Archive for denial
To understand these letters better, please read my post, “Now we know why the GOP insists that there’s no climate change”.
And with that, here are today’s L.A. Times letters to the editor, because our voices matter:
Re “Scientists warn that Earth may be approaching a tipping point,” June 8
We can be the greatest of greatest generations or those who fiddled while Rome burned. Adults today are the only ones who can avert what one scientist tells us is a catastrophe “equivalent to an asteroid striking the Earth.” Those before us didn’t know; for those after us it will be too late. We have a sobering responsibility, yet governments don’t seem able to help. Good people, it is up to us.
We need to consume much less and more wisely, think differently about our transportation choices and support family planning everywhere.
Corporations won’t change if consumers don’t. Force their hand with your pocketbook. Talk to others and risk people saying you’re obsessed.
Quite simply, all life on Earth is in our hands, and time is running out.
Vanae Ehret
Sherman Oaks
***
Once again, we are warned by scientists and yet this supremely important issue is glossed over. Where is a united, coordinated effort to make a change from our destructive practices? We are distracted always by self-interest.
Lately I have noticed the evening news reports often have stories on “extreme weather.” It has become a normal news staple. Yet when we break for commercials, fossil-fuel companies advertise their products. Can we please open our eyes?
Mary Clumeck
Santa Ana
Photo- Marcellus Protest
Michael Hiltzik’s L.A. Times column today is about lack of information. Specifically, lack of information about fracking (scroll).
Fracking — “hydraulic fracturing,” technically speaking — involves drilling a pipe horizontally into an underground oil- or natural gas-bearing formation and pumping a slurry into the formation at high pressure to liberate the hydrocarbons trapped within.
The very first sentence of his piece is a very important one: “As a public policy, denial requires one prerequisite to take root: lack of information.” Lack of information. That’s a powerful weapon used by the likes of Fox News [sic], one that I wrote about here.
But the more we know, the more armed we are to speak, respond, and act intelligently about all kinds of things, and in this case, threats to our environment. Republicans, and of course their powerful, influential Big Oil, Big Business supporters, don’t want Americans to know much about anything that can be regulated, especially oil drilling and fracking.
In fact, directly relating to this very topic, we now know why the GOP insists that there’s no climate change:
Some economists suggest that the milder winter allowed employers to hire workers sooner, making recent spring unemployment numbers look soft. And that, of course, has the potential to influence elections.
And so they like to keep pertinent information under wraps to avoid more regulation that would not only keep our air and water clean, it might lose them votes.
Hiltzik:
Fracking has a lot of friends these days. There’s the oil and natural gas industry, which spends more than $4 million a year lobbying in Sacramento. And there’s Halliburton Co., which pioneered the technique in the 1940s and remains a huge player in the field. The company’s former CEO, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney, got Congress in 2005 to exempt fracking from regulation under the Clean Drinking Water Act, and it employs one of the best-connected lobbying firms in the state. [...]
[There is] evidence that the huge volumes of chemical-laden water used in fracking can contaminate local water tables and streams and bring unexpectedly high levels of radioactivity to the surface. Residents near fracking sites have reported that chemicals have rendered their water unusable and that gas has migrated into their mains, a phenomenon memorably depicted in the documentary “Gasland” when the water flow from a household tap is made to burst into flame.
California state Sen. Fran Pavley (D-Agoura Hills) introduced a bill (that failed) that would have done nothing to actually regulate fracking. It would have required drillers to let local property owners and water authorities know in advance that they were planning to frack, and that before they did that, and after they did that, groundwater would be tested. That way they could accurately determine any resulting damage.
“No one seems to know where the wells were and there’s no testing and no one knows what chemicals are being used,” Pavley observes. “It had been a self-regulated thing.“
Oh, right. Self-regulation. If you’d like a sample of how well that works in principle, consider that Wall Street was largely “self-regulated” before it created the crash of 2008.
Of course, what the frackers really cared about was this: If local residents and authorities were better informed, they’d be able to more effectively push back, and they wanted none of that.
The biggest sticking point involves trade secrets — that is, the exact formulation of the fluids injected into the ground during fracking. The industry wants to withhold these secrets even from regulators.
Secrecy, aka withholding of information, continues to be the weapon of choice. Ignorance is their friend.
Sorry to bum you out, but after reading “Earth may be near tipping point, scientists warn” I thought I should give you a heads up. Here are a few unnerving excerpts:
Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels is making the ocean more acidic, and less hospitable to sea life. By midcentury, humans could have altered more than half the world’s land surface.
The swiftness of climate change is likely to outpace the ability of species to adapt, especially as natural habitat becomes more fragmented, Barnosky said.
All this could produce a biologically impoverished Earth that would rob humans of vital ecological services such as insects that pollinate crops, forests that provide clean water, and tropical species that are the source of new drugs. [...]
“This is what scientists saw in the ’60s and ’70s,” said Mikael Fortelius, a professor of evolutionary paleontology at the University of Helsinki in Finland and one of the paper’s authors. “We’ve never been quite sure when it would happen. We’re there now.” [...]
To avert a grim future, or at least make it less grim, the paper calls for significant reductions in world population growth and per-capita resource use, more efficient energy use, less reliance on fossil fuels and stepped-up efforts to protect the parts of Earth that have so far escaped human dominance.
Yikes!
Their solutions to make our future less grim seem obvious, yet most Republicans are staunch supporters of more oil drilling, including the potentially catastrophic Tar Sands Keystone XL Pipeline (scroll), and fracking (scroll). How idiotic does “Drill, baby, drill!” look after 22 researchers from a variety of fields– international scientists for goodness sake– are urgently warning of irreversible changes?
The L.A. Times’ Michael Muskal inadvertently answers that question in the following piece titled “May warmth helps shatter spring temperature records” in which he also explains the inexplicable: Why any Republican would deny climate change:
How meteorological cycles work play significant roles in the macro-economic world — in agriculture, in energy consumption and even in employers’ decisions on whether to hire more workers.
For example, the warmer period has caused dislocation in the fruit-growing season in the East. Some economists suggest that the milder winter allowed employers to hire workers sooner, making recent spring unemployment numbers look soft. And that, of course, has the potential to influence elections.
Now all that irrational denial can finally be deciphered: Self-destruction is acceptable because power grabs, politics, and profits take precedence over saving lives. Sound familar?
Somehow I think this is one meme that they’re just not going to convince us of. Via Think Progress.
The Marcus Bachmann impersonator was a local actor.
UPDATED, thanks to @CGoHome (Nick Espinosa) with a new “official” video and this (with permission):
Join the Horde! http://www.twitter.com/CGoHome
http://www.facebook.com/ColumbusGoHome
Stop taxpayer funds to Bachmann’s anti-gay clinic: http://bit.ly/rkViU8Producer: Sarah Webster Norton
Choreographer: John Agurkis
Edited by Dan Feidt & Gus GanleyEarlier today in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, an army of gay barbarians marched on Michele and Marcus Bachmann’s “clinic”, condemning the couple’s attempt to “pray away” their discredited gay conversion therapy.
The flashmob protest — inspired by Marcus’s assertion that gays are “barbarians who need to be disciplined” — comes in the wake of the unlicensed therapist’s peculiar reversal, now denying he or his “therapists” ever practiced the harmful therapy.
In an attempt to clear up the confusion, the group of “gay barbarians” approached the clinic earlier this morning in hopes to speak to Marcus. When the staff saw a horde of over 100 barbarians approaching, they locked the clinic doors.
Undaunted, the barbarians at the gates demanded to see Marcus. Significant medical evidence suggests the “therapy” is a farce.
The barbarians were locked out of the office, but remained undaunted and fabulous at the gates, along with newly converted “Marcus.”
The barbarians then began chanting “you can’t pray away the gay, baby I was born this way!”. Finally, a visibly frustrated “Marcus” emerged in front of the clinic and confronted the horde yelling “you barbarians need discipline!” as he reprimanded the dancing barbarians with a black leather whip. They responded by showering him with glitter, and after the sparkling baptism “Marcus” gave in to his barbaric urges, joining the horde in their infectious flashmob dance.
The Marcus impersonator was a local actor.
“Let’s be clear: Marcus Bachmann is the practitioner of an unhealthy, unscientific and dangerous practice,” explained Nick Espinosa, one of the event organizers. “It seems all too convenient that the minute Michele Bachamann becomes a candidate for President Marcus starts making a desperate attempt to walk back his previous statements.”
Marcus’s inexplicable change of orientation on the use of “ex-gay” therapy comes a month after an interview in which he claimed to only use the therapy “at the patient’s discretion.” This statement also contradicts video evidence from an undercover investigation that shows employees of the clinic clearly encouraging the widely-discredited therapy.
“The American people have a right to know: does the Bachmann family profit from bogus “gay reparative therapy” or not,” continued Espinosa. “The medical evidence against the practice aside, the Bachmann’s subversive marginalization of the LGBT community is despicable.”
Today’s action was organized by the same young man who previously glittered Newt Gingrich, inspiring a national trend in political protest of anti-LGBT sentiments from political candidates and campaigns.
“It’s clear that the Bachmanns are the real barbarians here, and their archaic views on LGBT equality will no longer be tolerated,” Espinosa said.
Earlier today in Lake Elmo, Minnesota, an army of gay barbarians marched on Michele and Marcus Bachmann’s “clinic”, condemning the couple’s attempt to “pray away” their discredited gay conversion therapy.
The flashmob protest — inspired by Marcus’s assertion that gays are “barbarians who need to be disciplined” — comes in the wake of the unlicensed therapist’s peculiar reversal, now denying he or his “therapists” ever practiced the harmful therapy.
In an attempt to clear up the confusion, the group of “gay barbarians” approached the clinic earlier this morning in hopes to speak to Marcus. When the staff saw a horde of over 100 barbarians approaching, they locked the clinic doors. [...]
When you refer to fellow human beings as “barbarians” because of who they love, and then pretend that documentation of such offensive statements don’t exist, it’s more than a little offensive. Hence, protests like this one.
The only thing more disturbing than the Bachmanns’ positions on homosexuality (and just about everything else) is the fact that voters are taking Michele Bachmann seriously. She has no business running for president, and he has no business running a “pray the gay away” clinic.
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