Like the debate over climate change itself, the debate over climate economics looks very different from the inside than it often does in popular media. The casual reader might have the impression that there are real doubts about whether emissions can be reduced without inflicting severe damage on the economy. In fact, once you filter out the noise generated by special-interest groups, you discover that there is widespread agreement among environmental economists that a market-based program to deal with the threat of climate change — one that limits carbon emissions by putting a price on them — can achieve large results at modest, though not trivial, cost. There is, however, much less agreement on how fast we should move, whether major conservation efforts should start almost immediately or be gradually increased over the course of many decades.
‘Building a Green Economy’, Paul Krugman in the New York Times
[President] Obama may be personally very appealing, but he has positioned himself all over the political map: the anti-Iraq war candidate who escalated the war in Afghanistan; the opponent of health insurance mandates who made a mandate to buy insurance the centerpiece of his plan; the president who stocked his administration with Wall Street insiders and went to the mat for the banks and big corporations, but who is now trying to present himself as a born-again populist. Mr. Obama is in danger of being perceived as someone whose rhetoric, however skillful, cannot always be trusted. He is creating a credibility gap for himself, and if it widens much more he won’t be able to close it.
Bob Herbert, “Obama’s Credibility Gap”, New York Times
By whose authority do the Standing Rules of the Senate govern the Senate? By the Senate’s alone. But what is the Senate, exactly? It is part of a larger entity, the Congress, that expires every two years after the entire House and one-third of the Senate stands for election. We currently have the 111th Congress. In Jan. 2011 we’ll have the 112th. In Jan. 2013 we’ll have the 113th. And so on. The first step in exercising the nuclear option, then, is for the president of the Senate (i.e., Vice President Joe Biden) to state, in effect, “Previous Congresses can’t tell this Congress what to do. Senate Rule 22 has no force because it was never agreed to by the current Senate.” Biden would then state, “Under Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution, this current Senate may ‘determine the rules of its proceedings.’ I say we change Rule 22 to eliminate the filibuster.
A risky parliamentary procedure might get health reform through the Senate. - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine (via indefensible)
reblogged from indefensible
Not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it became the official policy of our federal government to try to make America “a drug-free nation” 25 years ago. After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it’s slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?
From an excellent Wall Street Journal article titled ‘Undressing the Terror Threat’
I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by [Fox News president] Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corporation, its founder and every other global media business aspires to.
Rupert Murdoch’s son in law Matthew Freud, quoted in yesterday’s New York Times.
The New South Wales economy is in drastic need of reform. Its manufacturing base is collapsing. A long run of drought and climate chaos has left much of the state’s rural industry in a parlous state. It cannot call on a wealth of mineral resources to fill the Treasury’s coffers, while revenue-sharing arrangements negotiated back when the GST was introduced still favour the less populous states. The transport system, utilities sector and a host of big-dollar infrastructure projects are in need of urgent funding and attention. But the government that must attend to them is a government of the living dead. The Labor Party is shambling towards the polls early next year and the wrath of the electorate will be terrible to behold.
John Birmingham, “Failed State”, The Monthly (December 2009)
So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, “Well, I planted a bunch of trees.” And he says, “I’m talking about personal.” What I’m thinking in my head is, “Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I fucking changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective”.
Barack Obama (via dancroak) (via evangotlib)
reblogged from evangotlib
Let us in future be a bit more skeptical about the need to recreate the protest wheel. In almost all countries run by authoritarian regimes there is an untapped mass of activists, dissidents and anti-government intellectuals who have barely heard of Facebook. Reaching out to these offline but effective networks will yield more value than trying to badger bloggers to take up political activities. Western embassies working on the ground often excel at identifying and empowering such networks, and new media literacy should become part of diplomatic training. After all, these old-school types are the people who brought democracy to Central and Eastern Europe. And it will probably be them who win freedom for China and Iran too.
From Evgeny Morozov’s article “Dictators.com” in the Perspective section of today’s AFR. I don’t really agree with his conclusions but it is an extremely good read and an excellent reminder that we must not idealise social media as the answer to all of the world’s problems.
For the extreme left it [climate change] provides the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, sort of de-industrialise the Western world. The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left, and they embraced environmentalism as their new religion.
Liberals Senate leader Nick Minchin on ABC’s Four Corners. What a nutcase. This is the same guy who didn’t believe that cigarettes are addictive or that passive smoking is harmful.
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