The Royal Flush

Or, the royal scam.

Trump is going after environmental regulations concerning consumer products because he believes that, despite the newspaper headlines screaming about climate change and all of the hurricanes and firestorms caused by climate change, consumers will balk at any rules that cause them to change their behavior.  This includes the light bulbs we get, straws we drink with, the dishwashers we buy, and, yes, the toilets we use. 

The federal government has already scuttled regulations that would have started phasing out incandescent light bulbs beginning yesterday (January 1), because Trump marvels at the wonderful light that old-fashioned bulbs provide at a fraction of the cost of light emitting diode (LED) bulbs - never mind that LED bulbs last longer and pay for themselves in the long run.  Trump also wants to stop the move toward paper straws over plastic ones, as he finds plastic ones to be more user-friendly, and he complains about dishwashers and toilets that use too little water.  (They don't, really; they just use less.)

This could all work, though.  Because, as I've noted, Americans can be utterly stupid when it comes to matters of the environment.  Americans also don't like being told accept anything new.  As journalist David Kiley once observed, it takes time for Americans to embrace change, which is why it took a hundred years for the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution (multiracial suffrage) to be enforced and why we still haven't made the metric system official.  A lot of people in the heartland aren't ready to give up their inefficient light bulbs and appliances, which is why I think Trump can get an edge in the election this coming November.

Oh yeah, he's also doing away with tax credits for electric vehicles, the internal combustion engine being a tried-and-true icon of American automotive engineering.  Electric vehicles currently sell like opera tickets - that is, only a handful of wealthy, cultured people buy them - and Trump wants to keep it that way.  But Volkswagen, the same car company that cheated on diesel emissions, is hell-bent on providing electric vehicles for the U.S. market and even making them here, priced as competitively as standard gasoline-engine cars.  This is happening even as Detroit mostly pretends to be interested in entering the electric-vehicle market.  That all dovetails nicely with Trump's efforts to curtail the growth of the solar-panel industry with rules and tariffs designed to retard their sales and progress . . . and surrendering development of solar power to the Chinese.     

And Americans applaud Trump for standing up to change, thus proving that stupidity is a communicable disease.  

I hope you can't get it from a toilet seat.

Climate Change Change?

After all of the global climate change protests held this past Friday, am I more optimistic about the future of this planet?

No, I'm not.

Because the truth of the matter is that old habits die hard and new movements die quickly, as Occupy Wall Street in the earlier part of this decade (which, thankfully, is ending very soon) proved.  The protests were held primarily by teenagers, who, owing to their age, are too young to vote, and there simply aren't enough people who are old enough to vote for whom climate change is a top priority, If there were, Jay Inslee's presidential campaign here in the United States wouldn't have failed and he'd be the front runner.

It is also because of the United States, the world's most powerful nation and the world's greatest environmental outlaw (there, I said it!), the only country that doesn't recognize the Paris Agreement and the only country run by a climate-change denier - Charles Koch.  But Donald Trump happens to agree with the last surviving Koch brother on the subject, which is why he's been working overtime - or having his aides due the work for him while he plays golf - to roll back environmental regulations and make sure that no state or private corporation can do anything to fight the climate crisis.  His efforts to keep fuel economy standards low helps the profits of oil companies more than even the profits of automakers, many of whom actually support the since-rescinded Obama-era fuel economy regulations and are ready to go ahead with higher standards that California has pursued - including Ford, which is currently pushing SUVs and crossovers in its home market.  

Trump's absence from the climate conference the United Nations is holding this week makes it clear that the U.S. Government, the same government I was taught revere when I was in first grade (Nixon was President then!), is on record as refusing to do anything about the planet's health.  The U.S. corporations who will be represented at the conference only make it even more embarrassing that this country relies on profiteering capitalists more than our elected representatives (including Democrats - remember how Dianne Feinstein tried to blow off young climate activists in her Senate office this past winter?) to do the right thing.

But it's not just the American government, and it's not just lunkheaded American consumers buying Chevrolet Suburbans and eating steak every other night.  It's the French objecting to fuel taxes the encourage them to drive less.  It's the Australians voting in a more conservative government that is more skeptical of climate change.  It's the Chinese still using too much coal.  Oh, sure, the media are taking climate change more seriously.  MSNBC devoted a whole week to climate change stories.  But who cares when America's number one cable news channel is Fox News?

As the old MySpace marital status said, I don't want kids.  This is why.  One of them might even grow up to be a climate change denier.

It's Not Easy Being Green

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a woman on a mission.  With a brazen effort to seize the moment and hit the ground running, she unveiled a proposal for a Green New Deal - a Roosevelt-style economic policy that emphasizes the creation of jobs and the implementation of policies to benefit the environment and fight climate change while putting people to work.

Her proposal, which she put out with climate hawk and congressional veteran Edward Markey, the junior U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, would incentivize the creation of jobs to help the poor, underemployed and unemployed - jobs to expand renewable energy, get the United States on track to depend entirely on a 100% renewable, zero-emission energy grid, encourage the development of electric cars and high-speed passenger rail, and promote sustainable farming.

In other words, Ocasio-Cortez wants America to do what other countries have been doing for quite some time now.

Let's get something straight.  This Green New Deal proposal is not going to become law in this Congress, so long as the Republicans, who still control the Senate and the Presidency, scoff at anything that cuts into the profitable businesses of refining oil and selling SUVs.  Even if there is a Democratic sweep in the 2020 elections, we might still have to deal with moderate Democrats who laugh off the idea of going all-renewable and call it a "green dream" (to cop a phrase from Nancy Pelosi's reaction to the Ocasio-Cortez/Markey proposal).  But it does do something Republicans detest - it gets an issue they don't want to talk about in the public discourse.  Ocasio-Cortez is betting on the Green New Deal  to galvanize progressive, millennial and minority voters to become more politically active and demand change to our insane energy and transportation policies, which gave us electric-power plants belching carbon into the sky and an unsustainable overreliance on cars.  Not to mention the incentivization of mechanized farming based on petrochemical fertilizers.  The idea is to get enough voters riled up to the point where they make Washington pursue a path to a cleaner and greener economy.

Of course, some of these ideas have been around for awhile (*cough cough*, high-speed rail, *cough cough*), and the political realities of the present make the Green New Deal a heavy lift.  But it's not impossible to get it done; it's just difficult.  Here are a few other things that were heavy lifts - health care reform, civil rights legislation, old-age pensions, women's suffrage . . . I could go on.  I won't, because we have to start getting the Green New Deal off the ground.  And Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the perfect person to instigate it.  This is not unlike the idea of putting a man on the moon within ten years, which, you'll remember, happened.  Ocasio-Cortez's and Markey's plan happens to envision a ten-year transition to an all-renewable energy grid. And Ocasio-Cortez is firing up voters and inspiring the American people to find their can-do spirit and get this thing done.

With a little luck, we can make this whole damn thing work out. A little push, please.  ;-)    

Earth Day, Forty Years Later

Earth Day is once again upon us, and it's the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day. Call me cynical, but I'm beginning to think of Earth Day as the one day we're all environmentalists much like St. Patrick's Day is the one day we're all Irish. We talk a good game of saving the environment, but when the rubber hits the road, it's supporting a gas-guzzling SUV. And even if some of us do drive sensible subcompacts, are we willing to spend a little more money for one of those newfangled light bulbs that look like soft ice cream in a cone? And breaking one of those things would be like breaking a thermometer - it's too dangerous.

What about all the plastic bags we take groceries and other necessities home in, likely from stores we can't walk to or bike to? What if we buy a single item at a store we could walk or bike to but still take the car, because it's convenient and it "saves time?" And even though we all want to live in suburbia and be close to nature - or a chemically fertilized version of it - city life is actually very environmentally friendly because we use or cars less, take public transportation, and take up less space. And by living in cities we free space outside the cities for local agriculture rather than for a development called "Coventry Estates" populated by people unconnected to English nobility or a condominium called "Forest Glade Village" where's their no forest or no glade because both were bulldozed to build condos. But that would require us to live next to people who look or think differently than we do - can't have that.

Are you content to dust with a feather duster, or do you use a cleaning solvent made out of those same poisonous chemicals that produce dump sites in New Jersey?

To be fair, the environmentalist movement has brought positive change. More people recycle newspapers, many of us who can walk when it's feasible to do so, organically grown fruits and vegetables are somewhat popular (but still pricey), farmers' markets are gaining favor, and we're using more paper bags, the better to have something to recycle newspapers in. Some of us use reusable shopping bags. And the great Lakes are cleaner than they've been in a long time. We're readier than we've ever been to do something about climate change and the depleted ozone layer.

Now if we could only figure out what to do.

For the record, Earth Day was started by U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson, a Wisconsin Democrat who chose April 22 as the first Earth Day in 1970 because it fell on a Wednesday that year, and it fell during a period when college students were likely to be available to help promote it when there was less competition from other mid-week events. April 22 was also the birthday of Julius Sterling Morton, a U.S. Secretary of Agriculture who had started Arbor Day (his son founded the Morton Salt Company in Chicago), and it was also the birthday of noted actor, humanitarian, and environmental activist Eddie Albert, for whom green acres was more than a TV show.

Unfortunately for Nelson, April 22, 1970 was also the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, which, despite being a coincidence, linked environmentalism to Communism. Nelson was swept out of office in the Reagan Revolution a decade later. Nelson remained active in environmentalism until his death in 2005.

You Know The Drill

I wish this were an April Fool's Day joke, but it's really true that President Obama is opening the waters off the southern Atlantic coast of the United States, parts of the Arctic Ocean, and the eastern Gulf of Mexico to offshore oil drilling. He says it will help the economy and produce more jobs. Did a Sarah Palin mole replace environmental employment expert Van Jones as a White House point man on energy policy?

President Obama defended his decision as being part of a wider picture, saying that the United states needs to consider all possible energy sources -not just renewable ones - as part of a broad strategic plan to make itself independent of foreign energy sources. But what's to be gained from going from a dependence on foreign oil to a dependence on domestic oil? It's still more of a dependence on oil, and it gives us an excuse to continue an oil-based living pattern, encouraging more cars, more large cars and SUVs, more pollution, and more suburban sprawl. We don't need more oil. We need more biofuels, solar power, wind power, and, if there really is such a thing as clean coal, more of that. The jury is still out on natural gas.

We don't need the sprawl more oil will encourage, but rather, more walkable neighborhoods and towns. We need more mass transit, more small cars, and a gasoline tax to encourage such a living pattern. This decision by the President will just make our suburban lifestyle, with all of the driving and petrochemically grown foodstuffs that support it, last a little longer.

Many Democratic lawmakers, such as Senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Benjamin Cardin of Maryland, are opposed to this plan, afraid of oil spills polluting their states's beaches. Southern politicians support it, even those from would-be affected Southern coastal states. Good, I hope they get gobs of oil on their private beaches. To be fair, President Obama excluded the pristine Bristol Bay off the southwestern coast of Alaska and all of the Pacific coastline of the continental U.S. (which includes the Democratic states of Washington, Oregon, and California). The President sought to strike a balance in the quest for a compromise. But as the deals over the extension of slavery proved, compromises usually resolve nothing. They just perpetuate bad situations that can erupt into something worse.

Isn't there anyone advising the President on a green economy right now? Not likely. If there were, Glenn Beck would have hounded him out of office just like he did to Van Jones.

Regress

Congress, the late Nipsey Russell once said, is the opposite of progress. Last night, however, the House of Representatives stunned everyone by actually making progress on a contentious environmental issue - global warming. The clean energy bill passed by the House passed narrowly - by five votes - making investments in clean energy production more of a reality. The bill, known as the American Clean Energy and Security Act but sometimes called the Waxman-Markey Act (after its sponsors), requires carbon pollutants to be reduced by 17 percent by 2020, and up to 80 percent by 2050. Other provisions include a requirement for new use of renewable energy by utilities and energy efficiency incentives for homes and buildings.

Republicans and oil companies fought this bill diligently, and only eight Republicans voted for it. Tellingly, three of those Republican votes came from my own state of New Jersey. Sadly, my congressman's vote was not among them.

Bob Etheridge voted for it. :-) ;-)

The bill now goes to the Senate, where chances of passage seemed dim but get a boost from the House vote. This news is a big win for President Obama, who hopes at least to put America on a wiser, more efficient path when it comes to energy usage, and do more to combat climate change.