I hope we can fix cap and trade so it doesn’t unfairly punish businesses and families in coal dependent states like Missouri. (emphasis mine)

I can’t help but wonder what happened to the Senator who dared mention that oil prices shouldn’t be allowed to fall too far at the Rocky Mountain Roundtable, Session 2, Part 3, during the DNC:

There’s a certain reality here that it is important that we don’t get gas too cheap again, and I certainly agree with what [Randy Udall] said. We will never see the days of… when people are pumping $1, $1.50 gas again. And that may not be an all bad thing because it will motivate the politics on this issue to the forefront so we have a sense of urgency.

Lest you think I’m casting dispersions here, not only was I one of only a few obvious press in attendance, but here’s the audio in question. I apologize for the audio quality – I’m hardly a professional sound person.

A more cynical person than myself might make me wonder if Sen. McCaskill’s complaint about ACES is more because coal mining giant Peabody Energy, headquartered in Missouri, supported her election to the tune of $5,000 in direct PAC contributions (equal to former Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska and fellow Missouri Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond). Given that’s a paltry sum compared to the donations she’s received from most other sectors, perhaps not.

Perhaps, though, it’s fair to wonder if Sen. McCaskill would have had the courage to criticize coal had coal prices spiked equivalently to oil prices last summer….

UPDATE: There has been some criticism of Sen. McCaskill for her comments about the ACES cap and trade provisions. Here’s a few links to sites that have also taken her to task for her call to weaken it even further:

Get Energy Smart NOW!
ThinkProgress
Chris Bowers of OpenLeft on AlterNet

S&R, on the other hand, writes about music. About literature and poetry. About art. Education. Sports. Culture and popular culture. The Ramsey case and what it tells us about the state of media. And now that the election is over, S&R is writing about politics less than ever.

So really, what is S&R?

One response might argue that tout est politique. I’ve never been terribly comfortable with totalizing positions like this, though, because they tend to trivialize – if everything is politics, then nothing is. However, there’s no denying the fundamental truth that many things we don’t commonly associate with politics are powerfully political in their implications.

Take popular music, for instance. It’s impossible to consider the sweeping cultural and political upheavals of the 1960s without the soundtrack – Dylan, The Beatles, Woodstock…the list goes on and on. Some of those artists were quite explicitly agitating for political reform while others wove themselves into the social tapestry in less obvious ways, but the sum total of the music of that decade was inherently political.

Contrast that with the music of the Bush administration. Where was the protest, the outcry? Who was the Dylan of the 2000s? What record will we be comparing, come 2024, with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

The absence of such a voice was not an accident. Part of the grand conservative plan, the blitzkrieg that was launched upon Reagan’s inauguration, was the neutering of music’s political possibility. When Ronnie’s FCC hacks, Fowler and Brenner, decreed that “the public interest is what the public is interested in,” it did so in order to subvert, once and for all, the power of the creative social mind to the will of corporate logic. It dismantled radio ownership limits that assured a massive diversity of options for artists and audiences alike, and found its ultimate expression in Clear Channel’s pro-war, pro-Bush rallies and the banishment of those who chose to give voice to their dissent (the most notable case being the attempted silencing of The Dixie Chicks).

So when our generation needed to be marching in the streets and demanding an end to the outrage in Iraq, where was the soundtrack? Who ultimately benefited from those policies way back in the early ’80s? We’re fighting an unjust invasion and occupation and the rallies in the streets are for the war?! Corporate-sponsored pro-war rallies?!

When I’m writing a TunesDay piece on some band or another, providing a video link or encouraging you to check it out at eMusic, part of what’s going on is purely and simply about the music as art. But it’s also about the bigger picture, about the need for our culture to build a strong platform whereby artists can be heard. If they use this platform to sing silly love songs, that’s fine, so long as the platform is there when they need to sing about injustice. I recently did a piece promoting The Well Wishers, Maximo Park and The Dandy Warhols, and none of these bands may ever contribute a note to the cause of world peace. On the other hand, if I flash back to 1997 and Green Day’s Nimrod, I’m not sure I could have predicted American Idiot, a manifesto so powerful that not even the soul-deadening corporate might of Clear Channel could contain it.

What political blogs do is important, especially in a society where the legacy press has largely abdicated its responsibility to watchdog our institutions of power. Who Obama selects to run the State Department matters. His choices for Treasury and Defense and our various intelligence and military leadership posts matter tremendously.

But empires rarely rise and fall as a result of a couple close-in political knife fights. In my view, a great deal of what even the best poliblogs do is tactical, street-level and near-term. This isn’t true across the board, of course. There are outstanding thinkers and writers who are looking at the big picture and the long term. And this is where I think S&R has done and will continue to do its best work. Not in the political battle, but the culture war.

We may debate some of the nuances and specifics amongst ourselves, but in general it’s safe to say that those of us here at Scholars & Rogues have a shared vision of a more progressive society. I don’t use that word in any sort of conventional, partisan sense. By “progressive” I mean more enlightened; better educated; more appreciative of the cultural arts; better informed about the forces shaping our world; more productively spiritual (and less dogmatically sectarian) in our approach to life; more generous and charitable; more tolerant and more willing to understand the value of diversity; more committed to community and the common good; more literate; more intellectually curious and prone to critical thought; more responsive to the well-reasoned than to the passionately felt; and above all, more insistent that those we choose to represent us, to lead us and to govern us be the best America has to offer, not the worst.

Some of the solutions that get us to our destination may be “liberal” by our current reckoning, some “conservative.” The best ideas may be “idealistic” or they may be “pragmatic.” But in the end, I think most of us believe that a society that reads – in an environment uncluttered by censorship, either active or passive, governmental or cultural or corporate – is in better shape than one that doesn’t read or won’t. A society whose citizens not only have knowledge in their heads, but who have been trained to use it in innovative ways is more likely to solve more problems faster and more effectively. A country that thinks and thinks relentlessly is nearly immune to the machinations of despotism. A nation whose mythologies make clear that war is the last resort, not the first, is more likely to achieve greatness both at home and abroad. A nation whose media structures are designed to foster the best that is thought and created is one whose streets are less likely to flow with the blood of aggrieved citizens. A culture where competition aims to help people up the ladder instead of keeping them in their place is one that maximizes its collective genius. A political economy where genuine opportunity arises from a level playing field is certainly more likely to produce spectacular successes than one where the reality is that of a rigged game played beneath a banner of cynical egalitarian rhetoric.

And the most actualized of all possible societies is one where happiness and satisfaction have nothing at all to do with purchasing power.

This is what I think Scholars & Rogues is. We’ve covered a lot of ground since we launched less than two years ago, and at that point I deliberately chose not to compose a mission statement. Our philosophy was simple: invite the smartest people we could find to share their thoughts and trust the power of that intellect to start great conversations, attract more great minds and build the foundation of a thriving community. With that in place, I wanted to learn what we were rather than dictating what we would be.

Some of what we write may look trivial at first, and the occasional item may even prove trivial in the final analysis. But I think we now have a good sense of what we are and why our readers keep stopping by. We hope our political writings are worthy in the coming months and (if we’re lucky) years, and we expect that our audience will grasp the deeper political mission embedded in our far-flung musings.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to work toward a better culture, and in doing so will trust that if you enlighten the people and establish social structures that exalt the best they have to offer, the merely political will take care of itself.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 1 arrived today, and it provides a perspective on the process that most people probably haven’t encountered before.

Where are you Online” is a docuwebisode project exploring the shift from entertainment to ‘intertainment’.

We have a unique opportunity to document a shift in technology, entertainment, and our whole society’s view on “Who can be an artist?”

People making art spend most of their lives trying to find loopholes and secret entry ways into an industry that prides itself on being closed. We are enthralled with the idea that the gates have opened, and we are here to see what happens during and after the flood.

I recommend this very highly (and not just because of the particularly cool bits that start at the 2:46 and 5:19 marks).

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’ll let you know when subsequent segments are released.

NOTE: Some people seem to be having problems accessing the video link above. If you’re having issues, click here or here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, check out our post-show interview with Lee:

• part one: Is America ready for a black president (or Miley Cyrus)
• part two: “Thank God for Jon Stewart”

Have a nice Saturday…

As noted a couple weeks ago, the S&R team hooked up with the crew from Zero Coordinate and Eccentric Production at the DNC in Denver. In addition to their invaluable help in shooting the Lee Camp interview, we also worked together in covering the Returned Soldiers/Rage Against the Machine/Tent State march on the DNC.

Natalie Ashodian and her team have now produced a powerful video from that march, and for those who only read about it (or, as is more likely the case, given how little attention the mainstream press paid to it, never even heard about it in the first place) this coverage is extremely important.

Click here to view the embedded video.

That’s the debate I’ve been having with an old college friend whom I’ve recently reconnected with. He’s become a Catholic since we knew one another back in the ‘80s, and is a deep-thinking, deeply principled man. He will not be voting for Barack Obama in November. Nor will he be voting for John McCain. He will vote, but he will cast a blank ballot. He urges me, if I am serious about my moral commitments, to do likewise. Neither candidate, in his opinion, cares enough about ‘life issues’ to merit an affirmative vote.

The New York Times reports that other Catholics are struggling with what do with in the upcoming election. The most troublesome issue for many remains abortion. Some, like Joe Biden, believe we must make accommodations for differing views in a pluralistic society, despite his own embrace of personhood at conception. Others, like my old friend, see Biden’s support for legal access to abortion as no different from espousing the Holocaust – if not in deed, then in complicity.

Can a Catholic possibly vote for a Democratic candidate who has regularly received a 100% approval rating from Planned Parenthood and indeed, as a state senator, voted against an Illinois version of the Born Alive Infant Protection bill passed by Congress? Can I, as a person of faith who believes all life is sacred? I am going to answer ‘yes,’ and in so doing, proclaim myself also a utilitarian and a realist, with all the moral conundra that pragmatism involves.

If you’ll stay with me in this somewhat lengthy exposition, I’ll do my best to lead you through my reasoning. Along the way, I want to call liberals and conservatives alike to a fresh engagement with these most critical of issues, questions of the nature of our humanity and our obligations to one another, scrutiny of our mutual hypocrises, and a renewal of our willingness to tackle these profound dilemmas in a manner that can help us reach “common ground for the common good,” an expression used often at the inaugural Faith Council caucus at the Democratic National Convention, and at the DNC panel discussion of Democrats for Life. Only by refusing platitudes and rejecting ideology will we ever begin to achieve progress on these divisive concerns that continue to rend our body politic and erode our civility.

Although I am not Catholic, I am drawn to the “seamless garment” perspective that proclaims a holistic reverence for all life, and calls for a consistent pro-life ethic that seeks to protect life wherever it is threatened, whether by abortion, war, poverty, racism, capital punishment or euthanasia. I share the goal expressed by Consistent Life, a network of progressive pro-life interests, that what we are trying to achieve is “a revolution in thinking and feeling, an affirmation of peace and nonviolence, an infinite gentleness, a value for the life, happiness and welfare of every person, and all the political and structural changes that will bring this about.”

Within that overarching moral framework I see complexity, particularly when the pro-life interests of individuals conflict. Which is more deserving of protection, embryonic stem cells, or an adult suffering and ultimately dying from Parkinson’s disease? Is it ever justifiable to sacrifice thousands of civilians in a war to resist an evil regime that would otherwise kill even more innocents? Can one insist on the birth of all conceived babies while at the same time support, even laud, the use of capital punishment in a race- and class-biased system where innocent people are wrongly killed? Are the lives of babies lost to abortion more important than the lives of AIDS orphans in Africa lost to poverty and disease and warfare? Is one murder by intention and the other murder by neglect, and are there therefore moral distinctions between the two?

The challenge for shaping public policy in a manner that honors life amid such philosophically complex and often conflicting “life interests” does not lend itself to cut-and-dried, black-and-white terms or positions. What does “pro-choice” really mean? Does the fetus get a choice? Does it deserve one? Are conservatives willing to create a social structure in which a mother can choose life and be confident that the quality of her child’s life is also part of that ethos? Are liberals willing to examine the moral inconsistency of a worldview in which prairie dogs are accorded more value than unborn human life? There are plenty of folks in Boulder, Colorado, where I live, who regularly campaign for the welfare of the proliferating rodents yet refuse to recognize that a woman’s “right to privacy” involves a private choice to kill developing human life, which is what happens when you “terminate a pregnancy.” Their opponents on the right, however, disdain the importance of protecting the very ecosystems on which all life relies, failing to recognize, for instance, that the prairie dog is a keystone species whose presence contributes to a rich diversity of life that sustains us. Often, those who are first to speak against abortion are the same people, like Sarah Palin, who are also quickest to advocate destruction of the very environment that a Christian worldview deems God’s sacred creation, to be stewarded with care for all generations (for more on this, see Tom Yulsman’s 9/17 post).

The irony, the non sequiturs, the hypocrisy, are enough to turn anyone into a cynic, or at least further jade an already polarized society unwilling to engage one another in good faith on these enduring concerns that continue to split our electorate. Is it foolish to speak of “common ground for the common good”? Can we, amidst a field of always-flawed candidates, still find enough faith to vote in relatively good conscience and hope that within the parameters of our decisions, we can work toward policy outcomes that reflect at least some of our basic shared values? In this regard, should we not be able to agree on at least the fundamental premise that reducing the number of abortions in this country, or the number of lives lost to war, is a desirable thing?

To do that, we must summon the willingness, the energy, and the character to plunge into further discussion on life issues in a manner that seeks such bridge-building. The Democratic Party was right to include events such as the first-ever interfaith caucus, and to sanction Democrats for Life, as part of this essential effort. At the same time, the party is home to secularists as well, with whom we – including conservative Republicans — must co-exist.

As Jim Wallis, moderator the DNC Faith Council, said, the answer to the religious right is not a religious left, but a moral center. But few on either side seem invested in trying to get there.

My sense on the streets of Denver during the DNC was that many convention-goers were tired of, dismissive, even bored with the graphic photos of dismembered fetuses held high on signs outside the gates to the Pepsi Center and displayed in bloody, brutal relief on the sides of the Operation Rescue truck driving through downtown. Some turned away but most ignored the images, including that of a perfect, miniature hand laid against a quarter, perhaps the size of George Washington’s head. More chose to pay attention to equally gruesome photos of Falun Gong torture victims, whose faces were methodically burned by electric batons, or whose genitals were torn off.

I was arrested by all of these images, which were paraded side by side along a full block of 15th Street. Though I adamantly reject the harsh, often hostile efforts to engage passersby by many anti-abortion demonstrators in Denver (I was told by one that I was “going to hell” when I challenged him to use more Christ-like methods in his delivery), I just as adamantly believe there is a place for their message, including such photos. If liberals are going to argue against Chinese terrorist methods used in religious suppression but support the suctioning of late-term fetuses’ brains while their heads are exposed outside their mothers’ bodies, there needs to be an honest, explicit engagement with that apparent moral disconnect, and non-combative efforts to explain why. If conservatives are going to reject all embryonic stem cell research, they need to make a careful case as to why the sacredness of those microscopic cells is greater than that of my uncle who is declining with Parkinson’s and will likely see a premature end to his life as a result.

And if Senator Obama agrees that it is infanticide and a crime when a new mother discards her newborn infant in a trash can, yet supports doing nothing when a fetus survives an abortion and is placed in a medical waste can, then he needs to be forced into an engagement with the moral incongruity of that position. Obama has claimed that the reason he did not support a similar Illinois state version of the Born Alive Infants Protection Act that was simultaneously passed by a unanimous vote in the U.S. Senate is because of a concern (and I am paraphrasing here) that it would create an undue burden on the mother who sought the abortion, and would create a slippery-slope situation potentially leading to an undermining of legal abortion access of any kind.

Obama has claimed that his position on abortion is one that respects the plurality of moral views in American society. He wrote in The Audacity of Hope, “If I am opposed to abortion for religious reasons but seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.”

With regard to the overwhelming bipartisan support for the Born Alive Infants Act, Obama is clearly outside the critical mass that deems that fully born infants should not be left to lie alone to die. Obama’s critics are correct: he is in effect saying that the potential erosion of a woman’s right to choose is more important than the life of a baby that emerges alive from an abortion. It is more important to let that baby die than to jeopardize – even hypothetically — abortion rights.

I could not disagree more. And yet I am going to vote for him in November. As my Catholic friend beseeches me to explain, “Why??” How could I?

And there is where my pragmatism comes in. On virtually every other issue that ties into the preciousness and quality of life, an Obama presidency would be more beneficial than another round of failed Republican policies and philosophies that serve the rich and powerful far more than those most in need. From the economy to health care to energy to climate change and the very future of our ability to live on this planet, an Obama administration would be more likely to effect policy change that would realize the social justice aims that are so important to many voters of faith, including my own progressive Christian faith.

One prominent Catholic is in agreement with me, and it’s gotten him banned from taking communion, just as Joe Biden has been. Douglas Kmiec is a professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University and a former law faculty member at Notre Dame and Catholic University. He was also head of the Office of Legal Counsel for Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush. He spoke on an interfaith panel at the DNC Faith Council where he provided an answer to that posed in the title of his new book, “Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.”

Kmiec has stunned fellow conservatives with his endorsement of Obama, acknowledging as he addressed Democrats of faith at the DNC that “It’s unusual to be here.” Challenging those “who are making the argument under the guise of faith that it is a sin to vote for Barack Obama,” Kmiec has come to see Obama as “the best representative of the Catholic ‘path of life’” and a man of “deep faith…great intelligence, great integrity and great honesty.”

“That label of pro-life has to be a commitment to all of life, to a culture of life,” Kmiec said, contending that such a culture includes things like a living wage, adequate shelter, access to health care, and a recognition that we must live in community together.

But how does Kmiec, or how do I, or any other voter concerned about abortion as a moral crisis, ignore Obama’s views on such a central component of a consistent life ethic? We don’t. We search for and work together for that common ground. A Catholic, Kmiec argues in his book, can support the “non-negotiability of protecting human life” through the use of “imaginative means within Catholic social teaching to supply that protection.”

Kmiec quotes Obama:

“And so for me, the goal right now should be – and this is where I think we can find common ground, and by the way I have now inserted this into the Democratic Party platform – is how do we reduce the number of abortions, because the fact is that although we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortions over the last eight years [not to mention a majority of Supreme Court justice and federal judges who are Republican appointees – my addition], abortions have not gone down.”

Kmiec continues:

“If Republican Faith Partisans [those who condemn a vote for Obama as a sin – my addition] were actually capable of protecting human life through their singular focus on overturning Roe, the claim might have greater plausibility.”

Here again my pragmatic bent enters in, yet it is not incompatible with my overarching philosophical/religious orientation: I do not believe that Obama’s extreme views in support of abortion rights — and they are extreme, if we look at a basic bell curve of American opinion, with Obama on one end and Sarah Palin on the other – are likely to gain real traction in Congress or among the judiciary. Nor, for that matter, would Palin’s or McCain’s positions be likely to be turned into policy, given the moderate views held by most Americans. I do not anticipate that the Freedom of Choice Act will be passed, nor that Roe vs. Wade will be reversed, and even if it were, how likely is it that real inroads would be made in reducing the abortion rate as a result? The matter would merely be thrown back to the states for even more contentious and vitriolic political wrangling. The approach advocated by Obama and embraced by Kmiec, to enact policies that would reduce current abortion rates, is much more likely in the realm of political reality to be effective.

Polls continually show that Americans see abortion as a complex, multi-faceted moral issue. Most make distinctions between taking a morning-after pill that would expunge a fertilized egg versus a partial-birth procedure that sucks the brains out of a potentially viable, developed baby’s head. And most see a difficult continuum of developmental stages, each with ramifications for the morality of “choice,” in between. In a 2008 Gallup poll that asked voters whether they supported abortion in “all circumstances, some circumstances, or no circumstances,” respondents came down largely in the middle.

Many Christians, even Catholics, see such a spectrum of gray. My Catholic friend does not, and I respect him for the consistency of his position. Within his moral framework, human life – human personhood – begins at conception, and to destroy it for any reason is equivalent to committing murder. We have laws against murder in our society, and they trump our right to privacy. A woman enduring domestic abuse may wish to make the private decision to murder her abuser, but society says his right to life trumps her individual choice. If one believes, as my friend and many Christians do, that abortion is no different from murdering anyone already born, then there is a moral imperative to deny the legality of such a practice. To his credit, he is consistent on sanctity of life issues: unlike far too many religious conservatives, he doesn’t oppose abortion, then turn around and vote for a candidate who supports the war in Iraq or policies that keep kids in ghettoes well stocked with machine guns and assault rifles so they can keep killing each other (the same invalid slippery slope argument Obama makes applies most of the time to gun rights advocates, too).

I cannot make that same choice not to participate. As I see it, we humans are fallen and flawed and our institutions are, too. But they are the only structures we have within which to work toward our nobler goals of justice, fairness and the common good. There is a lot we can do outside of government. But government, whether a “necessary evil” or agent of our “better angels,” is a fixture in our collective welfare, and I believe we have a moral obligation to participate in it.

When it comes to resolving the social problems that prompt so many women to have abortions, I have faith that Democrats can do more to solve them than anything Republicans are proposing, despite their claim to be the pro-life party. As Kristen Day, head of Democrats for Life, said in an interview with the New Republic last month, “Republicans do nothing to help pregnant women who are facing pregnancy…Many women don’t have the resources to sustain a healthy pregnancy, let alone a child.” Data shows that Democratic policies such as those espoused in the Pregnant Women Support Act endorsed by Obama – providing prenatal resources, expanding health care – are effective in helping to reduce abortion rates.

It is one thing to speak out about against abortion, as Republicans do, but quite another to take action that makes meaningful inroads against its prevalence. Toward that utilitarian realization of an end, as Day said, “If a voter’s top priority is reducing abortion, she should vote Democratic.”

For many Catholics, abortion is that top-priority issue. For me, the whole gamut of issues that concern our quality of life as human beings, on earth, in community with one another, are just as central. Those are central concerns to many conservatives, too. As my staunchly Republican cousin claims whenever we talk politics, “We really want the same things in the end…we just disagree on the means to get there.” In many respects I think he’s right. But where I think he is wrong is in believing that yet more Republican policies will get us anywhere near our shared desire for a more humane society. My faith is buoyed, however, that we are talking, that I am talking with my Catholic friend, that we are being honest and respecting one another while cultivating conversation. The seeds of that elusive common ground we so desperately need in this country can only germinate in the soil of civility fertilized with integrity.

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“You’ve got 15 seconds to get a potential voter over to your side.” What do you say to that undecided voter in 15 seconds that is simple enough that you know they’ll get it, but that is also powerful enough to at least get them to do a double-take and ask you to explain what you mean? After all, everyone understands “Drill, baby! Drill!”. So how do you counter that simple message with an equally powerful and yet simple message?

The announcement of launch of the Green Jobs Now campaign this week is an excellent start, and one that was mentioned during the DNC discussion. With concerns about job security, outsourcing, and energy in the forefront of voters’ minds, this seems like a great approach. But there’s one flaw – what the hell is a “green job”? Because so many people don’t understand what a green job is, you won’t get as many double-take moments as you’ll need to oppose “drill here, drill now, pay less” et al. So while it’s certainly better than nothing, and the list of partnered organizations impressive, it’s not going to be enough to counter an oil drilling partisan. To counter folks like that, you need something more direct. Something that, instead of totally changing the conversation from gas prices to jobs (a very useful thing to do, I must admit), knocks the entire drilling argument on its head.

Next time you hear someone say that drilling more will drop oil prices, here’s your response:

Telling someone that they’ve been lied to, or that they’re lying, isn’t polite. That’s OK – what big oil has done – lied – on the drilling isn’t polite either, and the longer you let the people around you spew or parrot lies, the longer it’ll take to shut down the stupid “drill drill drill” meme that’s going around.

The only thing you have to do is make sure that you’ve got your facts straight once you’ve got their attention.

• If they say that they can get the oil to market fast, tell them that the Energy Information Administration (EIA) say’s they’re wrong and that it’ll take 10 years at a minimum to get outer continental shelf (OCS) oil to market. And if they quibble, point out that the EIA is officially non-partisan but still part of the Bush Administration. Don’t forget to point out that a) there’s not enough deep sea drilling rigs to punch more holes in the OCS for something like 5 years, b) you can’t just build more deep see drilling rigs because every single shipbuilder capable of building new rigs is already booked solid and it takes 2-4 years from order to deliver of a new rig anyway. So no “two years from lifting the OCS ban to new oil production” for them….
• If they say that oil shale will save us since there’s trillions of barrels of oil, tell them that a RAND Corporation study says that the savings from making shale-based oil available is only 3-5% and that it’ll be 2020 at the earliest before any oil could be available from shale projects (and 2028 before 1 million barrels per day would be exceeded – 2038 for 3 million barrels/day). And ask them where all the water needed for refining shale kerogen into useful oil products will come from – the water rights of local farmers and ranchers, or the downstream water rights of places like California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona.
• If they say that drilling in ANWR can get oil to market fast because the pipeline is already there, point out that the pipeline has a little extra capacity, but not enough to make a dent in the lower 48’s oil demand. And this doesn’t even factor into account the fact that the EIA says that 25% of all proven U.S. crude oil reserves are non-producing (not being pumped and/or drilled). If the reserves are proven, then why aren’t oil companies already pumping out of them, hmmmm? Oh, and let’s not forget that every existing on-shore drilling rig is already busy punching holes in the ground, it takes 1-2 years to build new ones, and all the new rigs being built are already spoken for for at least the next 3 years. And finally, the EIA estimates that even at full capacity, opening ANWR will drop the price for oil by about $1.27 per barrel, which at today’s closing price on the NYMEX, ~$104/barrel, would be about 1.2%

Or you can print out this great graph from Architecture 2030 that I found via SolveClimate.com:

Sure, it only applies to the outer continental shelf, but the basic trend line is similar for oil shale, only worse.

Perception is reality in politics, and Big Oil has repeated these lies enough that people are starting to perceive them as true even though they aren’t. That can’t be allowed to continue. And I can think of no better way to stop it than to call the lies what they are – lies.

Big Oil is lying to you. “Drill here, drill now, pay less” is a lie. “Drill, baby, drill” is a lie. “All of the above” is a lie. And anyone telling you otherwise is either lying to you or doesn’t know that they’ve been lied to.

Practice that until you can say it in less than 15 seconds. And then go out and say it every time you hear someone else repeat the lie.

Today, in our final segment, we talk about the science of global heating, the technology that can help address it, and it’s deniers.

S&R: How do you address the concerns of the person who just spent $4.30 per gallon to fill up their tank with gas, who is concerned that the price of gas for their furnace is going up, who sees their electricity prices rising because Chinese demand for coal is driving up coal prices, when you say that you’re going to make all of that carbon-based energy even more expensive?

Bill Becker: Well, first you tell them that the price has gone up not because of climate change or anything we’ve done to solve climate change, it’s gone up because these are fossil fuels, they’re finite fuels and it’s inevitable that they’re going to run out. There’s more people demanding them, the supplies are getting thinner, and the price is going up – it’s the old law of supply and demand. It’s not the fault of anyone who’s working in the environmental community or in climate change. I would tell them secondly that the price rises are going to continue – it’s inevitable. We may see little dips and that sort of thing but the general trend is going to be up, and so we need to deal with that right now. We can deal with it in a couple of ways.

One way is through energy efficiency and conservation. One of the best ways to mitigate the pain of energy prices is to use less energy, and as we heard today, efficiency is a way that you can get all the same benefit but use less energy. We need to have an unprecedented drive for energy efficiency – an energy efficiency surge in this economy that the President and the Congress can lead to help people reduce their energy bills from the get-go – and that can happen quickly. Energy efficiency is a very fast result-producing strategy.

The second thing we need to help people understand is that while fossil energy – coal and nuclear, gas, oil – all are going up, the cost of renewables are coming down, and there is a point – in fact we’ve crossed it some places already – where renewables – solar, wind, and geothermal – will be cheaper than the traditional energy resources we have. So what we need to do is get over the hump until that happens, until solar, wind, geothermal electricity, biofuels are relatively cheap forms of energy. They’re stabilizing energy prices because their supplies are infinite. The fuel costs for solar and wind are free. So we need to get through this transition period to the point where we’re based on renewable energy and prices stabilize. If people can see that future, I think they’ll be less afraid that we’ll see perpetual unaffordable increases in their energy costs, but we need to move to create that future – it’s not going to happen by itself.

S&R: So you’re not a fan of the “drill here, drill now, pay less” campaign.

BB: I’m not a fan of that. And the way I put it is that you can’t solve the addiction by changing suppliers. We just perpetuate the use of oil and carbon emissions by feeding more into the system. I’m not saying that we can go cold turkey. I understand that that kind of dislocation would be untenable, but we do need to have an intelligent, gradual, predictable strategy for backing our way out of that resource and replacing it cellulosic biofuels and other types of liquid fuels or electric vehicles and that kind of thing in our economy.

S&R: Here in Colorado we’re starting to hear the rhetoric of oil shale. Back in the 80’s, oil shale was big and then it crashed, and the communities that were depending on oil shale research crashed along with it. Naturally, most of those communities are now a little leery of jumping on the shale bandwagon again. What’s PCAP’s view on shale development?

BB: PCAP’s view is that we need to learn to solve problems, not switch problems – there’s a difference between problem solving and problem switching.

Let’s talk about liquid fuels from coal. Some people promote them as a way to reduce our petroleum imports; we’ll run our vehicles on liquids produced from coal. That’s a good thing from the standpoint of reducing our dependence on imports, but it’s a terrible thing from the standpoint of climate change because it’s a very carbon intensive operation. By getting into liquid fuels from coal we’re trading the import problem for the climate problem. We need solutions because this crisis is so urgent that solve both problems. We need to solve many problems at once. We need to multitask, so our solutions need to not create a whole new set of problems, they need to solve a whole bunch of problems all at one time. That’s what solar will do, for example, and wind, because they don’t have those liabilities. The same thing with nuclear – you’re producing what people call a low-carbon fuel in exchange for national security. You don’t want to make that trade-off.

Now, if there were no options that were not overall good and did not involve trade-offs, fine. But we have options. We have clean technologies that enhance national security, that are environmentally benign, economically good, job creating technologies. We need to actually exhaust those before we move into the more problematic options.

In terms of oil shale development, again, the oil industry is finding that more and more of the world’s oil is becoming harder to reach because oil is becoming nationalized. They’re not having as much access to the world’s oil fields as they used to, so they’re looking for new, non-conventional sources, they’re looking to drill in harder to reach places like offshore. They’re looking to oil shale as becoming a non-conventional source of oil so they can continue selling oil.

My argument is that, with the tremendous profits the oil industry is taking in right now, they should be investing in the energy technologies of the future, not of the past. They should spend less time defending the old economy, more time helping us build the new economy. And it’s not just me – the Rockefeller family, shareholders in ExxonMobil went to the last annual meeting and urged Exxon to begin investing more of its money in these renewable technologies of the future. We’re going to see more of that kind of pressure from the shareholders.

S&R: And yet Steve Milloy got up at the same meeting and was cheered for presenting a proposal that said “we have to stop shareholder activism” very much like what the Rockefeller family was proposing. How do you deal with that, or do you figure out a way to work around it?

BB: I think we’ll have the same disagreement and evolution in thinking among shareholders as we have had on the Hill in Congress. I don’t think because the Rockefellers sit up and said “we’ve got to go for solar” there’s suddenly a unanimous movement of shareholders. The battle’s going to have to be fought and minds changed in that community as well as the rest of America, but there’s no doubt in my mind that the smart thing for fossil energy industries to do is to take the wealth that they have now and, rather than turning it back into stock shares and high salaries for their executives, begin to invest it in the future so they have a future, so their shareholders have a future, so America has a future.

These guys know how to run a business, and we can use them. They need not be our enemy, the enemy of a new economy, I should say. They could be allies. We could build this new economy together, but I think right now they’re really caught in what they know, they’re caught in old patterns, and they need to come aboard.

S&R: This morning, Fred Palmer, Peabody Coal’s Senior Vice President for Government Relations and the other big energy panelists from the Energy and Climate Change roundtable this morning were proponents of the incrementalist approach: “It’s going to take us time to develop CCS, we need a government that’s going to give us the time we need and a policy that will give us the time to get there.” What’s your view on that?

BB: It’s not the government’s role to give us time. The time is out. The time has expired. What the government has to do is help us in a rapid turnaround. We can’t wait for research and development to figure out how to bury and sequester large amounts of carbon from the coal industry. We should continue researching that, and I hope it’s a technology that pans out, but we don’t have the time to wait 10, 15, or 20 years for that technology to become mature and move into the marketplace. We need to act now.

It so happens that energy efficiency, wind, and solar are very quickly deployed technologies. They’re things we can do very, very quickly. We’ve seen that again with the gasoline crisis and how quickly people responded to it, and we saw gasoline prices start to come down. We can’t wait for incremental approaches to this. In fact, Sam Walton of Wal-Mart said “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. We don’t want continuous improvement, we want radical change.” He saw that from a business standpoint. I think we’re seeing that from a government standpoint. Frankly, one of the statements that we heard this morning from the coal industry is that we have clean coal, that there is such a thing as clean coal. There is not such thing as clean coal.

S&R: And yet the ACCCE is standing outside the Denver Center for the Performing Arts passing out T-shirts and saying we’ve got the energy of the future. I take it you don’t agree?

BB: Uh, no. To be brutally frank, and you have to understand my bias because I worked my career in renewable energy and energy efficiency, so I’m a very biased person, but to be candid, what the fossil energy industries are doing is dressing up in new clothes for a new time. That doesn’t mean that underneath those clothes that they’re not still the same industries that they were before.

We may be able to achieve clean coal, but the way that they mean it is that we can capture and sequester the carbon, but clean really means what coal does to our economy and our people throughout its entire life cycle. If you fly over West Virginia and see what mountaintop removal mining has done, you’ll never believe it. You cannot call coal clean if you’ve seen mountaintop removal. If you’ve seen the water coming out of the wells in southern West Virginia, you’ll never call coal clean even if they manage to capture every atom of carbon and bury it underground.

So, as I talked about in the seminar this morning, when we talk about what needs to be on the table, we need to have a lot of options, but we need to pay most attention to the best ones that are truly clean over their entire life cycle in terms not just of energy, but water or carbon or the impact on the social well-being of the people who are in the mining regions, national security. All of those things need to be calculated so we can pick the options that do the least harm and the most good. Not all energy technologies are equal in this new economy at all. Some are better than others and we need to do the best ones first.

S&R: I have seen a lot of representatives of the nuclear industry claim that their industry is “carbon free”. In my experience, when they’re referring to their industry as carbon free, they’re talking about after they get the ore out of the ground and get it processed in the first place. Do you see a place for nuclear at the table?

BB: First of all, when they talk about it being carbon free or clean coal, they’re talking about the moment of combustion or the moment of nuclear reaction. Again, if you look at the whole lifecycle, you’ll see that nuclear does produce carbon. Not as badly as coal, but it does produce carbon. But the more serious consequences of using nuclear are at least threefold, and our position in PCAP is that we should not build nuclear unless the industry can solve three problems: non-proliferation of nuclear materials which result in nuclear weapons, permanent storage of the waste in a way that’s safe for generations to come, and how do we protect this nuclear plant that we’re building from becoming a terrorist target. When you think about proliferation these days, you think not only about someone acquiring the knowledge to build a very sophisticated weapon, but a dirty bomb. So those three things need to be solved before we move forward on nuclear.

What we say in PCAP is – we don’t oppose coal, we don’t oppose nuclear. We oppose carbon emissions, we oppose proliferation. What we need to do as a nation is set a performance standard for the technologies we’re going to promote and subsidize publicly. We need to meet this standard for net energy gain, net carbon reduction, national security impact, water consumption. We need to lay out the things that we can measure and know we need to measure and say “you need to meet these criteria if you’re going to be part of this nation’s energy solution, or at least the part we’re subsidizing with public money.”

S&R: There are a lot of very well organized and funded people out there who oppose making any changes. They either believe that climate change isn’t a problem, or they believe it’s going to cost too much. How are you going to counteract that message?

BB: First of all, that’s not unusual. Whenever we’ve had an economic transformation, and we’ve had some, there are people who are threatened by it, some of them very justifiably. When we switched from typewriters to laptop computers or PCs, the typewriter people lost their jobs. When we switched to cell phones, the people who made dial phones lost their jobs. We have to be sensitive to that. We have to help those people come into the new economy with economic security. We need to be sensitive.

But those who are opposing the science or who are that it’s “the sky is falling” rhetoric or that it’s a conspiracy by scientists to get more research money, the future is not on their side. I think events are going to prove them wrong. I think they’re arguing out of vested interests, and some of them are arguing just because they’re contrarians, I guess, but I think what happens in the next several years is going to eliminate most doubt except for the most intransigent people that this is an absolute real problem.

We’ve heard from the science. We’ve had the largest, collaborative scientific study in the world’s history conclude that this is a real and urgent problem, that we’ve just got a few years left to solve it, that we have to create a brand new economy, and I think that most people who are intelligent, well-meaning, and concerned about the future get that. I think the mainstream debate has moved beyond the science now and now the debate is about what we need to do to achieve that rapid turn around that the scientists say we need to achieve.

One thing I’ll say is that, in this project, we talk about needing to build a 21st century economy. The old economy isn’t working. The signs are all around us that it’s dysfunctional. There’s a bunch of new realities that we need to shape our economy to meet and to take advantage of. We say that the new economy needs to deliver security, opportunity, and stewardship, but when you say that to someone in the Rust Belt, when you say “we need a new economy”, what that means to them is “I’m going to lose my job – you’re phasing out my job.” We need to be sensitive to that.

There are things we can do. We can create enterprise zones, special places where a community, for example, that loses coal jobs or where an automobile plant goes down, heaven forbid, where federal incentives and state incentives combine to bring to bring new manufacturing businesses – wind power and others – into that community and retrain people for those jobs. We can take care of that problem if we’re sensitive to it, and I think the next President will be.

S&R: One last question. There has to be people out there who don’t like what you’re doing. Can you give me a basic rundown on who they are and why they don’t?

BB: I think everyone loves what we’re doing. I think we’re universally loved… I wish.

I tend to be more frontal, a little more aggressive than the diplomats on the hill about the need for this transition, and I’m sure that the fossil energy industries and the nuclear industry don’t like some of the proposals we’re putting forward, but I think they’re good proposals for the future of the country and actually for the future of these industries if they hop on board in creating this new economy rather than resisting it. And as I said, they spend a lot of time and money right now defending the old economy when they could help us build a new one.

But no, not everyone like it, but it’s something we need to do, and I think the more we talk about the opportunities inherent for the whole economy, the more people will understand this is not only the right thing, but is the right future that we need to work on. There’s always going to be deniers and there’s always going to be people who are afraid of change. We just have to counter the deniers with better information and help the people who are afraid to make it through the transition.

Monday:Part 1
Tuesday: Part 2
Wednesday Part 3

S&R: You’ve used a phrase that a photovoltaic panel, from a national security perspective, is equivalent to a rifle. Last night [at the Green Constitutional Congress] you also said that a plug-in hybrid was equivalent to a tank. How much into the public’s perception has national security risen that you’re starting to use this kind of language?

Bill Becker: Well, publicly I’m not sure it’s risen very far.

For several years there have been analyses of the national security impacts of climate change, but for the last two years we’ve seen a flurry of them. One was issued in April 2007 by the Center for Naval Analysis, the CNA. This study, headed by Sherri Goodman, who’s a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, involved eleven retired flag officers, generals and admirals, who came to the conclusion after a great deal of study that climate change was, as they put it, a “threat multiplier” that, if the science predictions are true – and they believe that they will be or could be – is going to cause upheaval in some of the most volatile parts of the world. Mass migrations, sea level rise, drought, those kinds of things. And that’s going to have direct security implications for the United States, even to the point where military bases don’t want to be connected to the grid because it’s not that reliable – [the bases] want to be independent of the grid so they’re not interrupted. Military bases located in coastal areas might be inundated [by seal level rise]. So it’s a wide-ranging issue.

Another big issue for them security wise is delivering fossil fuels to the field – it’s very expensive, the supply routes are hazardous for troops, it’s a dangerous thing to do, so they’re looking at all kinds of renewables. Another report is called “The Age of Consequences”, it was put out by a number of individuals including John Podesta at the Center for American Progress. [The report] looked at three different scenarios, sort of business as usual, kind of worse than that, and then really bad and then analyzed what the security implications would be.

And then most recently and probably most importantly, the National Intelligence Council did an analysis of the security implications of climate change and, last June in a classified report that they said something about on the hill, they agreed, that this is a national security issue, and their findings are very much in concert with those of the CNA. It’s a threat multiplier, we’ve got to act on it quickly, and it needs to be considered as a security issue.

Now, I use a bit of hyperbole [with the photovoltaics = an M-16 rifle, etc.], but what I mean to say is that investing in renewable energy and mitigating climate change and adapting to climate change needs to be considered a national security strategy. And so money that we’ve been spending thinking about security as a military issue and spending on weaponry might be invested in the kinds of technologies that prevent the security threat that these groups have identified. So there’s a little bit of hyperbole there, but really, we’re coming to the point where renewable energy is a very necessary and serious security strategy.

S&R: Are we to the point where we can consider, for example, shrinking foreign bases as a method to fund renewable energy research and development, or is that too aggressive?

BB: I wouldn’t presume to know how many foreign bases we should have and where. I would hope that we’d be entering a future where we don’t have foreign bases deployed in Muslim holy lands and other places to secure oil supplies. I would hope that we divorce ourselves as steadily and as rapidly as we can from imported oil. A lot of people have that aspiration for obvious reasons. But no, I can’t tell you where bases should be or how many there should be.

S&R: I understand. Today, one of the panelists in the Rocky Mountain Roundtable mentioned that one of the reasons the blue water navy existed was to protect access to oil shipping lanes. So basically, if I understand you correctly, you’re saying that if we wean ourselves off of oil especially, we won’t necessarily need so much Pentagon investment. Is that correct, or is that stretching it?

BB: It’s too simple. This is a very, very complex situation. Let me lay it out as best I can.

First of all, in PCAP, we suggest that America should not be the sole policeman and guardian of Persian Gulf shipping lanes. That ought to be a shared responsibility and a shared cost for all nations that rely on Persian Gulf oil. That hasn’t been the case and we think that we need to insist that way – a shared responsibility. That then frees up some money to do other things, if that comes about. But the truth is that the United States could completely cut off and stop using imported oil tomorrow and we’re still going to be vulnerable to oil shortages, embargos, and price manipulation because we’re part of a world economy, a global economy, and six of our top ten trading partners are net oil importers. And if their economies go down – Japan, China, or one of the others – our’s is going to feel it as well. So it’s a global commodity, it’s globally priced. We’re as vulnerable to the manipulations of the oil market as an oil consumer as we would be not importing it anymore.

What we suggest in PCAP is that all the oil importing nations get together and form something called the Organization of Petroleum Importing Countries, OPIC, so that the users are getting together and collaborating on research and development, policy, and mechanisms to wean us all gradually from foreign oil. And that’s necessary not just because we don’t like oil shocks, it’s necessary because oil supplies are running out. The cheap oil is no longer there. We’re reaching, if we have not already reached, peak oil, and what that means is that when one country in the world gets more oil, some other country is going to get less. When we had more demand for oil in the past, we just produced more. We’re not there any more. So that’s going to cause world tensions, it’s going to cause resource conflicts, and it’s in the interest of all nations to begin to backing out of a disappearing resource.

Monday: Part 1
Yesterday: Part 2
Tomorrow: S&R interviews PCAP’s Bill Becker, the conclusion.

S&R: John Podesta said today [at the Energy and Climate Change roundtable] that the process of decarbonizing, of getting ourselves off of fossil fuels, would be a massive and breathtakingly difficult process for our country and the world. How will PCAP help the President and Congress convince the American people that decarbonizing our economy won’t be too difficult to undertake at all?

Bill Becker: Well, a couple of things. John is right, this is going to be a massive undertaking. We’ve got 200 years of a fossil economy that we need to reinvent, and we need to do it on a dime – turn on a dime. And we need to do it as a global community instead of as one country. And we don’t have a czar who can impose this on us – the democratic process is frustrating to say the least. So it’s a huge undertaking.

The comparison I hear most people make is to FDR and World War II, how we turned production of automobiles into tanks on a dime, where we began to produce what we needed to win that war, where we rallied the nation to get involved with victory gardens and war bonds. They even had something called victory speakers which reminds me of Al Gore’s training of a thousand people to go out and give his speech. People in the community actually went out and gave 10, 15 minute speeches about supporting the war effort. What FDR had, finally, after a long, frustrating time, was strong public support to lead because of Pearl Harbor, because of the Depression.

This is a more subtle and insidious issue. It isn’t like we’re suddenly attacked. It’s like the frog in the water that heats up slowly until it’s boiling. It’s a leadership challenge to be sure. But I have a feeling that the American people are waiting to be asked to do something, that our political leaders in recent times have not had the courage to enlist the American people the effort, whatever it might be, in reducing gasoline consumption or oil use. [Our political leaders] didn’t have the courage to tell the people of New Orleans that they shouldn’t move back into this place because it’ll be flooded again.

I think there’s a pent up, sort of Kennedy-esque “ask what we can do for the country” spirit, and the American people are waiting to be asked to get involved. I think that one of the things the next President needs to do is rally that spirit and tell people what they can do, suggest what every American can do in every home or every automobile, and get us all involved. But there has to be a clear goal that we all can strive for. There needs to be amazingly inspirational leadership of the kind that John Kennedy often gave with his speeches, and I think we’ve got a candidate that can do that.

I think also that the weather is going to conspire and the oil market is going to conspire and, when we put a cap on carbon, the economic signals will conspire to help people change their behaviors. What we saw with gasoline prices going above $4 is that people began to voluntarily do what those of us in the energy conservation and efficiency business have wanted them to do for many years. They began to buy more smaller vehicles, more fuel efficient vehicles. They began to drive less, to use more mass transit, they began to walk more. All of those things. Their behavior was changed by the marketplace. So because oil is a declining resource, the price is naturally going to go up, a carbon tax would make prices up as well, so I think that economically people will want to change.

But I think that the President can rally us toward a cause. And the cause is to maintain the country that was created by the Founders, was defended by generations before us, and is going to be inhabited by generations after us. I think the patriotic thing to do, and the President can make this clear, is to address this problem, address it quickly, and to ensure a decent future for our kids.

S&R: You’ve talked about cap-and-trade, specifically cap-and-trade with an auction instead of a giveaway. I’ve wondered myself ever since I started blogging on energy and climate why the focus is on cap-and-trade over carbon tax. What’s PCAP’s reason for focusing on cap-and-trade as opposed to a carbon tax?

BB: Because the momentum seems to be behind cap-and-trade, and we could try and fight trench warfare about a carbon tax, which most economists seem to agree is the better and simpler approach, or we can go with where the momentum is. But the truth is if Congress passed a cap-and-trade or cap-and-auction system like we’re talking about, it’ll be a virtual tax. I use that term because taxes are like the third rail of politics, unfortunately, and I’ll say something about that in a minute, but we believe that if you have system that moves upstream and deals with 1500 entities it’ll be a good system and a workable one.

The really intrinsic advantage of cap-and-trade over a carbon tax is that with a cap-and-trade you’re assuring the level of carbon emissions. With a carbon tax you’re assuring the amount of income, in a sense. So the more effective approach is to cap carbon emissions and be certain by adjusting the price signal that the cap will be met. I do think cap-and-trade is superior in that way to a carbon tax.

S&R: [Senator] Clair McCaskill mentioned [during the Rocky Mountain Roundtable on Energy and Climate Change] that cap-and-trade might be too big to manage. Do you think that going to the 1500 points of entry upstream will make it viable?

BB: It’ll make it infinitely easier to manage.

What you have now is a system that’s the result of political compromise and tradeoffs. It’s trying to make sure that everyone’s taken care of, which is a good thing, but the result is a real patchwork with all kinds of nuances, all kinds of complexity. It’s hard to administer and probably pretty costly to administer. I think you need a system that the marketplace can trust, the American people can trust, that is transparent and that we can understand how it works so it’s hard to game. The people within the system can’t game it because it’s completely transparent. The administration costs are low. I think a system like that has a much better chance of working. I think it has a better chance of being perceived as equitable, so that’s the way we would go

The downside to that, I admit, is that, if you go upstream, the big emitters like big industries or power plants will not have a permit they can sell. And there’s a number of people I respect who contend “you’ll never get an upstream system through the Hill because there’s not people pushing for it, not enough people are going to profit from it.” So there’s going to have to be some sort of balance when we talk about the national interest vs. the property interest of utilities and large industries. Not any approach is perfect, but I prefer the upstream and I think that PCAP as a project does too.

S&R: The Congressional Budget Office did an analysis of cap-and-trade vs. carbon tax, and one of their concerns on the cap-and-trade option was that we’d end up with wild carbon price fluctuations leading to the end users’ bills fluctuating month to month, even week to week or day to day if you’re talking spot markets and oil. How can you address that with a cap-and-trade system?

BB: Well, I haven’t read the CBO report, but I do know that one of the attributes of cap-and-auction has to be flexibility, and what I mean by that there needs to be a quasi-independent entity – some people have talked about a carbon Fed, for example – that can monitor the marketplace and see whether the price that they’re setting is adequate to bring down carbon emissions or whether the kind of adverse effects you talked about are happening, and that is empowered by Congress to make, within limits, adjustments to the cap-and-trade system so we don’t have to go back to six more years of debate on the Hill in order to fine-tune it. It may be a while before we get it right, before we know exactly what price has the effect we want, what mechanisms need to be in place.

One of the things we’re proposing while we do that experimentation and fine tuning is that the President encourage EPA to immediately begin regulating greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. As you know, the Supreme Court virtually said it was [the EPA's] obligation to do so. This administration has delayed that. But a technicality is that the President doesn’t have the power to order the administrator of the EPA to do that – Congress has delegated that authority to the administrator. But the President can strongly encourage the administrator, can probably even hire someone who promises to do it right. But we need to begin to regulate [carbon emissions] under the Clean Air Act, probably the State Implementation Plan (SIP) process. And we’ve been talking to a number of states, including California, who think that’s a workable system. With a few administrative tweaks they think that [the SIP] regulatory regime can be applied to carbon emissions.

Now, the thing is, some people object to regulation – it’s a safety net. If cap-and-trade doesn’t work like we thought, we’re still reducing greenhouse gas emissions and we have a regime in place. If cap-and-trade is a marvelous success, if it’s wildly successful, then the regulatory regime becomes moot because there’s no emissions to regulate or because we’ve already achieved the targets set by the regulations. We think that has to happen. It’s kind of the belt and suspenders approach – you’ve got both levels of support, if one fails, the other doesn’t.

Yesterday: Part 1
Tomorrow: Part 3

In the interests of disclosure, I’ve rearranged the order of the questions and answers in order to group them logically by topic instead of chronologically.

S&R: Can you give me a brief rundown of what PCAP is and what its purpose is?

Bill Becker: PCAP is a project of the University of Colorado, the Wirth Chair, to produce a 100 day action plan for the next President of the United States on climate change. We’ve been going since January 1st 2007, eighteen or nineteen months now. We published our first plan in December of last year, 2007. We’re going to publish the final plan in October of this year. The first plan had more than 300 policy ideas and programmatic ideas. It’s easily the most comprehensive blueprint for federal private leadership that’s out there right now. What we’re finding is that a lot has changed since last December – the politics has changed, there’s been some new science, Jim Hansen has been more aggressive about what we need to do, so we’re updating all of what we proposed in December and we’ll release it very shortly.

S&R: You released your last plan in December, and you said that a whole bunch of things have changed since then. Can you give me some examples?

BB: One is Jim Hansen, who says that we need to get to 350 ppm [of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere]. We’re already over that, so that’s going to be quite a feat. The Warner-Lieberman Bill failed in the senate, so we don’t yet have a climate cap-and-auction or cap-and-trade bill in place. The Bali [conference] has happened since we published the report where nations have committed now, in December 2009, to come back together and figure out what we’re going to do after Kyoto. And there are some other things. The energy bill in December passed with new CAFÉ standards and some good features on appliance efficiency and so on. So all of that has changed and it impacts what we proposed in December and we’ll reflect that in the new one.

S&R: You’re talking to both Presidential candidates, and last night you said to the Green Constitutional Congress that you’d already talked to Congress some. What’s the response been so far?

BB: It’s been very positive. No promises, and we haven’t asked for any. You know, with more than 300 ideas it’s impractical to suggest that anybody’s going to sign up to them all, but they’re certainly using it. We see some of the ideas and even some of the language beginning to show up, or has some time ago shown up, in the platforms of the campaigns. So it’s good. The reception has been positive.

We met with Obama himself and his policy director Heather Higgenbottom last October, way back then when there was still a lot of people in the field for President. And then we met with John McCain’s senior staff starting late last year. And we’ve been in touch with the senior advisers of both campaigns since then. On July 1 we held in Washington D.C a briefing on the security implications of climate change for the senior advisers of the campaigns and both campaigns were well represented at that. We had six scientists, two admirals, and other national defense experts on hand. It was a day long briefing that went really, really well. So they’ve been engaged. We’ve been engaged. Very positive.

S&R: What would you say are the top five or ten recommendations that PCAP has made?

BB: The first thing is that the President, in his inaugural address, in those first hundred minutes of the administration, needs to stand up and send a signal to this country and to the international community that there’s a new sheriff in town and that this country is going to be a leader again and a collaborator with other nations in solving [climate change]. That signal needs to go out right away, and the whole world and this country will be watching for that signal.

The second thing is that the President needs to begin to exercise the authority he has under current law to begin to change federal policy, how federal government uses energy. There’s a considerable amount of executive authority already in the President’s hands to do some good things. We’ve done a legal analysis of those authorities and we’ve identified to the President, or rather he’ll be able to find out from our studies, what he can do without waiting for Congress.

Then I would recommend that the President challenge Congress to return to him a cap-and-trade bill – a cap-and-auction bill is a better way to put it – within a hundred days. We need to send the signal to the world that we’re serious about this. We need to get that debate behind us. We recommend a certain kind of auction bill, by the way, and we think that the President needs to set standards for the kind [of bill] he wants to see on his desk. It needs to be transparent. It needs to be equitable. It needs to be adjustable because market conditions will change and we may not get the price right all at once. It needs to be a 100% auction – we shouldn’t be giving allowances away. And we recommend that it be an upstream cap-and-trade, which means we’re permitting or auctioning allowances to the 1500 or so places where fossil fuel comes into the economy. That’s the mine mouth, the well head, the port for natural gas, and if you do that, you’re avoiding having to permit 15 or 20 thousand entities and you’ll get rid of all this complexity that’s been built into the legislation so far – the off ramps and price caps and all this kind of stuff. It becomes much easier to administer and a much more manageable system. So those are a couple things.

Then we think the President needs to champion a very controversial move – to stop subsidizing fossil energy. It’s only something that Congress can do, but the President, with the bully pulpit and leadership skills, needs to see that happen, and I’ll tell you why. It’s not just because it makes no sense for us to be paying one another to emit carbon, and that’s what we’re doing – taxpayer money is going to oil companies or coal companies – but it’s also because it makes no sense on one hand to put a price on carbon through a cap-and-auction system so that you’re correcting market signals so the market can do it’s magic, but on the other hand you’re distorting market signals by subsidizing the same fuels you’re trying to cap. It makes no sense from a public policy or economic standpoint. It’s a tough battle. Last December, the Senate and the House tried to pay for tax subsidies for solar and wind by shifting fossil energy subsidies over, basically oil company subsidies. The oil industry rose up, opposed it, the White House said it would veto it, and it failed. So it’s not going to be an easy fight, but the President should lead it.

The next thing the President should do is get control of the carbon emissions of the federal government itself. It’s the world’s largest energy user. It produces about 2% of the U.S. carbon emissions. The federal government has incredible procurement power – what it buys, it’s such a huge consumer that it can change the marketplace. If it starts buying plug-in hybrid vehicles, if it establishes a sustained, large market, that encourages manufacturers to invest in producing those [plug-in hybrids]. So the federal government has a long ways to go and can, we think, become a carbon neutral enterprise, certainly by mid-century. That’s no mean feat, but we think it can be done.

The President needs to set out a whole new set of energy metrics, a whole new set of energy targets for the country quite different from the ones we have now. We need to cut our petroleum use in half by 2020. We need to get 25% of our electricity from renewables by 2025. We need to increase our efficiency 2.5% a year. These kinds of metrics. Our President needs to stand up and recalibrate what the nation’s energy goals are. So those are a few of the things.

S&R: If you could think of the single greatest element that’s missing from the conversation over climate change in this country, what would it be?

BB: The opportunity. I don’t mean to be mercenary by that, but the fact is that in building this new economy and in sustaining it there’s probably the largest global opportunity for helping people, for creating jobs, for earning income, for economic stability – probably the largest opportunity we’ve ever seen. We have 2 billion people in the world without electricity. I mentioned earlier today the cheapest way to get them that electricity is with distributed solar and wind rather than building transmission lines and centralized power. That’s a huge market and so far we’re just sitting on the sidelines for the most part. We yielded the solar market to Germany, the wind market to Denmark, and more solar market to Japan.

We invented those technologies in this country. We’re still the most innovative country in the world by any stretch of the imagination. We’ve got more Nobel laureates, more national laboratories, we have more scientists – 100,000 scientists and engineers on the federal payroll for crying out loud. This is a huge opportunity, and I think if people move from fear of change, from fear of not knowing what the new economy is, and understand that we will come out much stronger as a nation and as people and as employers and employees at the other end of that transition, then I think that we’ll be able to mobilize the country to do the right thing.

I think right now there’s too much fear of change. Some of it results in skepticism that there is any problem, some of it results in inertia about doing anything about it, so we need to talk more about the positive side. This is a tremendous opportunity for this country and for the world. It has humanitarian dimensions. We heard today [at the Rocky Mountain Roundtable on Energy and Climate Change] that the two great problems are the environment and poverty in the world today. We can address both at once by helping get clean technologies for electricity and clean water to the people of the world, rather than building more coal plants or more fossil energy production projects to give them the energy they need. So it’s the opportunity argument I think we need to make.

S&R: How hard do you think it will be for Congress, or whatever organization it delegates, to sit down, go through the tax code and federal law, and pull out the subsidies, hidden or otherwise?

BB: It’s going to be hard. But I think it’s not Congress.

We’re suggesting that the President task the Office of Management of the Budget, the Department of Treasury, a task force, essentially, to begin pulling the curtain back on the ways in which we subsidize carbon. A lot of them are very, very subtle kinds of subsidies, and some of them are very, very popular subsidies. A good case in point is the home interest deduction on McMansions. [Congressmen] John Dingell put a bill in to eliminate the home interest deduction on homes over a certain size – the really, really huge homes – and to gradually reduce that deduction until you got down to 2500 or 3000 square feet. But the point is that [the home interest deduction] is a very popular subsidy that is actually encouraging people to build larger homes which use more electricity and produce more carbon emissions.

Some of [the subsidies] are sacred cows, and we’re not suggesting that the President stride into the field and start shooting sacred cows. Some of them need to be herded in different directions, we think. Not all subsidies can be or should be eliminated – some of them are necessary for national security. A good case in point is policing the Persian Gulf oil lanes or the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – those should be maintained.

The point I try to make on subsidies is that we need to stop paying one another to do the wrong things. We need to remove perverse subsidies from the system, and by perverse I mean those things that encourage the bad things like carbon emissions. We need to stop them. The process we’re recommending is an inventory, publicly put on the Internet where everyone can see it, of the subsidies that are identified that are encouraging carbon use so we get a national discussion of which we should jettison. The President could even form a Presidential commission to recommend which subsidies to get rid of and do a base-closing kind of procedure – all or nothing. Put a bill into Congress and either take the package or you do none of them. That eliminates some of the political pain of picking out certain constituencies.

S&R: If you can’t get federal action on those things for one reason or another, do you have a plan to get those kinds of things implemented in a bottom-up strategy instead of a top-down?

BB: Well, the bottom-up is already happening, of course. There are 850 mayors who pledged to meet at least Kyoto targets. There are 21 states that have passed renewable portfolio standards. There are 31 [states], I believe, that have climate action plans in place or under development. So the states and localities have already exerted leadership and I expect they’ll continue. As you know, there’s several regional cap-and-auction or cap-and-trade plans in place or coming into being. If there’s a silver lining to a lack of federal leadership these past years, and it’s hard to find one, but if there is one it’s that governors and mayors and even some businesspeople are beginning to take ownership of this issue and beginning to act on it.

I don’t think we’re going to see the failure at the federal level that you’ve asked about. I don’t think, with the international mandate to do something about this, with the growing scientific evidence, and with the growing physical evidence in this country of severe weather – flooding and forest fires and all of that, which I believe are the early signs of climate change in this country – I don’t believe the President or the Congress could fail to act in some way. It may take longer than we like, but they can’t take too long and I’ll tell you why.

When we and others talk about the need for bold and urgent action, we’re reflecting what the world community has said developed nations must do to solve this problem. The IPCC says we need to level off, globally, carbon emissions. We need to stop the growth of carbon emissions by 2015. That’s six years, only six years after the President takes office. That’s not a lot of time because that implies a major change in our economy – a transformation. Jim Hansen says next year is going to be the most important year perhaps in civilized history because the Congress and the President need to not only set the tone but set the policy for rapid change in our economy to a brand new, low carbon or carbon-constrained economy. 158 nations got together before Bali last year – the U.S. was not one of them – but they believe that the developed nations need to cut their carbon emissions between 25 and 40% by 2020. That’s a huge number.

Our carbon emissions in the United States are heading in the opposite direction – they’re going up 1.2 to 1.5% a year. The Energy Information Administration projects that under business as usual they’ll go up 35% by 2030. That’s precisely the wrong direction. So this is not going to happen as it needs to happen without federal leadership. The states and localities can do so much, but we need a unified federal policy, we need consistent policy, and we need leadership.

Tomorrow: S&R interviews PCAP’s Bill Becker, Part 2
Wednesday: Part 3

We’re still trying to make sense of the spectacle that was last week’s DNC in Denver, and the same goes for many of the city’s residents. Our friend Karl Christian had some thoughts on the proceedings, and has agreed to let us repost this article, written on Day 2 of the DNC.

beerkitty has a lot more photos here.

This is actually not my first political convention, but my third (2000 in Philadelphia with the Republican Convention and 2004 in Boston with the Democratic Convention.) I just always happen to live where the political action apparently likes to move to. Conventions are following me like a stalker. May need some form of mace. So, this is all old hat, but it is interesting seeing the wide-eyed reactions from my Denver friends to everything that is suddenly going on. Apparently, nothing this big has hit Denver in a very long time (apparently since the G8 conference about 10 years ago.) You might think that Stanley Cup or World Series run were big, but you have seen nothing.

Yes, there are cops, COs, and SWAT patrols everywhere. The whole downtown looks like a demilitarized zone, with checkpoints and all to the point where K was nervous to even jay walk. Yes, you can happily watch the entire security patrol clampdown as you sip your Jamba Juice, kind of feel secure, and incredibly uneasy at sudden realization of the police state you live in.

While K and I were walking downtown on Saturday night, we saw a couple wearing very pro-Republican shirts. Now, anyone can say or wear anything they want and still happily look like a fool. You are allowed to do that in this country, just as I am free to mock you. Now, I believe that they thought they were being ‘edgy’ and ‘outrageous’ wearing these shirts, but in actuality, they just looked like racist assholes. The man’s shirt said: ‘IQ > Shoe Size. Vote Republican.’ The woman’s shirt: ‘ Who wants BO in the White House. Vote Republican.’ Both shirts had ‘Reelect McCain in 2012’ on the back. Yes, of course the couple was older, white, and had the same self-satisfied smirks on their faces.

I went downtown Sunday morning to meet up with K, who was watching the ‘Recreate 68’ anti-war march. My first thought was “Why, the hell, would anyone ever want to recreate ‘68? There were riots in ‘68 that would play right into Republicans hands’ (even Rush Limbaugh commented that he wanted riots in Denver.) I feel the same way about the hard core Clinton supporters. Yes, your candidate lost (and arguments can be said that she shot herself in the foot as well.) That sucks, but just give it up. Your continuing bitching about it plays into their hands: A candidate that wants to take away woman’s rights. Think about it. Do you really want to vote against your own self-interest to make a point? Who’s the fool there?

So anyway, I rode my bike down there and because of the press of the crowds I found myself in the counter-protest crowd. Yes, I was watching the parade with the hardcore Republicans, all of which were yelling “Support the Troops” and “USA!” while waving patriotic signs such as: Dissent is patriotic? You are backstabbing! (which makes me wonder, ‘what is okay dissent? Writing a particularly strong worded letter to the editor?’), Osama wants you to oppose the War on Terror, Gen Petraeus for Man of the Year, and (of course) You want real change? Accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior!! The one sign I saw that I thought was funny, sad, and exhibited without any sort of irony (which is the hallmark of the true believer ) was a photo of George Orwell with the quote “Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense” George Orwell? The pro-republican, pro-government masses are using George Orwell as a symbol? Really? Really???? Then again, most of their slogans (”Peace through strength“) sound incredibly Orwellian. I don’t think they actually get it.

I found it all pretty amusing, especially at looking at who the counter-protesters were. All of them were white, middle age, and generally over weight (just as most of the protesters were white, young, and covered in tattoos.) After the parade moved on, people moved to the podium as there were a couple of pro-American speeches from the counter protesters. I stuck around cause I like to know what they are thinking. The one speech I caught was from an older woman saying how brave the troops are and how much we have to thank them for. Now, I utterly agree with that. My problem with that statement though is coming from these people. The reason is that this group only agrees to support the troops that think like them. Any troop that comments this war is fucked is quickly branded a traitor. For example, I saw a couple t-shirts proclaiming ‘Proud Vietnam Vet against John Kerry.’ I’m pretty sure John Kerry is a vet and has medals to prove it. I found all this amusing because (again, without any sort of irony) the old man wearing that shirt was also wearing a sticker supporting the fight against Alzheimer’s. Who said irony is dead?

What also bothers me about the counter-protesters (besides their blind trust in the government) is the hypocrisy. I’m positive that if Obama is elected, these pro-government masses will suddenly discover… as if a blinding religious revelation… that dissent IS patriotic. Instead of George Orwell, they will suddenly start carrying posters with Thomas Jefferson claiming that the tree of liberty must often be bathed in the blood of patriots and that dissent is the highest form of patriotism!!! Sigh…

As I left the counter-protesters to bike off, I told one of the sign wavers that he was holding his sign upside down. He was quite grateful.

So, what about the actual protesters? Well, I had a lot of problems with them as well. A large majority of them had the same old thing: No Blood for Oil, Bush is a War Monger, and such. My problem with them is that these people were the far Left. I had a conversation with a Republican friend the other day (one that was hoping for a riot) and I commented that one of the things about the Democratic Party is that they will protest themselves at a drop of a hat. These people were an example of that. Nothing the Democrats will ever do will ever satisfy the far left wing. These are the pro-Nader anarchists. These are the people that want to burn down the government and have nothing they want to replace it with. These are the people who simply want to destroy.

And they are allowed their views… I’m just concerned about anything that might let McCain slip on in to the White House. He’s a guy I once kinda respected (in 2000), but don’t recognize him or views in 2008.

I know I’m being naïve, but I wondered to K when the political discussion in this country boiled down to angry shouting slogans at one another. Of course, K patted me on the head and reminded me that it has always been this way. Look at 1968.

After the protest, we wandered over to the park. There was a lot of celebration, drum circles, people dancing, and such; as well as many little political stands set up, handing out buttons and pamphlets to people. The funniest one (in my mind) was the anti-smoking booth. Aside from the pamphlets, there was a black lung and a bottle of tar (this is how much gunk is in your lungs!!!) on the table. One of the women I was with just quit smoking and asked the kid behind the counter if he smoked. He paused, looked around, and replied, “I do, but I don’t tell the kids that.” Hilarity ensues.

In part two of the S&R Interview, comedian Lee Camp talks with me about the relationship between politics and comedy and has high praise for those who, like Jon Stewart and Chris Rock, are able to infuse their work with important insights about our society.

“Thank god for The Daily Show,” he says. “I wish there was a network that 24 hours [a day] played Daily Show-esque clips of ‘Bush said this and a month ago he said this and it’s completely the opposite. McCain said this and it conflicts with this‘.”

Camp also offers his personal experience on how the networks and media corporations use their money and the promise of wider exposure to co-opt and undercut the message of comedians with something more serious to say.

As noted in the introduction to part one, Lee is a lot more than just another funny guy. Here’s proof.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 1

Photo by Jack Shaftoe for S&R and JackShaftoe.com.

We’d like to offer a huge thanks to our great new friends at ZeroCoordinate.com for shooting the footage. Natalie Ashodian directed, Chris Bulkley-Logston did the camera work, and Paul Logston handled operations. We look forward to other projects with them in the future.

On February 23, comedian Lee Camp appeared on FOX News, where he proceeded to sound off on the hosts and their audience.

“What is Fox News?” asks comedian and activist Lee Camp on the air. “It’s just a parade of propaganda, isn’t it? It’s just a…festival of ignorance.”

Obviously Camp is a man with some political convictions. He’s also a very, very funny guy, as he demonstrated during the recent DNC festivities in Denver. Appearing with several other noteworthy names (SNL’s Fred Armisen, Sam Seder, Eugene Mirman, and the guys from BarelyPolitical.com, to name a few), Camp stole the show with a set that touched on everything from whether America is ready for a black president to whether we’re ready for Miley Cyrus.

Afterward, Camp made a few minutes to answer some questions for S&R and its readers. In the interview he talks about predicting the debacle over how many houses McCain has, the role of the comic in a political society and the challenges facing the working comedian in today’s compromise-at-all-costs media environment. (This is part one of two.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2: “Thank God for Jon Stewart”

We’d like to offer a huge thanks to our great new friends at ZeroCoordinate.com for shooting the footage. Natalie Ashodian directed, Chris Bulkley-Logston did the camera work, and Paul Logston handled operations. We look forward to other projects with them in the future.

I felt like I’d been to church. Not my sedate Presbyterian church, though — more of an old-fashioned revival meeting where the spirit was unleashed and something transcendent was uplifting everyone in its presence. Nobody was racing for the doors as Obama wrapped it up; everyone seemed to want to just stay and bask in the love. Sam said I was seduced by “political theater,” and maybe I was. But I like to think my intuition is sharp enough to know when something is authentic – in this case, the candidate and his vision for America – versus when I’ve been charmed or had.

Despite my disclaimer in my initial post that I may smack of being a bit of a Pollyanna, I’m not stupid, and I have a well-tuned bullshit detector. I just make the existential choice that hope is worthwhile, faith is warranted, and progress is possible, though the human condition never seems to move more than one step forward for every one step back. I guess that’s why, as a Christian, I cherish the doctrine of grace – we continually and irrevocably screw up, but we are loved and forgiven and given a two-millionth chance anyway. And sometimes we get it right.

WAIT, you say: Did she say Christian? Huh?! Isn’t Scholars and Rogues basically a liberal blog (albeit with some cantankerous iconoclasm to challenge easy labels)? And didn’t she just write a feisty piece criticizing the hypocrisy of the religious right who are cheerleading for stressed working mom/VP candidate Sarah Palin?

Yup, that’s me. That’s why I like the “Rogues” part of this blog’s name. I’ve got the academic cred to earn the “Scholars” part of the label, but you’ll see that I’m as much a rogue as I am any Pollyanna. Along with Jim Wallis, I would counter that the answer to the religious right is not creating a powerful religious left, but a moral center – and that doesn’t mean “mushy middle.” (And isn’t it a commentary on our society when moderate views can be deemed ‘roguish’?) Along with that, however, I would also argue that “liberal Christian” is not an oxymoron. I’m here to stir a few ideas up that my colleagues might not anticipate or agree with. But they invited me, and if they are going to be true to their name, then let’s test the definition a bit. My goal is that what I write may be more thought-provoking than predictable.

On that note, check back soon for a future post in which I’ll argue that it’s important to look at the grisly images on the signs carried by abortion protesters at the DNC – even though I detest the hostility that most of the protesters display, and am confounded at their refusal to recognize any moral complexity in this most divisive of issues. Stay tuned…

This represents the final bodies from Katrina, the last unknown victim of Katrina. This represents the pain and suffering.

— New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin; Laura Maggi of The Times-Picayune reported that “[s]even people who died during Hurricane Katrina were interred Friday morning in one of six mausoleums created to hold the remains of those who were not identified after the storm or whose families did not claim them; Aug. 29.

People are bringing five or six suitcases. We want to carry more people and less luggage.

— St. Charles Parish Emergency Preparedness Director Tab Troxler as residents of New Orleans and surrounding parishes begin evacuation of the Gulf Coast as Hurricane Gustav approaches; Aug. 30.

We’re well positioned and we’ve got a good set of plans and now we’re waiting to put them into motion.

—Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, adding that more than 1,000 buses were ready to facilitate evacuation of New Orleans; Aug. 29.

If we seek to understand American foreign policy in terms of a rational engagement with international problems, or even as an effective means of projecting power, we are looking in the wrong place. The government’s interests have always been provincial. It seeks to appease lobbyists, shift public opinion at crucial stages of the political cycle, accommodate crazy Christian fantasies and pander to television companies run by eccentric billionaires. The US does not really have a foreign policy. It has a series of domestic policies which it projects beyond its borders.

— George Monbiotin his Guardian commentary, “The US missile defence system is the magic pudding that will never run out”; Aug,. 19.

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about 50 or 100 years from now — and there should be preserved the kinescopes of one week of all three networks — they will there find, recorded in black and white and in color, evidence of decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable, and complacent. We have a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information.

Our mass media reflect this.

But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television, and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

— from Edward R. Murrow’s address to the Radio-Television News Directors Association & Foundation as depicted in the movie “Good Night and Good Luck.”

Bringing back the brooch

Before the Democratic National Convention, a plethora of questions swirled around the blogosphere. Would Barack Obama finally win over Hillary Clinton’s most loyal supporters? Would Bill Clinton’s speech come off as sincere or forced? And most important of all, what would Michelle Obama wear?

Apparently, Mrs. Obama put considerable thought into that last question, and it really paid off. Her simple blue dress received rave reviews from giddy commenters on this website, and with her jeweled pin, she may have single-handedly brought back the brooch. Grandmas, guard your jewelry boxes.

— teaser copy by Stephanie Lysaght of the Los Angeles Times prefacing a poll asking where Michelle Obama’s convention dress was “too frumpy,” “too matronly,” “flawless first lady,” or “too sexy”; Aug. 29.

During a get-out-the-vote drive, you don’t want to get out the wrong vote.

— Diane Rinaldo, political advertising director at Yahoo, which has worked with both the Obama and McCain campaigns; Washington Post writer Peter Whoriskey reported “Although both the Obama and John McCain campaigns are reluctant to discuss details, the ability to identify sympathetic voters based on their Internet habits, and then to target them with ads as they move across the Web, is one of the defining aspects of the 2008 presidential campaign. Digital advertising networks and large Web companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft are using Web behavior — which news articles people read, which blogs they visit or what search terms they enter — to target voters who may be sympathetic to a certain cause. Using a method known as ’sentiment detection,’ some companies even boast that they can tell whether the blog you go to is for or against the Iraq war”; Aug. 30.

The separation of church and state can sometimes be frustrating for women and men of religious faith. They may be tempted to misuse government in order to impose a value which they cannot persuade others to accept. But once we succumb to that temptation, we step onto a slippery slope where everyone’s freedom is at risk. … The real transgression occurs when religion wants government to tell citizens how to live uniquely personal parts of their lives. The failure of Prohibition proves the futility of such an attempt when a majority or even a substantial minority happens to disagree. Some questions may be inherently individual ones, or people may be sharply divided about whether they are. In such cases, like Prohibition and abortion, the proper role of religion is to appeal to the conscience of the individual, not the coercive power of the state.

— from an address by Sen. Ted Kennedy at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Va.; Oct. 3, 1983.

At noon on Tuesday, two young men walked onto the podium at the Democratic National Convention carrying four women’s suit jackets — red, orange, light blue and teal — and holding each one up to the lights to see which would look best in the hall. It was Hillary Clinton’s night, and nothing was being left to chance.

— from a commentary by Dana Milbank of The Washington Post; Aug. 27.

So it is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation. A vote for it is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our President and we say to him — use these powers wisely and as a last resort.

— from the floor speech of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on S.J. Res. 45, “A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq”; Oct. 10, 2002.

I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn’t go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base. But it was a moment of great pride for me to visit our troops …

— from a speech on Iraq by Sen. Hillary Clinton at at The George Washingon University; March 17.

[A] democracy requires a certain amount of common ground. I don’t believe you can solve complex questions like this at the grass-roots level or at the national level or anywhere in between if you have too much extremism of rhetoric and excessive partisanship. Times are changing too fast. We need to keep our eyes open. We need to keep our ears open. We need to be flexible. We need to have new solutions based on old values. We can’t get there unless we can establish some common ground. And that seems to me to impose certain specific responsibilities on citizens and on political leaders.

— from a speech by President Bill Clinton at Georgetown University; July 6, 1995.

Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.

— President Bill Clinton, challenging Sen. Barack Obama’s claim that the senator had always opposed the Iraq war; Jan. 11.

Pro-and anti-Democrat protesters yesterday besieged the streets of Denver, Colorado, United States (US), venue of the Democratic National Convention. They made their voices heard on issues ranging from the Iraqi war, abortion rights, gay marriage and rights for swingers (a club of people who swap wives, husbands or partners). … Policemen swarmed every block in the city on horses, motorcycles and vans. Helmet wearing cops, armed to the teeth with guns, clubs and combat style outfits patrolled the area.

— from a story by Constance Ikokwu for the Nigerian newspaper This Day; Aug. 26.

Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. John McCain at rally. [AP photo]

Here’s what I’m worried about. McCain had to protect his reputation as an opponent of status quo Washington. He had to pick someone with the shortest Washington résumé. He did that. He picked someone the right wing is going to be happy about. But it’s a gamble. The question is, what does it do to the argument that Obama’s not ready?

— Ed Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and former aide to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush, discussing the selection of Alaska governor Sarah Palin as Sen. John McCain’s running mate; Aug. 29.

She really doesn’t have the experience for this job.

— councilwoman Dianne Woodruff of Wasilla, where Gov. Sarah Palin served as mayor, on her performance as governor; Aug. 29.

Go, Sarah. We’re pumped over here. We’re really, really excited. My kids went to school with her. Todd buys his guns here.

— McCain supporter Roy Wallis, owner of Chimo Guns in downtown Wasilla; Aug. 29.

The President is looking forward to the honor of speaking at the Republican Convention on Monday night. The speech expresses gratitude. The President will thank his family, his administration, and most of all, the friends, supporters and volunteers in the convention hall who have supported him and the Republican agenda for these past eight years.

The speech reviews the major issues facing the country, from terrorism and war to the economy and the direction of our culture. Above all, the speech reflects on the role of the presidency and the qualities that are demanded by the job, and makes the case that John McCain is the best qualified to be our next leader and commander-in-chief. In particular, it highlights McCain’s unique judgment, perspective, and experience to deal with the unexpected, to stand firm on his convictions, put the country above himself, and make hard decisions necessary to protect the American people.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino at a press briefing; Aug. 29.

The American workforce continues to be the marvel of the world. Yet many working families have been weathering tough economic times. There are families across our country struggling to make ends meet. There is an understandable concern about the high price of gas and food. And many Americans are worried about the health of our housing and job markets. I share these concerns about our economy.

— President Bush, in his weekly radio address; Aug. 30.

photo credits:

• Edward R. Murrow: The Edward R. Murrow Center of Public Diplomacy at Tufts University
• Michelle Obama and her daughters, Malia and Sasha: Rodolfo Gonzalez, Associated Press
• Sen. Ted Kennedy: Susan Walsh, Associated Press
• Sen. Hillary Clinton: Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

(More below the cut)

Robert Corey Jr., a prominent Denver lawyer who has offered to defend at no charge anyone busted for pot this week, spoke to the crowd and encouraged them not to light up on the walk and to cooperate. Richard Eastman was the primary organizer of the event and if you heard anyone around town this week preaching medicinal marijuana on a bullhorn it was likely him. (see first picture under the cut for his image)

Walkers numbered in the high hundreds, bordering on a thousand by the time the procession reached Invesco Field. At the time we parted ways with them 30 minutes into the walk there had been no issues with the authorities. They were on their way to the protest cage and we do not have any report about what happened once they arrived there.

Word has it that some of the younger “marijuana is cool” crowd engaged the police and were taken into custody but that nobody who was actually preaching medicinal marijuana was involved.

Charlie Cannon imagines a world where our bridges, electricity transmission lines, sewer systems, etc. aren’t invisible externalities we only care about when they abruptly fail. He imagines opportunity where others see only a financial black hole. With all the infrastructure that is close to the end of its useful lifetime, the United States will have no choice but replace bridges, dams, roads, water mains, and so on. And with the need for tens of billions of dollars of public investment over the next several decades, Cannon thinks that we have the chance to rebuild infrastructure in sustainable ways. What that means for him is increased efficiency or modeling our infrastructure off natural systems. But Cannon also thinks that the first step is rethinking the relationships that have, in the past, led to confrontations between environmentalists, environmental justice activists, public and municipal utilities, developers, and elected officials. Cannon proposes that the best way to do that is to design the infrastructure from the very beginning with the awareness of all the interested parties and how they are affected by now included externalities.

Jonathan Greenblatt imagines the end of the need for corporate social responsibility because every corporation has so totally internalized the need to be responsible corporations that it underlies everything they do. Greenblatt also imagines that the markets can be used to create good, to generate businesses who focus on the long term instead of short term profits, and that entrepreneurs can create products that are fundamentally “rooted in authenticity”, that demonstrate a commitment to sustainability throughout their entire supply chain, that are disruptive to the existing markets, and that are transparent to the public and others. The best companies are this already, but most aren’t even remotely close. But perhaps the most imaginative suggestion that Greenblatt had was that the public, corporations, government entities, and non-profits work together in a bottom-up collaborative fashion instead of the failing top down, paternalistic paradigm.

Majora Carter, on the other hand, has dared to imagine something that is arguably even more impressive than Greenblatt’s paradigm shift. Carter imagines a world where sustainability is the foundation, not the penthouse. Instead, she imagines a world where green jobs help solve unemployment, where awareness of the supposed externalities of places like the South Bronx leads to cleaner neighborhoods and thus fewer poisons messing with our bodies and minds. Essentially, Carter imagines sustainabilty as the foundation upon which a building of opportunity will be constructed.

David Orr’s imagination focuses on education and how to fix the problems of education instead of the problems in education. He wants education to be the source of a “more rational rationality, a more scientific science” than the present, Enlightenment-based education system. He sees an education system so sick that mere antibiotics can’t help it anymore, but that major surgery is required to save the patient. Orr imagines an educational system that is inclusive instead of riven by divisive battles over useless testing. But perhaps most importantly, he understands that solving global heating requires new ideas and that new ideas are the domain of education.

Bill Becker imagines a new economy to replace the old, failing carbon-based economy. He imagines that the new economy can be redefined from mere exchange of goods and services to include every way we relate to each other and the natural world. And he believes that we are finally reaching an understanding of the unpleasant realities of peak oil, the rising costs of centralized industrial energy contrasted with the falling prices for distributed renewable energy, the global nature of pollution, the long-term security implications of protecting our carbon energy sources and producers, and humanity’s interconnectedness with the rest of the Earth’s biosphere.

The person who perhaps understands imagination the best is Paul Miller, aka artist DJ Spooky, imagines the United States not struck down by global heating as Ozymandius was by the desert. He imagines a world where the commons of our air, water, and earth are no longer subject to tragedy, and where the oil age is ended before we run out of oil. And perhaps his greatest feat of imagination is his ability to imagine that people like his fellow panelists have sufficient imagination themselves to balance technology, development, economy, and the commons in a way that is sustainable, that creates opportunities where none existed before, and where ideological statements like Reagan’s removal of the solar panels from the roof of the White House are replaced by rational actions.