There's A Connection Between Climate And Climate Change... Beyond Eric Cantor's Cynism

Billy Long (R-MO) don't need no freakin' makeup

Eric Cantor and the House GOP have made a cruel and political connection between global warming and the tornado that devastated Joplin, Missouri, that state's most Republican heartland. Cantor flat-out refused to agree to emergency aid for the victims of the devastating storm unless he could ram through the House a bill that would, literally, increase global warming. Watch Missouri Congressman Russ Carnahan on MSNBC reacting to Cantor's moral turpitude:



Meanwhile, respected environmentalist Bill McKibben, drew a very different kind of connection between the disaster in Joplin and global warming-- and he did it on the editorial pages of the Washington Post. Starting out with a sense of almost resigned irony, McKibben reminds his readers that the ruling elite-- i.e., Big Oil-- does not want, will not tolerate, any connections being made beyond the Cantor connections. "It is vitally important not to make connections," he writes. "When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing."

It is far better to think of these as isolated, unpredictable, discrete events. It is not advisable to try to connect them in your mind with, say, the fires burning across Texas-- fires that have burned more of America at this point this year than any wildfires have in previous years. Texas, and adjoining parts of Oklahoma and New Mexico, are drier than they’ve ever been-- the drought is worse than that of the Dust Bowl. But do not wonder if they’re somehow connected.

If you did wonder, you see, you would also have to wonder about whether this year’s record snowfalls and rainfalls across the Midwest-- resulting in record flooding along the Mississippi-- could somehow be related. And then you might find your thoughts wandering to, oh, global warming, and to the fact that climatologists have been predicting for years that as we flood the atmosphere with carbon we will also start both drying and flooding the planet, since warm air holds more water vapor than cold air.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods-- that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity-- that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Because if you asked yourself what it meant that the Amazon has just come through its second hundred-year drought in the past five years, or that the pine forests across the western part of this continent have been obliterated by a beetle in the past decade — well, you might have to ask other questions. Such as: Should President Obama really just have opened a huge swath of Wyoming to new coal mining? Should Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sign a permit this summer allowing a huge new pipeline to carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta? You might also have to ask yourself: Do we have a bigger problem than $4-a-gallon gasoline?

Better to join with the U.S. House of Representatives, which voted 240 to 184 this spring to defeat a resolution saying simply that “climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for public health and welfare.” Propose your own physics; ignore physics altogether. Just don’t start asking yourself whether there might be some relation among last year’s failed grain harvest from the Russian heat wave, and Queensland’s failed grain harvest from its record flood, and France’s and Germany’s current drought-related crop failures, and the death of the winter wheat crop in Texas, and the inability of Midwestern farmers to get corn planted in their sodden fields. Surely the record food prices are just freak outliers, not signs of anything systemic.

It’s very important to stay calm. If you got upset about any of this, you might forget how important it is not to disrupt the record profits of our fossil fuel companies. If worst ever did come to worst, it’s reassuring to remember what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce told the Environmental Protection Agency in a recent filing: that there’s no need to worry because “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.” I’m pretty sure that’s what residents are telling themselves in Joplin today.

Billy Long, the right-wing imbecile who represents Joplin voted to deny climate change. In fact, except for Dave Reichert who represents an aggressively pro-environmental suburban Seattle district, every single House Republican voted to deny climate change. And so did the 3 sleaziest conservative Democrats-- Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK), Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN), and Nick Rahall (WV)-- each of whom regularly solicits bribes from the very corporations who would be most impacted by serious clean energy policies. If Americans want a future for their children and grandchildren-- here on earth-- they'll do whatever they can to defeat Boren, Peterson, Rahall and every single Republican. That simple.

Will Republican Teabaggers Force Boehner Into Shutting Down The Government?

Unless John Amato's half joking prediction is correct and Boehner does rush through a settlement before tomorrow so he can watch the Masters today, the teabaggers will have forced the U.S. government into a shutdown, their plan all along-- all along since they found themselves with a colored man as president. I mean how much easier would it have been to force a shutdown when the GOP controlled the House, Senate and White House? Looks like 800,000 federal employees will be affected-- including our military families. I guess it will also slow down tax refunds, a key component of the Republican Party plan to help tank the economy leading up to the 2012 elections.

Last week, the Democrats offered a Motion To Recommit that said if Republicans force a government shutdown, Members of Congress and the President should not get paid. Americans’ elected officials should not receive their taxpayer-funded paycheck if they can’t do their jobs and keep public services up and running. The only Republican who backed it was Louie Gohmert-- and God only knows what was going through his deranged mind when he crossed the aisle to stand with Nancy Pelosi and her caucus. Yesterday moderate Democrat Russ Carnahan (MO) had had enough of the Republican game-playing:

“How low have we sunk? Our troops are fighting right now to protect American lives, and my Republican colleagues demand pay-- even when our troops would go without? 
 
“A government shutdown would seriously endanger our fragile economic recovery, and I am ready to negotiate at any time to end this bickering and avert the coming crisis. Letting a shutdown happen would be asking our troops to keep fighting without pay. That’s wrong.
 
“I urge my Republican colleagues to come back to the negotiating table. But if they decide it’s not in their political interests to continue negotiations, the least they can do is drop their demands for pay while our troops go without.”

I'm betting Weeping John Boehner understands better than the freshmen extremists who are pushing him around that the American people are not looking for another shutdown-- not anymore than they're rallying behind Paul Ryan's great Ayn Randian Cause to dismantle Medicare. Ryan would replace the current Medicare program with a voucher worth $8,000 for people who turn age 65 in 2022 and later.

According to the CBO analysis the benefit would cover 32 percent of the cost of a health insurance package equivalent to the current Medicare benefit. This means that the beneficiary would pay 68 percent of the cost of this package. Using the CBO assumption of 2.5 percent annual inflation, the voucher would have grown to $9,750 by 2030. This means that a Medicare type plan for someone age 65 would be $30,460 under Representative Ryan's plan, leaving seniors with a bill of $20,700. (This does not count various out of pocket medical expenditures not covered by Medicare.)

According to the Social Security trustees, the benefit for a medium wage earner who first starts collecting benefits at age 65 in 2030 would be $32,200. (This adjusts the benefit projected by the Social Security trustees [$19,652 in 2010 dollars] for the 2.5 percent annual inflation rate assumed by CBO.) For close to 70 percent of seniors, Social Security is more than half of their retirement income. Most seniors will get a benefit that is less than the medium earners benefit described here since their average earnings are less than that of a medium earner and they start collecting Social Security benefits before age 65.

But while everybody is sitting around breathlessly waiting to see how many lives Obama negotiates away to Republican vampires, progressives in Congress are long wise to the little corporate game being played. Yesterday Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair Raul Grijalva told ABC-TV that if Obama caves to too many of the most damaging Republican demands, he'll vote against the "compromise."

“We've opposed a lot of those in the past and there is a group of us here-- Democrats-- that feel that there are other areas ignored both my Democratic leadership, by the White House, and certainly by the Republicans. And we would be hard-pressed to just blindly go along without having some input.”

UPDATE: Republican Congressmen Want To Shut Down The Government... Except The Parts That Help In Their Own Districts

This morning the NY Times brought Washington state teabagger Jaime Herrera Beutler front and center. As radical right and extremist as the next fellow, she's all gung-ho about shutting down the government-- except when it comes to southwest Washington. She wants to cut everything-- except what she doesn't want to cut.

There, the Port of Vancouver had been waiting for a $10 million grant, one modeled on a popular program in the stimulus bill. But the money was rescinded in the Republican spending bill, known as H.R. 1, that passed the House in February but was later defeated in the Democratic-controlled Senate.

Port officials appealed to Ms. Herrera Beutler, one of 87 freshman Republicans in the House. She agreed to work on the port’s behalf to make sure it got its money before any cuts to the grant program went into effect. The outcome remains unknown.

Ms. Herrera Beutler’s spokesman said the project in her district was small relative to total government spending.

Of course, Beutler is hardly the only hypocrite in the Republican Caucus. Fellow freshman teabagger Bobby Schilling voted against rail financing for his district in Illinois, and later said that he did so only because he knew that the Senate would not sign off on the cut. Put a couple hundred of these GOP hypocrites together and what do you get? A Congress that ran wild when they and Bush were in control, leaving a mess for Obama to try to clean up.