Ring of Fire

So what’s an old broad to do?

(Whole post here.)

Today it is HOT in Seattle. HOT. This afternoon I will hang out in my cubicle writing a “lessons learned” document and reveling in the combination of delicious A/C and the gusty little fan under my desk.

Tomorrow I will wake up, brace myself for a day of miserable, pungent sweating, and keep on talking, blogging, and activism-ing about climate change. It’s the most pressing problem on our planet right now, and I don’t have any choice.

But tonight? Tonight I will creep home along the baking sidewalks, fling off my work clothes in favor of something loose and cool, shake up a wicked icy martini, and have this delicious, protein-packed no-cook salad for dinner.

Depleted Pantry Salade Nicoise

This recipe is based on a traditional Salade Nicoise and is adapted for what I know I have in my kitchen right now. Have I mentioned that it’s HOT? It’s hot. So I am not making any extra trips to buy ingredients, and I am not turning on the stove!

On a bed of fresh greens – I have romaine and butter lettuces in the fridge – arrange tuna, hard-boiled eggs, olives, green beans, and anchovies (yes, these are obviously optional). Boiled potatoes are traditional, and very nice, but I don’t have any cooked potatoes to hand.

I start by tearing up the lettuce into manageable pieces and tossing them in a basic vinaigrette. Here’s a really easy one from my favorite Swedish Chef, Marcus Samuelsson:

1 plump garlic clove, smashed and minced into a paste

1 generous tsp Dijon mustard

3 tbsp red wine vinegar

Juice of ½ lemon

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Whisk the garlic, mustard, vinegar and lemon juice in a bowl. Drizzle in the olive oil as you continue to whisk. (Or you can just dump everything into a small jar and shake it about madly.)

Toss the lettuces in half the dressing and mix to coat (reserve the other half for drizzling).

Plop the dressed greens on a broad salad plate (in an artful arrangement, if you have the energy).

I open and drain a can of sustainably harvested solid white tuna, but you can use whatever tuna you like.

Flake the tuna into sizeable chunks onto the greens. Use all of it for a protein punch, only half if you don’t want a salad dominated by fish.

Slice a hardboiled egg or two (I think I only have one, but we shall see) and arrange it over the salad.

Toss a few whole or halved olives onto the plate. I have a jar of supermarket salad olives. A good, traditional Salade Nicoise uses excellent French olives (or Cerignola olives, mmmmmmmm) but I am fresh out of those. Manzanilla olives from Safeway will have to do.

Arrange a few cooked green beans on top. I have leftover steamed beans that are-pre-dressed with a little garlic. If you have pickled green beans, those would work a treat!

Finally, drape an anchovy fillet or two over the top and drizzle with the remaining dressing. Eat it accompanied with a hunk of crusty bread. It’s easy, healthy, delicious, and does not require heat.

Bean, beans, the magical fruit!

Talking about FOOD over at Dailykos today. Trying to get my 90% vegan on. Check it out!

I think this looks better than....

THIS. Do you?  :-)

You don't need a weatherman...

Cross-posted here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/7/31/1784861/-You-don-t-need-a-weatherman

Charles P. Pierce has a short but stunning piece up today about Kiribati, sea level rise, and ex-situ nationhood. It’s a very good quick read. And together with something Richard Haas said today on “Morning Joe,” it’s got me re-freaked out about the political state of play with climate change.

Haas’s comment, which was pretty throwaway, was also quietly terrifying. I'm paraphrasing, but it was basically,

"I don't want to be pedantic here, but as we continue to experience challenges from extreme weather because of climate change...."

He then continued smoothly talking about how we aren’t taking things like climate and infrastructure seriously as a nation, and sort of, oh heck what can you do?

Haas is a Republican. I don’t know if he’s gone on record as a denier in the past, or not. It was the almost calculated smoothness of how he rolled climate change out as an unassailable fact, and how he said he didn’t want to be a “pedant,” that sent up a warning flare.

Why that flare? Because I can vividly imagine a scenario in which all of the “it’s a Chinese hoaxsters” and climate change deniers in the GOP make the cold, calculated decision to unobtrusively roll over, throw up their hands, and decide to admit that yep — the climate is changing. Without a break in stride, just deciding that the denial battle has been lost, and they’re gonna flip — with no fanfare, and no big announcement.

I can hear them already, talking in their smooth, “reasonable,” oleaginous voices about stricter immigration policies to deal with climate change refugees, harsher controls on displaced people arriving from island nations and places like Bangladesh, and fiscal and tax policies designed to protect the rich and their property from sea level rise and wildfires.

It’s not even a tiny stretch to imagine going from the current debate between us in the reality-based community and the congressional deniers being paid by the fossil fuel industry, to complete acceptance on their part, with no middle ground where they wake the FCK up and decide we need to DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.

This is the perfect time and political space for that change to happen. There’s a blazing orange fire in the White House to rival the wildfires in California (and Sweden!) and everyone’s attention has been absolutely riveted for the past 18 months on what will happen next with Mueller, Russia, Manafort, Papadopoulos, Jarvanka, Junior, Trump, and Stone. Climate change? What climate change? There are battalions of other shoes to drop! Ghouliani’s on CNN, rambling incoherently about Michael Cohen — pay attention to that!

In the meantime, the weather right now (and no, weather is not climate) is being extremely convincing on the subject of global warming-driven changes to “normal.” Fire! Flood! Hurricane season is upon us, and who knows what devastation might be unleashed this year?

So it’s a perfect time for Republicans to use the cover created by the Trumpstorm to noiselessly change their tune on climate change from flat out denial and contempt to sudden tacit acceptance. They can then use that new-found acceptance (“of course the climate is changing… look around you!”) as a very convenient excuse for policy making. Which is to say, for the making of regressive policies: piss-poor policies that prop up and protect the wealthy at the expense of the poor, the brown, and the displaced.

Frankly, I think that eventuality – about which I fervently hope I am wrong – is more insidious, and much worse, than if the majority of the GOP were to stay flat-out deniers. At least folks with an opposing position can be argued with. Some Republicans have even changed their minds when confronted with the evidence!

But now, just six weeks into his tenure as NASA administrator, Bridenstine stated that he has "evolved" on climate change.

“I don’t deny the consensus," Bridenstine said at a NASA town hall meeting. "I believe fully in climate change and that we human beings are contributing to it in a major way.”

When asked why he changed his mind, Bridenstine told The Washington Post, “I heard a lot of experts, and I read a lot. I came to the conclusion myself that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, that we've put a lot of it into the atmosphere, and therefore we have contributed to the global warming that we've seen."

But a GOP that soundlessly makes the change to acceptance of the facts, without putting the slightest thought or effort into policies that would help limit some of the worst effects of the warming climate, could be an unmitigated disaster.

These are, after all, the folks famous for their “I’ve got mine, Jack” attitude. They’re the “God ‘n’ guns ‘n’ country” hacks who fight to grow an already bloated military budget while paring back the laughably few dollars the federal government spends on the National Endowment for the Arts. They’re the wretched ghouls celebrating every bite they manage to take out of Obamacare. They’re the dead-eyed bureaucrats who thought that separating children from their parents was a swell idea that would deter future refugees from darkening our doors at the southern border.

It’s becoming unavoidably apparent that something is going very wrong with our climate. It’s becoming blindingly obvious that it is going to cost one hell of a lot of money to rebuild, dig out, harden coastlines, and deal with waves of displaced people seeking terra firma as their nations drown.

If the GOP realizes which way the wind is blowing, why wouldn’t their adaptive strategy be to drop the pretense of denial and start working to saving their own – and their rich donors’ – asses? The party hasn’t done anything in the last 40+ years to convince me they’d act for the greater good. Not even Jim Bridenstine’s reversal at NASA gives me the warm fuzzies about how the GOP writ large might act, if they make a political decision to accept facts and act in concert to save their own skins (and wallets).

It’s a chilling thought. And I am taking bets on how this all plays out. After all, you don’t need a weatherman…

The Last Big Push

In calendar 2017, I suggest we pivot to climate together. What am I rambling about? I'm asking that all of the social, environmental, and climate justice organizations that came together for the People's Climate March in September of 2014 come back together for ALL of 2017, and spend at least 50% of their time and treasure that year on climate change:

• Outreach
• Action
• Lobbying
• Education
• Advertising
• Web presence
• Social media

This is the last year. This must be the big push. Let's #PivotToClimate!

If we act fast, we may be able to seize and take advantage of one of those rare windows of opportunity that comes at the exactly right time - when we are close enough to disaster that we can see it looming up on the horizon, and yet have JUST enough time to grab the wheel and yank it around, narrowly avoiding what might otherwise have been inevitable.

In the April 2015issue of Scientific American, this appeared: "Greenpeace, a leading environmental advocacy group, says we have until around 2020 to significantly cut back on greenhouse gas output around the world—to the tune of a five percent annual reduction in emissions overall—if we are to avoid so-called “runaway” climate change.

This was when, as the article also noted,

"Currently the atmospheric concentration of CO2 (the leading greenhouse gas) is approximately 398.55 parts per million (ppm). "

And

"According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal scientific agency tasked with monitoring the health of our oceans and atmosphere, the current average annual rate of increase of 1.92 ppm means we could reach the point of no return by 2042."

In September, we crossed the threshold of 400ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere.

To quote from a recent piece on ThinkProgress:

"In the late 2000s, climate scientist James Hansen argued that the world needed to stay below 350 parts per million to avoid the worst impacts of climate change (his warning is what gave 350.org, the global climate activism group, its name). Three years ago, Earth’s atmospheric carbon dioxide levels first exceeded 400 parts per million, but those levels quickly dipped back below the threshold, as atmospheric carbon dioxide waxes and wanes with the seasons.

Which is why the fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide is still above 400 parts per million at the end of September is a worrying fact: September is usually the time when concentrations are at their lowest, as trees in the Northern Hemisphere have grown all summer, sucking carbon out of the atmosphere. In a blog post, Ralph Keeling, current head of the Scripps carbon dioxide measurement program and son of Charles Keeling, wrote that it is “almost impossible” that CO2 levels will drop below 400 in October.

“Concentrations will probably hover around 401 ppm over the next month as we sit near the annual low point,” he wrote. “Brief excursions towards lower values are still possible but it already seems safe to conclude that we won’t be seeing a monthly value below 400 ppm [parts per million] this year — or ever again for the indefinite future.”"

The first year of the new Clinton Administration will be the most propitious time - the time with the most potential for radical change - that we will have until… well, until it is likely too late.



The energy from pulling off a win could propel the new administration to take bold, aggressive action on climate change during Hillary Clinton's first year in office - especially if all of the players from the 2014 People's Climate March get back together (we're getting the band back together!) and focus her attention on the people's will.

If we act fast, we may be able to seize and take advantage of one of those rare windows of opportunity that comes at the exactly right time - when we are close enough to disaster that we can see it looming up on the horizon, and yet have JUST enough time to grab the wheel and yank it around, narrowly avoiding what might otherwise have been inevitable. Let's PIVOT TO CLIMATE - TOGETHER.

#PivotToClimate - #StrongerTogether

Deconstructing the Democratic Party Platform...

Well, just the sections that address climate change and clean energy.

I'm doing this not just for my own amusement and edification, but also to find out what's been proposed/promised, so when it's time to hold the Clinton administration's feet to the fire, we know what they committed to in the platform.

Hair On Fire People annotations are in italics below the paragraph they comment on.

And so without further ado.... from the Democratic Party platform, 2016...

Combat Climate Change, Build a Clean Energy Economy, and Secure Environmental Justice

Climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time. Fifteen of the 16 hottest years on record have occurred this century. While Donald Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” 2016 is on track to break global temperature records once more. Cities from Miami to Baltimore are already threatened by rising seas. California and the West have suffered years of brutal drought. Alaska has been scorched by wildfire. New York has been battered by superstorms, and Texas swamped by flash floods. The best science tells us that without ambitious, immediate action across our economy to cut carbon pollution and other greenhouse gases, all of these impacts will be far worse in the future. We cannot leave our children a planet that has been profoundly damaged.

This is a pretty good preamble. Just two notes:

We won’t just “leave our children a planet that has been profoundly damaged” – we must live in that damage ourselves. Talking about children allows wiggle room for procrastination.

The “planet” will be fine, whatever ultimately happens. What we should focus on is damage to the climate and the biosphere. The rocky ball that revolves around the sun will continue on apace – even without us, and even with wildly changed climatic conditions. But OUR survival in a radically altered climate and biosphere is not guaranteed, nor is the survival of our fellow travelers, the rest of the biomass of Planet Earth – nor is the survival of the food webs that keep us alive. We may be facing down extinction. And that should terrify us.

Democrats share a deep commitment to tackling the climate challenge; creating millions of good-paying middle class jobs; reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050; and meeting the pledge President Obama put forward in the landmark Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperature increases to “well below” two degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius. We believe America must be running entirely on clean energy by mid-century. We will take bold steps to slash carbon pollution and protect clean air at home, lead the fight against climate change around the world, ensure no Americans are left out or left behind as we accelerate the transition to a clean energy economy, and be responsible stewards of our natural resources and our public lands and waters. Democrats reject the notion that we have to choose between protecting our planet and creating good-paying jobs. We can and we will do both.

More scientifically literate types than I am can probably parse this paragraph better, but just at first blush it occurs to me that only a couple of years ago our “target” was reducing greenhouse gas emissions more than 80% below 1990 levels – not 2005 levels. Is this new research? Is this a different benchmark? How is this different? http://grist.org/climate-energy/yes-the-u-s-can-reduce-emissions-80-by-2050-in-six-graphs/

Mentioning both that Paris Agreement’s aim of keeping global temperature increases to “well below two degrees Celsius” as well as noting “efforts to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius” is heartening, because it keeps 1.5 degrees in the platform as a goal.

Pivot To Climate

So just what is #PivotToClimate?

Simply put, we (the members of the Hair On Fire People community) are asking that environmental and justice organizations such as the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, World Wildlife Federation, Oxfam and Unicef - that is, the pantheon of progressive activist groups that made up the People's Climate March in September of 2014 - join together again and pledge to dedicate at least 50% of their time and treasure to climate change during the 2017 calendar year (coinciding with the first year of the Hillary Clinton administration).

We ask that these groups recoalesce around the idea of a #PivotToClimate so we can combine our separate, individual rays of light into a super-charged floodlight trained squarely on the most pressing crisis of our - or any - time.

We ask that with their time and money, these groups collaborate on redoubled, concentrated efforts to educate, organize, mobilize, advertise and lobby for climate action.

In 2014, Business Insider reported that: 

"Last year, the global economy needed to slash world carbon emissions by 6 percent in order to stay on target, but we only managed a dismal global average of 1.2 percent. That means starting this year, we’ll need to cut 6.2 percent of our emissions every year for the rest of the century if we want to meet our 2 C goal."

Also in 2014, Michael E. Mann, writing in Scientific American produced new calculations indicating that:

"if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to two degrees Celsius by 2036, crossing a threshold that will harm human civilization."

 

In short: we are rapidly running out of time.

So what that does time limit have to do with a #PivotToClimate?

Do you remember the People's Climate March in September of 2014? A throng of marchers more than 250K strong took to the streets in NYC and cities across the globe, roaring for climate action. We were that many strong because we were inclusive not just of climate change activist groups, but of a panoply of progressive activist organizations and individuals.

Everyone joined forces and took to the streets together: indigenous peoples groups, LGBTQIA groups, Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, soccer teams and parents pushing strollers, nuns and priests, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (I think they were there), folks from Save the Wales, contingents from Greenpeace, and representatives from Oxfam, Avaaz, the World Wildlife Federation, the Teamsters, and 350.org.

There were labor groups, anti-corporate groups, peace and justice groups,  environmental justice organizations and other communities, food and water justice groups, interfaith groups. There were folks dressed as polar bears. There were people on stilts. There were hippies and hipsters and Millennials and Boomers and Gen Xers and various assorted cranky olds and cheerful youngs (and vice versa).

It was amazing. And despite a shocking lack of coverage on the day, it made a difference.

And now, we have to do it again - but this time, for an entire year. I am convinced that if every environmental and social justice group worked together just on climate change for one full year, our voice would be so loud, and the pressure we could exert would be so mighty, that things would change, and fast.

This of it this way. We seem to be a little stuck. It's like when your car gets stuck in the mud, and you can't push it out yourself. You and a buddy can't push it out together. But when a van full of folks pulls up and there are 10 of you pushing - voila! The car comes unstuck.

In upcoming posts, I will lay out my - admittedly still somewhat half baked - plans for what a year of concerted, multi-organization climate action would look like. If you have suggestions, please add them in the comments! This is our work in progress. I appreciate your ideas.

And, as always, please stay tuned!

It pays to advertise...

Energy companies – fossil fuel conglomerates – oil and coal and gas companies – run ads.  The “I’m Maggie, and I’m an Energy Voter!” ads.  Exxon Mobil ads that talk a disingenuous blue streak about all the alternative energy options they have in the pipeline.  The “We Are Koch!” ads that make it sound like the Brothers Koch are a caring, sharing pair of hippies who march in the front lines in solidarity with climate change activists.

These folks have money.  They have reach.  And they have talented minions cranking out advertising for them that is DESIGNED to obfuscate and spread mis- and disinformation on climate change, their role in it, and how an “all of the above” approach is a sane, sensible solution to a problem that they’re loathe to even admit exists: anthropogenic climate change.

We in the climate activism community need an advertising campaign, too.  That’s part of my year-long #PivotToClimate proposal, in which I am calling on the majority of environmental and social justice groups to spend 50% of their time and treasure, at a minimum, on climate change in calendar 2017.

If we just had a pool of money – money already raised by the Sierra Club, Greenpease, 350.org, Oxfam, and the like – to use on advertising, we could move the dial of public opinion in a HURRY.

We need to advertise – that is, to use the lingua franca of these United States – to inform, energize, and mobilize the American people on climate change.

The messaging I propose should be designed to hit people like they’ve been gut shot, and let them know that years of inaction by foot-dragging, heavily-lobbied, and bought-off politicians has led us to our current perilous position, facing a future of hellish heat waves, devastating droughts, rampant “once in 1,000 years” storms, epic deluges, terrible public health challenges, inundated coastal cities, and hordes of frantic climate change refugees.

This isn’t the time for business as usual.  It’s not the time for long explanations.  It’s not the time for nuance and for coaxing people along with rational explanations for why carbon dioxide can, yes, be a very good thing (in moderation) for our friends the plants, but at higher concentrations in the atmosphere begins to trap more heat which can lead to more moisture in the atmosphere, much like the effect you might feel in a greenhouse, which is why we call it….. zzzzzz…..

The years of teaching and educating and imploring and exhorting Americans to get worried about polar bears and shrinking ice sheets at the far reaches of our globe just hasn’t mobilized enough of us.  Yes, it’s mobilized some.  I am not overlooking all the excellent education and communication that’s been done.  The dial is moving… but it’s moving far, far too slowly.  I feel momentum – but I fear we need even more engagement, even faster.

Our “leaders” in DC are very well aware that most of us simply aren’t fussed enough about climate change for them to pay it much heed, either.  They read the polls.  They see where public opinion sits.  So they know they can keep on taking the money and lying like rugs (looking right at you, Senator McConnell) and not get voted out of office.  They know full well that they can hem and haw, splutter and obfuscate, deny, declare they’re not scientists, throw snowballs, and suffer no consequences.  And so while the dial has been moving recently – and President Obama has been raising a bit of a ruckus all by himself – we’re not moving in the right direction fast enough.

It’s time to crank it up to 11.

We need an electorate that’s furious at government inaction on climate change and will vote for politicians who promise to take immediate action.  We need an electorate who won’t put up with their lies any longer and who demand that their representatives do their will on this most urgent and pressing of issues.  We also need a population that is fired up enough to take the personal actions required, like giving up or rationing meat, driving less, buying green and renewable and local products, and more.

We need all Americans to be fired up and marching in the same direction – which is roughshod over the folks like Paul Ryan and Lamar Smith and Mitch McConnell and the Koch Brothers and the Heritage Institute and the big fossil fuel corporations who want to stand in the way of us saving the precious Goldilocks climate of our one and only home.

So… here’s my question.  If you worked in an advertising agency, what messaging would YOU propose to set the American public’s hair on fire?  How do we communicate urgency and get people angry that they’ve been shamelessly lied to for so many years?  We need ZING! and POW! and ZOWIE! messages!  What would they look like?  What would we say?

Please add your excellent ideas in the comments.  And thanks!