Carbon Pricing

Received an e-mail this morning from the Climate Crisis Coalition regarding this conference.

Wesleyan Statement: Carbon Pricing Principles Action to protect global climate is vital. Our national climate policy must reflect:

• A PRICE ON CARBON. To be effective, a price on carbon (whether a fee or tax) needs to be direct, upstream, steadily increasing, and calibrated to reduce emissions to levels called for by climate science consensus, with border adjustments or other mechanisms to reflect differences in carbon prices and policies in other nations.

• A DIVIDEND OR TAX REDUCTION TO CONSUMERS. The vast majority of revenues are to be returned to consumers, either directly ("dividend") or via tax reductions ("tax shift"), with a small portion allocated to a single fund for climate purposes such as transition assistance for affected communities; international adaptation, mitigation, research, and development; low-carbon energy research; and targeted cost-effective energy efficiency investments.

• DELIBERATE FEEDBACK. Effective carbon pricing policy must provide predictable long-term price expectations with periodic incremental adjustments to reflect –

a) updated findings in the peer-reviewed climate science literature, and

b) the observed effectiveness of carbon pricing and other policies in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

An example of legislation that embodies these principles is America's Energy Security Trust Fund Act by Rep. John B. Larson

Talking about treason

Steve Benen has a post this morning responding to a column by Michael Gerson in the Washington post, which is responding to another post by Steve about whether the Republicans are attempting to sabotage the recovery for political motives.  I noted that Steve was willing today to drag that word, "treason," into the argument indirectly.

Given this, is it really that extraordinary to wonder if this might include rejecting proposals that would make President Obama look more successful on economic policy -- especially given the fact that McConnell's approach to the economy appears to be carefully crafted to do the opposite of what's needed? After Gerson's West Wing colleagues effectively accused Democrats of treason in 2005, is it beyond the pale to have a conversation about Republicans' inexplicable motivations?

I think we have a right to have a conversation about this, but so far there has been no response to the specifics of our concerns, just parroting of the party line.  As the Republicans continue to deconstruct our country for the benefit of their contributors and their political goals, we must keep the pressure on.  The future of our country depends on them not selling us all out to the highest bidder.

"The only thing we have to fear"

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."  But did FDR imagine a day where the promotion of fear would be a big business, politically and economically?

There are now about 400 full-body scanners, set to grow to 1,000 next year. One of the people pushing them most energetically is Michael Chertoff, the former Secretary of Homeland Security.

He’s the co-founder and managing principal of the Chertoff Group, which provides security advice. One of its clients is California-based Rapiscan Systems, part of the OSI Systems corporation, that makes many of the “whole body” scanners being installed.

Chertoff has recently been busy rubbishing Martin Broughton, the wise British Airways chairman who said many security checks were redundant — calling him “ill-informed.” Early this year Chertoff called on Congress to “fund a large-scale deployment of next-generation systems.”

What have we come to?  Going on 10 years of a steady drumbeat of fear.  It's a sickness of the soul, and it's contagious.  And profitable.

Thankful

A long day, traveling two hours to Monmouth ME to have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with brothers, sister-in-law, niece and nephew.  I am thankful that all my family are progressive, environmentally-sensitive, sustainability-minded, smart and very caring about others.  I don't have to end up in arguments on holidays, and that is a thing to be very grateful for.
My youngest brother was a very premature baby back in 1951, and the only way they had discovered by then to keep such infants alive was to put them in incubators with high oxygen concentrations.  There are a whole cohort of adults born then who survived their premature birth, but ended up blind and with other developmental deficits.  My brother was at home with us in MA for some years, the youngest of 4 children, until it became too much for my mother to handle and was interfering with her health a great deal, so he was placed in the Fernald School outside of Boston.  He lived there, with regular visits home (my mother never stopped caring for him until she reached old age), for many years, until he transitioned, about 20 years ago, to a group home run by the MA Assoc. for the Blind, where he has received excellent care.
My other brother and I are his guardians now, and I visit him every couple of months, and bring him here and to Maine for our annual family celebration of Thanksgiving.  I look forward to being able to see him more often when I retire.  We will not move him from MA, because so far we have been able to count on his being in a state where the care for the most vulnerable is not always the first place to cut when some rich person's taxes are too high.  He lives with 2 other men he has known for 50 years, from when they were all children whose parents did not have the knowledge or support to care for them at home.
So that was our day today, a drive to Maine with Nick and two dogs, a delicious, mostly locally produced meal, a walk around the farm and the drive home.  Ben and Nick went in the hot tub and we are all relaxing now.  A day to be thankful for.

Whoops!

We kinda thought that Countrywide wasn't very on the up-and-up, but it looks like Bank of America is going to be very, very sorry they ended up taking over that company. 

If the notes and mortgages were not properly transferred to the trusts, then the mortgage-backed securities that the investors’ purchased were in fact non-mortgage-backed securities. In such a case, investors would have a claim for the rescission of the MBS, meaning that the securitization would be unwound, with investors receiving back their original payments at par (possibly with interest at the judgment rate). Rescission would mean that the securitization sponsor would have the notes and mortgages on its books, meaning that the losses on the loans would be the securitization sponsor’s, not the MBS investors, and that the securitization sponsor would have to have risk-weighted capital for the mortgages. If this problem exists on a wide-scale, there is not the capital in the financial system to pay for the rescission claims; the rescission claims would be in the trillions of dollars, making the major banking institutions in the United States would be insolvent.

What fun!  Maybe we can bail out a few more banks.  Such a great use for our tax money.  But I am sure when the Republicans promoted deregulation of financial institutions they didn't mean for something like this to happen.  After all, greed is good, right?

Came home a board member

I went to The Forum annual meeting a contributor and came home a board member.  Odd how that happens.

I love The Forum, our local on-line newspaper, three print editions a year that go free to all households in our 4 towns, great coverage of elections, both before and after, local volunteer reporters and columnists, lots of pictures, just an all-round great enterprise.  Maybe the future of journalism?

Globalization - still the elephant in the room

Great article in The Nation about the effects of our trade imbalance, our job imbalance and the whole US economy, which appears to be on the brink of dragging the entire world down with it.

Only in America do multinationals get to behave like free riders, with no strings attached. They harvest public money as subsidies and investment capital, they are protected by US armed forces and diplomacy, and they are rescued when they get into trouble. It is a one-way relationship, and the American public knows it.

The author believes that President Obama understands the problem, and has ideas about how to turn it around, but as usual the treasonous Republicans are standing in the way.  Their vision is for their richest donors to own the whole world, with the rest of us as wage slaves in a feudal/capitalist society.

Oh, and did anyone ever explain to you the capitalism does NOT equal Democracy?

I used some words that will probably get me in trouble in this blog post:  treasonous and wage slaves.  But I see no other goal toward which the Republicans' policies point.  They say they want to create jobs, but that hasn't worked yet and it has been tried off and on for 40 years.  No, their goal lies elsewhere, and it is not good for the rest of us.

Enough with the catfood commission

If you combine this Paul Krugman blog post and the fun NY Times tool  you have enough information to know that the catfood commission's chairs are full of shit.

Or put it another way: what on earth are people who say things like, “This proposal can be a starting point for discussion” thinking? We’ve been discussing and discussing, ad nauseam; the commission was supposed to provide a finishing point for discussion. Instead, it produced a PowerPoint that is one part stuff that has long been on the table, one part conservative wish-list, and one part just weirdly ill-considered.

The kindest thing we can do now is pretend the whole thing never happened.

The MANDATE!

I posted this at Blue Hampshire and am too lazy to post it here too, so go read it there, it's pretty damn accurate!

Roots camp

I wish I had been able to go to Roots Camp on Saturday!  I can't wait to hear about it.  But duty called, and I had a board meeting for one of my dearest projects, BearPaw Regional Greenways, our land trust.  So I will have to hope that others can fill me in.

Uh-oh

One of my friends and colleagues asked me if I might join a town board since I wasn't elected state rep, and I am distressed (I guess?) to say that my reaction was to tell him that I didn't know if I really wanted to spend my retirement time working for the people of Northwood at this point.

I have really, really tried to move from the campaign directly into figuring out how to fix things that went wrong, and that may not work, emotionally.  I may have to do that damn, time-wasting, grieving thing, one stage of which is anger.  I know myself well enough to know that it has to be channelled fairly quickly or it eats me, but I might just have to go through some of it anyway.

Fair warning.

I suppose

one has to say something about the draft from the "catfood" commission chairs.  I think Kevin Drum says just about everything I would say:

Bottom line: this document isn't really aimed at deficit reduction. It's aimed at keeping government small. There's nothing wrong with that if you're a conservative think tank and that's what you're dedicated to selling. But it should be called by its right name. This document is a paean to cutting the federal government, not cutting the federal deficit.

Any proposal that calls for cutting taxes on the rich instead of raising them is not going to work and will condemn this country to banana republic status.  Of course, the people who own the banana groves do very well under that sort of regime, unless the underclass (us) rise up and manage to get through the gates.

Been quiet this week

I've been pretty quiet this week.  Mostly lack of time.  Trying to finish up my job and move into retirement in the best way possible for the people I have been serving for the past 12 years is like having two jobs at once.  Add the recent painful campaign and all the ideas percolating up from the netroots and trying to make sense of what to do next.  A bit mind-blowing.

CFR

If you don't know that those letters stand for, read this.  And don't ever forget this:

Better late than never?

Letter to the editor which should have made it into every paper in the USA BEFORE the election.

All told, my family has saved $15,000 in the past year and will continue to save over $3,500 per year as a result of these new policies. Additionally, we are using less energy and sending less money overseas. Once again, thank you President Obama. Your policies have meant much more to my family than any other president's in my lifetime.

They can't read

Mayor Bloomberg of New York City ( a place I have some fondness for, since I was born there) thinks that he has an explanation for why our new congressman (ugh, I hate to write that) lost his bank account:

“If you look at the U.S., you look at who we’re electing to Congress, to the Senate—they can’t read,” he said. “I’ll bet you a bunch of these people don’t have passports. We’re about to start a trade war with China if we’re not careful here,” he warned, “only because nobody knows where China is. Nobody knows what China is.”  [Emphasis mine]

What's a "water year"?

I report precipitation for a national network of volunteers,  because I have always been interested in weather, and am even more interested in climate now that my climate is changing in unpredictable ways.  Here's a report from my location of my "water year."

So much for trains

The Republican governors seem determined to condemn their residents to having to depend on gasoline, drive over crumbling roads and bridges, and pollute their air as they creep from one place to another.  They are canceling rail projects all over the place.  Meanwhile, China is ramping up some really cool infrastructure that saves energy and moves people FAST!

And GE has been making a lot of money building big, fast, and efficient locomotives for...wait for it.... China!  Of course, now they have moved production from the US to China too.

I tell you, these Republicans must mean to bankrupt us.  Nobody is that stupid, are they?

Real economics vs slogan economics

Does it really matter if your economic policies are based on as close to reality as social science ever comes, or slogans and ideology? Paul Krugman says it does.

The simple fact is that we have a global excess supply of savings, which is doing terrible things to workers. The reasonable thing is to do something about it; it’s deeply unreasonable, and deeply irresponsible, to invent reasons not to act because you’re clinging to simplistic slogans.

What could possibly go wrong?

Let's go bomb Iran.  Didn't some presidential candidate sing a song about that?

Sure, piece of cake. We'd no doubt go in, destroy Iran's entire military infrastructure, and be home in time for dinner. It's only a large Middle Eastern country of 75 million people, two and a half times the size of Texas, while U.S. troops continue to serve in Iraq and Afghanistan. What could possibly go wrong?

Maybe we should be asking that question - what could possibly go wrong - more often?

 

Now you get mad!

Not sure who originally wrote this, but I would add one comment:  if the Republicans won't work with the Democrats because they see obstruction and making things worse as a road to power (and this election unfortunately filled their gas tank), then what are our choices?

"After The 8 Years Of The Bush/Cheney Disaster, Now You Get Mad?
    
You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.
      
You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq .
        
You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.
      
You didn't get mad when the Patriot Act got passed.
      
You didn't get mad when we illegally invaded a country that posed no threat to us.
      
You didn't get mad when we spent over 800 billion (and counting) on said illegal war.
    
You didn't get mad when Bush borrowed more money from foreign sources than the previous 42 Presidents combined.
      
You didn't get mad when over 10 billion dollars in cash just disappeared in Iraq .
        
You didn't get mad when you found out we were torturing people.
        
You didn't get mad when Bush embraced trade and outsourcing policies that shipped 6 million American jobs out of the country.
        
You didn't get mad when the government was illegally wiretapping Americans.
      
You didn't get mad when we didn't catch Bin Laden. You didn't get mad when Bush rang up 10 trillion dollars in combined budget and current account deficits.
        
You didn't get mad when you saw the horrible conditions at Walter Reed.
      
You didn't get mad when we let a major US city, New Orleans , drown.
        
You didn't get mad when we gave people who had more money than they could spend, the filthy rich, over a trillion dollars in tax breaks.
        
You didn't get mad with the worst 8 years of job creations in several decades.
      
You didn't get mad when over 200,000 US Citizens lost their lives because they had no health insurance.
      
You didn't get mad when lack of oversight and regulations from the Bush Administration caused US Citizens to lose 12 trillion dollars in investments, retirement, and home values.
        
You finally got mad when a black man was elected President and is attempting to fix the mess Bush/Cheney left us and decided that people in America deserved the right to see a doctor if they are sick. Yes, illegal wars, lies, corruption, torture, job losses by the millions, stealing your tax dollars to make the rich richer, and the worst economic disaster since 1929 are all okay with you, but helping fellow Americans who are sick...Oh, Hell No!! The president did not make this mess he is trying to correct it. Bush gets eight years to make this mess and you want it fixed in two.

The system is a joke!!  The only solution is both parties working together to solve this mess we are in."

Restoration of our democracy

Another excellent post from Daily Kos, a mine of fascinating thinking, if you learn what to look for.  Because it is such a big blog, you really do have to learn to read the front page, and then skim the recommended diaries to see if there is a title that looks interesting.

OK, they have the keys again

OK, we have handed them back the keys. Are we having second thoughts? So how do we get the keys away from the drunk again? Elections, you say? I thought that was what we just had, did you forget to vote?

 Now that the Republicans have taken back America and Obama is no longer relevant, a funny thing is happening. The chattering classes have started to notice that this country is in bad shape, is not getting better, and the people they've been gushing about might not have a real answer. They are belatedly waking up to the fact that the Tea Party agenda.....has no substance. There's no way to make it work - because it's full of contradictions where it isn't totally incoherent.  Sure, they all proclaimed Obama screwed up - but just stopping him won't make the problems go away.