Blogs / Better Planet

We like to avoid the gloom and doom around here, but this has to be said. The first presidential debate, about to get underway at Ole Miss as I write, will hopefully contain some kind of casual, glancing reference to the climate-change pollution stat that came out today.

Basically, the chemicals that contribute to global warming when released into Earth’s atmosphere got released 3% more this year than last year, making the direst predictions of 2007 look optimistic.

But why get angry yet? Maybe one of the candidates will  say something fittingly urgent in tone. Maybe Jim Lehrer will bring it up. Or I’ll have the excuse to start smoking again that I’ve been looking for.

flickr: Image/mind’s-eye

Everything that happens in congress now is assumed to bear on the crazily tight presidential race. So it makes sense that the House Dems just smashed through a compromise off-shore drilling bill, thus undermining a GOP line of attack. And it makes sense that the GOP lampooned it as a “figment of the imagination” (Rep. Don Young, Republican of Alaska).

Also predictable: Bush just vowed to veto it. Harder to predict is whether Senate Republicans will filibuster. They’ve been shouting “Drill baby drill” at conventions. Will they be able to get away with reading from a telephone book on the floor to block a bill that enables oil companies to do just that?

Image: flickr/PhillipC 

She just denied she ever denied manmade global warming. On ABC News. And got easily schooled by the press after.

I can appreciate the tragedy of her situation. She denied man-made climate change quite explicitly twice. Part of her whole thing is that she’s not a duplicitous Washington type.  And she’s an unconventionally-educated woman of the people. So why not stay with the ill-informed thing? But there’s only so far you can go in that direction with the moderate wing of her party, and with independents.

I feel like the Obama campaign’s fate will rest partly on whether they can knock Palin off her pedestal in the coming weeks. This should give them something to work with.

Image: flickr/zieak 

There is much speculation about how Obama should go after Sarah Palin. If he goes after her resume—she was mayor of a town of 7,000, then the governor of a state of 680,000—that leaves him open to the absurd but potentially effective argument that these credentials are superior to those of a senator. If he goes after her evident backwardness or unusually conservative religious beliefs, the gun/bikini photo, the never traveled anywhere thing—well, we know how the clinging to guns and religion thing went over.

It seems to me you say, she thinks the melting of arctic ice isn’t caused by humans. She thinks polar bears aren’t endangered. She doesn’t think Exxon should have to pay up. All those non-radical conservatives in Colorado, Ohio, and Nevada care about this. (See this recap of her record so far). It’s not a personal attack, and it’s not just a reiteration of the tired McCain administration = Bush administration charge.

It’s just a way of making the effects of her ignorance concrete. She’s not just a smiling hick in a bathing suit holding a gun by a pool. She’s a smiling hick in a bathing suit standing on a melting iceberg.

Image: flickr/Chesi - Fotos CC

Environmentalism needs good villains. Rather than rely on the public’s ability to blame its own high-consuming tendencies, it’s nice if we can let them point to somsebody who’s trying to kill us all. Sarah Palin is just the thing.

I mean, look at her. That is the smile of the demonically possessed. More substantively, she is typical of Alaskan Republicans in that she’s a staunch ally of big oil. She supports drilling in ANWR, and generally comes down in favor of letting energy companies run pipelines wherever they want. They in turn have contributed generously to her campaigns.

She has apparently already caused Hurricane Gustav, which, according to New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who has orchestrated a relatively orderly evacuation, looks to be a worse storm than Katrina.

Image: flickr/Thomas Roche 

PBS has an interesting story online about how evangelical Christians are starting to behave as if they’d be up for an alliance with greens.

Their national assocation has been asking churches to get their energy consumption down, quoting scripture about how you shouldn’t let anything go to waste. Since evangelicals are about a quarter of the electorate this is good news. The only reason not to get too excited is that there is one marginally green party in the US right now, and it’s the Dems. Will climate change override school prayer and gun control and gay marriage and all the other “values” issues that tend to keep evangelicals in the GOP?

The alternative, I guess, would be to hope evangelicals will help to forge a greener Republican party. But as long as said party’s funding comes from the energy industry… Well, may the Lord be with them. But, as my own, more cynical, American subculture would say, like, good luck with that.

Image: flickr/gruntzooki