Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation writes—Climate Denialism Is Literally Killing Us:
The tragedy of Harvey starts with the suffering of innocents like Jordyn Grace, the 3-year-old who survived the flood by clinging to the body of her drowned mother, who had prayed with her last breaths. At least 60 people died in Texas because of the storm, over 1 million people were displaced, and who knows how many survived but lost everything? Multiply the death and destruction in Texas a hundredfold to comprehend the scale of devastation in India, Nepal, and Bangladesh, where—although the news coverage has been a fraction of Harvey’s—a staggering 16 million children“are in urgent need of life-saving support” after “torrential monsoon rains and catastrophic flooding,” UNICEF reports.
What makes this so infuriating is that it shouldn’t be happening. Experts have warned for decades that global warming would increase these sorts of weather extremes and that people would suffer and die if protective measures were not implemented. In 2008, John Podesta, soon to be Obama’s transition director, organized a war game to test the responses to projected climate disruptions. Eerily enough, the scenario chosen—and vetted as scientifically accurate by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—envisioned a Category 4 hurricane striking Houston and extreme monsoons flooding India. This is not to say that global warming “caused” Harvey—a scientifically illiterate framing of the issue—but it did make the rains bigger, more intense, and more destructive. Harvey dumped 27 trillion gallons of water—“enough to cover all of Manhattan a mile deep,” noted Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press—and as much as 30 percent of it can be attributed to global warming, according to Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Many other experts have issued warnings, starting with NASA scientist James Hansen’s landmark 1988 Senate testimony that global warming had begun and, if left unchecked, would threaten the future of human civilization. Recent years have also brought abundant evidence that shifting to wind power, less meat-heavy diets, and other climate-friendly alternatives would result in lasting economic and health benefits: more jobs, less inequality, cleaner air, stronger communities.
Yet Donald Trump and other powerful know-nothings in Washington seem perversely determined to ignore the lessons of Harvey, while doubling down on making things worse. Trump has crammed his administration full of climate-change deniers while pushing full steam ahead on more oil, gas, and coal production. His EPA chief, incredibly, has urged governors to ignore the Clean Power Plan proposed by the Obama administration, aiding conservative efforts to gut the policy. Days before Harvey drenched Texas, Trump rescinded Obama’s requirement that federal agencies take climate impacts into account before approving major infrastructure. And in a stunning insult not only to climate preparedness but the legacy of US space exploration, Trump nominated a climate denier with no scientific training to run NASA. [...]
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QUOTATION
“I had the foolish idea that we should test for desirable and useful traits so that we could assemble ideally balanced teams to the colonies. [...] It's like those foolish attempts to control immigration to America based on the traits that were deemed desirable, when in fact the only trait that defines Americans historically is "descended from somebody willing to give up everything to live there.”
~Orson Scott Card, Ender in Exile
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2002—A war resolution all of Congress can support:
The administration briefed some members of Congress on the Iraq situation, but apparently offered no new information. […]
[H]ere's a resolution that everyone can support, and will ensure we don't go to war:
We, the Congress of the United States, authorize force to effect 'Regime Change' in Iraq, provided the following conditions are met:
- The Administration certifies that Iraq is manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, and provides evidence of such;
- The Administration, working alongside the U.N. Security Council, makes a bona fide and concerted effort to reintroduce UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq, in accordance to previous Security Council resolutions; and
- The Administration secures new authorization to effect 'regime change' from the U.N. Security Council.
You know they'll never be able to get Security Council authorization. Oh, we can have lots of fun with this resolution -- we can add requirements that the US have binding commitments from other nations for Iraq's rebuilding, or requirements that the US enter battle alongside a broad international coalition of more than just UK.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Greg Dworkin and Joan McCarter are back, loud and clear! DACA in disarray. Nunes’ bizarre subpoena game. Trump steals everything that isn’t nailed down, plus a crowbar. Disaster after disaster complicates September for Republicans. So do Harvey and Irma.
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