Pure Science Fiction

Almost lost among all the big news: celebrity global warming-denier (and pal of everyone's favorite senator) Michael Crichton died at 66.

Escaping from reality will never be the same again...

Ted Stevens caricature

Wow...

And I thought my caricature was nasty!

More on Big Oil, drilling...

In case you didn't catch it, the name "Cheney milkshakes" in this week's 'toon was borrowed from the now-infamous final scene of There Will Be Blood... but I'm sure you caught that. You're quite clever...

Tidbits:

• All indications are that offshore drilling (like drilling in ANWR) would not yield any oil for 10 years, and even then would have no significant impact on gas prices. Meanwhile, here's what it'll do to the environment:
  

  ...the back-to-back wallops of Katrina and Hurricane Rita caused 124 spills that released more than 700,000 gallons of petroleum pollution into the environment. Furthermore, the problem of drilling-related pollution is not limited to the aftermath of natural disasters. Offshore oil production also brings with it the risk of spills from tanker accidents, which are devastating to ocean and shore life as well as seaside tourist economies. Then there's the
  chronic pollution from drilling operations. The Rainforest Action Network estimates that over its lifetime one normally operating oil drilling rig will:
  * dump more than 90,000 metric tons of toxic drilling fluid and metal cuttings into the ocean;
  * drill between 50 and 100 wells, each of which will dump as much as 25,000 pounds of toxic metals including lead, chromium and mercury, and potent carcinogens like toluene, benzene, and xylene into the ocean; and
  * pollute the air as much as 7,000 cars driving 50 miles a day.

• Michael Brush:
  

  ExxonMobil... generated $40.6 billion in net income last year and $36.6 billion in free cash flow. What did it do with those riches? It gave $38.4 billion back to shareholders -- $7.4 billion in dividend payments and $31 billion through share buybacks.
  ...
  This means the windfall profits that ExxonMobil gave back to shareholders last year were enough to buy all the households in both California and Pennsylvania gasoline for the entire year. It was enough to give everyone a 27 cents-a-gallon discount on gas nationwide for the whole year.

  
  
• If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to check out an out-freakin'-standing piece by Paul Salopek called "A Tank of Gas, A World of Trouble," which has been sitting in my "stuff-to-read" folder for a while. It traces a tank of gas from the time it's taken out of the ground in a war-torn foreign land, to the "Heartland" gas station where it's pumped by an oblivious soccer-mom into her 10 mpg Hummer. Among the compelling stories are fascinating snippets like this:
  
  

  In some respects, crude really does resemble blood. It scabs on exposure to air. It is organic and viscous. Some companies warm oil to about 90 degrees to make it slip more easily, with less friction, through pipelines. This temperature approximates that of the human body. Cold oil will coagulate. It coats the inner surfaces of the pipes with waxy buildups, much like arterial plaque.

  
  

Fighting Words: 6/23/08 Cartoon...

"Fuzzy Fetish"...

More on our Stone-Age dialogue on global warming...

Tidbits for this week's 'toon:

• Saw more of the same old shit on global warming from Captain "Wrong-Way/Right-Way" this morning...
  
  
• E.O. Wilson:
  

  How did such frail creatures come to be a geophysical force and dominate the world? Brains, obviously. Somehow, by a process still not well understood, we mastered fire, invented weaponry, and learned to talk to one another in arbitrarily devised symbolic languages. But in rising to power, beginning with the invention of agriculture a scant 10 millennia ago, we carried along with us the heavy baggage of ancient primate instincts. Today, as a result, we live in Star Wars civilizations ruled by Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology.

• Renee Schoof on John McCain's environmental policy:
  

  When McCain introduced his latest version of a cap and trade plan in January 2007, he warned: "Just as there is danger in doing too little, there is peril in going too far, too fast, in a way that imposes unsustainable costs on the economy."

• Brad Johnson of GristMill:
  

  Like Bush, McCain’s global warming talk is good — both speaking in generalities about needing to be “good stewards” and get “serious” about climate change.
  Like Bush, Candidate McCain is drenched in ties to Big Oil — McCain’s campaign is run by lobbyists for Saudi Arabia and energy companies, and McCain has repeatedly blocked attempts to roll back subsidies for Big Oil.
  Like Bush, McCain uses China and India as an excuse for inaction — When asked about global warming policy, both Sen. McCain and Bush say that India and China have to participate in a global agreement — ignoring the fact that unlike the United States, both countries are signatories to the Kyoto Protocol. Moreover, the rest of the industrialized world is not making excuses — they’ve set to work.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from his new manifesto on global warming:
  

  The evidence is before our eyes. The practice of borrowing a billion dollars each day to buy foreign oil has caused the American dollar to implode. More than a trillion dollars in annual subsidies to coal and oil producers have beggared a nation that four decades ago owned half the globe’s wealth. Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.

  
  
• Read my previous post on Frontline's Hot Politics.
  

Fighting Words: 4/14/07 Cartoon...

"Neandercons: Ice Age!"...

More on Global Warming, IPCC report...

Articles for this week's 'toon:

• The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued their report last week, which spelled out the situation in stark and unambiguous terms. The team of scientific experts on the subject calls the evidence of global warming "unequivocal" and the need for action "urgent." The panel's head is quoted as saying that this is our "defining moment" and that "if there's no action before 2012, that's too late." Meanwhile, experts have reportedly been "stunned" at the loss of Arctic ice recently, to the extent that they predict the summertime Arctic could be completely ice-free by 2030.
  
  The IPCC spells out our options pretty clearly: either we take action NOW and take a small hit to the world's economic growth (which is offset by short-term benefits like improved health due to reduced pollution), or we roll the dice and risk what the world's top minds predict will be catastrophic consequences.
  
  
• All of this can only leave one wondering how those who oppose any action on climate change are afforded any credibility whatsoever in this debate. What possible counter-argument is there? All that's left is a childish, responsibility-shirking retort along the lines of "but I don't wanna!" And yet, there they are, in the Washington Post's story on the IPCC report, which dutifully warns the reader that "some" people disagree with the findings.
  
  Which people, exactly? Well, the people who write op-eds like this one in Investor's Business Daily, which counter the science community's conclusions on global warming with a string of ad hominems and baseless accusations about the scientists' sinister hidden agendas (of course, there's no mention of the corporate community's possible agenda). Or the people who cherry-pick or misrepresent facts to argue that "carbon dioxide is actually good!" (except, y'know, where there's too much of it) or that global warming is actually due to "solar brightness."
  
  
• While Bush has finally admitted that global warming is real, it appears that not much has changed in the administration's approach to the problem. While yet another story recently came out linking a top Bush contributor to excessive carbon emissions, Darth Cheney is again angling for more control over the administration's global warming policy.
  
  
• Check out a fascinating review by Gary Kamiya of Alan Weisman's "The World Without Us."
  

Fighting Words: 11/26/07 Cartoon...

"Mortal Diskussion"...

Fighting Words: 10/22/07 Cartoon...

"George W. Bush Conversation With God: The Environment"...

More on the Alaskan Way Viaduct...

Coincidentally, I was planning on doing something on one of Seattle's own disaster-prone bridges for this week's toon before the disaster in Minnesota happened...

For readers outside Seattle, the Alaskan Way Viaduct is a butt-ugly, elevated freeway in the downtown area that has been a source of great controversy over the years. The viaduct is one good ground-shake away from completely falling to the ground, possibly in a manner similar to San Francisco's Cypress Street Viaduct, which came down during the '89 Loma Prieta earthquake. For quite a few years now, local government entities have bickered like children over the best way to handle the viaduct problem, with little progress made on coming up with a final solution.

Clearly, doing nothing with the viaduct is not an option, unless we want to see the thing collapse in rush-hour traffic like 35W did in Minneapolis. Democratic Governor Christine Gregoire has decided that the only option is to replace the viaduct with an even bigger, "butt-uglier" elevated freeway to accommodate all the people who just have to drive their cars everywhere. Mayor Greg Nickels wants a super-cool tunnel to replace the viaduct, a tricky and expensive project that would probably end up bearing a disturbing resemblance to Boston's Big Dig. Both of these choices are wrong, though...

What's the right choice? Tear the sucker down!

The People's Waterfront Coalition site has a good roundup of the arguments and numbers involved in the fight over the viaduct. A new elevated freeway would cost $3 billion, and wouldn't be fully open until 2020. A new tunnel could cost at least $4.5 billion, and who knows when that thing would be completely done. For that kind of money, the best choice would be to tear down the viaduct and invest in making surface street improvements, redirecting traffic out into arterials, and repairing the crumbling seawall.

But most importantly, we could afford to finally start investing in public transit. Every time I visit Washington, D.C., I am really impressed with how easy to learn and use their metrorail system is. And every time I get back from a city like that, I find myself pissed off that we Seattleites (who are supposed to be "enlightened" on environmental issues) don't have something like that here. Seattle has a bus system, but it is extremely unreliable and, of course, vulnerable to traffic jams.

Nickels has received all kinds of accolades for being an "environmental hero" and a "rising green star," but take one look at the ridiculous traffic here and something doesn't smell quite right (literally and figuratively). Any promises to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Seattle are meaningless unless something is also done to break Seattleites of our car addictions. As Erica Barnett notes in an outstanding article, no other city in the world is building a new elevated freeway; in fact, cities like Portland, Chattanooga, Milwaukee, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia are actually tearing them down. By contrast, building a big new freeway here in Seattle would be "inducing demand"... people are gonna drive on it.

The viaduct runs right down the Elliot Bay waterfront, along property which would otherwise be extremely valuable were it not for the gigantic concrete monstrosity hovering over it. The new viaduct that Gregoire wants to build would be 71% larger than the current one, and would put 50% more of the waterfront in shade. Consider instead this vision of the waterfront, which would finally put this "amazing civic resource" to good use. An analogous situation would the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, which was demolished in favor of a surface street after the '89 earthquake. The result there has not been gridlock, but rather a decrease in traffic. People sought other options.

On March 13, voters in Seattle overwhelmingly rejected both the tunnel option and the new elevated freeway (the surface street option wasn't even included on the ballot). It looks like the State couldn't care less, though... they're just going to do whatever they want anyway.

Fighting Words: 8/7/07 Cartoon...

"The Futuresons: Seattle!"...

Trying out a local issue cartoon... sorry, non-Seattle folks. I'll explain the viaduct debacle in my next blog post.

Previous episode of the Futuresons:

Oh God Yes...

This story is so delicious, it just has to be fattening...

The Duke Cunningham scandal and Tom Delay scandal and Jack Abramoff scandal and Mark Foley scandal and David Vitter scandal etc. etc. etc. etc. etc...... were all satisfying, but nothing would be quite as scrumptious as seeing Ted Stevens stink up a jail cell with his "old man smell":



...unless he was sharing the cell with Inhofe.

More on Global Warming skeptics...

Quick list of articles for this week's 'toon:

• James Wolcott has a good column on Rush Limbaugh as the poster-boy for Global Warming skepticism. See also Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on some of the corporate lackeys who are trying to drive the debate on the environment into the mystical right-wing land of Narnia, where animals can talk, magic is common, good battles evil, and environmentalism equals tyranny.


• Check out the recent Frontline episode, Hot Politics, which is now posted online. Among the points made in this episode, they suggest that the Clinton administration is as much to blame for current environmental policy as Bush II is. As proof, they cite Clinton's bungling when they were supposed to submit the negotiated Kyoto protocol to the Senate for ratification. George Monbiot makes a similar argument in an excerpt from his book, How to Stop the Planet From Burning.
  
  It has struck me before, that when all is said and done, in some ways Dubya may end up having been a good thing for this country. Not because of anything he's done on purpose, but just because he so freakin' bad, people now actually make an effort to keep themselves informed on rather obscure issues like environmental policy. Maybe it's just me, but I don't recall a public dialogue of any kind when the Clinton administration was, in Monbiot's words, "destroying the Kyoto protocol as an effective instrument."


• Check out a SCOTUSblog post on the Supreme Court's recent decision on global warming, and an article on the Dems close-call with a plan that would have blocked California (aka "Cah-lee-FOH-nya") from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.


• Marilyn Berlin Snell has a good recap of a roundtable of intellectuals on global warming, almost all of whom (even the "free-market Republican") agree that there must be substantial government intervention in tackling this problem.

Fighting Words: 6/25/07 Cartoon

"The Skeptics"...

Similar previous 'toons on Global Warming arguments:

More on Environmentalism...

Not many sources for this week's 'toon... it was mainly based on some of my own older observations and arguments on environmentalism. Often, it seems like the debate gets stuck in the old rut where the pro-environment side will argue that the science is in their favor (which it is), while the pro-business or pro-libertarian or pro-Armageddon crowd (whatever they call themselves to keep from being called anti-environment) reflexively find a way to convince themselves that reductive science is not believable. The end result, of course, is a stalemate... the anti-environmentalists steadfastly cling to their "mind-bottling" ideas about the movement towards conservation, and the environmentalists fail to make the argument in a way that makes a personal connection with the people they are trying to convince. It has occurred to me that there's another aspect of the environmental movement that doesn't get enough attention: the people who act to save it because they simply like to be outside (including a good number of my friends and family). They do so because being in nature provides them with a means for spiritual fulfillment. I believe that our opponents in this fight would be less likely to dismiss the environmentalist position if they were able to substitute the faces and motivations of real people for the "Al Gore political-types" or the "dirty protester hippies" they imagine when they think of "environmentalism."

The quotes of famous naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir capture these ideas well.

Anyway, here are some articles:

• Speaking of Gore, check out Robert Parry and Media Matters on the mainstream media's never-ending vendetta against the former veep.


• While James Inhofe and others compare environmentalists to the Nazis, the new/old trend seems to be comparing them (and everyone else who disagrees with you) to communists. Amazing how they can span the entire political spectrum like that with a snap of the fingers.

Fighting Words: 4/2/07 Cartoon

"Fuzzy Fulfillment"...

See the previous FB/HB episodes with Stanley, the Sheep of Piety:

Inhofe Smashed...

Lots to blog about this week...

By far the biggest douchebag in Congress is James Inhofe. Okay, that's too bold-- Ted Stevens is a pretty big d-bag, too... so is Tom Coburn... and Duncan Hunter, John Cornyn, Trent Lott... but I digress. Suffice it to say, James Inhofe is a douchebag.

By far the best moment of Al Gore's testimony before the Senate the other day was Inhofe getting smacked down like a bratty child when he kept trying to cut off Gore's answers on global warming. Do yourself a favor and watch it...

Incovenient Ignorance

Welcome to Federal Way, WA, home of a very special people commonly known as White Trash. Shockingly, the Federal Way school district has placed a moratorium on the showing of An Inconvenient Truth, after a couple of parents complained about their children being indoctrinated with such "controversial" ideas:

"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD."

Fortunately, the likelihood that any of Frosty's seven kids are going to grow up to be in a position to make decisions for the rest of us on such issues of consequence is extremely remote. Parents like Frosty will likely have their greatest ambitions for their children realized when little 15 year-old Joe Dirt or Tiffani-Ann gets ripped on Stroh's at the big monster truck extravaganza at the Tacoma Dome, and then knocks up (or gets knocked up by) their cousin in the back of a 1984 Pontiac Firebird with a "Calvin pissing" sticker in the back window.

Good job, folks!

Energy follow-up...

Apparently, energy is going to be a "central theme" in the upcoming State of the Union, to the extent that Dubya sez it's gonna "knock your socks off!"

How's that going to happen? Well, I'm no Pat Robertson or anything when it comes to divining the future, but I can take a wild stab...

• ANWR! (there goes one sock)... which will buy us a whole extra year doing what we do until we get our


• Super-cool futuristic hydrogen cells! (and sock #2 goes)

There's a classic scene in Who Killed the Electric Car of Dubya at a highly-scripted photo-op, chatting with a blue-collar Joe about the super-cool futuristic hydrogen cells around the corner that will change all of our lives. Meanwhile, Rove skulks in the background on his cell phone, plotting... something.

Think Progress has a good list of Bush's sock-shedding shockers on energy through the years.

More on energy alternatives, conservation...

My main inspiration for this week's 'toon was "Who Killed the Electric Car," which I had a chance to watch last week. It's a generally well-argued documentary that raises a lot of questions about GM's systematic campaign in the early 90's to sabotage their own product, the EV1. A few of these questions remained unanswered for me at the end of the film, but I'd still highly recommend it simply for the fact that it sheds light on events that are not often discussed. Why the hell don't we have these electric cars (which are relatively low-tech, clean, fast, and quiet) all over the highways today? Why did nobody pay attention when a California zero emissions law was killed by a taxpayer surcharge opposition group (which later turned out to be a front for big oil)? For his part, Ralph Nader, who's been fighting on these issues for years, offers an explanation: car companies and big oil make too much money from "technological stagnation" to have any incentive to change.

Here also are some articles to check out:

• Bill McKibbon in the Sierra Club magazine on energy alternatives. His main point seems to be that most magic energy solutions like hydrogen cells and ethanol are economically unfeasible, and would save as much energy as just a little bit of organized conservation.


• A great article in Mother Jones by Dennis Gaffney on "hypermilers," a group of nutty guys who are obsessed with squeezing the absolute most out of a tank of gas, and who enter competitions to test the limits. As fanatical as they are, there's a bunch of handy tips in there that I wish everybody would utilize... like all the freakin' idiots who sit idling in McDonald's drive-thrus.
  
  Of course, I also finally watched "Super-Size Me" last week, so that raises a whole other thing...


• A blog post on Sen. Inhofe's parting shots at the environment and, y'know, people who like the environment.


• John F. Borowski on the National Science Teachers Association's refusal to distribute "An Inconvenient Truth."


• Robert Bryce on "The Ongoing Myth of Energy Independence."