than spending more money on music education.     

When it comes to trying to heal the planet, the Europeans are America's superiors, just as they are in cinema, urban planning, social welfare, and intellectualism, but von der Leyen and her fellow commissioners seem resigned to the idea that anything they attempt to do to combat climate change that is more than what they're doing right now is going to be canceled out by Trump.  The United States is already the biggest polluter on earth, except when in some years it's China, and Trump's commitment to more carbon pollution - which he took pride in during his incoherently improvised speech to the United Nations this past September - is only going to make that worse.

To be fair, many American companies such as General Motors and Pepsico, along with even a couple of oil companies like Occidental Petroleum, are defying Trump and working with foreign governments and various NGOs to do something about climate change, recognizing, as John Kerry predicted, the positive business opportunities that dealing with climate change offers.  Many of them were active in the COP30 climate change summit in Brazil, as was California governor Gavin Newsom, who as the chief executive of the world's fourth-largest economy, is a de facto world leader. But - and you knew I was coming to a "but" - the mission statement COP30 issued was as substantial as milquetoast, and the participants who vowed vocally to continue the fight against climate change spoke with the roar of a tiger but offered the bite of a kitten. 

And while there are many states other than California who still want to be in the Paris Agreement and commit to its goals, Trump is already working on ways to prevent that, and in, for example, my home state of New Jersey, where Trump canceled federal support for a wind farm designed to reduce energy costs, Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill has her work cut out for her. Given that there is more commitment to the Paris Agreement in more Democratic regions of the United States than in Republican regions, and given that the U.S. is too divided to return to the Paris Agreement if a Democrat ever holds the Presidency again - not that we'll be welcomed back in, given that a future Republican President probably would pull us back out and cause a perpetual whiplash when it comes to American climate policy - well, bearing all that in mind, this is just another perfect argument for breaking up the United States in separate countries.     

The California Republic will join the Paris Agreement and stay in.  So will the United Republic of New England and whatever republic New Jersey ends up in.  The Confederate States will reject the Paris Agreement and stay out. 

Bye bye, Florida. 

One For the Road

And the rails.  And the utilities.  And a whole lot of other things.

Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer is ready to have a procedural Senate vote to continue work on the massive bipartisan infrastructure bill amounting to $1.2 trillion so that it can be passed in tandem with the Democratic-only $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to expand infrastructure spending to child care, Medicare, and clean-energy programs.  The vote is scheduled for Wednesday,

Can he pull it off?  Republicans are grousing about the rushing of a bill that hasn't been written yet beyond the outline, with the funding still murky.  But it's a safe bet that they'll stay on board in order to help the GOP have something to brag about in the 2022 midterms.  Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has made a couple of concessions to get the bill through while keeping a close eye on his own priorities. And as Democrats negotiate amongst themselves on how to pay for the reconciliation package, Schumer is making sure that he keeps everyone on the same page, just as he did with the COVID relief bill.  So you might say I'm cautiously optimistic.

Schumer has been preparing for something like this for his entire Senate tenure.  If he succeeds at this infrastructure gambit, he could end up being the most effective Senate Democratic majority leader since Lyndon Johnson.

Biden's Fossil-Fuel Fumble

So how did the last debate go?  Joe Biden presented himself well by showing empathy and knowledge regarding COVID-19, racial justice, and immigration.  Trump was more restrained and civil, meaning that he lied through his teeth quietly.

Biden did leave one wrinkle, though.  He opened himself up to an issue that Trump can use against him in the few remaining days in the presidential campaign.  And it's not his son Hunter.  Biden reiterated his opposition to ending hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas from the ground (though he opposes allowing it on federal land) but insisted the he wants to see it phased out while making a transition to cleaner energy.

"Oh, transition," Trump said, with a tone suggesting sarcasm.  "That's a big statement."

And it could be a big f---in' deal, to cop a phrase Biden once used.  Trump went on to say that Biden's stand on hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," would be dangerous for the economy.

"Because basically what he’s saying is he’s going to destroy the oil industry," Trump continued.  "Will you remember that, Texas? Will you remember that, Pennsylvania? Oklahoma? Ohio?" 

Here Biden let himself open to charges - charges that will continue to the end of the campaign - that his energy policy will cost oil workers and gas workers their jobs in those states, especially Pennsylvania, which is a must-win state for Biden.  Bear in mind that Pennsylvania is the the state where the American oil industry began in 1859, when Edwin L. Drake drilled the first oil well in the United States.  Fossil-fuel development is a hydraulically fractured keystone in the Keystone State.  And if Trump succeeds in getting enough oil workers and gas workers to doubt that Biden's policy is good for them - even though Biden would help them get new and better-paying jobs - that means that just enough voters in Pennsylvania could tip the state to Trump and possibly give him the Presidency again.

Biden not only supports a careful transition to cleaner energy, he supports ending tax subsidies for the oil companies.  Which would make gasoline more expensive.  Which would mean we'd have to buy smaller cars - like this Volkswagen Polo, which is currently unavailable in America.

Not surprisingly, I wouldn't have a problem with that.  But most Americans, who consider cheap gasoline a birthright, would.  Expensive gasoline means that people would have to give up their SUVs.  You can imagine a conservative columnist saying, "First our guns, now our sort utility vehicles!"  (Actually, I don't have to imagine it - Cal Thomas wrote that back in 1998.) And don't forget pickup trucks.  The Ford F-150 is America's bestselling motor vehicle, and Chris Matthews, back when he was covering the 2020 Democratic presidential primary campaign before he was forced into early retirement, said that no Democratic presidential candidate should dare make anyone think he or she would come for their F-150s. Electric vehicles?  Please.  The sort of swing voters Biden and Trump are competing for dismiss electric cars as wimpish, namby-pamby appliance cars for self-righteous, latte-sipping, foreign-film-loving white-collar bourgeois liberals.   

Some folks think Trump's hardline pro-fracking stance may not help him much out of concern for the environment, as this Daily Beast column suggests.  Maybe.  But when you remember that the election results in Pennsylvania, like other swing states such as Michigan, Florida and possibly some other state that doesn't require a front license plate for your Jeep Grand Cherokee, could be decided by a couple thousand or even a couple hundred votes, Trump doesn't have to reach every voter to win.  Just a very small bunch of them.

No Turning Back

The world is finally doing something about climate change.  It's not much, but it's something.

And what a something it is!  The Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions has just gone into effect, with 55 nations joining in to ensure that it will go into force in early November.  While it can't exactly - okay, not even remotely - reverse carbon emissions, its efforts to keep mean global temperature increases  below 2 degrees Celsius and push it down to 1.5-degree-Celsius increase is encouraging, if only because it will highlight the necessity to move away from fossil fuels and more toward cleaner and renewable energy.  It's admittedlygoing to be a long process; people aren't going to give up their Chevy Suburbans for Nissan Leafs and VW e-Golfs overnight.

The deal requires any country that wished to get out of it to wait until November 2019 to do so.  So, even if Donald Trump does get elected President, he has to wait two years and ten months into his term to make good on his bad idea.  And lo and behold - November 2019 is a year before the next presidential election, and if President Trump tries to take the United States out of this deal, that just might prove to be politically disadvantageous for him.     

One thing Trump won't do if elected is bring coal back.  The market has spoken; coal is no longer cool.  More and more businesses that use coal in mass quantities, like power-generating companies,  are moving away from the dirty fuel in favor of more clean-burning natural gas.  Public Service Electric & Gas in New Jersey just announced the closing of its last two coal-fired power plants in the state.

Even corporations are committing themselves to a cleaner and greener energy future.  There is indeed no turning back.    

Kaputnik Moment

I found proposals for the 2012 federal budget - particularly cuts in federal spending for home heating assistance for the poor and Pell grants for college students - to be appalling. I wouldn't have been so appalled by the cuts if they had been proposed by the Republicans; given their history of budget priorities, that would be expected of them. But these proposed cuts came from the White House's $3.7 trillion budget blueprint!

You know, when I voted for Obama in 2008, I thought I was voting for a Democrat. Now I know how all those budget hawks who supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 felt when they were thought they were voting for a conservative.

President Obama did try to appease his base with increases in education spending as well as increased spending on high-speed rail projects and alternative energy, but the attempt to trim the deficit by $1 trillion over the next decade by freezing various spending programs at current levels without reforming social programs like Medicare hasn't impressed anyone. Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) finds the plan too timid, as does House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI). And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell couldn't resist a jab at Obama's plans for spending money on rail transit and clean energy as money for "trains and windmills," as if they were toys. In McConnell's home state of Kentucky, where almost no one uses any kind of public transit and where the economy depends on coal mining, trains and windmills probably are thought of as toys.

Yes, yes, you say, Obama's domestic spending cuts are all too bad, but he has to prioritize his own goals and make concessions to the Republicans who control the House to get anything done. Yeah, how's that working out so far? I'd rather see Obama act like Harry Truman and fight the opposition to the bitter end, as Truman did against the Republican Eightieth Congress of 1947 and 1948. Chris Matthews suggested that possibility once, and Pat Buchanan replied with a stinging rejoinder. "Chris," Buchanan said of Obama, "do you see any of Harry Truman in this guy?"

Buchanan has a point. I don't even see any of Harry Reid in this guy.

So, we won't get much in the way of high-speed rail spending, we won't get any clean energy programs, and we'll get even more draconian domestic spending cuts when the negotiations are completed between the White House and Congress and the smoke clears.

Three weeks ago, Obama spoke of a Sputnik moment. This budget is our Kaputnik moment.

In that spirit, to sum up our national predicament, I present a video clip of the failed Vanguard TV3 "Kaputnik" satellite launch of December 6, 1957.