Politics – Page 74 – Media Nation

Green hypocrites

From the you-can’t-make-this-up department: U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, has filed a bill that would prevent solar panels and wind farms from being built in the Mojave Desert. I hope this wrecks her 92 percent rating from the League of Conservation Voters.

Meanwhile, one of Feinstein’s principal critics is the noted environmentalist (and would-be Mojave developer) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says, “This is arguably the best solar land in the world, and Sen. Feinstein shouldn’t be allowed to take this land off the table without a proper and scientific environmental review.”

No, she shouldn’t. But if you recall, Kennedy — like other members of his family, including, unfortunately, his late uncle Ted — has been a staunch opponent of Cape Wind, our very own Mojave Desert when it comes to untapped energy potential.

OK, here’s where I could say something snarky about “environmentalists.” Sorry. The vast majority of environmentalists favor clean energy projects of all stripes, most definitely including Cape Wind. But save us, please, from politicians and celebrities.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (VI)

The series explained.

In the current issue of the New Yorker, the environmental journalist Fen Montaigne reports on the decline of the Adélie penguin in the northwest Antarctic Peninsula — a decline directly traceable to a catastrophic loss of sea ice in recent decades, compounded by an increase in snowfall, which interferes with the penguins’ ability to protect their eggs.

Unfortunately, the article is not online, though you can listen to Montaigne talk about it here and here. But Montaigne includes a litany of disturbing statistics in his report:

The average annual temperature in the region is nearly 5 degrees warmer today than it was in 1951.
Winter temperatures have risen 11 degrees during the past 60 years, an increase that is five times higher than the worldwide average.
Sea ice off the peninsula arrives 54 days later in the fall and melts 31 days sooner in the spring than was the case in 1979.
Eighty-seven percent of the glaciers along the Antarctic Peninsula are retreating.

Although the Adélie population has collapsed in the warmer parts of Antarctica, the penguins continue to thrive in colder regions. But if the warming trends continue, extinction is a real possibility.

The problem, according to Bill Fraser, the research scientist who is Montaigne’s principal source (and the subject of a book Montaigne is writing), is that changes that might normally take place over the course of centuries are instead being compressed into a few decades, making it impossible for the Adélies to adapt.

“What we’re looking at here is an entire ecosystem that is changing, and it’s not changing in hundreds of years, which is what we used to be taught,” Fraser tells Montaigne. “It’s changed so quickly that it has encompassed the research lives of a few people who have spent a lifetime here.”

Addendum: In an earlier installment, I noted that Sarah Palin was rather late to global-warming skepticism. As it turns out, her move to the far right on this issue was considerably more dramatic than I had realized. Check out these quotes from September 2007, when she signed an order creating a panel to prepare for climate change. Said the then-Alaska governor:

Many scientists note that Alaska’s climate is changing. We are already seeing the effects. Coastal erosion, thawing permafrost, retreating sea ice and record forest fires affect our communities and our infrastructure. Some scientists tell us to expect more changes in the future. We must begin to prepare for those changes now.

Of course, Palin in 2007 was not as interested in impressing the Republican right as she is today.

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Photo (cc) by Robert Nunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Merry Christmas, Charlie Baker

The Boston Globe reports today that state Treasurer Tim Cahill may spend close to $1 million on private lawyers to defend himself and an associate against charges alleging favoritism at the Lottery. Yet the conflict of interest that kept Attorney General Martha Coakley from taking the case at a much lower cost no longer exists.

The story, by Frank Phillips and my Northeastern University colleague Walter Robinson, takes some pains to play down the charges themselves. But this is very bad news for Cahill, who’s running for governor next year as an independent.

It’s also bad news for Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, whose best insurance for re-election is a strong enough Cahill candidacy to split the anti-Patrick vote with Republican challenger Charlie Baker.

Further thoughts from the Outraged Liberal.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (V)

The series explained.

Maple syrup, a New England staple since Colonial times, may become an exotic import as a result of global warming. Sap production from sugar maples is dependent on warm days and freezing nights. But climate change has been accompanied by earlier and earlier springs — and a smaller window for producing maple syrup.

Back as 2004, the Associated Press reported on this trend as documented by the Clark Sugar House in Acworth, N.H., in business since 1896. According to Clark family records, sugar maples were never tapped before March until the mid-1980s. Then, as spring began arriving earlier each year, the timetable was moved back to February.

Three years later the New York Times checked in with Vermont maple-sugar farmers, including Burr Morse, who said he’d missed out on at least 300 gallons of sap because even February had proven to be too late.

“You might be tempted to say, well that’s a bunch of baloney — global warming,” Morse told the Times. “But the way I feel, we get too much warm. How many winters are we going to go with Decembers turning into short-sleeve weather, before the maple trees say, ‘I don’t like it here any more?’ ”

Indeed, according to the Times, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that winter temperatures in the Northeast had risen by 2.8 degrees between 1971 and 2007. The Times story also finds that though the main effect of global warming now is that maple-sugar season takes place earlier in season, eventually sugar maples will be crowded out by trees more suited to a warmer climate.* The New England Climate Coalition has posted state-by-state data here.

Quebec already dominates the maple-syrup industry. If present trends continue — and there’s no reason to think they won’t — then New England’s maple-sugar farms could soon be reduced to museums. Or Wal-Marts.

*Sentence added for clarity.

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Photo (cc) by Melissa and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Coakley’s “other Kennedy” calculation

It’s hardly unusual when a prohibitive frontrunner says that independent candidates should be included in debates. The tactic can be an effective way of marginalizing the principal challenger.

In Martha Coakley’s case, though, I wonder if something else might be in play. It’s possible that she wants to be sure voters won’t walk into the booth on Jan. 19, be confronted with the name Joe Kennedy for the first time — and come to the wrong conclusion.

Tom Oliphant reviews Kennedy memoir

Retired Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant’s closeness to the late senator Ted Kennedy may have deprived him of the ability to consider Kennedy dispassionately or skeptically. But he did have insights into Kennedy’s character and thinking that were rare for a journalist to attain.

So I highly recommend Oliphant’s review of Kennedy’s posthumous memoir, “True Compass,” which appears in a new quarterly journal called Democracy. According to Oliphant, Kennedy’s personal tone, his serious consideration of Catholic social-justice ideas and his remorse over his personal failings come through in ways that were rarely heard outside the circle of his family and close friends. Oliphant writes:

Introspection was never a Kennedy strength or habit, but “True Compass” has surprised and astonished those who knew him well. That includes me, a baby reporter in the late 1960s gleefully sucked into the vortex of Kennedy’s involvement in all the burning issues of his time. I dealt with him for 40 years in a happy evolution from quasi-student to willing accomplice on scores of causes (some hopeless, many successful) to something more personal; my real bias is that I never stopped being stunned by his work ethic, his relentlessness and diligence, not to mention his kindness.

Above all, Oliphant invokes a time when Kennedy was part of a better Senate — less ideological, less money-driven than today’s circus. Sadly, it makes you realize that if it seems Kennedy’s likely successor, Martha Coakley, may be unable to fill his shoes, neither could a young Ted Kennedy himself, given how the institution has diminished in stature and seriousness.

Photo (cc) by the BBC World Service and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

What to do about the other Joe Kennedy

With the primaries for the U.S. Senate now behind us, I’m starting to hear rumblings about a third candidate in the race — Joe Kennedy. No, he’s not the former congressman. Rather, he’s an independent who says his views “are closely aligned with the Libertarian Party.”

Thus the media’s perpetual dilemma. Do they cover someone who poses absolutely no threat either to Democratic candidate Martha Coakley or Republican Scott Brown? Or do they ignore him and face accusations of bias in favor of the two major parties?

Such matters should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Kennedy did have to get 10,000 signatures, just like Coakley and Brown. But the majors had to test themselves in contested primaries. Kennedy, by contrast, automatically won a spot on the ballot. It hardly seems right to put him on an equal footing.

I’d also draw a contrast between Kennedy’s candidacy and those of past longshot candidates who represented actual political parties. In recent years, the Green and Libertarian parties have briefly enjoyed major-party status thanks to the appeal of strong candidates like Jill Stein and Carla Howell, respectively. In situations like those, attention must be paid. But Kennedy is not a third-party candidate; he’s a no-party candidate.

Kennedy deserves some coverage, but certainly not equal coverage. And I’d invite him to the first televised debate. If he registers in subsequent poll results and can raise some money, then he’ll deserve to be taken seriously. If not, then the media shouldn’t be blamed for focusing on candidates who actually have some chance of winning.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (IV)

The series explained.

Carbon dioxide is killing the world’s coral reefs in two distinctly different ways. Indirectly, the human-caused build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere has led to global warming, which pushes these fragile ecosystems outside the narrow range of temperatures in which they can thrive.

In 2006, National Geographic put it this way: “Small but prolonged rises in sea temperature force coral colonies to expel their symbiotic, food-producing algae, a process known as bleaching.”

But CO2 kills the reefs directly, too. Because much of what doesn’t end up in the atmosphere is sequestered in the ocean, where it turns the water more acidic. As the Christian Science Monitor reported yesterday, Jeffrey Short, a scientist and environmentalist, told delegates at the Copenhagen conference on global warming that carbon-dioxide emissions should be drastically cut even in the unlikely event that they are not contributing to global warming.

Damage to the coral reefs, the nearest of which are off the coast of Florida, is not theoretical. They are already dead and dying, and some experts believe there’s little chance of their bouncing back. (The Miami Herald reported in 2006 that 90 percent of the reefs in that area had already died.) The reefs are important breeding grounds for fish. According to a study conducted several years ago, National Geographic reports, “fish diversity has tumbled by half in some areas.”

A particularly catastophic event took place in 1998, when a strong El Niño season led to devastating ocean warming. Yes, such natural occurrences show that there are limits to what humans can accomplish. But it also dramatized the effects of long-term, human-caused warming.

As David Adam wrote in the Guardian three months ago:

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

All this during a week when the World Meteorological Organization reported that the current decade appears to be the warmest on record — warmer than the 1990s, which in turn was warmer than the 1980s. The New York Times reports that the study “largely meshes with an interim analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States.”

Which brings me back to 1998. Global-warming skeptics such as syndicated columnist George Will are fond of saying that the earth has been cooling since 1998. Essentially what Will and others are doing is pointing to an unusual El Niño year and using it as their baseline. They’re playing a dishonest game, and the new studies make that clear.

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Photo by Sarah Olmstead (a.k.a. Queen Esoterica) and published here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

A desultory race for a storied seat

Coakley speaks with reporters following her victory rally Tuesday night at the Sheraton Boston. Click on image for more photos.

In my latest for the Guardian (whose technical difficulties prevented this from being posted earlier), I write that the only surprising aspect of the U.S. Senate race to succeed the late Ted Kennedy was how little interest the voters demonstrated.

That’s not likely to change with state Attorney General Martha Coakley now slated to face off against state Sen. Scott Brown in the final election.

Tweeting tonight’s primary returns

I’m writing about the Massachusetts Senate race for tomorrow’s Guardian, so I’ll be heading over to Martha Coakley headquarters in a bit. If I get a chance, I may try to hit Michael Capuano’s event as well.

I may also try to post a few field reports to my Twitter feed, complete with blurry cell-phone photos. You won’t want to miss those!