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The Senate’s abandonment of climate legislation, confirmed last night, is not a victory of Republicans over Democrats, business over government, skeptics over believers. It’s a failure of capitalism, above all, and a failure of capitalism’s apprentice: democracy.

In facing global warming, human beings have faced the unprecedented necessity–and the unprecedented possibility–of changing our collective behavior through our collective will.

We didn’t attempt to do it through imperial fiat, totalitarian dictate, One World Order — we attempted to do it through the most powerful engine of change known to modern time, and only after taking a vote.

Capitalism has marched across the last two centuries undeterred by world wars, by massive economic collapses, by the rise and fall of rival ideologies sporting massive armies toting lethal arsenals, by unimagined technological innovation, by profound shifts in what we know, what we believe, and what we can do.

Through all of this it has continued to chug along, from steam engines to microprocessors, puff puff puffing from its chimney.

What other force can chill out an overheating planet? Not only does it have the power, it has the smokestacks.

The climate bill was not anti-capitalist: it would have created a new market. It was not anti-business: it had been endorsed by every major business that would be affected by it. It was not a tax: it was an opportunity to make a new kind of profit.

It was not undemocratic: and that may have been its undoing.

It was a small-d democratic attempt to steer the power of the markets to effect global change, not in the name of any utopian ideal, unless in this cynical age survival has become the utopian ideal.

It was capitalist, democratic, and necessary, and in America’s upper legislative body, that august chamber of powdery old rich men and women, it failed.

This failure, the one announced last night, is the failure that counts. Copenhagen failed to live up to the world’s hopes and expectations, but at the end of the meetings in Copenhagen more real possibility existed than had existed before. Real financial commitments had been made, real alliances had formed across ideologies, a real path had been charted, if only roughly.

All that was needed was for the United States to step up and make a measley 17 percent reduction in its carbon output, to show the world that it could harness the power that had created this problem in order to solve it.

This is the failure that counts: the failure of the United States, which has produced most of the world’s existing greenhouse gas pollution. The failure, in particular, of the United States Senate, so resistant to change it would sooner risk the climate than do anything risky.

This is the failure of individual senators like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who promised to support the bill three times and broke that promise at least that many times, in the end using BP’s oil spill disaster as an excuse to do nothing about the disaster of oil.

And this is the failure, in some way, of 99 others just like him.

The Democrats needed one Republican vote, but in the end, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, they could not find one. Those fatcat Republicans make nice scapegoats, best roasted on a spit, but a political choice was made in 57 cold Democratic hearts as well, now relieved not to have to fight this uncertain battle in an election year.

This is not a partisan failure. It’s too big for that. A scalding future will not look back on 2010 and blame the 41 Republicans in the Senate.

Those terribly uncomfortable future humans wandering their dismal, apocalyptic scorched earth, alone but for the company of cockroaches and flies, as they gather around the few remaining mud holes, will blame our era, our system, our inability to control ourselves, our inability to act at will for the common and the future good.

They will scoff at our naivete, our preposterous notion that freedom equates to handing power to a tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy eogists who couldn’t be bothered to save the planet.

They’ll blame us. “Idiots!” they’ll say. And then they’ll die. And with cockroaches in stewardship, the earth will recover.

The sun sets on the oil derrick. Image by AFP via @daylife

Don’t believe in global warming? There’s a backup disaster.

Even without the threat of climate change, economic disaster looms for businesses that fail to switch from fossil fuels to alternative energy sources, the insurance giant Lloyd’s of London warns.

“Companies which are able to plan for and take advantage of this new energy reality will increase both their resilience and competitiveness. Failure to do so could lead to expensive and potentially catastrophic consequences,” according to a white paper (pdf) prepared for Lloyd’s by Antony Froggatt and Glada Lahn, researchers at the London analysis firm Chatham House.

As the global economy recovers from recession, demand for fossil fuels will increase worldwide. At the same time, breakneck development in China, India, Brazil and South Africa will vastly increase the demand for fossil fuels in those rapidly developing nations.

And at the same time, the supply of fossil fuels will increasingly lag behind demand because of poor planning, the difficulty of reaching remaining oil supplies, and an increasingly hostile political atmosphere worldwide.

The increasingly hostile atmosphere derives not only from climate change but especially from the BP oil-spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

“We have entered a period of deep uncertainty in how we will source energy for power, heat and mobility, and how much we will have to pay for it,” said Lloyd’s CEO Richard Ward.

“Is this any different from the normal volatility of the oil or gas markets? Yes, it is. Today, a number of pressures are combining: constraints on ‘easy to access’ oil; the environmental and political urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions; and a sharp rise in energy demand from the Asian economies, particularly China.

“All of this means that the current generation of business leaders – and their successors – are going to have to find a new energy paradigm.”

The cost of oil could pass $200 per barrel in coming years, Ward said. Meanwhile, alternative energy will require a $26 trillion investment by 2030, he said. That’s ten times the size of the 2010 U.S. federal budget.

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Safe to say, nothing is so bad that a hurricane can’t make worse. Take an existing problem, toss it around in the wind and smack it with flying debris – it’s certainly not going to improve. Shoddy construction is made worse, communication concerns – made worse, a struggling economy – made worse, disastrous Bush presidency – made worse. And now the wonders of deregulation – the BP Oil Spill – the worst environmental disaster in the history of the U.S. – found itself in the pathway of early riser Alex, the first official hurricane of this season.

Alex shut down drilling and clean-up efforts for a few days until it made landfall in Monterrey, Mexico, missing the marshes of Louisiana. Rain instead has plagued the region. The BP Oil Spill is already a current-carried glob of doom. It’s a mass of toxic sludge submerged in the Northern Hemisphere’s hotbed of hurricanes. As usual, we are at the mercy of the winds. We are the subjects of the impending season of storms that rip through our Gulf Coast every year.

In 2007 during a cable interview, Senator Barbara Boxer said, ”One of the very important national security threats we face is climate change.” Warmer waters in the Gulf will promise more hurricanes. Oceans will rise from the melting of glaciers. Heat waves will kill crops and damage industries. Famine, floods, tornadoes, drought, violent storms, fires, tsunamis, disease and unrest? Sure, this could be a concern to the security of the nation.

Now, sacked Hewlett-Packard CEO turned California Republican Senate candidate Carly Fiorina used the Boxer clip for an attack ad. Carly, in her curious Jodie Foster accent, said in the spot, “Terrorism kills and Barbara Boxer is worried about the weather.”

Then the self-proclaimed fringe to the “lamestream media” and fraction-of-a-term governor Sarah Palin chimed in on Twitter, “BarbBoxer sez ’greatest security threat’ is WEATHER. Not nukes, or unsustainable debt leading 2 insolvency? Silly Senator, glad theres competition.” [Spaces added.]

Palin is like a militant reformed smoker – she quit her job as governor and now has contempt for all who continue the habit of public service. Silly Senator, keeping oaths are for chumps.

Okay, first off: the “weather” is not the “climate.” The difference between weather and climate is length of time. Weather is the immediate information – climate is the big picture. So it’s like trying to discuss a concern about a decade and Carly Fiorina says you’re worrying about an hour. This is why climate change deniers disagree with scientists – they’re not using the same measurements. If you believed miles were inches, you’d think you were being lied to by eggheads all the time too.

Our climate is changing. And yes, WEATHER is also something which warrants worry: In the last ten years, there were more Americans who died from extreme weather than there were U.S. soldiers who died in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars combined. According to the National Weather Service, during the last decade 5,754 people have died due to weather events such as extreme temperatures, flooding and hurricanes. Compare that death toll with the 5,521 soldiers killed in the two wars we’ve waged since 2001. Truth be told, to date there have been more U.S. lives lost as a result of Hurricane Katrina (estimated 1,800) than there have been U.S. soldiers killed in the war in Afghanistan (1,125).

And as far as Fiorina’s focus on terrorism killing – well, an average of 42 Americans die from being struck by lightning every year. As opposed to – well, almost none from terrorist attacks on U.S. soil since 9/11.

Here’s the problem with the Politics of Fear and Confusion: it confuses what to fear. Is terrorism still a threat? Sure. Should we pursue the elimination of terrorism while ignoring all other concerns because it makes politicians seem tough? No – at least not anymore.

This week the National Weather Service issued an excessive heat advisory for the Northeast. Forecasters predict prolonged temperatures exceeding 102 degrees could wreak havoc in cities like New York, D.C. and Philadelphia. Several have already died from the heat. In 1980 during a similar heat wave was responsible for 1,250 deaths.

Why? Because weather kills.

How’s that “worried about the weather-y” thing workin’ for ya?

From the New York Times:

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources. [emphasis added.]

From The Simpsons episode “Much Apu About Nothing“:

Crowd: Down with taxes! Down with taxes!
Mayor Quimby: Are these morons getting dumber or just louder?
Aide: Dumber, sir. They won’t give up the bear patrol, but they won’t pay the tax for it either. [emphasis added.]

Nothing has to be added here, other than to reiterate that when The Simpsons is in the zone there has never been a better TV show.

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KISUMU, Kenya—The rainy season in East Africa is also the malaria season.

Rain water collects in puddles and old tires and gutters. It also accumulates in discarded tin cans and in the folds of plastic shopping bags in garbage heaps. Malarial mosquitoes lay their eggs in the stagnant water and pretty soon you have killer mosquitoes hatching.

Around the world more than 800,000 people die every year from malaria, mostly young children. More than 90 percent of the deaths are in Africa, and Kenya is among a handful of African countries where the disease is at its worst.

The red clay flatlands and hills here in western Kenya, around Lake Victoria and the hard-scrabble city of Kisumu, lie in the worst part of a bad malaria zone – ground zero in Kenya. “There’s a very high chance of getting malaria here,” said Tom Guda, a Kenyan researcher at the International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology in the nearby lake shore town of Mbita.

Western Kenya is an ideal place to study malaria and American and Kenyan researchers have been working together here for years at a joint laboratory of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Kenya Medical Research Institute. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the main research institutes in the United States for malaria and other infectious diseases, began nearly 70 years ago as an important player in the ultimate elimination of malaria in the United States.

In the last few years malaria has caught the imagination of Hollywood entertainers, government leaders around the world, gazillionaires and ordinary people. Lots of money has been raised. The World Health Organization estimates that $1.7 billion was available for malaria in 2009, double the amount just three years earlier. The American Idol television show, alone, raised $9 million for the organization Malaria No More during a single charity broadcast, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put more than $168 million into overcoming the disease.

This may be a time of great progress against malaria. But it is hard to be sure. The latest data compiled by the World Health Organization shows little change in recent years: 863,000 deaths and 243 million cases of malaria reported in 2008 compared with 881,000 deaths and 247 million infections two years earlier. But experts say that record-keeping on malaria is poor and that the numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Much of the malaria money is going into buying and handing out mosquito nets saturated with insect repellant–at $10 each– and to spraying insecticide on the inside walls of houses. And it may be paying off.

“We know that sleeping under insect nets is effective and we know that the number of people sleeping under nets is increasing rapidly,” said Dr. Matthew Lynch, the director of the Global Program on Malaria at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore in an interview.

Richard Tren, the director of Africa Fighting Malaria, a small organization with offices in Durban, South Africa and in Washington, told me that “progress in some places is phenomenal.” But, he added, “there are a lot of other places where things are not working.”

The World Health Organization says it believes there have been big gains against malaria in some small countries, including Rwanda and Zambia and on the island of Zanzibar off East Africa. But it is urging that anti-malaria efforts be concentrated more on bigger countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, where malaria is rampant and where the situation has either gotten worse or not changed much.

At the Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology on Lake Victoria, Mr. Guda said that malaria infections and deaths are increasing in western Kenya.

“People are getting bed nets but it is still rising,” Mr. Guda told me one sweltering afternoon at his center. One reason, he said, is that “people are not using the nets properly.”

In the one-room huts that are home to many people here, Mr. Guda said, there is one bed. “The big people sleep in the bed,” with the net, he said. “The children sleep on the floor.”

Dr. Laurence Slutsker is the chief of the malaria branch at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Ga. Dr. Slutsker, who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention laboratories in western Kenya for five years and still watches the area closely, said that after dropping sharply over the last 15 years, infections in children around here have begun to rise. Two years ago, 30 percent of those under five had malaria parasites in their blood. The latest samplings, he said, showed 40 percent were infected. Not a good sign.

The big picture on malaria around the world? “I think it’s getting better in some places,” Dr. Slutsker said in an interview. “I think it’s basically the same in other places. We talk about our success, which is good. But there’s a lot of work that needs to be done.” #

Senator Lisa Murkowski R-Alaska. Image by Getty Images via @daylife

UPDATED with tally of Gulf Coast senators.

If you want to know why the United States has failed to act on climate change–a political failure that could precipiate a larger political failure for the world–here’s one answer: Evan Bayh of Indiana, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

Those are the six Senate Democrats who voted with Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski this afternoon in a failed effort to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its power to regulate greenhouse gas pollution. Murkowski enjoyed the support of all her fellow Republicans in the resolution, which went down 47-53 (roll call).

Independent Joe Lieberman voted with the majority to defeat the resolution.

The vote might have been closer, but North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, who has come out against a carbon cap in the past, has been liberated by his pending retirement to support climate legislation with little fear of reprisal from North Dakota’s powerful coal interests. However, pending retirement worked the opposite way for Evan Bayh, from coal-dependent Indiana, who voted for the resolution.

Federal action on climate change has been stalled in the Senate, where Democrats were unable to bring a climate bill to the floor even when they held a 60-vote Senate supermajority. The crucial hinge has always been those Senate Democrats obstructing their own party’s efforts in order to shield the oil and coal industries from increased regulation and the prospect of eventual obsolescence.

So tenacious is the grip of oil on the Senate that all but one of the Senators from the Gulf states threatened by the BP oil spill–Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi Alabama, and Florida–voted with Murkowski, a vote to preserve the economy’s dependence on carbon-heavy fossil fuels. Florida’s Bill Nelson, a Democrat, was the lone no vote.

This has been Murkowski’s second attempt to strip regulatory power from the EPA. Her first fell short in September.

The EPA has the power to implement a carbon cap and trade program under the Clean Air Act–an authority given it by Congress and affirmed by the Supreme Court–but it has held that power in reserve in favor of legislation action. If EPA acts on its own, its regulation would likely be held up by lawsuits.

You know what, before we even get all the way into Graham’s position (sexy!), it’s worth remembering that Americans are actually losing belief in Climate Change science.  I haven’t seen any polls taken since the BP oil spill, but, generally speaking, shoddy journalism and massive campaigning by Climate Change deniers is having an effect.  That, coupled with the fact that the House already passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill — which is only good until January 2011, the end of the current Congressional session — make it more important than ever to pass some kind of climate legislation in the Senate.

After spending much of this year helping draft a climate bill with Sad John Kerry and Sour Patch Kid Joe Lieberman, Graham announced yesterday that he will be voting against his own bill.  Then, yesterday, he got all “well no one really knows anything, right, when you think about it” at a press conference with Dicky Lugar.  Oh, and Graham also said he’d be supporting Lugar’s engery bill, which doesn’t contain any provisions for capping carbon emissions.  If it all sounds confusing, well, welcome to the party, drinks are in the corner.

Passing it off to Shepard now, for the finger roll.

Reporters asked Graham several times about why he was supporting Lugar’s bill, when just a few months ago he had argued that the Senate shouldn’t pass a “half-assed” bill that lacked hard restrictions on carbon emissions. Graham replied that he now doesn’t think pricing carbon is that important. “The science about global warming has changed,” he noted, offhandedly. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question,” Graham told reporters.

So, so, so, Graham doesn’t believe in the science behind the bill he was writing.  Ha.  We went on to give what Shepard referred to as a “humdinger” of an explanation of his belief about Climate Change.

It’s not a stretch to say that what goes into the air is contributing to global warming, but I don’t want to be in the camp that says I know people in Northern Virginia will never see snow. At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not.

He goes on, and it isn’t pretty.  Here’s that Shepard link again, for the full response.

Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind, admires a car. (AP Photo/Luis M. Alvarez via Daylife)

It comes in pretty green wrapping. Sen. Richard Lugar’s “Practical Energy and Climate Plan” calls for increased energy efficiency in buildings and industry, increased vehicle efficiency, more choices in automotive fuels and more diverse domestic energy sources, all in the name of reduced dependence on foreign oil. The wrapper is pretty enough to sway The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein:

The upside of this bill is obvious: We start the process of reducing our carbon emissions. Things like efficiency improvements and clean-energy incentives can be done now, and a price on carbon will simply have to wait until there’s more public support for it. The downside is also obvious: Congress gets to pretend that it “did” climate change, when it hasn’t, in fact, done nearly enough. Right now, I’m leaning toward support, though I’m open to arguments from both sides.

But beneath the pretty green wrapper is expanded oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf and a decade of amnesty for the nation’s oldest and most toxic coal-burning power plants.

“This is a dirty scam and deserves to be exposed as such,” Frank O’Donnell of Clean Air Watch said in an email. “It was obviously cooked up by some of the big power companies – both coal-heavy Duke and American Electric Power operate in Indiana. These companies have been evading pollution cleanup for many years. This seems to be their latest gambit. Lugar in effect is offering an amnesty for polluters plan. This would be a gift to some of the biggest corporate polluters in America.”

Lugar (R-Ind.) revealed his plan (pdf here) yesterday, less than a week after the Environmental Protection Agency released new standards on sulfur dioxide emissions designed to reduce sickness and death caused by air pollution. The standards would require older coal power plants, which have so far evaded regulation, to clean up their emissions.

Lugar would offer the plants what O’Donnell calls “amnesty” in return for what Lugar calls a “voluntary retirement program.” Lugar’s plan does not mandate retirement, so the powerful energy companies would enjoy another 10 years of exemption from regulation, and nothing that’s yet been put in writing would prevent them from seeking further extensions during that decade.

Lugar said his plan would reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil by 1.75 billion barrels over the next 20 years. Most of that savings would come from energy efficiency, he said, but 11 percent would derive from increased oil drilling on the Outer Continental Shelf.

“The legislation contains no specific provisions to enhance outer-continental shelf oil production,” Lugar said. “The primary driver of increased OCS production will be increased oil prices.”

Why would oil prices increase if the nation is reducing demand for oil through increased efficiency and development of alternative fuels? Nothing in his plan would restrict far greater expansion of offshore drilling or, for that matter, increased dependence on foreign oil. Nor would it restrict carbon pollution.

Lugar claims the plan would “cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent over business as usual” by 2030. If that achievement came to pass it would amount to only about half the short-term savings President Obama committed the U.S. to achieving during the Copenhagen Climate Talks–a 17 percent reduction by 2020 already criticized the world over as inadequate.

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FORT LAUDERDALE—Summer time. Hurricanes. This year, with a very busy hurricane season coming up – according to government and university experts—the National Weather Service wants to set a few things straight.

For nearly 40 years, government forecasters have been describing hurricanes in the dispassionate, clinical terms of engineers and meteorologists.

Now the forecasters have rewritten the guidelines on hurricanes to make the impact of high winds more vivid. And they may end up scaring the daylights out of people.

The forecasters have thrown away terms like minimal, moderate and extensive damage and now starkly warn that even the most modest hurricanes can savagely dismantle mobile homes, shatter windows, rip off roofs, kill and maim. The most severe storms, the new guidelines say, are very likely to leave parts of towns and cities “uninhabitable for weeks or months.”

You already knew hurricanes were bad. But you have never heard it so clearly from weather central. Now the forecasters are saying, enough with restraint, enough with ambiguity. Let’s try telling it like it is.

“This might scare people,” said Bill Proenza, the regional director for the southern United States for the National Weather Service. But, most of all, he said, it might motivate them to put up shutters, tie down lawn furniture and show a little respect for even the lowly Category 1 hurricane which, with winds as low as 74 miles an hour, has done its share of killing and wrecking. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was a Category 1 when it sliced across Florida in 2005 and it wreaked $1 billion in damage.

This could be a terrible hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that up to 14 hurricanes could develop during the six-six month season from June 1 to Nov. 30 and that as many as seven of them could become major storms. A big hurricane could spread the BP oil spill across a wider swath of the Gulf of Mexico. Federal Emergency Management officials say that as little as several days of heavy rain on the periphery of a hurricane could create a new disaster for the one million Haitians still living in tents after the earthquake in January.

The forecasters worry that the tens of millions of Americans living in the hurricane zone, mostly along the southern coasts, may not be taking hurricanes seriously. One reason more than 1,800 people died in Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi, storm experts say, was that many shrugged when they should have been boarding up their homes and heading for higher ground. The awful memories of Hurricane Katrina may be fading, the forecasters say, especially after last hurricane season when not a single powerful storm made landfall in the United States.

“Complacency is always a problem,” Mr. Proenza said in an interview here during a break in the annual Florida Governor’s Hurricane Conference in late May.

People who are newly arrived in the hurricane zone, those who have been on the fringes of big storms and others who have lived all their lives along the coasts, but never endured a hurricane, are the most likely to ignore storm warnings and end up in trouble, the experts say.  “They really don’t comprehend the full potential impact of a hurricane,” Mr. Proenza said.

So after nearly 40 years of referring to hurricanes in low-key generalities, the weather service has decided to try something new. “We wanted to provide a realistic portrait of what winds can do,” said Chris Landsea, the Science and Operations officer at the National Hurricane Center near Miami. Mr. Landsea led a team of experts who rewrote what used to be known as “The Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale.” The guidelines are published on Internet sites around the world, distributed by emergency managers and referred to by journalists in their reports. The new guidelines were issued without fanfare in March and revisions were being made well into May.

The new name for the government guide that describes the five categories of hurricanes is “The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.” Hard to see the difference? One big feature of the new guidelines is what you can’t see.

The whole project got started because complaints had been growing, both among experts and among ordinary Americans, that “The Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Scale” was misleading on storm surge, the wall of water that often slams ashore in a hurricane with the force of a bulldozer and that over the years has killed many more people than wind.

According to Saffir/Simpson, which was introduced in 1972, A Category 3 hurricane with winds of up to 130 miles an hour should create a storm surge of up to 12 feet. Katrina came ashore in Louisiana and Mississippi as a Category 3 hurricane and was pushing a wall of water nearly 30 feet high. Three years later, Hurricane Ike hit the Texas coast as a Category 2 hurricane with a 20-foot-high storm surge, more than three times greater than anticipated by Saffir/Simpson.

The forecasters’ solution was to yank the information on storm surge from Saffir/Simpson. So it is no longer a hurricane scale with guidance on both wind and storm surge. The new Saffir/Simpson deals only with wind, hence the new name, “The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.” Now, on storm surge, the forecasters are going to be creating tailor-made estimates for each hurricane as it develops, working with a wide range of variables including one of the most important, the shallowness of offshore waters. The shallower the water, the bigger the storm surge.

Forecasters have routinely warned in commentaries that Category 1 hurricanes should not be disregarded and they have been offering their own calculations on storm surge. But their remarks and calculations have been contradicted by storm descriptions in official documents.

Strictly speaking, hurricane experts say, the descriptions were not wrong. But they were not clear either. “The winds in a Category 1 hurricane are about the same as the winds in a severe thunderstorm, a little higher,’’ Bill Read, the director of the National Hurricane Center told me. So in a sense you could say, as the old Saffir/Simpson did, that the winds might cause minimal damage. “But,” Mr. Read said, “the thunderstorm winds might last for one to 15 minutes. The same winds in a Category 1 hurricane last for hours and can have a tremendous impact.” #

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

In the worsening midst of the worst oil disaster in U.S. history, Sen. Lindsey Graham said last night that the climate bill he helped author does not allow enough new drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s why he won’t support it.

The South Carolina Republican told Reuters last night that the bill’s other two sponsors, Democrat John Kerry and Independent Joe Lieberman, had “greatly compromised” the bill’s original plans to expand offshore oil drilling in the eastern Gulf.

“You’ll never get my vote,” he said, without more allowances for fossil fuel extraction.

Graham was once described as the bill’s lone Republican vote, but that label dissolved throughout the first half of the year as he withdrew support for the bill three times between the announcement of his sponsorship and the release of the bill May 12.

His intermittent support was nonetheless more Republican support than a prior climate bill had enjoyed. It passed the Environment and Public Works Committee over a Republican boycott but did not have enough support to reach the Senate floor.

It was in return for the support of Graham, Lieberman, and conservative Democrats that President Obama made his portentous decision in late March to allow an expansion of offshore oil drilling. The Deepwater Horizon accident occurred three weeks later, on April 20.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill also includes concessions to the nuclear and coal industries that Kerry traded for enough conservative votes to pass the Senate.

The climate bill would create a carbon trading market designed to shift the U.S. economy off of fossil fuels and onto renewable energy sources. The bill would strive to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17 percent by 2020–the meager promise Obama offered the world in Copenhagen–and up to 83 percent by 2050.

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• Lindsey Graham withdraws support for climate bill, take three (trueslant.com)
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KIBERA , Kenya —The government clinic gets a shipment of water purification tablets every three or four months. In a week or two the tablets are gone. And then the people here in this rambling slum on the edge of Nairobi are on their own.

So how bad is that? This is one of those places around the world where the water can make you very sick. But, just like a lot of other places, it doesn’t always make you sick. Many people are convinced that the water is fine, or almost fine. People take the purification tablets because they are free. They don’t routinely use them, just like they don’t routinely boil their water. Most people in Kibera don’t have toilets and that adds to health problems.

The worn,  reddish clay hills of Kibera are packed with tin-roofed shanties. The stench of sewage is strong in the air . Little clouds of smoke from charcoal cooking fires and burning garbage st ing the eyes. The slum is a microcosm of horrible conditions in much of the developing world . The United Nations estimate s that more than a billion people in places like Kibera – and places that are not nearly so extreme – don’t have consistently safe drinking water piped into their homes or within easy walking distance. Perhaps 2.5 billion people don’t have toilets. This adds up to a lot of sickness and about two million deaths every year. Over the last decade or so the situation has improved only slightly and it may very well get worse as the world population relentlessly rises.

Governments in many developing countries pay very little attention to clean drinking water and toilets and I could see from conversations in Kibera that there is little or no demand for improvement from many people living withiffy-water and unspeakable sanitary conditions. They don’t see a problem with their water. Some non-governmental organizations put a lot of energy into water and sanitation. But the going is tough.

In Kibera I sat on a railroad bridge with two men in their 30s who said they work from time to time as laborers in Nairobi . They said they were never sick because of the water. Just about everyone I spoke with said the same thing. Dolith Okello has set up a sports bar with four television screens in a three-room shack that she calls the Miami Inn Café. Ms. Okello, who roots for a British soccer team and speaks colloquial English, s aid the water never made her sick either.

“We don’t boil our water and we don’t get sick,” she told me. “There are diarrhea outbreaks, but they’re not related to the water . It’s because we don’t have proper latrines and we don’t have proper garbage disposal. ”

She thought a little more about water having nothing to do with diarrhea in Kibera and added: “ That’s 75 percent no and 25 percent maybe. ”

At the hot, dusty government clinic, Joyce Omune, a registered nurse who is in charge, said most of the patients are very young children. “Number one on the list” of problems,” she said, “is diarrheal diseases.” There are five other nurses, two of them registered nurses, and no doctors. There is no electricity. The paint is peeling. Each morning about 60 children are brought in with diarrhea, Ms. Omune said. One day like that would be a crisis in the United States and Europe.

Dr. Onesmo K. Ole-MoiYoi, a Kenya n graduate of Harvard University and an expert on disease in East Africa, said the problem in Kibera w as almost certainly a result of “drinking contaminated water.” Malnutrition, he said, makes children more susceptible. In turn, frequent diarrhea contributes to malnutrition, said Dr. Linda K. Ethangatta, a former United Nations nutritionist .

Some treated municipal water lines flow into Kibera , but the pipes are corroded and sewage seeps in. Middlemen routinely intercept the water and sell it. P eople end up with just enough to get by. They don’t wash their hands often en o ugh. There is garbage and filth everywhere. Flies dip into open sewers, then dance on fish and chunks of meat sizzling in open pots.

During surges of diarrhea, Ms. Omune said , people ask for purification tablets. “But when things settle down,” she said, “they go back to their old routine of just using the water the way it is.”

Ms. Omune said several non-governmental organizations had conducted campaigns to help people understand the bad things that can happen with drinking water . But there is still a lot of work to do here and around the world. And most of it is not getting done. #

Good grief. Good freaking grief.

C-SPAN has video of this theater of the absurd. I haven’t been able to psych myself up to watch it yet.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell as Marie Antoinette. Photo Illustration by Marge Collins.

Flocks of environmentalists and economists will alight in Vancouver this evening for a weekend of striving toward a more sensible capitalism.

The De-Growth conference hopes to achieve a “viable economic, social and ecological system” that’s kinder to both workers and to the earth, but these are no Molotov-hurling Bolsheviks. They’re just looking for sustainable capitalism.

That means shrinking the economies of the developed world. Which will be hard to do. In a political campaign, that’s not a platform to stand on, it’s a plank to walk.

And I wonder whether we have the power to engineer the economy quite that radically. It may only have the power to engineer us.

A favorite bloody example is that messiness in 18th Century Europe, when aristocrats were losing their heads. It might have seemed as if people were ecstatic with notions of liberté, egalité, fraternité, but those also just happened to be values the economy needed to expel the last vestiges of feudalism and get the capitalist orgy underway.

You can’t have the fishmonger’s son growing up believing he’s destined to become a fishmonger, not when there are jobs opening in new factories, in whole new industries. Whose destiny would it be to operate the steam engine? The nuclear power plant? The silicon chipmaker?

And so democracy became all the rage, along with its values–the liberty to work in a factory instead of a fishmarket, the equality to be replaced by another worker the day you depart, the fraternity to take your lumps until 5 and show up again at 8.

The economic system fueled the ideas, according to this venerable argument, not the other way around.

You see what I’m getting at, don’t you–just as feudalism proved too inflexible for industrialization, capitalism appears too inflexible for sustainability. And sustainability increasingly appears necessary for survival. Democracy and capitalism get along famously well, as America has demonstrated, and nothing can stop them.

Except the planet.

It’s the developed democracies of the New World, those built from scratch on capitalism, that are having the most difficulty adapting to climate change.

You know what’s been happening in the United States: we’re going nowhere. Canada has said it’ll do whatever the U.S. does, perhaps confident that the U.S. will never do anything. Yesterday, Australia reneged on its promise to reduce emissions a measly 5 percent, putting off any action until at least 2012.

Totalitarian China and socialist Europe have been making more significant strides, but China in particular is careful not to make any sudden moves that might disrupt its young romance with capitalism.

The United States has only seriously considered a capitalist solution to climate change–a carbon market–and even that monied enterprise appears impossible without huge payoffs to coal, oil, agriculture–all the dirty practices that got us into this mess.

But we can best see America’s stalemate by examining our capitalists:

The Competitive Enterprise Institute produced a documentary on climate change last year, “The Truth About Global Warming,” which argued that there’s no need to worry about climate change because people adapt to higher temperatures.

Their evidence? Temperatures have risen in U.S. cities in the last 35 years, but heat-related deaths have declined. The video quotes Patrick J. Michaels of the capitalist CATO Institute saying, “The more frequent heat waves are, the fewer people die. That’s because they adapt.”

They sure do. They adapt by turning on their air conditioners. Heat-related deaths have declined in U.S. cities since the early 1970s largely because more people have air conditioners, and secondarily because cities do a better job of rescuing people who don’t.

How do we know that? From a study conducted in 2003 at the University of Virginia by none other than Patrick J. Michaels of the CATO Institute.

Offered a dark cloud, capitalists can’t help but mine the silver from the lining.

As it gets warmer, people will buy more air conditioners! As they turn on more air conditioners, they will use more power, consume more fossil fuels, emit more greenhouse gases. As they emit more greenhouse gases, it will get warmer. As it gets warmer, people will buy more air conditioners!

It’s a win, win, win for industry…. Until the ice caps melt, the sea levels rise, the rivers dry up, farms and cities wither. But even those dark clouds have silver linings. Markets will flourish for imported water, fresh food, higher ground, as the demand for each increases.

This is just how capitalism works. It capitalizes. But we may be verging upon the moment of history when we see that it’s a finite system: not a loop but a long, dusty road to a dead end. You can make a lot of money extracting carbon from the ground and putting it into the air… until atmospheric carbon begins to threaten our survival.

The people who are trying to solve this problem are not just trying to save polar bears, they’re trying to save human beings, and by embracing carbon markets they’re trying to save capitalism. (For this they’re called socialists.) From the UN to the White House to Vancouver, people are trying to shift the forces of capitalism away from finite fossil fuels, before its too late, and unleash them on renewable energy.

I think they might fail. But I also think it’s worth a try. It’s might be our only shot.

I have more faith that the sold-out politicians in Congress can do it than the idealistic activists and academic economists presently gathering in Vancouver, precisely because those politicians are invested in capitalism. If anyone can make progress profitable, it’s the big whigs who lunch with the fat cats.

But it might be the case that no one can do it, that the economic system steers us and we only think we steer it. If so, neither can we get rid of it.

The protestors at the Copenhagen Climate Talks found themselves in an awkward position: they wanted to solve climate change, but they were bodily assaulting the only global effort to accomplish that. Their message was incoherent, their behavior reinforced the incoherence, but one prevalent theme I could discern was anti-capitalist.

In the beginning, there was Naomi Klein: “Finally we’re seeing the movement and it’s focused on these false solutions, these market based solutions–the insanity, after what we’ve just witnessed, of handing over the most pressing, challenging, horrifying crisis to the very same people that created that crisis, that gambled away people’s jobs and homes and pensions.”

At the rally, with 40,000 demonstrators gathered in the city center, there was Vandama Shiva: “The time is past for big capital to make more money. The earth must make the change. The earth must make the rules.”

Klein was in the clouds, I thought at the time, but Shiva was on to something. We might have a moment to use capitalism, the very engine of our social organization, to forestall more undesirable consequences. But if capitalism fails to adapt–and it’s failing so far–change will come whether we like it or not via the earth.

When change comes, it will bring corresponding political ideas, and we’ll embrace the emerging ideology. We’ll believe we thought of it ourselves. We’ll do its dirty work by lopping the heads off of air conditioner salesmen (in all their various forms).

But we will no more control the future in that moment than Robespierre’s Reign of Terror controlled industrialization. We’ll be the steered, not the steering.

In Vancouver this weekend, ecological economist Dave Batker will ask the question, “What’s the economy for, anyway?” And like many smart people who pose questions, he’ll have an answer:

“Using Gifford Pinchot’s idea that the economy’s purpose is ‘the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run,’ Batker compares the performance of the U.S. economy with that of other industrial countries in terms of providing a high quality of life, fairness and ecological sustainability, concluding that when you do the numbers, we come out near the bottom in nearly every category.”

Tell us something we don’t know. Like, how do we turn this supertanker around?

Treehuggers and eggheads aren’t going to shrink the world economy from the Vancouver Library. Likewise, no raggle taggle mass of protesters is going to overthrow capitalism by rallying in Copenhagen, especially when they identify themselves largely through commodity preferences–hemp clothes, folk music, natural toothpaste. No army will do it either, if the massive red armies of the Soviet Union and China failed.

But the earth can do it. The earth can do it by creating conditions warm enough to disrupt markets. And look: she’s on the march.

Lindsey Graham and John Kerry. Image by Getty Images via Daylife

With startling consistency, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) withdrew his support for the climate bill that will bear his name for a third time this weekend, and then reportedly, for a third time, reconsidered.

In mid-December Graham announced he would join Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman in crafting a tri-partisan energy bill that would begin to shift the United States away from fossil fuels. He seemed to withdraw that support before the month was over, saying the way the Democrats passed health-care reform in the House had “made it very hard for Republicans to sit down at the table with these guys.”

Graham soon clarified, promising he would continue to work on the bill. But then in March, when the Democrats advanced health-care reform in the Senate, Graham said on ABC’s This Week: “If they do this, it is going to poison the well for anything else they would like to achieve this year or thereafter.”

A week later, Graham recanted, promising the well was not so poisoned that he wouldn’t continue to work with Kerry and Lieberman on the energy bill.

With the energy bill expected to be announced Monday, Graham withdrew support for a third time on Saturday, now because of immigration reform, which Graham characterized as a cynical political ploy by Democrats to win Latino votes in the upcoming election. Kerry and Lieberman canceled the press conference they had scheduled on Monday.

But only a day later Lieberman was expressing confidence that Graham would withdraw his threat yet again:

Lieberman said Reid pledged to bring the energy bill to the full Senate as soon as possible this year. In a separate conversation, according to Lieberman, Graham reiterated his support for the energy bill once it’s no longer tangled up with immigration legislation.

“Now I’m encouraged,” Lieberman said. Asked when the energy bill might advance, he said, “Sometime soon, as soon as we can get Lindsey on board.”

via Lieberman encouraged energy bill will be on track, Associated Press.

The Energy Bill is expected to be loaded with concessions to coal, oil, and agriculture to make it more palatable to Republicans and conservative Democrats. Even if Graham were the sole Republican vote, his support would give the Democrats the 60 votes necessary to prevent a filibuster.

It’s a beautiful illustration of the power of human agency, how thousands of small individual actions have the power to overwhelm natural processes. Would be nice if we could get that working in reverse.

Anybody notice anything wrong in this graph? That’s right. It would be a lot cooler if that triangle on the right were erupting.

via James Fallows.

Image by pawpaw67 via Flickr

Over the past two decades spring has been creeping up upon winter so that now, the season arrives 10 days earlier. The warming trend has far reaching ramifications, researchers at the Union of Concerned Scientists (which is a great name for a rock band) found in a report released earlier this month.

Scientists are concerned about phenology, or the timing of seasonal activities of animals and plants, because not every species behavior corresponds positively.

One such animal species that is suffering from an expanded spring is human beings, whose allergies kick into high gear that much earlier as flowering plants awaken from their winter slumber.

A study presented in February at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology hinted at a link between higher temperatures and higher pollen levels.

More CO2 in the atmosphere is great news for ragweed, which thrives in such conditions, produces more pollen, and unleashes a torrent of sneezing. So, you see, not everyone is cheering on this year’s record breaking spring temperatures.

Evo Morales - Image via Wikipedia

The poorest country in South America, Bolivia– an indigenous majority nation– is seeking a heavyweight role on climate change.

Bolivia’s President Evo Morales already has surprised the world’s economists by leading his nation to some of the hemisphere’s best economic growth figures. Even as the rest of the global economy went south, Bolivia grew significantly in 2008 (6%) and posted good numbers for 2009, a phenomenon tracked closely by blog Inca Kola News.

Morales also has managed to exercise a muscular control (including expropriations) over the country’s lithium and natural gas resources without permanently alienating potential partners such as Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Brazil’s Petrobras state-run energy behemoth

Now, after upping its economic and energy profile, Bolivia is seeking a larger voice on climate change, and is hosting a climate summit, a kind of anti-Copenhagen, in Cochabamba. The event started yesterday and will run through most of the week. My brother, journalist Teo Ballvé has an excellent summary of the issues on the table at Cochabamba, over at The Progressive magazine. An interesting side issue he mentions is fresh water reserves:

The grassroots summit will also pay special attention to the links between climate change and increased scarcity of fresh water. Bolivia is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s tropical glaciers. In recent years, these glaciers have lost 40 percent of their mass, leading to growing strains on local water supplies.

Basically, Cochabamba is aiming to pool together poor nations’ views on climate change and related environmental impacts in order to give these countries a larger prominence in climate negotiations.

Earlier this month, the United States cut climate change assistance to Bolivia. The government of Evo Morales believes this was done in retaliation for Bolivia’s critical stance toward the Copenhagen deal, which led to nonbinding carbon targets and in the view of Bolivia, tacitly gave industrialized countries a free hand in running up their carbon output. Here’s Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations expressing that view in a strongly worded op-ed that circulated last month.

Bolivia … believed that Copenhagen marked a backwards step, undoing the work built on since the climate talks in Kyoto. That is why, against strong pressure from industrialised countries, we and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and why we are hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, we were not prepared to ‘betray our people for 30 pieces of silver’

Bolivian President Evo Morales hosts the World People's Conference on Climate Change. Image via Wikipedia

Diplomats from the 17 largest economies are meeting behind closed doors for a second day today in Washington D.C. to work out their differences on climate change. As the name suggests–the Major Economies Forum–all the major players are there: the U.S., the European Union, Japan, China, India, Brazil, South Africa…

But 4,000 miles to the south, as many as 15,000 people are expected to gather at the municipal coliseum in Tiquipaya, Bolivia, to open the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth. Many who have been excluded from the major forums will be there–not just less influential nations, but also indigenous peoples, activist groups, non-governmental organizations.

“Everybody is invited: individuals, scientific, civil society, NGOs, 192 countries. Everybody. Everybody can come to Bolivia, give their view, debate,” said Bolivian Ambassador Angelica Navarro. ”We think democracy is key. The wisdom is in the people, the wisdom is in those that are suffering or that are willing to help.

“We hope that together, those of us that were excluded can have a stronger say in the formal setting and come back and say (to governments), this is what civil society is asking. Can you deliver or not?”

On the agenda:

• An International Climate Justice Tribunal: “The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change contains no mechanisms for trying or sanctioning developed countries that fail to comply with their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, President Evo Morales has proposed the creation of an International Climate Justice Tribunal at the United Nations.”

If the proposed court were ever to be realized, it would have jurisdiction over United Nations climate change agreements, possibly other international environmental treaties, and perhaps “any serious crimes against nature.”

Likely defendants would be Canada, which ratified the Kyoto Treaty but failed to meet its requirements, and the United States, which is responsible for most of the greenhouse gas pollution currently in the atmosphere.

• A World Referendum on Climate Change: In Copenhagen, Morales proposed a worldwide referendum to ask the people how governments should respond to climate change. Delegates to the World People’s Conference will consider the proposal and the proposed yes-or-no questions, which might seem leading in their present, draft form:

1) Do you agree with reestablishing harmony with nature while recognizing the rights of the Mother Earth? YES or NO

2) Do you agree with changing this model of over-consumption and waste that represents capitalist system? YES or NO

3) Do you agree that developing countries reduce and reabsorb their domestic greenhouse gas emissions for temperature not to rise more than 1 degree Celsius? YES or NO

4) Do you agree with transferring all that is spent in wars and for allocating a budget bigger than used for defense to climate change? YES or NO

5) Do you agree with a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge those who destroy Mother Earth? YES or NO

• Climate Debt: The conference organizers contend that the developed world, which produced as much as 80 percent of the world’s current greenhouse gas pollution, owes a debt to those  less developed nations likely to bear the brunt of climate-change effects. The conferees will strive to “produce a text that systematizes and expands upon the concept of climate debt, enumerating its components, its creditors, and forms of compensation.”

These are but three of 17 topics that working groups will consider as they develop texts to present at the next major UN Climate Conference in Cancun Nov. 29.

“There will be no secret discussions behind closed doors,” Bolivia’s UN ambassador, Pablo Solon, told The Guardian. “The debate and the proposals will be led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and by organisations and individuals from civil society dedicated to tackling the climate crisis.”

The Bolivian president has taken an increasingly prominent role in challenging the dominance of the major economies, at some cost to Bolivia. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the U.S. cut off $3 million in climate-related aid to Bolivia and $2.5 million to its neighbor and ally, Ecuador.