The Conservative Apocalypse

The conservative reaction to the meteor that slammed into Russia last week has been truly bizarre, if somewhat predictable. Never ones to miss a chance to knock the “hoax” of climate change, the same people poking fun at a CNN host for asking Bill Nye whether an asteroid flyby had anything to do with global warming are now suggesting, as far as I can tell, that we really shouldn’t worry about rising temperatures because, you know, we could all get creamed with a meteor tomorrow. Apparently every dollar spent to mitigate global warming is a dollar not spent on deflecting a meteor . . . or something. The criticism might ring truer if the GOP hadn’t spent the last generation slashing funding for basic science research or trying to privatize NASA, but the party of creationism has never let logical consistency stand in its way before.

The Wall Street Journal, in typical Journal fashion, can’t let an opportunity to snark about climate change go by:

We’re all for studying the climate and doing what can be done within economic reason to cope with temperature changes. But if it’s catastrophe we want to avoid, maybe the marginal dollar is better spent searching for the space rock that we know is eventually headed our way so we can prevent it.

First of all, the Journal is certainly not “for studying the climate” or coping with temperature changes. Otherwise, it wouldn’t publish open letters from “scientists” using cherry-picked data and specious arguments to claim that, uh, temperatures aren’t rising at all. It wouldn’t denigrate every investment in clean energy as a Solyndra-level debacle. Second, only to right-wing budget hawks would a dollar spent on climate change mitigation be seen as a dollar not spent on safer skies. Do we cut money for cancer research because more people die of heart attacks? Here’s a proposition the Journal never seems to consdier: Maybe the marginal dollar of tax cuts for the wealthy are better spent searching for space rocks. After all, mansions get flattened by meteors just as easily as hovels. Lastly, the implication that “we know” the apocalypse will “eventually” come via the heavens is amusing. Rising oceans and crop-killing drought is apparently not something we know will eventually occur.

But hey, maybe the GOP has finally found a piece of discretionary spending it can support.

In other corners of the conservative world, Andrew Stuttaford of National Review wrote, incredibly:

We waste a fortune on measures (that will have no impact for decades, if ever) to tamper with the climate. Some of that money would be better spent on asteroid insurance.

This is a guy who would turn down fire insurance because, hey, he already has a flood policy.

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum mocked him in a post titled “Frying the Planet Is Okay As Long As We Protect It From Asteroids,” saying that “I can’t really come up with anything witty to say about this. I just wanted to save it for posterity in case someone decides to run a contest at the end of the year or something.” Stuttaford’s response was to cite another piece in Mother Jones discussing the importance of funding efforts to detect threats from asteroids and cry hypocrisy because . . . well, I’m not sure why. Because he thought Drum meant we should never, ever spend money on NASA, and only shovel cash into Al Gore’s bank accounts?

Since then, Stuttaford has gleefully re-posted every mainstream or liberal suggestion that doomsday could come from the skies, though I’m not sure what he thinks this proves: that Democrats want to protect the planet against more than a single threat? Damning, to be sure. Liberals are for guarding against all of the likeliest Armageddon scenarios including the ones that are – contra the deniers – becoming more and more inevitable with each ton of carbon released into the atmosphere. How that makes them hypocrites I’m not sure. No need to try to head off one disaster as long as we plan for another one!

A devastating asteroid impact that snuffs out humanity is possible, even probable, but we may not be able to prevent it even if we could see it coming. Climate change, on the other hand, is not only happening right now, but is fully within our power to mitigate. Certainly it’s easier to focus on asteroids and meteors, and more politically convenient; launching a few rockets doesn’t require any changes in our behavior, or any challenges to the oil companies. We can scan the sky for dinosaur-killing asteroids and still drive our SUVs and burn our coal. But there is something profoundly sad about wringing one’s hands over random, uncontrollable events while obstinately refusing to fix the problems caused by one’s own actions. It’s the ultimate abdication of responsibility.

Really, conservatives should be praying the asteroid hits, not trying to avoid it. Otherwise, the end will not be fast and fiery but slow, smoggy and hot.

Snowball Found in Hell, and the WSJ Is On It!

A lovely selection from the Tea Party Tribune

Like the old Midwestern man standing on his porch, surveying the snow drifts and declaring “Don’t know what all this global warming fuss is about!”, the Wall Street Journal continues its crusade to diligently ignore climate change, even in its ostensibly neutral news pages. On January 9, when most mainstream media sources led with the story that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the lower 48 U.S. states, the Journal relegated the news to page 4, devoting less than 500 words to the topic. By contrast, the Times gave an article twice as long valuable front-page real estate, and followed up with several posts across its blogs. The Washington Post followed suit, covering the record-breaking temperatures not only with a page-one article but with a blog post in the Business section and on its new streaming video channel. You would think the WSJ would be interested; there are few things that will impact major corporations and business owners of all stripes in the coming decades more than rising temperatures and increasingly wild weather. Whether you’re an insurance company reeling from the gut-punch of Hurricane Sandy, a farmer tweaking his crop choices in reaction to a longer growing season, or a multi-national oil conglomerate forced to deal with the European Union’s carbon-control measures, you can’t afford to live in the bubble of climate-change denial: It might literally cost you your job.

Yet the Journal, which routinely turns over its opinion section to open letters from “scientists” (only 4 of the 16 signatories were actual climate scientists) claiming that humans aren’t contributing to global warming while simultaneously rejecting letters signed by 255 real climatologists, didn’t feel that “2012: The Warmest Year” was front-page material. The Atlantic’s James Fallows, comparing the print editions of three major newspapers, notes that the only climate-related news on the Journal’s front page was an artful photo of brush fires in Australia. The news about record temperatures gets one line in the “news briefs” box that indicates a story inside the paper.

Fallows, who in an earlier post also noted discrepancies in the major papers’ treatment of the latest unemployment numbers, writes:

For years everyone who talks about the WSJ has contrasted its editorial & op-ed pages, which are the print equivalents of Fox News or CCTV, with its news operations, admired by all. The main biases of the news operation would be the professional/cultural biases of journalism in general, rather than a Fox-style partisan tilt.

Yet as a matter of strict news judgment and framing, in both of these cases the NYT and the WP chose one emphasis (job report basically positive; climate report quite important) and the WSJ chose an emphasis that was not only different but also more “right wing.” Jobs-report news is basically bad; climate news is not that important. Coincidence? Sign of editorial/news convergence at Murdoch’s WSJ? I don’t know, and these are only two data points. But it may be a trend worth watching.

Well, for anyone watching this particular trend, today’s Journal provides further evidence that its denialist bias is infecting its news pages. Over the weekend, the opinion section ran a bizarre piece by columnist Holman Jenkins titled “Our ‘Hottest Year’ and Al Gore’s Epic Failure” that attempts to pooh-pooh the science behind the NOAA report. He claims the awful media — he might as well pull a full Palin and call it the “lamestream media” — frames the news such that it allows the media to talk about global warming in our time without mentioning that, ahem, global warming has ceased in our time.” He continues:

Nor was it mentioned that 2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006. Or that 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.

For a general take on why such cherry-picked data, which is rife in classic Journal op-eds like “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” is truly the “epic failure,” go here or here. A climate scientist blogging for Discover Magazine wrote that the Journal published “a textbook example of misleading prose. It’s laden to bursting with factual errors, but the one that stood out to me most was this whopper: ‘Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.'” He then provides this trend line, showing that while you can grab a few individual data points to make the case that there are cooler years or regions, you can’t really argue with the fact that the average is going up, or that 9 of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000:

Jenkins then segues into an attack on the “sanctimonious” Al Gore, the Journal’s favorite punching bag, whom Jenkins just really, really doesn’t like. In his view, Americans have ignored climate change because Gore and anyone else concerned with the trend (not the cherry-picked numbers Jenkins cites) of rising temperatures are “more interested in asserting their moral superiority and denouncing their ‘enemies’ than in making progress” and are “prone to self-discrediting hysteria and false assertions about global warming.” Gee, that must be why a majority of Republicans don’t even believe the world is heating up. It couldn’t have anything to do with, say, their favorite media outlet continuously claiming that, uh, the world isn’t heating up.

But Jenkins is just an unhinged member of the editorial board. Theoretically, he shouldn’t have any influence over the paper’s news coverage. But an article in Monday’s paper seems to be straight out of the Jenkins playbook. On page three — a higher placement than was given the story on record-breaking temperatures — the Journal gives us this: “California Farmers Battle Record Chill.” Here’s the gist of it:

Subfreezing temperatures in parts of California are threatening to damage the state’s $2 billion a year citrus industry and have forced farmers to adopt emergency measures.

It’s too early to assess the latest damage, but an Arctic cold front that reached the state on Thursday—and caused a 40-mile stretch of Interstate 5 to temporarily close due to snow—has already led California farmers to spend more than $10 million in cold-containment measures, such as wind machines that circulate warm air at night.

The WSJ view of the world

The words “climate change” appear nowhere in the article, though wildly fluctuating temperatures and extreme weather have indeed been associated with a warming planet. Reporter John W. Miller notes that “even before now, prices for some produce in grocery stores have risen higher than usual because of abnormal weather that has caused shortages,” but he doesn’t go further than that. To be fair, the risk to crops and the financial hit faced by California farmers are issues of interest to the Journal’s business-minded readers. And there’s nothing wrong with writing about the effects of the cold snap — it is, after all, news. Nothing in the piece suggests that a cold spell refutes the science of global warming. But you’d have to be remarkably dense not to acknowledge that’s just how the climate change deniers will interpret it. The Journal doesn’t connect the (non-existent) dots between low temperatures and Al Gore’s wrongness. It doesn’t have to — the talking heads on Fox News, that other arm of the Murdoch empire, will surely take up the task tomorrow morning. The Journal is technically innocent here. But the appearance of the article, and the prominent placement it is given, just days after the Journal all but ignored the 2012 temperature record is nevertheless striking.

It may not mean anything. Perhaps the newsroom is indeed independent, and its editors simply felt that page 3 needed a story about agriculture. Perhaps it’s paranoid to think the Journal mandarins are sitting around their offices, delightedly pointing to a wire story about the cold snap and remarking, “Well, would you look at that.” And perhaps it takes the hyper-awareness of a Media Matters scout to imagine those mandarins chuckling and telling one another, “Take that, Al Gore.”

Still, how terribly convenient that the print media’s leading denier of climate change just happened to stumble across a story that, in the minds of the aforementioned clueless codger, seems to validate the global warming conspiracy theories of the far-right. The Journal’s news editors are educated people, and they likely know that global warming doesn’t mean it will suddenly stop snowing in Wisconsin, or that December in Massachusetts will now mean bathing-suit weather. But they also likely know that isn’t how many of their readers will interpret the story. They’ve seen the cartoon with the guy with the snow shovel grumbling, “We sure could use some global warming right about now.”

So, yes, Mr. Fallows, the WSJ’s rightward slant is indeed a trend worth watching.

On that note, I’ll leave you with a different cartoon, this one from the NRDC, to counter the shovel-wielding climate change denier:

 

Gravity: Just Another Pesky Regulation to Repeal

Isaac Newton, you fraud! (Portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1689)

The catalogue of offensive Republican statements in my last post depressed me so much that I thought I’d take today to highlight a handful of lighter, albeit still ridiculous, remarks from conservatives. Attacks on reproductive rights just make me angry, but I can at least attempt a sense of humor about general ignorance. For all the attention paid lately to the so-called “war on women,” the war on science is equally as fierce and possibly even more moronic.

Mitt Romney earned riotous laughter from the climate-change deniers filling the Tampa Bay Times Forum arena when he proclaimed, “President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.”

What’s the implication here — that families in New Orleans won’t benefit from not having their houses swamped by floodwater from increasingly frequent hurricanes? That everyone’s children won’t appreciate inheriting a planet stricken by droughts and famine? That people whose beachfront property will be underwater in 20 years don’t need any help from a President Romney? As Steve Benen writes at his MSNBC blog, Romney’s promise is “great news for those of us who don’t have families on this planet.” Benen also points out that Romney is in no position to poke fun at Obama’s grandiose speeches. At a campaign event in Jacksonville this weekend, the Republican nominee revealed his own delusions of grandeur:

We’re going to take America back. The future demands it. The future is out there for us to take it. Our kids deserve it. You deserve it. The nation deserves it. Peace on the planet depends on it.

And here’s Benen: “Wait, what? Peace on earth is dependent on electing the Romney-Ryan ticket?” Well, of course. Don’t you know this is the most important election since 1860?!

Along the same lines, Representative Mike Pompeo of Kansas has an opinion piece on Politico that argues against renewable energy tax credits. He name-checks Solyndra, of course, as if having 3.6 of clean energy loans default (which is less than a third of the 12.85 percent default rate predicted by the White House) proves that the government has no place trying to keep fossil-fuel emissions from destroying the environment. The most nonsensical part of the entire op-ed:

There’s been a steady drumbeat recently from those seeking an extension of the wind production tax credit. For many reasons, including some that former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has carefully highlighted in his opposition, this is a bad idea.

First, an extension continues this unsettling policy trend in which citizens are asked to bear all the risks and gain none of the rewards.

Yeah, breathing clean air, having uncontaminated drinking water, investing in a future that doesn’t rely on the whims of Saudi Arabian oil production — no rewards at all! Didn’t someone much wiser than myself once ask, What’s the matter with Kansas?

Then there’s Kentucky, where GOP lawmakers talk a good game about education reform but fall short when it actually comes to, you know, educating kids. Three years after fighting to align state testing protocols with national standards, Republicans are backtracking. The problem? Someone actually read the national standards, which include language about the importance of teaching evolution to college-bound high-schoolers. As McClatchy reports, Sen. David Givens is disturbed: “I would hope that creationism is presented as a theory in the classroom, in a science classroom, alongside evolution.” But that’s nothing compared to this gem from Rep. Ben Waide:

The theory of evolution is a theory, and essentially the theory of evolution is not science — Darwin made it up.

Ah. Then I’m sure Waide would agree with the following: The theory of gravity is a theory, and essentially the theory of gravity is not science – Newton made it up.

“Discover,” “make up” — hey, it’s all the same to Waide. In his world, humans never discovered electricity; they just made it up. Fire wasn’t discovered; it was handed to early man by Prometheus, or perhaps just created when God separated the heavens from the earth. Someone buy this man a Merriam-Webster’s, because he is apparently confusing “theory” with “wild stab in the dark.” The scary thing is, I have a feeling that Waide would have no problem asserting the absolute veracity of Jesus turning water to wine or bringing Lazarus back from the dead.

Where is Jon Huntsman when you need him? In response to Rick Perry’s own “just a theory” line, the Republican also-ran famously tweeted last August, “To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

And, yes. They called him crazy.

Vote for Sanity in 2016

(photo via The Atlantic)

Since Jon Huntsman made the anti-EPA remarks that inspired my last ramble on his political future, the candidate has pivoted sharply toward the center, dismissing fellow 2012 contenders Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann as “unelectable.” While one of the first comments on the Times’ Caucus blog was something to the effect of “It takes one to know one,” Huntsman seems to have realized that trying to out-crazy the crazies is not a viable strategy. A former governor who supports civil unions and calls Perry’s skepticism about global warming “a serious problem” is not going to win over any Bachmann-ites or Palin-boosters. Though Huntsman takes pains to point out that he is still a conservative — the WSJ notes that he no longer advocates capping greenhouse gases or fighting climate change “as long as unemployment remains high” — he added to his Twitter following on Friday when he remarked that, “To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy.”

Is this is a good move for Huntsman? I maintained in my last post that moving to the right would do little to strengthen his appeal to Tea Partiers, while simultaneously alienating the moderates he will need to depend on for a 2016 run (or, for that matter, a 2012 general election). At the National Journal, Ben Terris writes that “While the move is sure to differentiate Huntsman from the crowd, it remains to be seen whether it will also be an act of political suicide.” Terris has a point: no matter how much attention Huntsman draws from his noisy shift to the center, it won’t help him in a primary season that has seen Michele Bachmann top the Iowa Straw Poll. Indeed, Politico is reporting that the Democratic National Committee has gleefully latched onto Huntsman’s recent remarks, inserting them into an e-mail to reporters. This belies the theory that there is no such thing as bad P.R., as receiving the seal of approval from the DNC is about as helpful as Obama’s sly, repeated references to Huntsman as “my good friend.”

Still, Huntsman doubled down on his radical-centrist strategy on Sunday, declaring on ABC News’s This Week that “this country is crying out for a sensible middle ground,” not “people on the fringes” with “zero substance.” At the Times, Brian Knowlton writes that such comments “suggested that he might have learned a lesson from a fellow Republican whose campaign bore some similarities to his own: Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota.” Pawlenty, “another former two-term governor with a record as a relatively mainstream conservative,” was criticized for “[coming] across as too soft-spoken and moderate in a year of unusually heated partisan passions.” Where Huntsman presumably hopes to improve on Pawlenty, however, is in the conflation of “moderate” and “soft-spoken.” As far as I can tell, the former governor of Utah wants to prove that mainstream sanity can be just as passionate and conviction-filled as Michele Bachmann’s born-again faith or Rick Perry’s criminalization of the Fed. He’s pinning his chance on the theory that home-schooling and secession aren’t the only things that get crowds riled up. It remains to be seen, however, whether cries to find “practical, common-sense solutions” and end America’s “heroin-like dependence” on foreign oil will be as attractive to voters as the red-meat exhortations Tea Party adherents have come to expect.

None of this is to say that Huntsman is turning into someone who independents will automatically love. His positions are still very much to the right of the many swing voters who were crucial to Obama’s win in 2008 and who increasingly appear to be up for grabs in 2012. The Wall Street Journal writes that he “supports repealing President Barack Obama’s health-care law and turning Medicaid into block grants to the states,” and while what the Journal refers to as “ObamaCare” does not poll well among independents, other parts of Huntsman’s platform are less palatable. He wants to roll back the Wall Street reforms of Dodd-Frank, despite continued Main Street disgust with overpaid bankers and an economy teetering on the brink of another recession. He “opposes another round of federal funding for infrastructure,” when even Bill Gross, the Republican who heads the enormous bond fund Pimco, is advocating for direct hiring by the federal government. If Huntsman is indeed positioning himself for a 2016 run, his foray into the 2012 primaries still has the potential to unearth some landmines.

At The Atlantic, James Fallows took one look at Huntsman’s global-warming Tweet and proclaimed “At Last There’s Proof: Jon Huntsman Is Aiming for 2016.” I can see where Fallows is coming from; it’s indeed evident that Huntsman’s “views are going nowhere with the Republican primary electorate this time around.” In my last post, I wondered whether, by falling into line at the Iowa debate and refusing a hypothetical budget deal that favors spending cuts over taxes by a 10-to-1 ratio, Huntsman risked making himself unelectable in 2016. But now that he has begun to tack more aggressively toward the center, I can discern the outlines of a master plan. Whether Huntsman intended all along to use his 2012 bid as a way to keep his name in the press, or whether he moved the goalpost to 2016 only after realizing the hopelessness of the current field, he seems to have acknowledged the benefit of a reputation for reality-based thinking. If he makes an impression as a sane, qualified contender this time around, 2016 may be for him what 2008 was for John McCain and what 2012 may be for Mitt Romney. After all, America loves a comeback, and one needs only look to post-presidency Bill Clinton or post-OxyContin Rush Limbaugh to know that this is truly the country of second chances.

The WSJ observes that his “low-key, Mr. Mellow approach to the Republican presidential campaign has gotten him high praise in elite media circles – from a spread in Vogue to the New York Times Magazine cover – but little traction among Republican voters who actually do the choosing.” In fact, attention from the “elite media” tends to have an inverse relationship to traction among Republicans ; more of the former invariably results in less of the latter. It’s not for nothing that Sarah Palin, on her latest bus tour, tried her hardest to give the slip to the “lamestream media.” Vogue’s readers may not be voting in the Republican primaries (though, I should point out, neither will many of the Newsweek readers who were treated to the magazine’s creepy, soft-porn photos of a hoodie’d Palin lounging dockside), but Huntsman knows that they may well be voting in November 2016.