Kemstone's Journal

I will try to make this as brief as possible because I want to increase the likelihood that people will read it. If you agree with my assessment, I hope you’ll spread this around the internet far and wide, because this is a conversation that needs to happen NOW if it happens at all. Running a progressive candidate against Barack Obama will require a year of fund-raising, and the Iowa caucus is a year away.

I never thought I’d advocate challenging Obama in the 2012 election, but I also never thought that after two years of a Democratic president with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, things would still be this bad.

Foreign policy-wise, the troops are still in Iraq and our presence in Afghanistan has escalated. The prisons at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base are still open. The torturers have not been punished nor even investigated, and the president has now claimed the power to execute American citizens suspected of terrorism without due process of law.

Domestically, our government is still illegally spying on its citizens. Private health insurance companies still have no competition to prevent them from profiting by letting people die. Wall Street is continuing the practices that crashed the economy and unless more measures are taken it’s only a matter of time before the second crash comes. The climate change issue has gone completely unaddressed and Big Oil and Coal can continue to rake in record profits. And now, the national debt and deficit will continue to sky-rocket for a minimum of two years as the completely un-necessary and un-stimulative tax-cuts for the wealthiest 2% of Americans are extended. Presumably, this decrease in revenue will be balanced by decreases in spending, and it looks like Social Security is first on the chopping block.

“But wait,” you might say, “didn’t he sign a measure strengthening registration and reporting requirements for lobbyists?” Yes, you can easily rattle off a long list of small-ball accomplishments that we could never have expected from a Republican president, but most of these things can be done or un-done with the stroke of a pen. When it comes to the fights that really count, the things that go to the heart of the broken system, this president has consistently maintained the status quo.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was when Obama’s advisors started talking about how the tax-cut deal he struck with Republicans would actually be good for the country. Fox News commentators are actually praising Obama for finally “admitting” that tax-cuts for the rich create jobs, and because Obama has now made Bush’s economic policy his own, he has no choice but to defend it. It’s absurd to think he’ll fight to let them expire in two years if he wasn’t willing to do that when he still had wide Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Democratic president will now be pushing for Republican policies and defending them with Republican talking points. Presumably, we’re going to start hearing him agree with his deficit commission that cuts need to be made to Social Security.

At this point, it has to be acknowledged that unless we issue a primary challenge to Obama, we will essentially have two Republican candidates in 2012.

The objection to this strategy is clear: A primary challenge is likely to fail and it will only weaken Obama and hurt his chances to win the general election. And wouldn’t a Republican president be worse?

Until last week I would have agreed with you. But then I asked myself this question, and I hope you’ll ask yourselves the same:

Which is worse for America? A Republican president who tries to implement Republican policies which progressives and the majority of Americans can rally against to stop those policies from going through? Or a Democratic president who acts as though he has no choice but to implement Republican policies, in which case the progressive movement is fractured and there is not enough unified opposition to prevent them from going through?

Ideally, a primary challenge would result in a true progressive in the White House who will finally draw lines in the sand and be willing to take sides with the American people and against the upper class. But if not, it’s beginning to look like a second Obama term would actually be worse for America than a Republican.

We demand smaller government (except for the defense department).

The government needs to balance the budget (as long as it doesn’t involve raising taxes).

The government better not mess with the free market (so it should let giant corporations merge and monopolize every industry).

The government needs to look out for the interests of the middle class (by letting the richest people take as large a share of the nation’s wealth as possible).

The government has to drastically cut spending (but continue to pay billions for military equipment designed to fight the Soviet Union).

The government’s primary responsibility is to eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorism (which it can do by invading Muslim countries, killing loads of civilians, and imprisoning and torturing their friends and neighbors).

The government needs to stay the hell away from religion (unless it’s to impose Biblical law on all citizens).

The government better not step between us and our doctors (unless it’s to deny us the choice to have an abortion).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us who we can and can not marry).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when it comes to tapping our phones or groping us at the airport).

The government needs to stay out of our private lives (except when they’re telling us which chemicals we’re forbidden to put in our bodies).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (except hire people directly).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (by cutting tax-rates for giant corporations that don’t pay any taxes anyway).

The government needs to do everything it can to create jobs (as long as it doesn’t force companies to create those jobs in America instead of overseas).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean eliminating oversight of Wall Street so that they can continue to get rich by putting the entire economy in jeopardy).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting corporations maximize profits by deceiving and screwing over consumers at every opportunity).

We demand smaller government (by which we mean letting the coal and oil industries cut whatever corners in terms of worker and environmental safety that they see fit).

Our biggest concern is for the well-being of our grandchildren (but it’s not even worth considering whether scientists are right about climate change).

We firmly believe in living by Christian values (except for loving thy neighbor and caring for the less fortunate).

We believe in abiding by the constitution (except for the parts about equal rights and the separation of church and state).

Our ideology is superior to all other political ideologies (because it’s based on our gut feeling that it is).

I often rail against the “power-elite”—wealthy individuals and corporations who use their massive amounts of power to influence politics, usually to the effect of funneling money from the lower and middle-classes to the wealthiest of the wealthy. I usually think of them as some kind of abstract, faceless entity—which is just how they like it. But today I can be more specific. I can show you the face of The Enemy:

America, meet Charles and David Koch. They were recently featured in a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, and in a segment on the Rachel Maddow show in which Mayer was interviewed. For anyone with the time to spare and the desire to know exactly who is destroying America and how, I’d strongly urge you to read the article, watch the clip, and tell everyone you know about Koch Industries—especially Tea Party conservatives.

For those with less of an attention-span, here is the basic story. It began with Fred Koch, who in 1927 invented a more efficient process for turning oil into gasoline. Seen as a threat by other American oil companies, he was shut out of the industry, and spent the 1930s building oil refineries in the Soviet Union where he witnessed the brutality of the Stalin regime. Upon his return to America he fell in with arch-conservative groups like the John Birch Society, and eventually passed on his fiercely anti-socialist ideology to his sons:

David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”

After his death in 1967, his sons renamed his business Koch Industries and used their oil wealth to promote libertarian ideals. So far, nothing too sinister.

Nor was there anything sinister about David Koch running for Vice President in the 1980 election on the Libertarian ticket. His party only got 1% of the vote, but that’s democracy. If people reject your ideas, you don’t win political power.

Unless you set out to directly instill your ideas into the public.

The Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

After the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists.

The Kochs have given hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that criticize environmental regulation and advocate for lower taxes on industry. They’ve poured millions into disputing the science behind climate change, and just to hedge their bets have pushed the idea that even if the earth is warming up, it’s actually a good thing: “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food” David Koch once argued.

Of course conservatives can point to people like George Soros, who spends millions promoting liberal causes, and say that the Koch Brothers are doing the same thing—merely using the capital they’ve earned through their financial success to promote ideas they believe in. The counter-argument is that Soros gives money to causes that actually go against his own financial interests, while the Koch Brothers put their money behind groups that do work which positively effects their bottom line. They “earn” their fortune by spending it on groups that help them increase their fortune, usually by lying and distorting the facts.

But it actually goes much deeper than that:

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

Koch Industries is the group behind Americans For Prosperity, one of the leading organizations behind last years’ Tea Party protests in which thousands of Americans were bussed from district to district and told to interrupt town hall meetings on Health Care reform. Tricked into believing that the bill was some kind of nefarious government plot to euthanize senior citizens, frightened conservatives held rallies in which they hung effigies of Democratic lawmakers, held up banners depicting corpses from Dachau, and relentlessly compared Obama to Hitler.

These protests are now widely believed to be the pivotal moment at which the Obama presidency began its slow downward spiral. When asked about the Republican Party’s efforts to kill the health care bill, conservative Grover Norquist replied:

The Republican leadership in Congress, he said, “couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”

The Koch brothers’ war on Obama seems to be succeeding. By staying out of the limelight, they’ve managed to avoid major scrutiny of their front groups like Americans For Prosperity, Patients United Now, and a whole host of other organizations with grassroots-sounding names. The tactic is as simple as it is brilliant—pour lots of money into groups that appear to be grassroots and thus create the perception that there is a massive resistance to the president’s agenda. But don’t let anyone onto the fact that the objections to the president’s agenda were falsehoods cooked up by your own think-tanks and spoon-fed to the American people.

“To bring about social change,” Charles Koch once told a reporter, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.”

So now you know the Enemy, or at least a couple of their faces. The question is how you can fight it. Well, you can wait for Obama to do it for you. After all, they’re deliberately targeting him and his agenda so you’d think he’d fight back strong. After all, he did say at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser in Austin that:

the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.”

But apparently that didn’t get the message across. For some reason Obama doesn’t want to name names and call any of his enemies out for what they’re doing. He must be one of the most passive-aggressive presidents of all time. Maybe he’s afraid they’ll spend even more of their money to defeat him, as if they weren’t already going after him with everything they’ve got.

So I wouldn’t count on Obama or any of the weak and spineless Democrats to fight this battle for us. All we can do is take the time to learn who these people are and to let everyone else know as well.

Once we know, we can follow the money back to its source. Unfortunately most of it comes from oil, but there are plenty of other products that are brought to you by the fine people at Koch Industries, including:

• Brawny paper towels
• Dixie cups
• Georgie-Pacific lumber
• Stainmaster carpet
• Lycra

I for one don’t plan on buying Brawny paper towels or Dixie cups any time soon. I hardly think that’ll take down Koch Industries and be the end of the Tea Party Movement, but it’s an easy way to make a statement. These people hide from the limelight precisely because they don’t want their products associated with radical libertarian ideology and the destruction of the Obama presidency.

And even we do manage to take down Koch Industries, there are plenty of multi-billionaires who will quite happily continue their work of destroying the environment and funneling all the world’s wealth and resources into as few hands as possible. I may have an idea for how we can begin to tackle that problem, but it needs a bit more work. Stay tuned…

Just another quick comment today, this one on the corrupt and spineless senate democrats:

After almost a year of trying to build consensus, top Democrats on Thursday admitted that a sweeping climate and energy bill simply couldn’t be done, faulting Republicans for being unwilling to contribute neither votes nor ideas toward forging a compromise. At a press conference on the Hill, climate crusader Sen. John Kerry called the prospect “admittedly narrow.” Majority Leader Harry Reid followed with a frank conclusion: “We simply don’t have the votes.”

I would be much more angry about this if I thought that the legislation would have had a serious impact on America’s energy policy and the global climate crisis, but had they moved forward we would have no doubt ended up with something weak and ineffective that wouldn’t have really solved anything or brought about real change but would have somehow benefited the oil and coal companies.

Still, just in terms of the gesture itself, this is one big “fuck you” to everyone who voted for Obama and congressional democrats. A radical, “Apollo-style” transformation of American energy policy was one of Obama’s central campaign platforms, and they’re just saying it’s too difficult—they don’t have the votes.

Of course you don’t fucking have the votes! You never have the votes at the very beginning. Too many democrats (as well as every last republican) are owned by the fossil fuel industry. The last thing they want is to have to vote on something that will either piss off their constituents or piss off their energy-industry pals. You have to push the legislation and call on your supporters to put pressure on these people to do the right thing. You never start off with enough votes—you have to fight to get them.

But instead they’ve decided not to fight at all. They piss their constituents off, but there’s no prolonged battle, it’s not in the headlines, nobody is talking about it, and therefore [they think] nobody suffers any electoral consequences for it.

But the worst part is that they’re saying “Now is not the right time. It’s too difficult.” Right, with a Democrat in the White House and overwhelming Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, passing legislation that the overwhelming majority of Democratic voters have been demanding for decades is just too hard. Maybe after the mid-term elections when the Republican Party [presumably] takes over again, it’ll be easier.

I really hate these people.

Thanks to a tweet from @EcoInteractive, I now have even more reason to believe that the fate of humanity is in dire peril. According to this article from Physorg.com, Australian scientist Frank Fenner predicts that humans will be extinct within the next 100 years thanks to climate change, dwindling natural resources, and the exploding population growth.

Wow, that's a lot of procreation.

According to the article, other scientists including retired professor Stephen Boyd are more optimistic because they are hopeful that “awareness of the problems will rise and the required revolutionary changes will be made to achieve ecological sustainability.”

Yeah…good luck with that, Professor Boyd. Call me a pessimist, but I just don’t think awareness of the problem (which I’m trying to help spread) will be enough to stop it in the face of the overwhelming levels of ignorance and apathy that mankind has regarding its own fate.

There is a lot to get discouraged about when it comes to the oil spill, but America’s pathetic response is probably the most discouraging thing of all. Peter Daou wrote an excellent piece last week on the Huffington Post about how the oil spill is the biggest opportunity we’ve had in a generation to push back against the green-bashers who enabled the oil companies to wreak their environmental havoc upon us but that nobody is going after them. If there was ever a time for the adherents of an ideology—environmentalism—to launch of a big fat fucking “We told you so” at the adherents of another ideology—green-bashing—now is the time. And since my blog is mostly a bunch of substance-free ranting anyway, I suppose this is as good a platform as any to do it.

Seriously you guys—we told you so. You said that offshore drilling was safe, that we needed to extract every drop of oil from the earth’s crust and that the potential environment damage was negligible. Look at the news. Who was right and who was wrong? Go ahead and defend your position now.

What can you say except that we need oil to fuel our cars and jet-planes and that renewable energy sources won’t do the job so oil drilling is necessary? Well, is it necessary? Or is it just that oil companies have so much influence over the government that we don’t spend what’s required to switch to alternative fuel sources and instead keep paying for fossil fuels? Sure, maybe we can’t currently supply enough energy to power our country on clean energy sources alone, but with enough research we might be able to, especially if we’re also willing to make some sacrifices regarding our energy use. If we devoted as much money and resources to developing new energy technologies and strategies for sustainability, I think we could pull it off. We put men on the moon, didn’t we? Whatever happened to Obama’s proposal for an “Apollo-style” program to switch America to clean energy?

Now I spend a lot of time bashing Obama—and I will again in just a moment—but I have to give credit when credit is due and he did come out this week and used the oil spill to justify the push for clean energy. I usually do like what the president says. It’s what he does that pisses me off. In front of the cameras he admits that there’s no safe way to drill for oil in extremely deep water, but behind closed doors he still lets oil companies start new drilling projects.

If this spill won’t be a wake-up call for America in terms of our feelings regarding energy and the environment, then I don’t think we ever will wake up. Clearly, while we had the technology to drill at those depths, we never had the technology to prevent a catastrophe if something went wrong. So we let them drill, and what did we get out of it? BP certainly got their fair share of profits, and when all is said and done they might very well still be standing just like Exxon after the Valdez spill. But what did the American people get? Obtaining some of our oil from domestic sources reduced the price of gasoline by a few cents at most. The average family probably saved a few bucks a year. So for a few bucks a year we’ve allowed entire ecosystems to be destroyed, livelihoods to be ruined, tourism-based economies to be crushed, and cities to be placed in jeopardy due to the loss of hurricane surge-protecting marshlands. I won’t even mention the horrific deaths of countless animals—as we already know the opposition can’t be moved by that.

We should be rubbing this in their faces, but instead we continue to let Rush Limbaugh dictate the terms of the debate. “It’s the environmentalists’ fault!” he cries. What’s it going to take to get these people to acknowledge that they’re wrong? Global warming could accelerate, the ice-caps could melt and the sea-levels could rise and flood New York City and the likes of Limbaugh and Beck would still be railing against Al Gore from their new studios further inland.

Every single republican who ever took the microphone and initiated a chant of “Drill, baby, drill” should have to shut up and hide away in shame right now. They should be too embarrassed to show their faces in public, let alone go on national TV and continue to defend offshore drilling. And yet Sarah Palin, the worst of the worst of the Drill-baby-drillers, goes on Facebook to say what she really meant was “Drill, baby, drill in safe onshore locations” in spite of all the clips of her explicitly saying offshore. She actually has the nerve to say to the “greenies”: “Now, do you get it?”

Well, fuck me. If only we’d listened to Sarah Palin. She warned us about drilling in the right locations, but we tree-hugging sissy-pants liberals just wouldn’t listen. BP wanted to drill safely on shore but we just wouldn’t have it and we forced them to drill so far from the coast that a catastrophe like this was bound to happen.

No, goddammit! Sarah Palin does not get to be the one saying “I told you so” here! This is one instance in which one side is clearly right and the other clearly wrong. They said offshore drilling was safe and that the reward would be well worth the relatively negligible risk. Well the risk was not negligible and the reward was hardly worth it. How about some kind of consensus in the media regarding what’s right before our eyes?

Luckily, what’s right before our eyes is so hard to ignore that offshore drilling supporters actually do feel like they have to walk back from it and insist “I never said drill, baby, drill.” But the media is still so obsessed with the appearance of objectivity that they continue to invite people on to talk about how important and necessary offshore drilling is for America.

And the president goes along with it. Now is the best opportunity we’ve ever had to simply say “Enough is enough” and make a clean break with oil. But even in spite of this tragedy, in spite of all the warnings of environmentalists having come to fruition, they are still regarded as some kind of nutty fringe that just doesn’t get it. And we keep on drilling.

They are the ones who don’t get it. There’s only so much damage we can do to the earth before it starts to purge us like a disease. We’re sucking sludge from the ground and spewing it all over the sea and into the sky. We don’t treat it like a catastrophe because it’s happening so slowly, but just look at the images of the oil gushing from that well and consider that it’s now guaranteed to keep gushing until August at the earliest. This crisis is just one small part of a much larger crisis, and the people who are out there shouting warnings from the rooftops continue to be derided as naïve and childish fools. If we do keep sucking and spewing until the planet is pushed past its tipping point and billions of us start to die off, the fact that they can then say “We told you so” will be no consolation.

For the record, I do believe that humans are responsible for the dangerous rate of global warming that the earth is currently undergoing. The point of my last entry was not to cast doubt on the science or call into question the scientific consensus that exists on the issue, but merely to acknowledge that there are legitimate reasons to doubt, and that advocates of fixing the climate problem are making a mistake to dismiss them.

I suppose my point got lost in all the snark, but I was only making a comment on the nature of the debate at this point. Since the 2007 IPCC report on climate change was released, proponents of the proposition that global warming is manmade have simply declared that the debate is over, the verdict is in, and that if you don’t accept it they’re not even going to bother trying to convince you anymore. And perhaps that’s an understandable attitude, but it’s not the right attitude if you really want to move things forward. Polls are showing that the number of people who doubt that global warming is manmade is actually growing, not shrinking, so clearly you’re doing something wrong. You can’t just dismiss nearly half of the entire population as willfully blind fools. To be fair, a great deal of them are exactly that, but it’s a disservice to your cause when you lump everyone who has doubts into the same category.

I compared the belief that global warming is manmade to a religion, because I do think that many liberals actually treat it as such. They may have a lot more evidence to support their claims than the followers of religion, but they treat their conclusions more like Absolute Truth than the result of the scientific process, which itself is all about questioning and re-questioning your conclusions. I was completely convinced that global warming was manmade until it seemed that everybody suddenly declared that the debate was over. That naturally made me suspicious. Really? The debate is over? You’re not even going to entertain alternative theories anymore? Maybe I should take a look at what these alternative theories are…

The people who are putting forth these other theories, meanwhile, are being labeled “deniers”, the same word they use for people who don’t believe the Holocaust really happened. Anyone who expresses any doubt on the matter gets leapt on and attacked by those on the left, accused of being shills for big corporations or worse. Many of them may be exactly that, but again, you shouldn’t lump all your opponents into the same category. That makes me suspicious too. Why won’t you just examine the merits of what they’re actually saying? Give a scientific counter-argument to their scientific arguments instead of just dismissing them as a corporate shill. If you won’t argue in terms of facts and evidence, then the only facts and evidence I have before me is that offered by the skeptic. Yes, the IPCC report is there for all to read, but if you really want to help your cause you’ll refer to it, cite it, quote it, use it however you can to counter the argument being made. But if you just dismiss it right away, I start to think that there might be something to it.

Finally, when you’ve framed this issue as one of the biggest threats to humanity and future generations, when you characterize the situation as a dire crisis that requires drastic and immediate action, why is the solution you are advocating something as pathetic and transparently profit-motivated as cap-and-trade? Introducing a financial incentive to cut emissions is logical, but will we really be cutting emissions or merely the profits of energy companies? And if energy companies want to offset the cost of these carbon credits, couldn’t they just…say…raise the price of energy? They may take a few half-hearted measures to cut their emissions for PR purposes, but at the end of the day they’re going to keep polluting because polluting is what they do. Making pollution more expensive will just make energy more expensive—it won’t stop global warming, not by a long shot.

And naturally, with this whole new carbon-credit market Wall Street will have a whole new bag of goodies to speculate on, overvalue, buy and sell and inflate and get super-rich from. They want this climate legislation more than anyone, and that makes me more suspicious than anything else.

The point is, from the perspective of a layman who doesn’t want to go crusading without some degree of certainty that the crusade is necessary, there are too many WTF-aspects of this climate debate to feel sure of oneself at all. That’s the problem I was highlighting, and the solution I was suggesting is A) to stop treating Global Warming like a religion and attacking everyone who has doubts, and B) if you really believe in your cause, don’t just sit-back and accept this bullshit cap-and-trade deal. Keep referring to the facts, and insist on a solution to the problem that takes those facts into account.

One more point—my cousin mentioned “climate-gate” in the comments, referring to the incident in which e-mails circulated among a few climatologists revealed that they were willing to fudge data in order to support their pre-existing conclusion that global warming is anthropogenic. I think this is just another instance of the right-wing blowing something hugely out of proportion and drawing conclusions that don’t follow from the evidence. The fact that we know some scientists are unethical does not entail that all scientists are unethical. That logic is so simple even a four-year-old could grasp it. But conservatives have leapt all over this story and declared the debate has ended in their favor with just as much unjustified self-assurance as the liberals who have declared that the debate has ended in theirs.

Finally, I should say that even if I have my doubts about the degree to which global warming is manmade, I absolutely do not believe we should do nothing about it, or that we shouldn’t act until we know for certain. If we’re going to err, it should be on the side of minimizing our environmental impact. If you ask whether human activity is destroying the planet, I’d be the first to say “yes, of fucking course we are.” Deforestation, over-fishing, damming up rivers, dumping waste into the ocean—we are absolutely on the fast-track to destroying ourselves. I’m just not as sure about the climate thing, for reasons I hope I’ve made clear. But this entry has only been about the debate, not the issue itself. When it comes to what I think we should do about the issue, I absolutely think we have to do something whether we’re sure about the science or not.

National leaders from all over the world are meeting in Copenhagen this week to discuss what needs to be done to stave off the impending Climate Catastrophe that threatens billions of lives and could potentially make life uninhabitable on planet Earth unless drastic measures are taken. Faced with such an incredibly dire threat to all of humanity, surely our leaders will take whatever steps are necessary to prevent this unspeakable horror from coming to pass, no matter what the cost. No amount of effort could possibly be too great when faced with such peril. Even if we have to tear down every fossil-fuel generated power-plant and live by candle-light for a few decades until an entirely new global clean-energy grid can be constructed, I’m sure we can all agree that the alternative—total annihilation—would be far worse.

Oh, but what’s that you say? Nobody is suggesting we tear down the fossil-fuel power plants? Okay, then what is the solution to this mind-numbingly serious problem that is being proposed? Wait, this sounds complicated. Explain it to me slowly. We establish a limit for how much CO2 a given polluter can spew into the atmosphere each year. Okay, well that sounds like a start. If CO2 is causing this catastrophic rise in temperatures to occur, then forcing companies to emit less of it is only logical. But wait, you say we aren’t forcing these companies to pollute less? That they can pollute all they want, but if they do so they’ll have to pay for permission slips called ‘carbon-credits’ to go beyond the limit, and that these permission slips can be bought and sold and traded? You mean like Credit-Default Swaps and Collateralized Debt Obligations, the fantasy-paper-money financial products that led to the global economic crisis?

Well gee, that sounds like a great idea…I guess the Climate Crisis is solved. I guess we can all go home now.

*heavy sigh*

So if you’re like me and you like for things to make sense, you might be a little flabbergasted by this whole Climate Change issue. On the one hand we’ve got Al Gore and an army of liberals shouting that this is the greatest threat that humanity has faced since the dawn of civilization. On the other hand we’ve got conspiracy theorists and wingnuts claiming that it’s all a big hoax designed to set up a Global Socialist Fascist World Government. And in between you’ve got Energy Companies, Wall Street Executives, and politicians all scheming for how they can exploit this issue to their own maximum benefit. Somehow, when you add all of that together, we get “cap-and-trade”.

Wait, am I forgetting anyone? I feel like I’m leaving something out. No, I mentioned Al Gore. I covered Wall Street. Who else is involved in this? Oh yeah—scientists. I forgot about the scientists.

So what do the scientists say? According to Al Gore, every single one of them agrees that the earth’s temperature is rising more rapidly than ever before thanks to CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel power plants…what? They don’t all agree on that? But I distinctly remember reading an article about how every person with a college-education knows with 100% certainty that Global Warming is a result of human activity, and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot who also thinks the earth is flat. Right?

Okay, after doing a little research it now appears to be the case that while everyone agrees that the Earth’s temperature is rising, many scientists actually think this has much more to do with the sun than with CO2 emissions, and that capping those emissions really won’t have any affect at all.

Well now I’m really confused. I thought we all knew for certain that Global Warming was manmade. After all, Sarah Palin says it’s not true, and since everything Sarah Palin says is a lie, then ipso facto it must be true. Right? Seriously, Sarah Palin and a bunch of conservative full-of-shit politicians can’t possibly have it right while all of my favorite liberal bloggers and commentators have it wrong. If that were the case my whole world would just implode in on itself.

Shit, now I’m really losing it. Somebody, anybody, please prove to me that Global Warming is manmade! I can’t handle the doubt! The more I think about it, the stronger the doubt becomes. The idea that global warming really isn’t manmade and that people like Al Gore are only insisting it is to profit from it is just too easy to believe. I mean, Al Gore seems like a nice guy and all, but what has he ever done to earn my complete trust? Doesn’t it make sense, given all that potential profit that could be made through the new “green economy” that many people would have a very real financial interest in promoting the idea that Global Warming is manmade? And doesn’t it just seem to fit all too perfectly, considering how our proposed “solution” to the problem is the creation of a carbon-credits market for Wall Street to feed on and grow even fatter and more powerful?

Hey, hold on! Why all the sudden vitriol and name-calling? I’m just asking questions, people! Suddenly I’m a “flat-earther” or even worse, a “denier” like I’m some kind of neo-Nazi who refuses to believe the Holocaust really happened. I just want to know the truth is all. I’m not saying Global Warming isn’t manmade, I’m just saying that nobody has convinced me of that yet.

Okay, thanks for lowering your voice. You’ll explain it to me. Good. So CO2 traps heat, right? So the more CO2 we pump into the atmosphere, the hotter the earth will become, and if it gets too hot, there will be irreversible damage to the ecosystem. Thank you, that makes sense. Simple. Logical. Something we learned way back in grade school.

But allow me to play devil’s advocate for just one second…hold on, let me just…it’s just for one second, okay? Because I also read that CO2 makes up only 0.03% of the earth’s atmosphere, that water vapor is far more prevalent and actually traps more heat, that there is a definite correlation between the sun’s energy output and earth’s temperature, that CO2 levels in the atmosphere have always gone up over a period of about 800 years after a rise in earth’s temperature, that CO2’s ability to trap heat actually follows a logarithmic curve rather than a straight line anyway and that it’s already absorbing the maximum level of heat it can…okay, I see I’ve lost you.

My point is, every “Global Warming Is Not Manmade” article I read is filled with facts and figures and sciency-sounding-stuff, while every “Global Warming Is To Manmande” article just seems to be name-calling and insults directed at those who aren’t convinced. They are so completely sure that they’re right that they don’t seem to think they need to bother convincing anyone. If I don’t believe it, I’m just a willfully blind ignoramus who deserves to drown when the sea levels rise.

But I don’t not-believe it. Lots of very smart people say it’s true, there’s a legitimate scientific basis to support the claim that global warming is manmade, and according to most sources it seems that most scientists agree that we are causing it. But forgive me if I don’t consider “Most scientists believe it” to be conclusive proof of anything. There was a time, after all, when most scientists believed that the sun revolved around the earth, that everything was composed of four basic elements, and that all mental and physical problems were caused by an imbalance of the bodily humors.

Yes, our techniques for acquiring information are much better now, but they’re not perfect, especially when it comes to a system as complex as the earth’s atmosphere. And if you read about global-warming from any purely scientific, non-biased source, you’ll hear the same thing: “We think this is the case, but we don’t know.”

And that’s the only reasonable conclusion anyone can draw here. Those on the left side of the political spectrum, where I reside comfortably when it comes to most issues, have set up Global Warming as something akin to a religion. They can’t possibly have conducted experiments themselves, so every one of them are relying only on what they’ve read, just as religious people rely on Scripture to justify their beliefs. Nobody has ever seen God, just as no liberal has ever proved the correlation between CO2 emissions and Global Warming, but they absolutely believe with every bone in their body that They Are Right. And when convinced of their own Rightness, both religious people and the proponents of Manmade Global Warming will see anyone who doesn’t share their beliefs as an infidel, a blind ignorant fool, one of the damned.

Perhaps my philosophical training has done me a disservice here. To me, the most interesting area of epistemology, the Theory of Knowledge, is the question of whether and to what extent our beliefs are volitional. Basically, to what degree are our beliefs chosen by us? Naturally, some beliefs are more volitional than others. For example, I can’t decide whether or not to believe that there is a computer in front of me—there is overwhelming direct evidence to suggest that there is. But the less evidence you have, the more room there is for volition. That’s why whether or not one believes in God is usually a result of choice.

The fact is, even the scientists who support the idea that Global Warming is manmade will admit that they aren’t sure. So nobody knows with any certainty if it is or it isn’t. Which means that it’s open to everyone whether or not to choose to believe in it. Liberals choose to believe it because it fits in with the rest of their worldview, while conservatives choose not to believe it because that fits in more closely with theirs.

Personally, I like to withhold my judgment on any factual matter until I feel I have conclusive evidence one way or another. That’s why I’m an agnostic when it comes to God, and why even though I really really want to believe that Global Warming is manmade (it fits in so well with my misanthropic, pessimistic worldview) I just can’t accept that conclusion unless someone makes a convincing case that acknowledges and successfully rebuts all of the reasons for doubting I mentioned above. Perhaps someone has, but I haven’t found it. I might be able to find it, but I’d have to look really really hard first.

So my critique is essentially this: if you want everyone to agree that Global Warming is manmade, stop being so damned condescending to those of us who aren’t convinced yet and start talking facts and evidence. I’m inherently skeptical of religion, so if you stop acting like devout followers of a religion, then maybe I won’t be so skeptical. It’s reasonable to believe that CO2 emissions are causing Global Warming, but it’s also entirely conceivable that we’ve all been duped by wealthy elites who see this whole thing as an enormous untapped source of potential profits (which it is) and that they have therefore inflated the idea of the threat so that we all go along with it. It wouldn’t be the first time the masses have been deceived for the benefit of the elites. Religion has served that very role for centuries.

But if it is true, if humanity is facing its own potential extinction due to the carbon it’s emitting into the atmosphere, we’d all better fucking do something about it before it’s too late. Something a little more drastic than “cap-and-trade”. But as long as this whole thing is just another big Right vs. Left Battle Royale in which facts and evidence take a back-seat to pre-existing ideological preferences, then we’re not going to get anywhere, and before you know it we’ll all be living in wooden huts at high elevations, arguing over who we should blame.

Planning English lessons for the week doesn’t have to take much time if you can use the same materials for more than one class. This Sunday, I found an article for my lesson with Frau Suhr on The Huffington Post called “The Top 10 Global Warming Stories of 2008”, which provided enough material, after the grammar review, for the remaining hour and ten minutes, and I knew I’d be able to use it for other classes as well. The article was about the biggest stories of 2008 related to Global Warming and how although we can allow ourselves to be slightly more hopeful because of Obama’s election, it still doesn’t look like we’re going to act in time to avert catastrophe, thanks to all the “deniers” out there.

On the day of the lesson, Tuesday morning, I found another article, also on HuffPost, called “Mr. Gore: Apology Accepted”, which gave a very thorough scientific argument as to why human beings have virtually no effect on the climate at all. This is stuff I heard a little over a year ago, and for a long while afterwards I remained quite sceptical about manmade global warming. But after many months of hearing nothing but the standard reports about how every scientist in the universe agrees we’re fucking the atmosphere up royally, my scepticism was buried again. This article, however, tore it right back out of the ground. The climate, as it points out, is always changing, and periods of rapid increases in temperature have in fact happened in the past, just not in the extremely brief historical period in which exact measurement have been diligently recorded. Most carbon dioxide comes from evaporation of the oceans, which release their carbon into the air as they get warmer, like boiling the bubbles out of mineral water. The rise in global temperature over the last thirty years has been due to the ocean cycles, as warm El Niños have caused the rise that the cold La Niñas will now mitigate over the next three decades. Furthermore, the giant star in our near proximity goes through cycles as well which have much more of an impact on global temperatures than carbon dioxide, which makes up only a tiny percentage of the atmosphere and most of which comes from the sea. Finally, and most interestingly, there is only so much heat that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can absorb (it follows a logarithmic rather than a linear curve) and it’s already absorbing the maximum amount. The effect that carbon emissions have on global climate is so infinitesimal as to be statistically irrelevant.

All of that may be completely wrong. I don’t know—I’m not a climate scientist. But it sounds like science to me, and all I read from proponents of drastic action to stop global warming is how everyone who still denies it’s manmade is a complete fool. Honestly, I would like to believe that we’re causing it—it’s much easier to be angry at the human race than natural processes—but I just don’t see the science. Okay, so carbon dioxide traps heat, and we’re pumping it into the atmosphere. Therefore…what? Is it really that big of a deal? Maybe so, but show me the arguments to back it up.

Anyway, Frau Suhr had also read some articles casting doubt on the manmade global warming theory—one in a conservative source and one from a liberal source—so although I hadn’t printed that article I talked about it a lot with her as we picked apart the “Top 10” article’s points, which really amounted to little more than finger-pointing and name-calling.

Then on Thursday I had a crazy long day because I agreed to do an extra substitution in Helmstedt on top of the two 2:15 lessons I already had. It was from 8:40 to 10:55 with just one guy, and he too didn’t believe global warming was caused by man. So having come prepared with both articles I began with the “Mr. Gore” article and we gave it a very thorough look, and we both came out more convinced than before that all the hype about human activity causing global warming is mostly bullshit. We didn’t even get to the other article.

Then came my next class, which ended up being a group of four men, including the conservative Andreas, the one who believes in the death penalty, less gun-control, and is against gay marriage. Surprisingly, he believed that man is responsible for global warming and we ought to be acting more aggressively to stop it. Two of the others agreed with him, and only one of the men there (the one who is critical of affirmative action) was somewhat sceptical, believing that humans merely augment rather than cause the problem. So we read through the “Top 10” article first and had some good discussion. Andreas was able to get on his high horse a little bit and talk about how anyone who still denies that global warming isn’t caused by man is ignorant.

Then I busted out the “Mr. Gore” article, and Andreas’s tone began to change. At first he just made fun of the guy. The second paragraph traces global climate and human history, showing how times of cold temperatures (such as the fall of Rome and the Dark Ages) are usually marked by a great deal of suffering and strife while warmer periods (including the Renaissance and our current day and age) are times of great flourishing. Andreas didn’t think this was such an important point. And indeed, we all know the climate changes naturally so there’s nothing too convincing about simply pointing that out.

But as we got deeper into the article and the real science behind it, Andreas got quieter and quieter. I couldn’t help but feel a slight sense of schadenfreude at having shown him something to make him question a belief he had been so sure of only minutes ago. At one point he said, “Now you and this article are responsible for everything I do in the future,” which I guess means he’s going to start personally filling the atmosphere with as much carbon dioxide as he can simply because he no longer believes it’s harmful. By the end of the lecture, he was so upset he didn’t want to read anymore.

I did my best to sympathise. I was also quite angry when I first heard the opposing side of the global warming debate, and to think that we’ve been lied to for so long and that now even most of us go on believing in baseless propaganda pisses me off to no end. We’re being told that this is the most important issue of our time, when really there are so much more important things to worry about. All the extra money we pay for electricity due to cap-and-trade systems, all the money wasted on “carbon capture” technology—simply for politics and nothing more. It’s become politically unpopular to deny global warming, so we get all of these useless measures that wouldn’t even stop it if it was coming from us.

And yet, of course, there still is an energy problem. We can all still agree that even if coal and oil aren’t causing the ice-caps to melt that these resources will run out and then we’ll need things like wind and solar to power our beast of civilization. Personally, I’d rather it just die but that’s not something I want to argue with a bunch of German energy-industry workers. Not yet, at least.

But the whole thing was rather interesting, and I got at least one other person to feel as pissed off as I am about global warming. Now I have to deal with the fact that on this issue, I actually agree with more republicans than democrats, and that I even share the same view as Sarah fucking Palin (i.e. we don’t know if man is causing it but we should prepare for the consequences). I don’t like that one bit. Hopefully I’ll come across something that will refute the refutation I read this week, and I can return to my comfortable far-left position that we’re destroying the sky just as much as we’re destroying the earth, and that evil Big Energy industry (whose success is ironically now paying my bills) is to blame.

Things are just about back to normal. After my long e-mail accepting Corey’s “decision not to be my friend anymore” he wrote me back and apparently he never made such a decision. He was just angry. We cleared things up (I hope) and now we’re in touch again and he’s probably still the only person reading this.

As for life in Hannover, I had my first day back at “work” yesterday. I had to get up early yesterday for a couple of substitution lessons for Alan. The secretaries at Planeo had screwed up the meeting room so I wandered around from room to room and building to building for a good half-hour, calling the office several times so they could call the woman who was waiting for me and we finally found each other. She was the only one there out of three people, and apparently this is usually the case. A very nice woman named Sabine who doesn’t use English for her job but likes to take lessons anyway just to keep her skills sharp. Apparently she speaks four languages—German, English, French, and Dutch, which is what she speaks at home because her husband is Dutch. I could tell she used to be incredibly beautiful, but luckily it’s been at least two decades since I would have fallen in love with her. Anyway, I didn’t really have anything planned so I just busted out the issues list and a discussion about global warming (everyone’s favourite topic) turned into a much deeper conversation even venturing into the topics of religion and spirituality. She thinks religion is responsible for every war. I didn’t say I disagreed, but devil’s advocate that I am I defended the principles at the core of religion and blamed the wars on people’s ignorance rather than the religions themselves.

It was a pleasant exchange, and then I went to my second lesson to which nobody showed up, which means I get paid for nothing. So I walked out of there having made 68 euros for basically just having a nice conversation for an hour. It feels wrong somehow, but I can’t complain. If the energy industry wants to share some of its abundant supply of money with me, I won’t refuses.

I went to the Planeo office to hand in my bill for last month, and I practiced my newfound German speaking ability on the secretaries there, who were extremely glad to not have to speak English to me. That went well.

Then at night I had another “date” with Frau Sen, who wants to change our meeting time from Monday night to Thursday afternoon, right after my lesson with the apprentices, which would make for a really long-ass day for me every Thursday, but would completely free up Mondays. We agreed to give it a try, but not until two weeks from now at the earliest. Most of that lesson was spent on the thrilling subject of “contract remedies” but when neither of us could take any more of that I busted out the issues sheet and we had the global warming conversation as well. She doesn’t have much of an opinion on the issue, so I just talked about an article I’d read that morning that says humans are not responsible for it. There are some powerful fucking arguments that raise all kinds of doubts about man’s impact on the climate, like the fact that carbon dioxide levels have always historically risen AFTER the earth’s temperature rises (due to melting icecaps) and that the giant fusion reactor in the sky has WAY more of an impact on the earth than a trace amount of gas in the atmosphere, but when all is said and done I think we should still try and minimize our impact anyway. Fuck the coal industry and automobile manufacturers.

The next topic was more interesting—separation of church and state. She said that they are completely separated but I pointed out that even if it’s not explicit, religiously-derived morality is still behind much of the laws today—it’s just harder to see in Europe than in the U.S. Prostitution is the perfect example. It’s not illegal for any practical reason—it’s just seen as immoral because the Bible says so. She tried to tell me that it’s not the Bible that makes people believe it’s wrong, that plenty of non-religious people think it’s immoral too, and I asked her where they get their morals from. Education. Okay, so the teachers decide what’s right and wrong? No, it’s…some German word that doesn’t translate…the culture. Society. Okay, so where does socially-constructed morality have its roots? Religion! Tell me I’m wrong. No? Okay then. Check-mate.

And she’s the lawyer! The one who’s supposed to make arguments for a living. Can’t even tell me where morals come from if not from God….Somewhere buried under a hill in France, Camus was laughing.