The climatic case for Obama

Environmentalist claptrap, Marxist cant and economic idiocy.

Thanks goodness you do to get to vote here. Go vote for Labour and ruin your own nation; Keep you feeble hands of of ours.

The “Carbon Emissions” nonsense is just a hustle and a racket; and is “renewable energy”. As it is, the UK will be rationing power in 10 years, that and kowtowing to the Russionas and the Middle East, which is exactly what the Left wand

This thing about swing states: Isn’t it a paradox to say that your vote doesn’t matter because you don’t live in a swing state, when even if you were in a swing state the odds that your vote would be decisive are negligible?

ohreally,

If that really is your name. If this were the Senate contest in CT we were talking about, I’ld hit you over the head with a chair. Don’t worry, it would be a Championship Wrestling chair, and I would tag in before braining you with it. I believe strictly in keeping up the tone of American elections.

Even if every single one of your points against the Democrats were true, and as a Democrat, I have much stronger points against my party, and sneer at your feeble efforts to vilify it, there still remains this reason to vote against the Rs, if not for the Dems — the Rs have made the political process in the US a sick joke. You might get some public policy result from a D administration that wasn’t 100% political main chance, while an R in the WH is likely to start a war just to help out with the midterm elections. And they won’t be using breakaway chairs. Quit trolling on behalf of criminals.

Inasfar as the natural gas boom (that is also mentioned in the link) has contributed to a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions, can it be attributed to Obama or, for that matter, to any regulation? (I’d also note that not everybody welcomed it – Krugman more or less came out against it in a column, and Romm doesn’t even think one can attribute much CO2 reduction to it. I am a bit lost on the issue, to be honest.) Is this really the consequence of some sort of incentive, or do we just see the coincidence that a ‘new’ cheap energy source also happens to reduce emissions?

Only ten comments in and already two deranged trolls on the thread. You can smell the flop sweat as their guy goes down for the count. Maybe next time don’t nominate Richie Rich as your candidate.

@9,

Criminals all the same. Often the same criminals, or at least criminal organizations with interlocking boards of directors.

“But if libertarians would only get sane on climate change, I’d put Johnson ahead of Obama.”

Why? I’m guessing it’s foreign policy, anti-imperialism, disgust and outrage over our drone policies and also the drug war. But isn’t Gary Johnson sort of insane on economic issues?

.just like he didn’t save the auto industry (that was W) and didn’t “create or save” 3 million jobs (that never happened) and didn’t cut the deficit in half (he doubled it).
—

Right out of the Rove book.

I’d be depressed by the comments here if I didn’t have a very strong sense that Obama will win, especially here in Ohio. And there is virtually no group more hostile to environmentalism than the “I’ve got mine Jack” and “I don’t need a social contract” libertarian contingent. In fact, the outright dishonesty and fanaticism on climate change that libertarians employ was what confirmed my deep hostility to the entire enterprise – basically, it’s nothing but a market-as-God cult.

Yes, the increase in fuel efficiency and the prospect of EPA regulations are very strong reasons to favor Obama. As is his receptiveness to renewable energy, as opposed to being completely in the pocket of the fossil fuel industries (e.g. Romney.) We really do have no better prospect than Obama on climate change. It is is an inefficient way to get the job done, but if money blocks the efficient channels I’ll take what I can get.

Tim do you ever wonder that a party that refuses to accept the science behind global warming may have other serious issues?

“But if libertarians would only get sane on climate change, I’d put Johnson ahead of Obama. ”

Who does, after all, need laws forbidding child labor or racial discrimination in accommodations when the Ineffable Workings of the Free Market have been shown to vaporize such flaws in the long history of LibertopiaVille ?

While there’s obviously problems with Obama from an environmental standpoints, it’s pretty safe to say that he’s contributed to the ‘greening’ of America, whether it’s green energy or taking the environment into account in government decisions. But obviously, if you were a liberal single-issue voter on the environment (or most other issues, really) you’d vote for Obama. The only reasons you wouldn’t would be holistic (you don’t necessarily approve of Romney but think he’d get us out of this recession quicker), excessive strategizing (you know obama wasn’t the ideal president, but maybe political pressure would force romney to be), or ideologically principled (you know Romney would probably be worse on the environment/taxes/banks/civil rights, but still can’t vote for Obama because of what he’s done).

Well yes, at least with Obama only a few keys to the country will be given to the oligarchs.

The argument about whether the whole fracking natural gas things has cut carbon emissions revolves around a few potential setbacks. The most obvious is that we haven’t cut coal mining by as much as we’ve reduced burning it, we are exporting the difference. Secondarily, cheap natural gas, makes renewables less competitive. So while we are retiring coal power ahead of schedule, we are letting the transition slip in other ways. Plus natral gas drilling has morphed into “wet” natural gas drilling, where liquid fuels are the real payoff. Our increases in domestic oil production are caused by the same forces that have improved the natural gas production.

Kind of reminds me of Australia, they imposed a carbon tax, but are expanding coal exports willy nilly. I guess emissions don’t count if the actual burning takes place in someone elses territory?

American coal exports have not increased enough to replace falling domestic demand. If Obama stays in office I have some hope that environmental challenges to new coal-export terminals will succeed and American coal production will not rebound.

The EPA’s cap on CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour seems like a fairly arbitrary and inefficient way to clean up electrical production. A new plant that’s 10% over the threshold simply can’t be built and a plant that’s 10% under is treated no differently from a plant that’s 80% under. But I prefer this weird scheme to no mitigation effort at all.

The coal industry has been talking for years about how carbon capture and storage can deliver “clean coal” energy. Now’s the time to step up and prove it. Unless, heaven forbid, the talk about clean coal was just a delaying tactic with no intent to follow through with action.

The shift to natural gas seems like a pretty good thing to me from an emissions perspective. Maybe not so much from a groundwater perspective in fracking areas. But natural gas plants can change output faster than coal, so they match intermittent renewables better, plus they emit only about half the CO2 when directly substituting for coal. The downside is low electricity prices potentially undermining renewable generation, but there’s a lot of state-level laws mandating renewable energy targets that won’t be diminished at all by cheap fossil electricity.

I’m in a safe blue state, and I’m voting for Johnson. Sure, I like Stein a lot better, but the Greens can only progress at the expense of the Democratics, whereas the Libertarians will mostly cost the Republicans, and where they can draw from Democrats, it will be because of their positions on civil liberties, militarism, and the war on drugs, and the Dems need to feel some pressure in those areas.

Here’s the good news: we may see the death of the Republican Party in our lifetimes.

Major parties in the US do die. The Federalists did. The Whigs did (I am defining “major party” as one capable of producing Presidents). And the unthinkable happens. The Soviet Union was an inescapable fact of life, until, very quickly, it was not.

The Democrat/Republican structure has been stable for a long time. The leftmost party used also to be the party of racism, which enabled and required unusual cross-party alliances. Ironically, the ideological contradictions made the structure more stable. This ended in the 60s, and the consequences have been playing out since. I think we are now at an endpoint.

The Southern Strategy is dead. If Kevin Phillips were given the power of Dr. Frankenstein and tried to create the perfect candidate to use this strategy on, he would have sewn together Barack Hussein Obama, a black man with a name that sounds both African and Arab, partly raised in a Muslim country, with radical associates in his past. But Obama whooped them once, and looks likely to win again (unless voter suppression and electronic voting games will be more effective than people realize). If this strategy fails against Barack Hussein Obama, it will be an utter joke against candidates with names like Clinton and Biden. It’s dead, Jim.

But the GOP is married to the corpse. They must stroke its bony hands in bed and whisper sweet nothings into its putrid remains of an ear. Their only way out is to find a latin lover (blacks are unavailable), but the slightest movement in that direction, the faintest flicking off of the sheets, as Perry learned, brings the wrath of their base. And risking their share of the white vote on a deeply uncertain effort to get a sizable share of the latino one would be suicide.

So they’re painted into a corner, and both racial demographic trends and the differences in attitude between the generation currently coming of age and that currently dying off indicate that corner will get smaller and smaller.

All of which, I realize, is analysis frequently done before, though perhaps less imagistically expressed.

The question is what next?

The usual view is to assume the Republicans will either adapt by expanding their appeal or soldier on as a regional and minority party. But it is not easy to see how they will do either. If they cannot appeal to non-white voters, then they have to expand their appeal to white ones, and/or find non-white ones who will vote based on other facts about themselves than race. There have been attempts. They have been banking on generational warfare, but the clock is running out on that strategy (they may get one last shot in 2016. After that, Gen X itself hits the 55 year-old line that they have drawn, and they lose the opportunity to play to their resentment of boomers). I think the expanded attacks on abortion and such are partly a hope to find Latinos who will vote as good Catholics, rather than as Latinos. I think this likely to fail. Most of the whites who do not support them now are unlikely to be convinced. So how do they rebound?

Minority party then? But this is a party dominated by warriors who want nothing of compromise and whose stridency masks deep ideological divisions. Do you think Paul Ryan enjoyed having to Peterlike deny the love of his life, Ayn Rand, to kiss up to a bunch of old church ladies? Do you think Romney can stand trying to act like a 47%-er regular guy – with their bad cookies and tacky rain ponchoes? What holds this party together is the desire not to pay taxes, but that is not ideology, it is spoils, whatever hogwash apology is dredged up. And a minority party cannot deliver spoils.

Regional? Well, they are back on the states’ rights kick. But there is not that much the states can deliver. They don’t control that much of the money. They can make abortion difficult, but not illegal. They cannot wage war. They cannot control the Supreme Court. Most of the income tax is out of their hands.

There is then the possibility that being shut out of power without a visible path back in could be the death of the party. The main thing preventing this would be that none of the major elements of their coalition has anywhere else to go.

The Libertarians do have a party to go to. They have stayed away from it because they wanted to actually hold power, but if that is not looking likely, it would be better to make your case in pure form, rather than pretending that fundamentalists and tribalists are your allies.

This year Ron Paul showed that the Libertarian element in the Republican coalition, while a minority, is not numerically insignificant. And it is the youth and therefore future of the party. But the party screwed them: changing the rules so as not to seat Paul’s delegates and not even giving him a speaking slot at the Convention.

There was a poll yesterday of Ohio that included the minor party candidates. Johnson got 5% (On the other hand, a Green candidate in Ohio has just sued over suspect voting machines. Probably should not have waited till the last minute). That’s at partisan ground zero. Matched nationally, that’s sufficient to qualify for matching funds and therefore news.

“I feel dirty.
So very, very dirty.”

And not in a good way, I presume.

Good post, but hasn’t this site been totally discredited by its lack of devotion to the overwhelming importance of an invincible navy? Next to that, the extinction of the planet from climatic change seems meaningless, really.

http://ageofsail.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/the-lesser-of-two-weevils/

and this
http://ageofsail.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/weevily-biscuit/#more-308

“lesser of two evilism” has gotten us two parties virtually indistunguishable on “national security” and more than 50/75 % of democrats supporting Guantanamo and drone strikes
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Actually, no. First, 100,000+ dead Iraqis disagree on “virtually indistinguishable”. Buy some moral glasses. Second, the parlous state of US politics is due to the success that narcissistic handwringers have had in helping the GOP win with their self-serving pious moralizing.

Hi,

Because of the system we have in the U.S. and the power of money in it, we are always reduced to a choice of lesser evils. Democrats are venal, corrupt, mostly ineffectual, and often completely wrong, but Republicans, and their fellow right-wing travelers, are even worse, metaphysically and murderously evil, and an active threat and danger to all of humanity. Even if Democrats don’t provide a reasonable alternative, I have not yet reached the point of nihilistic cynicism that would prevent me from doing everything I can to oppose these right-wing ideologues, their tactics, their beliefs, and their candidates. I wish I also had a way to do that against the many idiotic Democrats too, but in a two-party monopoly system funded by the wealthiest and most powerful, that is impossible. There were ten different choices on the presidential election ballot this year. Two of them were socialist, plus the Green party, all three which are substantially to the political left of the Democrats. I really wish we had a system were I could have voted for any or all of them without further empowering the right wing conservatives. But there isn’t, so I voted for Obama again, in spite of my disappointment in his first term performance. Perhaps he’ll do better in his second term.

Have a great day!
Antti

Antti @50: Perhaps he’ll do better in his second term.

If there were a way to put the screws to the bastard, he might. I’d love to hear ideas on that from the Americans here. How do you shout louder than Wall Street or Big Pharma?

Yay for MPA Victoria.

Of course, we now have millions of Iraqis living in a democracy, as well as many democratic regions in a government that all to long ago was being written off as inherently uncivilised by the Democrats.

Victory speech leaves me slightly more optimistic about this — “threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet” is certainly stronger language than I’d anticipated. We might get a fair bit more than locked-in existing regulations. Maybe.

“we now have millions of Iraqis living in a democracy”: presumably the ones who fled the country, along with the most recent recruits to the republic of the dead.

I’m encouraged by Obama’s re-election especially because he’s a black guy with an Arabic name. It says something about my blinkered, bigoted country that we were able to do this. We have made at least this much progress. The pious pundits wring their hands and worry that our party didn’t carry a majority of Real Americans, which is to say rural white men, but it’s actually a relief to know for sure that we no longer require a cartoon cowboy as chief executive.

Soullite is absolutely right that decreasing emissions is snake oil. We know that the problem is the CO2 that is already in the atmosphere. And decreasing the rate at which more CO2 is added is totally different from reducing the amount that’s there. Reducing emissions means making the problem worse at a slower rate. It’s as if, on a sinking ship, a proposal were made to take on more water — at a slower rate…

In the long term, humanity will surely opt to reverse the damage to Earth through what science fiction calls “terra-forming.” But this will have nothing to do with Obama or the USA Democrats.

“It’s admirable no doubt that you plug away trying to persuade the apparently unpersuadable denizens of libertarianism on the environmental facts,”

And what else am I supposed to do?

We have it on good authority (Stern, Nordhaus) that a carbon tax is a good solution to the problem of climate change. Given that climate change is a problem that we need to do something about then touting what we’re told is a good solution seems reasonable enough.

Tim Worstall might be so very crazy on so many, many things. But he did write this

http://timworstall.com/2012/10/28/oh-do-fuck-off-ms-may/

So huzzah for Timmy, and you have my vote if you ever run in my district (this probably isn’t UKIP policy though, I assume?)

There luckily were enough cases for Obama. The climatic case is one. Another one has to do with minority rights. And I confess that the word “climatic” made me associate toward the rights of women as well. I read somewhere that if Obama vs Romney would have been in Europe, the smallest percentage Obama would have got in any European nation would have been 85%. The decisive factor in that certainly would have been the lunacy of going back in time on ethical points. Probably with Obama the going forward will still be slow, but it will be much better than status quo.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. Absolutely ashamed.”

Seriously?

I’m responsible for what I write and say. Not for what other people write and or say in the same publication. I’ve written for The Guardian and I’m not in the slightest responsible for Seumas “Stalin was a misunderstood dreamer for egalitarianism who just happened to run the Gulags” Milne, nor for that newspaper’s tax dodging, Cayman Islands subsidiary nor their contribution to climate change through AutoTrader. Ditto the DT and tax dodging on Sark, The Times and the eeevil that is Murdoch, Express and the porn of Richard Desmond.

I’m a jobbing freelancer trying to make the mortgage each month. Give me a break would you?

John b: “A roofer listens to this, not his wallet.”

“John b: “A roofer listens to this, not his wallet.””
You know Kevin Smith gets a bad rap.

I disagree with Tim and have done for a decade. But I’ve never seen Tim adopt an opinion for money that he doesn’t actually hold. Some of them are so fucking weird that there isn’t a payscale in place.

If someone offered me an article in the National Review, whether or not there was money attached, I’d take it. Only difference from being offered a piece in Graun and NYT is I would insist on copy approval.

Your views in front of loons: better than James Taranto’s views in front of loons, AFAICS.

Drone attacks must be stopped. Citizens United overturned. Single payer instituted as promised. Full employment and affordable housing and education (free for doctors and teachers) maternal leave and end to exploitation of temporary workers, must be new goals.

“If you published articles there about the horribleness of racism, that would be cool!”

Of course that is not what Tim was doing:

“Before we commit ourselves to trillions of dollars of expenditure and wealth foregone on the basis of what we now know to be, to put it kindly, dodgy figures? ”

It is also worth mentioning that his article was published on a section of the site entitled Planet Gore….

“I’d be delighted to cash a cheque from either of them. Just as I would from the Morning Star and would have done from Izvestia or Pravda back in the old days ”

At least you are honest about your mercenary nature. So I guess you have that going for you.

Isn’t arguing for climate change at the National Review basically an application of the lesser-evil principle? If someone’s supposed to be willing to vote for someone they believe to be a war criminal and mass murderer, I would think people should be willing to write for the National Review or even the KKK Monthly, so long as they’re arguing for something considerably less bad than the consensus opinion there.

(Yes, I get that there’s a big difference between article-writing and voting, practically speaking. I just don’t think that difference is terribly important, morally speaking. Either you take advantage of the options as they are, choosing the best option out of the ones that avail themselves, or you stand on moral principle and reject those options.)

“. . . arguing for climate change at the National Review basically . . . ”

I fear that, once you step through the Looking Glass, into Topsy Turvy land, the tendency would be to find one’s argument turning into a blueprint, in the same way, say, that Democratic complaints about inadequate voting systems get turned into a plan to suppress Democratic voting or otherwise hijack the electoral system. Consider the conservative economist, Michael Kahn and his book, Climatopolis, which, basically, argues that emissions restraint, though theoretically desirable, is unlikely, so rich people should aggressively use their resources to “adjust”, and screw lots of poor people in the process, because, as Jesus says, the poor are always with us, or something.

The fact that you and “many” like you oppose the war on terror doesn’t make my statement false–many Democrats support whatever Obama does.

I have never seen any backup for that argument beyond self-congratulation. People like Greenwald insist that they are brave truth tellers, holding fast to principles that immoral Obots can only dimly even perceive, but that’s just marketing, not an argument.

And Glenn writes a column that is mostly about US human rights violations–he doesn’t order his “brigade”, whoever they might be, to vote a certain way. .

Glenn and his fan club have a peculiar ideology that appears to mix libertarianism with a veneer of “left” concern and fake constitutional analysis.

(And yes, I voted for Obama.)

I’m not a fan of Tim Worstall’s writings in general, but he deserves defence here.

Lesser-evilism or not, it’s obnoxious for people (MPAVictoria I’m looking at you) to engage in self-righteous pronouncements about the morality of personal choices from behind a wall of pseudonymity/anonymity. Like many people I have made (continue to make) many compromises of my own in order to earn a living. I’m happy to talk them over in private with someone who will also share their own doubts and mistakes, but stone throwing from on high does not deserve a response. Maybe MPAVictoria is as ideologically pure as his/her stance suggests, but somehow I doubt it.

‘People like Greenwald insist that they are brave truth tellers….’

Jesus, you won the election comfortably. Time to put away the strawmen

JW, not if the issue that is important to you is how early in the alphabet the letter indicating party identification occurs.

And now the lesser evilists try to sell themselves as dissidents. It’s the gulag run by Greenwald on his blog that mass their lives as the not adults in the room so very very hard, I suppose. You could not make it up. I agree btw there is often nothing unprincipled about the very widespread support racist state terrorism for example receives from the Democratic party and its supporters in think tanks, academia, the media, and on blogs. It is rather that the majority of the party and many supporters have entirely disgusting principles built around a firm belief in American exceptionalism, ethno-centrism, and all the other ideological trappings of Western civilization we know and love.

Really? So Obama is all by himself on this drone issue then.
—

Your claim was “Well, that and the fact that many Democrats only care about human rights when Republicans violate them.”

It is possible that many Democrats agree with the use of Drones in Pakistan/Yemen and yet do care about human rights. And it is also possible for people to oppose the drone war without considering it a disqualifying issue – in fact that appears to be your position, but you want to be self-righteous about it for some reason. The issue of human rights is neither limited to drone warfare nor authoritatively prioritized by Glenn Greenwald. The theory that anyone who fails to accept Greenwalds (or Jeremy Scahill’s) position on drone war is, by necessity, someone who does not genuinely care about human rights is just puffery.

I have no idea what you are talking about. None of this has anything to do with moral purity. The problem with your politics isn’t moral. It is political. Ironically it is you who tends to make this all into a question of personal moral failings (eg living in Brazil – whatever is wrong with that – or taking money from the wrong people, or failing to appreciate the moral imperative of embracing the lesser evil).

Bruce Wilder: “Consider the conservative economist, Michael Kahn and his book, Climatopolis, which, basically, argues that emissions restraint, though theoretically desirable, is unlikely, so rich people should aggressively use their resources to “adjust”, and screw lots of poor people in the process, because, as Jesus says, the poor are always with us, or something.”

Really? DeLong says that it is a very good book ….

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/12/department-of-huh.html

“It is possible that many Democrats agree with the use of Drones in Pakistan/Yemen and yet do care about human rights. ”

Sure. Orwell wrote essay after essay about this fact of human nature–“Notes on Nationalism” is one of the better ones. Osama bin Laden claims to have been upset by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the killing of civilians there, and by the sanctions on Iraq and there’s no particular reason to doubt him. And even if he was lying about that there are plenty of other people who care about human rights when they are violated by group A, but not when violated by a person or group they support.

Anyway, I gather you are more upset by people who criticize Democrats than by Democrats who support Obama’s drone policy.

“The claim was that: “many Democrats only care about human rights when Republicans violate them.” In other words, the moral principles of human rights are not actually embraced by “many Democrats”.

I amend the statement to this–“Many Democrats” show the same moral consistency as “many Republicans” or many “Islamic fundamentalists” on the subject of human rights. This didn’t start with Obama.

I’m a little disappointed about this worthless discussion of Tim Worstall’s moral purity (or lack thereof). It’s off-topic.

Please, people: Soullite has already pointed to the elephant in the room. Reducing carbon emissions is not solving the problem. A carbon emissions tax can only possibly slow the rate of the destruction, but humanity needs to reverse the destruction.

A tax on carbon emissions is not a ban of carbon emissions.

Even a 50% reduction in the rate of global CO2 output (which is far more than any emissions tax promises, and also more than is compatible with modern industrial society) will do no better than to double the time before the disaster. It will not prevent the disaster.

Reducing the rate of CO2 emissions will not stabilize atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

Humanity needs an Apollo Mission-scale terraforming project to stabilize Earth’s climate. This will happen. The question is only whether prediction or observation of climatic disaster will impel action.

Emissions taxes are a form of denial, as dangerous as denial of climate change itself.

dissidents from the Greenwald line

Do you understand what “dissident” means? (Assuming you want it’s normal political use.) Greenwald is a staff writer (I think?) for a liberal online magazine. Seriously, that’s what he is! You couldn’t be a “dissident from his line” no matter how hard you tried.

“I’m happy that you are now on the side of sanity, but the effect of your writing for Planet Gore was mostly on the other side – you wouldn’t have lasted more than a few columns there otherwise.”

Worth noting that I didn’t actually last very long there either……

Bucky: “Even a 50% reduction in the rate of global CO2 output (which is far more than any emissions tax promises, and also more than is compatible with modern industrial society)”

John Quiggin: “This simply isn’t true. A 50 per cent reduction is easily feasible using carbon taxes, and entirely consistent with modern industrial society. Britain has already announced it as a target by 2025. The EU is debating 30 per cent by 2020”

Professor Quiggin, please… do I really have to explain to you why your statement does not refute mine?

A 50% reduction in Britain, plus a 30% reduction in the EU, is nowhere near a 50% global reduction. It’s also nowhere near a 50% reduction in just those areas combined. It’s only 32% of those regions. (And it’s only 5% globally.)

100*(4177817*.3+522856*.5)/(4177817+522856) = 32.22460
c.f. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

Quiggin: “Reductions of 80 0r 90 per cent, which are what is actually needed, will take a bit longer, but again are entirely feasible over a few decades. That (along with reductions in other greenhouse gases, reforestation and so on) would be sufficient to stabilise CO2 levels at around 450 ppm.”

What you are saying here is that even a 90% global reduction is insufficient to stabilize CO2 levels. (It would require an additional “and so on.”) That’s correct. I would like to highlight again that even the insufficient 90% global reduction is nowhere near what is being proposed.

As far as the question of whether a 90% global reduction(!) in CO2 emissions, in “a few decades,” is compatible with existing industrial society — I think you’re fooling yourself here. But I won’t argue the point except to say this: there’s a reason nobody is proposing such drastic reductions.

Do you understand what “dissident” means? (Assuming you want it’s normal political use.) Greenwald is a staff writer (I think?) for a liberal online magazine. Seriously, that’s what he is! You couldn’t be a “dissident from his line” no matter how hard you tried.
—

“disagreeing especially with an established religious or political system, organization, or belief “

Donald Johnson: War is not about guilt. In war you can kill anyone who is a combatant, even if they never pick up a gun or touch a grenade. Pakistan can end this tomorrow by ensuring that no fighters reach Afghanistan from inside Pakistan. Otherwise, it isn’t neutral but enemy-occupied territory, and the US is more then justified in carrying out operations against members of the Taliban there from a laws of war perspective.

“Pakistan can end this tomorrow by ensuring that no fighters reach Afghanistan from inside Pakistan.”

That would assume that the Pakistani State is in control of the border areas. Historically, it’s not really been true that anyone at all has been in control of these areas.

http://diplomatdc.wordpress.com/2011/05/21/marque/

In fact, only one US Congress member had the courage and brains to oppose the Afghanistan AUMF and her name is Barbara Lee. Paul not only voted for the war and the open grant of authority but he proposed giving George W. Bush open authority to charter privateers.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=433×829909

It is very revealing that Paul is a hero for many of our supposed principled opponents of the war, and Barbara Lee is not ever mentioned.

I do not at all agree with Greenwald (or anyone else who thinks like him) that anything good can come out of a political alliance with right-wingers of any kind;of course this doesn’t mean we should avoid making an argument just b. I do however find it a bit rich when this complaint comes from people who have spent the last many months arguing explicitely that we MUST vote for a right-winger for president and we MUST not even criticise his right-wing policies (apparently even after he has been re-elected). That’s just projection.

Ok don’t know why this posted before completion… the first sentence should continue “[… just b]ecause right-wingers make a superficially similar one”.

“GG is basically the new Chomsky , though Noam always made a point to say that the Democrats were the lesser of the two evils. ”

I think you are correct. Noam Chomsky is a leftist, an Anarchist, a pretty deep thinker, and a scrupulously honest researcher. Further, Professor Chomsky lived his ideals – he was very close to serious jail time during the Vietnam war. Greenwald is a Libertarian, a dishonest slapdash writer who cuts and pastes and adds meaningless citations to provide the impression of research just as he affects indignation to provide the impression of principles. He’s the modern Chomsky and a perfect symbol of the end of the US Left as a serious political and intellectual force.

Greenwald is just representative. One finds the same phenomenon in economics where Libertarianism has also infected “left criticism”. The Democratic Party at this moment is the party of the working class in the USA and it incorporates most of what is still alive in what we used to call “the left”. The mostly white middle class “intellectual left” that is contemptuous of the Democratic Party is then forced to drift into Libertarianism as its natural ideological base.

Of course, the EU isn’t enough. To restate the point of the OP, that’s why it’s important that the US should join the effort.

Definitely. And one fervently hopes that China will join too if the US gets on board. A good guess is that China will surpass CO2 emissions of the US and EU combined either this year or the next. India can wait somewhat longer, since it already has an emissions-curbing system of coal shortages, load shedding, and failure to meet planned electricity targets.

The Libertarians are the sane side on climate change. EPA’s mileage rules kill hundreds of people every year by forcing them into smaller cars where they’ll die in wrecks; meantime, it’s been thoroughly proven (see Montford, “The Hockey Stick Illusion”) that Mann and his colleagues cherry-picked both the formulas and data that produced the “Hockey Stick chart” to serve pre-chosen political conclusions. Anyone who really “believes in” human-caused climate change (and I doubt the Left’s leadership do, honestly) is deluding himself.

“As a contributor to the insanity, Tim, you might want to think about why your side of politics has gone this way.” It’s gone this way because the Left’s policies of subsidizing out-of-wedlock breeding by shiftless teenage girls (to the extent that they’re now 40% of all births in the US) has made an old horror movie come true: The Marching Morons.

“The EPA’s mileage rules kill hundreds of people every year by forcing them into smaller cars where they’ll die in wrecks.”

John David Galt @ 138 must be a parody, witting or unwitting, since thanks to government safety regulations and public education, motor vehicle deaths have steadily been declining for the last twenty years.

From 1979 to 2005, the number of deaths per year decreased 14.97% while the number of deaths per capita decreased by 35.46%. Traffic fatalities in 2010 were the lowest in 62 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year

. Pretty silly summary of Greenwald, rootless. He writes about American human rights violations, much as Chomsky did, and he gets attacked by mainstream Democrats for the same reasons Chomsky was bashed.

Pretty much the same except Chomsky was a scrupulous researcher with a viewpoint informed by a sophisticated left wing political understanding and Greenwald is a sloppy confabulator who knows nothing about history and thinks Gary Johnson is admirable.

I don’t think Obama is a progressive hero.

@Bucky To clarify my position a bit. As I understand the numbers (I’ll post a link when I can locate a good one), we could stabilize the global climate if CO2 emissions per person in the world were about 20 per cent of current European levels which is 10 per cent of current US levels, and if we got a net gain by reducing emissions of methane and other GHGs (because methane is short-lived, reductions in emissions imply reductions in stocks in reasonable time) and by reversing deforestation. So

* My 80-90 per cent isn’t meant as deception: it’s the range required for developed countries
* The calculation allows for an increase in very poor countries, or for them to sell emissions rights in a tradeable system
* There’s no reason to think costs of mitigation are higher for China. That’s not to say they will reduce emissions fast, just that, like the EU and US they could do so at modest cost if they chose.

To restate, it’s entirely possible to stabilize the global climate, with or without radical changes to the existing social order. Whether we will do so is another matter.