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We have a local newspaper, on-line with 3-4 print editions each year which go to all households in the 4 towns in our district. We also have an excellent observer of the local landscape and wildlife who has been writing a series about his observations and adventures. His notes on the changes in our climate are detailed and stunning this year:
Back here in NH it is not just the oaks that have been hit hard by the too-early spring followed by a hard frost on May 5....The fruit trees, especially apples, were hit even harder. I cannot see a single apple on any of the trees in Epsom. The ornamental crab apples in my travels to Concord are devoid of fruit, even the ones in the city. The impact of no apples is going to affect all manner of critters this fall and winter... . When I was at my camp in Maine over the Memorial Day weekend, I read that 90 percent of the Maine apple crop is gone thanks to the too early apple blossoming followed by a hard frost. So the economic hit of climate change will devastate the orchardists. YES, climate change IS occurring right now and IS impacting wildlife and us.
Lots of charts and graphs, lots of observations, lots of FACTS. Not much help for the ideologues here, but that certainly won't stop them.
My daffodils are coming up. Our old pattern was, we were later than everyone else because we are at an elevation, warmer later in the fall, and cooler later in the spring. I think this is the earliest I have seen the green shoots.
We're diving deep into "geek world" today with a story that combines economic hardball, the periodic table of the elements, and a barely noticed provision of the Defense Authorization Act that seeks to break a monopoly which today gives China near-absolute control over the materials that make cell phones, electric cars, wind turbines, and pretty much every other tool of modern life possible.
If we successfully break the monopoly, we'll be able to create millions of new manufacturing jobs in this country-and if we don't, somebody else owns the 21st Century.
Ironically, the global warming we're trying to fight with new green technologies might be an ally in our efforts to make those very same green technologies happen.
There's a revolution in industrial processing going on, rare earths are at the center of it all...and in today's story, the revolution will be televised.
Forty years ago this week an event occurred that changed the history of mankind forever.
An event so monumental that the memory lingers on, even though the venue where the event took place has been, shall we say, "repurposed".
But we're not here to talk about the time that Minnesota Twins Manager Billy Martin appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Instead, let's talk space.
NASA is forever trying to interest the world in space exploration...and forever struggling to come up with the money to get things done.
Well, I'm not a scientist, nor an engineer, and I don't assemble rocket vehicles...but I am a fake consultant, and if NASA took my advice, I'd bet my fake paycheck that money would be a lot less of a problem.
This is not directly related to NH, except it is a topic that is near-and dear to NHGOP party chairman Sununu's heart. But it crystalizes why we cannot rest in the fight against the GOP
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Congressional Republicans held an energy summit this week, where they put forth their views on energy and global climate change, and what we need to do to deal with these issues. What's the plan? Uh, not ready for prime-time yet, but it will be an "all of the above" strategy, whatever the hell that means. One thing for sure, they want to "drill, baby, drill". And "clean coal", of course.
What they are definitely, positively, absolutely against is the Obama administration's cap-and-trade plan, which they say is "tantamount to an economic declaration of war on the Midwest by liberals in Washington". Yikes.
One could reasonably ask how a strategy that promotes more oil exploration and more use of coal will solve CO2-driven climate change. And the short, sweet answer is it won't, and the GOP is fine with that. They believe the problem isn't CO2, its cleaner air. Their "Big Ideas" spokesman, Rep. Mike Pence (R-Bible Belt) said, "While some may like to bog this debate down in the science over the manmade origins of global warming, we prefer rather to focus on - let's all move toward a horizon of cleaner air." It's as if the last 15 years of climate research, 4 UN IPCC conferences, and the vast and overwhelming evidence of climate change never happened. He and his party want to go back to the 1970's era of "let's get rid of smog". This is important.
Pence is not some hick backbench representative- he matters. He is the chair of House Republican Caucus, which sets policy and strategy for House Republicans.
John H Sununu made his now-famous quips about the fraudulent nature of global climate change at a recent conference hosted by a group called the Heartland Institute. That got my attention, because I know these guys. The Heartland Institute is an extreme right-wing lobbying operation whose self-proclaimed mission is "to promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems". It does this by sending five "news" magazines to every state legislator in the country that cover topics like health-care, tax policies, and environmental issues, all from their rather unique perspective. Anyone who has ever been a NH legislator has been cursed to receive one or more of these "news" magazines every week. To read one is to take a step into an Alice-in-Wonderland world where all action by business is good and beneficial and all government actions are destructive. Where business leaders act with pure hearts to help mankind, but are thwarted at every turn by politicians who are either ignorant, or venal, or both.
You would think in this time of stunning market failures around the world, the Heartland folks might want to be keeping a little quieter. But that is not the way they operate. They will cheerfully tell you the current economic problem is not too little government regulation, but too much, and that this has distorted the market and caused the recession, among other ills. They use this same facts-be-damned attitude when analyzing climate change. They know what the answer- global warming is just a natural cycle. The problem as they see it is to find a few people who agree with them and promote them to the world as a responsible alternative.
As one would expect, the group will not say who funds its operations, but its founders include the founder of the John Birch Society and the major funder of the libertarian Cato Institute. Exxon and other oil companies are big supporters as well.
It's not uncommon for companies who want help to advance their business agendas to turn to think tanks like the Heartland Institute. In addition to providing the appearance of independent support for corporate policies, the institute presents a scholarly image and as an extra benefit knows how to play the media game well. Their goal in this is to create just enough doubt about climate change that policy makers will hesitate to take the hard decisions needed to deal with the issue.
Back to Dr. Sununu. For a leader of one of the two political parties in our state to speak to the collection of free-market cultists, science-deniers, and other assorted kooks who gathered for the Heartland Institute's conference is a little stunning. It would be like Ray Buckley addressing the Flat Earth Society about the folly of Cartesian cartography or Howard Dean talking to the American Nazi Party and denying the Holocaust. Shouldn't there be consequences for this kind of misbehavior, at least to Sununu's reputation? It may not be an issue among members of his party, who regularly deny facts if they contradict their political dogmas, but people in the general community ought to care that one of the two choices for which organization will direct important public policies in our state is headed by a guy who has some very eccentric views.
Thinking about Al Gore's Nobel Prize today really did put me into an Irish funk. I kept thinking today about what a loss it was that the man who should have been president did not get to serve, and the way in which our country has gone backwards in so many areas where we could have moved forward. It makes me both sad and angry.
George W. Bush and the ideologues at the White House really have done our country a disservice with their war on science, whether by refusing to fund stem cell research, refusing to accept the reality of global warming, and doctoring government reports to ignore science. If the far right does not want to live in a reality based world, well, bully for them, but their insistence on imposing their beliefs on the rest of us at great cost has damaged our lives and our planet.
I wrote this piece for our local on line citizen journalism paper The Forum and thought I would post it here as well. After going to the Rockingham County Democrats picnic on Sunday, I was thinking about what I look for in a candidate. I have previously written that I look for a leader on progressive values, but I decided I needed something else as well, well-trained intelligence.
