While the Hillary and Bernie mudslinging goes on, important stories are getting very little coverage, stories that are just as critical to the future of our country and our world as to which candidate is acting worse than the other. For example, out West, climate change, drought and wind are creating a rash of large, out of control wildfires:
More than 100 wildfires are burning across the West — destroying dozens of homes, forcing hundreds of people to flee and stretching firefighting budgets to the breaking point.
In Washington state, a fire was moving so quickly that authorities weren’t sure how many homes were lost, but they feared it was roughly 75.
Firefighters face a triple threat of extreme heat, severe drought conditions and gusty winds. And they’re doing it with dwindling resources: The U.S. Forest Service is spending $100 million a week on the fires, and next week it will burn through its annual budget.
On Sunday, fires forced evacuations in Oregon and California, left thousands without power in Washington and enveloped the San Francisco Bay Area in a thick gray haze.
All you Bernie and Hillary supporters, please take a minute to stop the back and forth trolling long enough to pay attention to a issue that is of major importance.
Because our next president must be the Climate Change President.
Our rapidly changing climate with extreme weather event after extreme weather event already poses a real and present danger to our national security. If we hope to have a sustainable society – hell, a sustainable civilization – action, immediate action is absolutely necessary, and our Presidential candidate better not only recognize that fact, but get out in front and lead on this issue, and they better get elected, too. This crisis is accelerating, but no one is making it a priority. Our next president needs to have a plan ready to go from day one not openly to raise awareness, but to get a kicking and screaming Congress to take action. Because the world’s environment isn’t going to fix itself. Global warming and its horrific consequences for humanity is going to worsen and worsen as quickly as the wildfires out West are burning across a veritable tinderbox dried, dead vegetation, releasing immense amounts of soot and carbon into the atmosphere and speeding up the process whereby we burn up the only planet are species can live on.
California is having a very bad year, ecologically speaking. With 92 percent of the state in severe drought and wildfires raging from the Oregon border to the Mexican border, California can’t seem to catch a break. Now comes new research from the University of California, Davis, that suggests the wildfires may be accelerating the process of climate change, moving the state faster into the future.
“Our goal was to describe how forest thinning and fire are affecting the plant diversity underneath California’s conifer forests,” Jens Stevens, the lead author of the paper, which was published in the Journal of Ecology, wrote in an email. “In other words, how many species do we have, and what kind of species are they?” Stevens measured a new process, recently named and not particularly thoroughly studied, called thermophilization.[…]
Stevens’ work is not in the agricultural field and doesn’t directly comment on agriculture, but it’s not hard to draw a parallel between what’s happening in the natural world and what could happen in agriculture. In 2012, researchers at CGIAR took a look at the production of the world’s biggest cereal crops, among them wheat, rice, and corn, and found that many developing countries will find that their ability to grow them will decrease in the wake of climate change. One particularly interesting prediction is that potatoes, which rely on cool temperatures and especially thrive at high altitudes, will prove tricky to grow. CGIAR predicted that bananas, or plantains, could end up replacing potatoes at these altitudes.
So, can we stop with the grade school behavior and the “gotcha” political gamesmanship long enough to ask our candidates and their supporters to focus on this issue of Global Warming/Climate Change/MassExtinction (or whatever term you want to use) and have them tell us what they plan to do as President to address a crisis that has, to all effects and purposes, begun to spin out of control?
Wildfires are raging across multiple Western states amid the latest scientific warnings about climate change. Montana declared a state of emergency over the fires, which also burned across Idaho, Oregon, California and Washington state. NASA has confirmed last month was the hottest July on record. Meanwhile, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says warmer ocean temperatures could make this year’s El Niño the strongest ever recorded.
Because we damn well better, my friends, we damn well better.
And Hillary and Bernie and all their raving supporters better, too.
FWIW — I didn’t ignore the CA wildfires and a few good souls here chimed in as well. While many of us accept that it’s related to climate, it’s also important to recognize that droughts and wildfires are features of the western landscape.
Is the Bezos’ sweatshop one of those other stories that has been ignored here?
How about Trump trashing Silicon Valley over H-1B visas (apparently Rubio is Zuckerberg’s favorite Senator). (Should be music to the ears of a couple of regulars at the Pond.)
Sanders opposes the pipeline. Hillary won’t say.
Sanders talks about climate as part of family values, i.e., leaving the world habitable.
The mudslinging on the part of Sanders’ backers (since Sanders says nothing bad about Clinton) has more to do with the media campaign against him than anything Hillary has publicly said.
Hillary’s campaign is phlegmatic half-stepping on just about every topic. That’s why the punditry class keeps trotting out Gore and Biden for Plan B, in case her fall continues. For Beltway insiders the acceleration of Sanders’ popularity is the scariest thing in this election cycle and Hillary so far hasn’t shown any ability to stop it. It’s hard for an insider to run against the insiders.
To be fair, it’s not only the media that’s slinging mud at Sanders. The Hillary supporters and/or operatives have been out in force for a couple of month blaring that AA voters are all in with Clinton and want nothing to do with Sanders. It’s why the BLM at NN appeared so suspicious to Sanders’ supporters.
I’ve missed most of this alleged anti-Bernie “mud slinging”, even in some online forums. Rather mild skepticism at worst.
Can you give some examples of the “campaign against him”, and where they occurred in the media?
Not much mud slinging at Msnbc, except occasionally at Hillary (Lawrence O’Donnell getting apoplectic about the silly emails). Quite a few stories about whether her candidacy is going to withstand the Bernie bandwagon.
Since the MSM famously despises both Clintons, and also usually favors the Repub, doesn’t it make more sense that they’d be touting the Bernie candidacy while playing up Hillary’s weaknesses and the pseudo scandals?
What has become clear is the left side of the punditry class is farther to the right than most of its constituents. Not unexpected. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Did I miss something?
Obviously not all supporters will be as well-behaved as the politicians they support might be, but I haven’t seen much of that yet. Certainly not anywhere near the level that a small-but-loud-and-ugly subset of Clinton and Obama supporters eventually got to. (Although it’s still early, of course.)
I’m guessing that over amongst the Repub Clown Car factions, they’re already knee-deep in the mud and exchanging small arms fire. At least.
At this point seems to me to be worse than it was in 2007. Possibly b/c dKos was more of a hub for Obama support than Clinton. Not until the 9/30/07 FEC filings were out did the Clinton supporters fully recognize that she didn’t have it in the bag and that Obama wasn’t but one of the “seven dwarfs” but an actual threat to the “inevitable” nominee.
The dKos primary wars mudslinging goes back to 2003. The one or two supporters of Leiberman, Gephardt, and Kerry didn’t get into it. Perhaps b/c they were so outnumbered. The Edwards supporters were vocal but polite. The rough and tumble stuff was directed at Dean supporters by the Wes Clark troops. They were bullies. Most of them seemed to favor Obama in 2008 and this time around, they are lined up for Clinton and doing working hard to do to Sanders what they did to Dean.
Oh, dKos. I’m not sure they’re a meaningful sample of, well, anything.
I mean, neither is this place, really. But last I looked in on dKos, it seemed like it had largely done the political equivalent of falling into its own belly-button, dropped below some sort of discussion event horizon, something like that.
Too bad the next President is likely to be the “end birthright citizenship” President. (That’s how bad Republicans want Obama not to be a citizen.)
And that’s what the immigration fuss is leading up to–a new Southern Strategy.
Hard not to notice the wildfires up north here in CA and the scorching, record-setting/tying high temps down south this summer, along with the forecasts of a very strong El Nino later this year hitting the southern half of the state.
I’ve been following the global warming/climate change issue since back in the mid-80s, back when they called it the Greenhouse Effect, so it’s a subject I’m at least generally familiar with.
Pardon me though for not chiming in very often on this topic, but I’ve come to the conclusion the only solution is to impose strict population controls on a worldwide basis as we are currently billions of people over the limit this planet’s resources can provide for. A sensible and independent UN panel of scientists and engineers, like the one that’s been studying global warming for the past few decades, would also be created to propose additional ways to obtain clean, renewable energy sources to supplement solar and wind. Hopefully they would be sensible and independent enough not to recommend nuclear.
For the next President to be the Climate President, the next Congress must be the Climate Congress.
And for the next Congress to be a Climate Congress, the electorate must become a Climate Population. Like that’s going to happen anytime soon.
Everyone wants to do something about the environment, until they hear the specifics of what it’s going to take. Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise” speech is going to sound like giving up meat once a year compared to what we’ll need to sacrifice.
And don’t even start about refugee crisis. Syria? That’s a canary in a coal mine…and it’s going to look quite manageable in comparison.
The thing is that almost all Americans want more today and almost none are willing to do with less. If gas prices rise and that forces individuals to drive less, they’ll do so but complain continuously about it. If gas prices go down — it’s yippee — we can drive more.
We know from our grand experiment with a 55 MPH speed limit that gas consumption and highway death and injuries went down. A good deal all around and most motorists hated it.
Those that grew up in a “waste not” home didn’t need to see the Carter sweater; we were already energy misers. But our lives were still built around the automobile. On business trips to SF my colleagues thought I was daft for suggesting that we didn’t need to rent a car. Well, until one time a car was such a pain in the ass that we were thirty minutes late for a meeting and could have gotten there forty minutes faster and at one quarter the cost in a taxi.
Ugh, I’m probably the only one who got mad when our governor increased speed limits from 65 MPH to 70 MPH.
Meanwhile, McDonnell’s road funding experiment has also paid, erm, dividends of its own.
If you’re talking about grade school-type hate and insults on this blog, it seems to center on the most frequent poster. Her name ends in 3.
Well, I live in the middle of what is a fire war in Central Washington state. It is like nothing you can imagine. Our whole County is on Evac Level 1. From my house I have a line of sight more than 50 miles and the horizon is filled with plumes from the wildfires. The wind kicked up today from the north and drove new fires caused by burning embers falling onto dry grass. There are so many big fires and so many starts that are exploding that there simply are no more resources to call in. We are on our own.
Our fires started from lightning, they have jumped 2 rivers now, filled the air with choking smoke and terrified homeowners and businesses for hundreds of miles. We had weeks of temps over 100 degrees and no rain. Gorgeous forests that have suffered from beetle kill have been torched in minutes.
I’d like to care about other issues. Not today. Today I will fight fires. But when my fury clears I will become a single issue voter and it will be climate that gets my attention.
Unless there is a clean sweep, an exorcism if you will, of the majority of republicans and all conservative democrats in both houses of congress with a sixty plus advantage in the senate along with the election of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders will we only have a snow balls chance in hell to implement legislation to help reduce the United States impact on the earths environment. Even if that down the rabbit hole wish comes true our actions alone are not enough. Sadly it is most likely decades to late to have started if in fact we even have. Face it the earth children are in for what appears to be a very rough ride.
Sadly, I’m more pessimistic. I think the environment has gone past the tipping point. It may still be possible to put off catastrophe, but catastrophe is coming regardless. Depressing view, I know.
It’s very easy to be pessimistic. Because there are so many solid reasons for it. Our whole culture and economy is built around short-term profit, enjoying on credit, stealing from the future, hiding the consequences.
For instance, industrial meat production is right there with fossil fuels as a source of GHGs. Some argue it’s even worse. It’s also probably the leading cause of habitat destruction and extinction worldwide. I need to find more data but it appears the total global biomass of livestock is significantly higher that the biomass of wild vertebrates, as in a multiple. Think about that. It destroys habitats, massively pollutes, uses massive quantities of water, uses huge quantities of grains, etc. Not to mention the legitimate ethical questions about industrial meat. Now just imagine trying to get people to eat less meat on a national level. The denial on that issue will probably make the denial around fossil fuels look modest and restrained.
But we have to try. Our home is burning down. And things can always get worse.
We have to try everything we can. Little steps, futile gestures. We don’t have enough firefighters and equipment to fight fires in the west. This should be a national scandal. We’ve got 600 billion a year to pretend to go to war with the Islamic boogeymen, but we don’t have enough money for fire prevention? Where are our priorities?
The World’s Hot Spot
We might be too late or too stupid. Throw another snowball in the senate. Was that some kind of Repug religious ritual?