Identified as a "radical centrist" by Mark Satin, Daniel C. Esty at The New York Times writes Bottom-Up Climate Fix:
Smart people in the 20th century thought we could tackle climate change with a treaty in which the world’s nations agreed to “targets and timetables” for reducing emissions. These reductions would be implemented by top-down, national mandates and government support for clean energy technologies. But 22 years after the original climate agreement, emissions continue to rise and threats of significant harm loom larger.
As one of those who, as an official at the Environmental Protection Agency, negotiated that first United Nations treaty in 1992, I believe we need to shift gears and try something new. Relying on national governments alone to deliver results is not enough, as the last two decades have shown. The real action on climate change around the world is coming from governors, mayors, corporate chief executives and community leaders. [...]
And while we’re at it, let’s shift away from the top-down way that the federal government subsidizes clean energy innovations, which relies on picking winners and assisting chosen industries and technologies. Instead, let’s promote a financing approach in which the government works to engage the private sector in delivering clean energy projects.
Doyle McManus at the
Los Angeles Times writes
In Iraq, closing the gap between Obama's goal and means:
“To promise that we're going to destroy ISIS or ISIL sets a goal that may be unattainable,” [former Secretary of Defense Robert] Gates said in a television interview last week. “By continuing to repeat that [no U.S. forces will engage in combat], the president, in effect, traps himself.”
If Plan A doesn't work, Obama will be forced to close the gap between his ambitious goals and his limited means. That means either escalating U.S. military involvement and stepping onto the slippery slope he fears, or reducing the goal to the more realistic target he incautiously proposed last month: “to shrink [Islamic State] to the point where it is a manageable problem.”
There are more pundit excerpts below the fold.
Mark Hertsgaard at The Nation writes The People’s Climate March Was Huge, but Will It Change Everything?
Many veteran activists of the climate movement expressed the same overjoyed reaction to this march as did Annie Leonard, the new executive director of Greenpeace USA, who recently returned to the organization after eighteen years away: finally, the climate movement is getting serious about building political power. “The organizing for this march looks very different than most environmental organizing twenty years ago did,” she told The Nation. “This march is led by environmental justice groups and includes nurses, farmers, labor organizers, young people and activists working on immigrant rights, economic equality and indigenous rights. The movement is more broad and inclusive than ever. If we environmentalists had done real power-building work like this twenty years ago, we wouldn’t be in this climate mess we’re in now. The window for action is closing, but a day like this gives me hope that we’ll make it.”
“Today is enormously exciting, not just the size of the march but how many young people are here,” Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said. “It shows that young people are not turned off to politics. And given the power of corporations in our country, the only way we’ll get the change we need on climate change or any other issue is if millions of people take to the streets and demand change.”
Paul Krugman at
The New York Times writes
Those Lazy Jobless:
First things first: I don’t know how many people realize just how successful the campaign against any kind of relief for those who can’t find jobs has been. But it’s a striking picture. The job market has improved lately, but there are still almost three million Americans who have been out of work for more than six months, the usual maximum duration of unemployment insurance. That’s nearly three times the pre-recession total. Yet extended benefits for the long-term unemployed have been eliminated — and in some states the duration of benefits has been slashed even further.
The result is that most of the unemployed have been cut off. Only 26 percent of jobless Americans are receiving any kind of unemployment benefit, the lowest level in many decades. The total value of unemployment benefits is less than 0.25 percent of G.D.P., half what it was in 2003, when the unemployment rate was roughly the same as it is now. It’s not hyperbole to say that America has abandoned its out-of-work citizens.
Strange to say, this outbreak of anti-compassionate conservatism hasn’t produced a job surge. In fact, the whole proposition that cruelty is the key to prosperity hasn’t been faring too well lately. Last week Nathan Deal, the Republican governor of Georgia, complained that many states with Republican governors have seen a rise in unemployment and suggested that the feds were cooking the books. But maybe the right’s preferred policies don’t work?
Naomi Klein writes
Climate Change Is a People’s Shock at
The Nation, as adapted from her book
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate:
The research I’ve done over the past five years has convinced me that climate change represents a historic opening for progressive transformation. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels so many climate scientists recommend, we have the chance to advance policies that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. Rather than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine I wrote about in my last book—a frenzy of new resource grabs and repression by the 1 percent—climate change can be a “People’s Shock,” a blow from below. It can disperse power into the hands of the many, rather than consolidating it in the hands of a few, and it can radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off in pieces. Getting to the root of why we are facing serial crises in the first place would leave us with both a more habitable climate than the one we are headed for and a far more just economy than the one we have now.
But none of this will happen if we let history’s knock go unanswered—because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. We also know how that system will deal with serial climate-related disasters: with profiteering and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. To arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on.
Shane Bauer at
Mother Jones writes
How Can The Atlantic Give Us 5,000 Words on Prison Life Without Interviewing Prisoners?
Wood, on the other hand, makes the experience of living in one of those cells sound transcendental. It is as if everyone is “on one of those interstellar journeys that span multiple human lifetimes.”
It’s hard to know where that impression came from because, in his story on prison gangs, Wood doesn’t interview prisoners. Well, that’s not completely true. He does go to the doors of several inmates’ cells—with prison staff—to ask them about prison gangs, then tells us breathlessly that almost no one would talk to him. [...]
It’s remarkable that a publication as reputable as The Atlantic would run such a thinly sourced story. Its 5,000 words are based almost entirely on four sources: an academic, the spokesperson of Pelican Bay, the warden, and the gang investigator. Wood prints their claims straight away. At the beginning of the story, for example, Wood is standing with the prison’s spokesperson, Lt. Chris Acosta, and together they are looking out onto the yard, observing prisoners and their behavior. Then he quotes Acosta saying, “There’s like 30 knives out there right now. Hidden up their rectums.”
Well hold on a second. How did Acosta know that? Did Wood verify this? How did his editor let that one slide?
Chris Hedges at
Truthdig writes
The Coming Climate Revolt:
This audience is well aware of the Democratic Party’s squalid record on the environment, laid out in detail in a new Greenpeace report written by Charlie Cray and Peter Montague, titled “The Kingpins of Carbon and Their War on Democracy.” The report chronicles what it calls “a multi-decade war on democracy by the kingpins of carbon—the coal, the oil, and gas industries allied with a handful of self-interested libertarian billionaires.”
The Obama administration, in return for financial support from these kingpins of carbon, has cynically undermined international climate treaties, a fact we discovered only because of the revelations provided by Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. It uses its intelligence agencies, these revelations revealed, to spy on those carrying out climate negotiations to thwart caps on carbon emissions and push through useless, nonbinding agreements. The Obama administration has overseen a massive expansion of fracking. It is pushing through a series of trade agreements such as the TPP and the TAFTA that will increase fracking along with expanding our exports of coal, oil and gas. It authorized the excavation of tar sands in Utah and Alabama. It approved the southern half of the Keystone pipeline. It has permitted seismic testing for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, the East Coast and in parts of Alaska, a process that kills off hundreds of sea mammals. It authorized drilling within four miles of the Florida coastline, violating one of Obama’s 2008 campaign promises. This expansion of offshore drilling reversed 20 years of federal policy.
If we appeal to self-identified liberals in the establishment who have no capacity or desire to carry out the radical reforms, we will pour energy into a black hole. And this is what the corporate state seeks. It seeks to perpetuate the facade of democracy. It seeks to make us believe what is no longer real, that if we work within the system we can reform it. And it has put in place a terrifying superstructure to silence all who step outside the narrow parameters it defines as acceptable.
Fred Guerin at
Truthout writes
The Charitable Society or "How to Avoid the Poor and Perpetuate the Wealth Gap":
A society that genuinely cares for its citizens' well-being has little need for manufactured, top-down charity because such a society builds institutions that democratically enable all citizens to participate in a shared commons, where no one need suffer the indignity of gross injustice, burdensome debt or soul-destroying poverty.
One of the most potent, propagandistic memes advanced by the corporate well-to-do in the United States today has been the projection of themselves as lovers of philanthropy and charity on behalf of the needy and less fortunate. In the past, such exercises in ersatz empathy were carried out by Henry Ford, Dale Carnegie, Howard Hughes and the robber baron John D. Rockefeller, who was infamous for throwing dimes to poor people. Today, the banner of charity is paraded by the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates, the Koch brothers, Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomberg and George Soros - all of whom are heralded and praised by the media or opportunistic politicians for their apparent generosity of spirit.
The super-wealthy of the world can undoubtedly feel good about their big-heartedness. Some might even see the private accumulation of massive wealth as morally justified, even in the face of profound inequality - that is, justified so long as they can somehow claim that their great individual wealth will inevitably "trickle down" to the have-nots. Of course, very few economists today would have the temerity to defend trickle-down economics. This is why the latter idea has to be reconfigured in more positive terms. Instead of trickle-down economics, we now have the rich speaking openly about "corporate social responsibility" and broadcasting their beneficence through charitable foundations.
E.J. Dionne at
The Washington Post writes
Republican control of Senate not a slam dunk:
The careful statistical models keep gyrating on the question of whether Republicans will win control of the Senate this November. The prognosticators who rely on their reporting and their guts as well as the numbers are sometimes at odds with the statisticians. [....]
I’ll try to practice some of the humility I’m preaching by acknowledging that I have no idea whether Republicans will take the six seats they need to control the Senate. Maybe their incessant assaults on Obama will prove to be enough. But an election that once looked to be a Republican slam dunk has even Karl Rove worried, because many voters seem to want to do more with their ballots than just slap the president in the face.
Desmond Tutu at
The Guardian We fought apartheid. Now climate change is our global enemy:
As responsible citizens of the world – sisters and brothers of one family, the human family, God's family – we have a duty to persuade our leaders to lead us in a new direction: to help us abandon our collective addiction to fossil fuels, starting this week in New York at the United Nations Climate Summit. Reducing our carbon footprint is not just a technical scientific necessity; it has also emerged as the human rights challenge of our time. While global emissions have risen unchecked, real-world impacts have taken hold in earnest. The most devastating effects of climate change – deadly storms, heat waves, droughts, rising food prices and the advent of climate refugees – are being visited on the world's poor. Those who have no involvement in creating the problem are the most affected, while those with the capacity to arrest the slide dither. Africans, who emit far less carbon than the people of any other continent, will pay the steepest price. It is a deep injustice.