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Tag: climate denialism
'Third-Rate Grandstander': Even Trump Wanted Massie Tossed Out Of The GOP

'Third-Rate Grandstander': Even Trump Wanted Massie Tossed Out Of The GOP

Some days, it’s the little things, the small absurdities in the news that make a person wonder if there’s any real hope for American democracy.

Consider, for example, the Christmas greeting sent out by Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, featuring the Republican congressman’s entire family—husband, wife, two daughters, and three sons—brandishing semi-automatic rifles and grinning into the camera like some latter-day Bonnie and Clyde. Or “Y’all Qaeda” as somebody derisively dubbed the happy family on Twitter.

There’s a Christmas tree in the background, and a cheery holiday message: "Merry Christmas!, ps. Santa, please bring ammo."

Ho, ho, ho!

This only a few days after a disturbed 15 year-old in Michigan murdered four high school classmates with a semi-automatic handgun that his parents gave him as an early Christmas gift.

Oh yeah, this too: Rep. Massie himself appears to be fondling an actual machine gun, presumably to let everybody know who’s the head honcho of this hardy brood of crackpots. None of whom, you can bet your own personal Colt .45, has ever heard a shot fired in anger, nor—prayerfully—ever will.

Somebody who has experienced actual combat, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), an Iraq War veteran, put it this way: "I'm pro second amendment, but this isn't supporting the right to keep and bear arms, this is a gun fetish."

My sentiments exactly. Current right-wing idolatry of firearms as totemic objects, it seems to me, signifies arrested development in those like Rep. Massie who make a spectacle of brandishing them. You can’t hunt or go target-shooting with a heavy-caliber automatic weapon. They’re useless for self-defense or for anything other than military purposes. In civilian hands, they’re essentially masturbatory. Basically codpieces.

Speaking of arrested development, you may not be astonished to learn that Rep. Massie’s Facebook page identifies him as a “Libertarian,” that is, as somebody whose intellectual development stalled at the “You’re not the boss of me” stage of early adolescence. The congressman, whose district stretches along the Ohio River in rural northern Kentucky, has made rather a specialty of solitary grandstanding.

Back in 2013, Massie was the only congressman to vote against the “Undetectable Firearms Act,” a bill to prevent non-metallic weapons from being smuggled aboard airplanes. (Or the U.S. Capitol, for that matter.) His was the only vote against the “Stolen Valor Act” punishing people falsely posing as war heroes. In 2017, he cast the lone vote against sanctioning North Korea. He’s also provided solitary votes against helping to build Israel’s “Iron Dome” missile defense system; and supporting Hong Kong’s democracy.

Trained as a mechanical engineer at MIT—just to show you—he derides climatology as “pseudoscience” and rejects all efforts to do anything about it. Regarding the Covid plague, he has argued fiercely against mask mandates. He and Marjorie Taylor Greene, to give readers an idea of the company he keeps, have sued Speaker Nancy Pelosi after being fined for refusing to wear masks on the House floor.

Like Greene, he has compared vaccination mandates to the Holocaust, trivializing the gravest crime in living memory. “There is no authority in the Constitution that authorizes the government to stick a needle in you against your will, [or] force you to wear a face mask,” he once tweeted. “Can you imagine the signers of the Declaration of Independence submitting to any of these things?!”

Better-informed critics quickly cited Constitutional Law 101: "Congress shall have power to…provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States." Others noted that in 1776, Gen. George Washington ordered his army inoculated against smallpox at Valley Forge, no exceptions. Putting down the epidemic proved decisive in the Revolutionary War.

Me, I wondered if Rep. Massie thinks laws requiring him to wear pants constitute government tyranny? Indeed, no less an authority than Donald J. Trump, irritated by a Massie ploy in June 2021, in which he demanded an in-person floor vote delaying a Covid relief bill that had passed 96-0 in the Senate, called him “a third-rate grandstander” who should be drummed out of the Republican Party. Former Sen. John Kerry commented that Massie had "tested positive for being an a**hole."

And yet, the five-term congressman endures, an experienced vaudeville performer and firm fixture in the GOP Clown Caucus, along with such worthies as Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), and noted cartoon assassin Paul Gosar (R-AZ.). Me, I’m just glad he’s not from Arkansas, where I live, although we have a couple of districts where his slack-jawed comedy stylings—filing bills to abolish the U.S. Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency, for example—would definitely play.

He’d have to make up with Trump, however, although abject flattery is all that’s really necessary to win the great man’s favor.

You’d like to think Massie’s grotesque parody of a Christmas card would finish him politically. But then you’d like to think a lot of things.

Are Americans Ready To Demand Climate Action? Is It Too Late?

Are Americans Ready To Demand Climate Action? Is It Too Late?

Even for somebody whose job it is to keep up with the news, some stories are just too upsetting. So it was with the recent release of a United Nations scientific report on biodiversity. A week after the fact, I had to force myself to go back and read the story. Headlined “Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace” in the New York Times, the 1500-page study documents nothing less than the destruction of creation as we know it.
I use the term “creation” advisedly. As a species, we are desecrating the earth, a sacrilege against any God we can imagine.  
 Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben calls the U.N. report “as depressing a document as humans have ever produced.” According to the scientists who wrote it, absent drastic, planet-wide action climate change and habitat destruction will bring about mass extinctions worldwide over coming decades. Along with severe warming, deforestation, air and water pollution, promiscuous use of pesticides, over-fishing, even widespread poaching are all contributing to the accelerating catastrophe.   
Already, the current rate of global extinction is “at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.” Absent drastic action, roughly 1 million species of plants, animals, reptiles, insects and fish will vanish from the earth forever within decades. Animals such as elephants, lions and bears will live only, if at all, in zoos. The effects on human civilization—such as it is—are unimaginable.
Think you won’t miss most insects, for example? Then who’s going to pollinate food crops that human diets depend upon?
Already, impoverished peasants worldwide are fleeing places where traditional agricultural practices have been rendered impossible. Persistent drought, for example, has ruined coffee plantations in the highlands of Guatemala: refugees are showing up at the Mexican border.
The temptation is to resignation. Or to denial, another word for despair. After all, I won’t be around decades hence to witness the worst of it. So why should I care?
In this country, one of our two major political parties has gone anti-science, indeed anti-reason in a big way. The president of the United States describes climate change as a Chinese hoax—as if a worldwide cabal of scientists from dozens of disciplines ranging from atmospheric physics to plant cell biology was even possible. To anybody with even the slightest grasp of the scientific method, such a thing can’t happen. Alas, that excludes Trump.
Historically, the blame lies mostly with the oil, natural gas and coal industries. Adopting techniques borrowed from the tobacco companies’ campaign to deny the link between cigarettes and cancer, outfits like Koch Industries have peddled climate denialism with great success.
Today’s GOP has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the fossil fuel industry. “That’s what happens,” author McKibben told the New Yorker, “when you have the biggest industry in the world all in behind the most consequential lie in human history.” 
If there’s hope, it’s that the accelerating pace of climate-driven disasters has put denialists on the defensive. Wildfires, floods and increasingly destructive hurricanes have gotten peoples’ attention. Last summer, the ironically-named city of Paradise, California was consumed by flames. The summer before, Santa Rosa burned. Where will it be this summer?
How many 500-year flood events can Houston, TX have in a three year period before much of the city becomes uninhabitable? New Orleans? Coastal Florida narrowly avoided disaster last year. Will Trump live to see the Atlantic Ocean roll across his Mar-a-Lago resort? You’d have to say the odds are favorable.
Meanwhile, atmospheric carbon dioxide passed 415 parts per million for the first time in human history. What Trump pretends to believe doesn’t matter. It’s not a matter of belief, it’s a matter of geophysics. It’s going to get hotter. Temperatures in the Arctic reached the 80s last weekend.
Polls are beginning to show an aroused populace. According to a recent CNN survey of 1,007 registered voters, fully 96 percent said it’s important that a presidential candidate propose “aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change.” Even 56 percent of Republicans in another poll agreed that government should limit carbon emissions from power plants, and levy carbon taxes.
Public attitudes, in short, are changing fast. Even faster across Europe. But can they change fast enough to bring about the kind of vast, planet-wide effort necessary to stave off a rapidly-encroaching catastrophe? Frankly, it’s hard to imagine human beings putting aside narrow self-interest and hard-wired tribal enmities for the common good. Put that way, I’d say no way.
But then last night at dusk, Jesse, my 13-year-old Great Pyrenees and I—two old duffers out walking before bedtime—encountered a red fox at the edge of a wooded thicket here in the middle of town. He paused and stared at us, impossibly beautiful, a survivor. A sign.
IMAGE: The Aletsch Glacier is pictured from the Eggishorn summit in Fiesch, Switzerland, August 22, 2015. One of Europe’s biggest glaciers, the Great Aletsch coils 23 km (14 miles) through the Swiss Alps – and yet this mighty river of ice could almost vanish in the lifetimes of people born today because of climate change. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
#EndorseThis: Al Franken Explains The Koch Brothers To David Letterman

#EndorseThis: Al Franken Explains The Koch Brothers To David Letterman

If you’re like David Letterman and still don’t know about Siegfried and Roy Koch (better known as the Koch brothers), Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) is here to explain on the second of six episodes of his Funny Or Die web series, Boiling The Frog.

You can stream all six episodes — which dropped last week — here.