Of the over 400 amendments offered on the House government-funding measure, the 2011 Continuing Resolution (H.R. 1), dozens are focused on climate change, energy policy, and environmental protection. The existing language in the budget bill is already designed to deny global warming, slash and burn public health and green jobs, but the amendments would take even more radical steps to reward polluters who are killing our children’s future. Republican amendments, if fully enacted, would:
– Eliminate the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the Special Envoy for Climate Change, the Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, the NOAA Climate Service, the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, National Science Foundation K-12 funding
– Block US funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Global Environment Facility
– Suspend enforcement of fisheries laws and construction and conservation acquisition programs of the National Parks and Department of the Interior
– Block rules for cement plant pollution, coal ash, industrial boiler pollution, water quality, climate change pollution, climate change adaptation, energy-efficient lighting, mountaintop removal, atrazine, and water conservation.
“Most of these amendments are budget neutral, not lowering the deficit one cent. Several defund extremely effective jobs programs that cost only a few million dollars. The goal of these amendments is not fiscal responsibility or jobs creation, but polluter protection, even though the pollution is poisoning babies, causing the elderly to suffer, and destroying America’s natural bounty.
Max Shelby | Vincent Alabama said, find how your representative voted and give ’em hell!
These were revenue-neutral amendments, meaning they weren’t aimed at reducing the federal budget deficit, but were designed solely to prevent the EPA and other government agencies from updating and enforcing clean air and clean water laws. In short, it was Christmas for polluters.
Profile
Brad Johnson is a climate researcher-blogger at the Center for American Progress Action Fund. He blogs at the ThinkProgress Wonk Room on the climate crisis, energy policy and building a green economy and is a speaker/trainer at NetRoots Nation.
See also: Brad Johnson. Super freaking wrong. 21 Oct 2009. The Guardian.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s new book promotes a contrarian view of climate change that has no scientific merit.
Editor’s Note (29 Jul 2023): Links in the article below may be outdated but are now sourced from archive.org.
Superfreakonomics is a super freaking mess. US publisher Harper Collins promotes the sequel to the pop-economics bestseller Freakonomics, authored by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner, as “bigger, more provocative, and sure to challenge the way we think all over again”. Too often, however, the book provokes by just getting things wrong – including matters involving life and death.
Levitt and Dubner begin by arguing that if you’re intoxicated, “driving is safer than walking” – based not on actual research but on “shoddy statistical work“. The authors boast about their time spent interviewing a $500-an-hour call girl, describing her as “essentially a trophy wife who is rented by the hour“, while getting the economics and history of prostitution wrong. But the most serious concerns are raised by their treatment of climate change.
Superfreakonomics promotes a contrarian view of climate change, calling global warming a “religion” and lionising Microsoft billionaire and scientific dilettante Nathan Myhrvold. Myhrvold unscientifically pooh-poohs solar power and promotes the “cheap and simple” solution to global warming of pumping sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to blot out the sun. But this Bond-villain fantasy solution cannot come to pass, the Superfreaks bemoan, because the “people like Al Gore” think “it’s nuts”.
The chapter “What do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?” essentially cribs from previous contrarian work, repeating confused arguments against climate science by conservative columnist George Will, and following slavishly a 2006 Rolling Stone profile by Jeff Goodell of Star-Wars physicist Lowell Wood and climate scientist Ken Caldeira. Like Will, Levitt and Dubner complain about a “drumbeat of doom” growing louder from “doomsayers” even though a “little-discussed fact about global warming,” is that the average global temperature “has in fact decreased“.
Of course, this “little-discussed fact” is one of the most popular canards among global warming sceptics – from Tea Party activists to the heads of the American Farm Bureau and the US Chamber of Commerce – and this decade is the warmest in recorded history. The Superfreaks also repeat Will’s obsession with a supposed consensus about “global cooling” in the 1970s, falsely portraying articles that discussed scientific controversy over a wide array of climatic changes as “predicting the effects of global cooling”.
Most tellingly, Levitt and Dubner shockingly misrepresent the one climate scientist they interviewed, the Carnegie Institution’s Ken Caldeira, a renowned climate modeler. They say Caldeira believes that “carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight“. In fact, Caldeira says, “Carbon dioxide is the right villain.” They say Caldeira has found that trees are an “environmental scourge”. In fact, Caldeira, whose research actually finds that tropical and boreal forests have different effects on climate change, has written that “Clear-cutting mountains to slow climate change is, of course, nuts.”
They write Caldeira “endorses” the “solution” of injecting millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere as a response to global warming – forever. In fact, “geo-engineering is not an alternative to carbon emissions reductions,” Caldeira has explained. “If emissions keep going up and up, and you use geo-engineering as a way to deal with it, it’s pretty clear the endgame of that process is pretty ugly.” It would be, he says, “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story”. “As a long-term strategy,” Caldeira said in 2006, “it’s nuts.”
After economists, scientists, journalists and energy experts condemned Superfreakonomics for its error-ridden, fatuous contrarianism, the authors reacted with rage and confusion, accusing critics of ideological bias, falsehood and smears.
Superfreakonomics is a circus sideshow. Levitt and Dubner may think they’re being super, but this time they’re actually just the freaks.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/oct/21/superfreakonomics-climate-change-book-science
See: A Life’s Value May Depend on the Agency, but It’s Rising
