Inside The Beltway, Political ‘Reality’ Trumps Actual Reality
Inside The Beltway, Political ‘Reality’ Trumps Actual Reality
After it was reported that House Democrats do not intend to include President Obama’s carbon cap legislation in a non-filibusterable budget reconciliation bill, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos called health care “the survivor“:
Cap and trade will not get the same budget protection, and there are nowhere near 60 votes for it. Keeping it out of the reconciliation process recognizes reality: Congress can’t pass it in the middle of a recession.
Delaying climate legislation doesn’t “recognize reality” — it ignores it. As top climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf explained at the Copenhagen Climate Change Congress last week, the observed reality is worse than climate models have been predicting. Even limiting global warming to two degrees Centigrade above historical levels — 1.3 degrees (2.3 F) above current temperatures — isn’t as safe as Russian roulette:
I personally as a climate scientist, I could not honestly go and tell the public that two degrees warming is safe. We’re already seeing a lot of impacts of the 0.7 degrees warming that we’ve had so far. So I consider two degrees not safe. And John Schellnhuber this morning asked about the question “Is Russian roulette dangerous?” and in Russian roulette you have a one in six chance of something terrible happening, I think that when we go to two degrees we probably have more than a one in six chance of really bad impacts occurring.
Watch it:
Fair point. I should have emphasized "political" reality.
The risk in putting off cap-and-trade, of course, is that "later" may turn out to mean "never" -- and "never" is not an acceptable alternative when we are near so many environmental tipping points. It's easy enough to imagine a scenario in which the economic recovery is slow in coming, the Dems become skittish about advancing cap-and-trade in an election year (2010), they nevertheless lose a bunch of seats during the midterms, and then Sarah Palin gets elected in 2012 and we're all burning moose dung and invading Alberta a few years later.
4 Responses to “Inside The Beltway, Political ‘Reality’ Trumps Actual Reality”
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Rahmstorf is is an agenda scientist and hockey team member from RealClimate. His boss at Potsdam is serial doomster John Schellnhuber. Temperatures haven’t risen in 10 years in spite of rising CO2, from the late 40’s to the 80’s temperatures fell in spite of rising CO2. The planet has entered ice ages with CO2 12 times higher than current.
This really is so much BS.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:29 pmStrictly from an economic stand-point:
It does not take a rocket scientist to see the economy is directly tied to the environment in many different ways. Ignoring the warning signs now will exact a greater price in the long-term.
With increasingly odd weather patterns emerging and natural disasters growing more severe and frequent the monetary costs to rebuild towns and cities will be enormous.
The human toil in terms of health also spill over into economic concerns. Maintaining health in an atmosphere filled with toxins is impossible. Businesses lose money when employees are too sick to work. Money spent on health care and insurance cost more in the long-run, too.
Environmentally speaking: Rising temperatures brings more dis_ease. Fresh water is becoming scarcer by the day. Sea life is diminishing at alarming rates because our oceans and lakes are polluted and dying. The onslaught of drought sweeping across the globe destroyed large swaths of land used for farming & growing food, cattle grazing, etc. They do not seem to be abating either. The growing threats to lucrative businesses and the livelihoods of farmers, ranchers, fishermen are serious.
Whether lobbyists for special interest groups can cajole, bribe or otherwise convince our representatives in Washington to ignore the warning signs is unknown.
With the stakes this high, I get the distinct impression that the decision-makers in Washington fail to understand the enormity of what it means to hold the fate of the world in their hands. In that respect there is no reason to believe they will live up to their responsibility and make the right decisions.
However they would be wise to consider the economy will be the first casualty before life on earth becomes unsustainable.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:33 amThe very sad but true part of this story is that Congress is willing to deal with “Emergencies” – they created a bill in 2 days based on populous outrage. They are either unwilling or unable to see past the next election cycle.
So what needs to be done is have a populous outrage over the environment, but even the TVA disaster in TN only made headlines for a few days and it certainly is not resolved.
Someone a whole lot smarter than me needs to show how Cap and Trade will be WORTH IT to the American public who are so far listening to the IT COST TOO MUCH pundits.
In this “ME ONLY” society, very few are willing to stake their political future on a plan that outlast their next political election – very sad indeed!
March 21st, 2009 at 1:01 pmharbinger,
Even if you were correct, and I doubt whether any of your uncited statistics are, the fact is that observations have shown us a marked increase is storm strength, which is directly related to flood insurance rates. Even if that were not the case, a renewable energy economy — the U.S. would need wind farms on only 3% of its farmland to serve current demand, and even if we converted to 100% plug-in hybrid cars and trucks overnight, without any other forms of grid load shaping, we still wouldn’t need wind farms on more than 7% of U.S. farmland. Are you going to say no to all those farmers who stand to earn that money just so we can keep sending it to Saudi Arabia?
March 21st, 2009 at 7:41 pm