Germaine takes a stab at estimating the costs of climate change

The cost of climate change is never mentioned by pro-pollution interests and ideologues. That is because they demagogue the issue instead of debating it. Like most other contested issues in politics, radical right conservatives and fascists no longer debate, assuming they ever did. Instead, they demagogue because they cannot win arguments on the merits. 

Over the last couple of months, various sources have been increasingly reporting on costs of climate change and environmental damage. Presumably, that increased focus on cost is due to the fact that the costs are starting to become very painful for increasing numbers of people. For example, the AP writes:

Every day billions of people depend on wild flora and fauna to obtain food, medicine and energy. But a new United Nations-backed report says that overexploitation, climate change, pollution and deforestation are pushing one million species towards extinction.

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services - or IPBES - report said Friday that unless humankind improves the sustainable use of nature, the Earth is on its way to losing 12% of its wild tree species, over a thousand wild mammal species and almost 450 species of sharks and rays, among other irreparable harm.

Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 7.9 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said. 1 in 3 people rely on fuel wood for cooking, the number even higher in Africa.

For decades, pro-pollution interests including the Republican Party, Exxon-Mobile, Koch Industries Dow Chemical Company and other big pro-pollution corporations and interests have successfully blocked efforts to acknowledge climate change, and to deal with it. An important and effective part of their demagoguery is to ignore costs when possible, or downplay or deny them when they cannot weasel out of the question. Usually they weasel out, because (i) the mainstream media is lame at best and co-opted or complicit at worst, and/or (ii) the polluters and their defenders hide behind a massive shield of silence and opacity. That's just laissez-faire capitalism doing its thing as usual.

Big pile of waste plastic

The subjectivity of environmental and climate value or cost

Two other factors that favor the polluters are (1) perceptions of value and costs can be and have been demagogued and skewed to favor polluters, and (2) the fact that humans inherently value many things very differently. That is especially true when demagoguery has skewed perceptions of value and cost to favor the people and interests who benefit. 

We all remember how hard affected interests howled in outrage about the worthlessness of the spotted owl in the Northwest and the snail darter fish in central California. The species were condemned as worthless and costing waaay too much to save. Defenses of the species back then were pretty weak. These days, defenses of threatened species are weaker than they were then.

As a start to realign perceptions of value and costs, here is Germaine's list of costs for various environmental damages from carbon dioxide and other forms of pollution. These are top of head personal estimates. Exxon-Mobile and Koch Industries would no doubt howl in outrage, but they are mostly demagogic crooks and liars who profit from polluting our environment. They lie about it.

Death of a human, e.g., from excessive heat exposure: $15 million

Extinction of a valued plant or mammal species: $8-10 trillion 

Extinction of a less than valued plant or mammal species: $4-6 trillion  

Extinction of a valued insect species, e.g., bees: $4-6 trillion 

Extinction of a less than valued insect species: $2-3 trillion  

Loss of clear air, with frequent haze: $15 trillion

Dirty air and associated injury and human deaths: $20 trillion

Plastic in the environment: $30 trillion

Sea level rise: $15 trillion per inch

Drought in the American Southwest $6-8 trillion 

Availability of unregulated polluting energy and plastics: $100-200 trillion

Prevention of efforts to deal with climate change by pro-pollution interests: $100-200 trillion

Things like clear air might not come to mind as something of any value. But it has serious value to me. I remember the 1950s and 1960s when the air was usually clearer than today. I really miss days when the air is clear. I really, really like clear air.

The effectiveness of pro-pollution interests to keep on polluting is also a real cost. Obviously polluters would not see it that way, but again, they are crooks and liars. They advocate their interests based on demagoguery and lies. I advocate mine based on what I believe to be facts, reason and my own values, including concern for the public interest. 

Q: Is Germaine off his rocker by attaching high costs to various kinds of environmental damage, or is this at least a reasonable way to start to rethink environmental damage?

Golly, that is a big pile of waste plastic and 

most of it, ~91%, is headed for the landfill, the ocean, lakes, etc.

News from Redstatelandia: America's future unfolds today

Given where the US is headed, brief news updates from red states seem to be in order. These fiddly bits entertain us as fascism slowly creeps over the land and poisons everything it touches.

First off, is Arizona and its move toward a police state. This one starts slowly, but over time one can expect the law to harden into fascist police state brutality. Azcentral writes:

People will no longer be allowed to take close-range recordings of Arizona police under a new bill signed into law by Gov. Doug Ducey on Wednesday. House Bill 2319, sponsored by Rep. John Kavanagh, makes it illegal for anyone within 8 feet of law enforcement activity to record police. Violators could face a misdemeanor, but only after being verbally warned and continuing to record anyway.

The farther away people are kept, the less evidence of policy brutality their videos will contain. The original draft law had the limit at 15 feet, but it got changed to 8. It will take some years to harden this law based on to 1st Amendment concerns. The Supreme Court will need to nibble away at the 1st by creating exceptions for police activity.

We all knew this was coming. From South Carolina, a proud leader in fascism, we have more abortion restrictions on the horizon. From the NYT:

Nearly two weeks after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade, South Carolina lawmakers became the first to consider more restrictive legislation. The state had already decided to outlaw abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy. But on Thursday its legislature, now empowered to consider even greater restrictions, offered the first glimpse of a state taking early steps into a post-Roe America.

 

Not quite yet there feller, hold yer horses

Abortion is going to be murder

The red state stampede to be the most fascist about abortion is on. Big herds of red state legislators states are thundering ahead in a massive cloud of thick dust. The race is on to be the first and worst. It will be of some interest to those with inquiring minds to see the unintended consequences unfold, including lives destroyed.

From Wisconsin he have an update on fascist election subversion:

A divided Wisconsin Supreme Court barred the use of most ballot drop boxes on Friday and ruled voters could not give their completed absentee ballots to others to return on their behalf, a practice that some conservatives disparage as “ballot harvesting.” For years, ballot drop boxes were used without controversy across Wisconsin. Election clerks greatly expanded their use in 2020 during the coronavirus pandemic as absentee voting hit unprecedented levels.

That speaks for itself. The question is how effective will it be at boosting Republican votes while suppressing Democratic votes? That is the intent.

Next is a fun snippet from federal Redstatelandia. This is about how the IRS will be turned into a tool to obliterate those darned anti-fascists, not to be confused with Antifa people. Well, maybe there will be some comingling. Whatever. The NYT writes about the IRS tax audit to two people that T**** hated and wanted to see dead, so they got the next best thing just short of outright murder 😊, an intense IRS tax audit 😵‍💫:

How Unlikely Is It That the Audits of Comey and McCabe Were a Coincidence? A Statistical Exploration. The chances are minuscule. But minuscule is not zero.

But gee whiz, it really was just a coincidence!

Honest!!

In the statistical analysis, there were other ways of calculating how likely it was that T**** had sicked the IRS on McCabe and Comey.[1] The odds of random chance at play were always so small that one can be about as certain as reasonably possible that the IRS intentionally targeted those two yahoos because T**** told it to do that. That's just how fascists do politics. Nixon tried to do the same fascist thing. But way back then, Republican politicians still had some respect for democracy, truth, the rule of law and the Constitution. Those days are gone and not coming back.

There's your exciting update from Redstatelandia. The folks there want to succeed from the Onion, er, Union. Maybe it's time to let 'em go? 

Footnote: 

1. It is hard to have sympathy for Comey. He was the Republican jackass that announced an FBI investigation of Hillary about a week before the 2016 election. IMO, that was a necessary factor in Clinton's loss to T**** (necessary but alone not sufficient). Naturally, Comey's devastating investigation fizzled into the nothingburger it always was. That left Clinton grievously wounded just days before the election. 

Some time after his fascist Republican investigation fiasco, Comey got pensive and philosophical and whatnot. His idiotic reaction to what he did was something stupid about like this:

Gee willikers, golly and shucks. I hope I didn't have any effect on the election. That would have been awful if it hurt Hillary. Gosh, dang and darn. That would have been not good. I'm all aflutter just thinking about it! Jeez. mumble . . . . mumble . . . . mumble

Lame Republican crap like that is enough to inspire one to buy an AR-15 (or two) and a few thousand rounds of ammo. For self-defense, of course. Peace out man! 

Peace out 2022

It's been real!

Devout Christian nationalist morality & propaganda tactics

Scott DesJarlais - the irresistible,

fornicating man stud

The NY Times Intelligencer Magazine writes:

For some insane reason, tea-party Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee taped himself pressuring his mistress into getting an abortion back in 2000, the Huffington Post reports today. DesJarlais, now a pro-life Republican congressman, was a doctor at the time, and met the woman when she had a foot problem during a rocky time in his marriage. “You told me you’d have an abortion, and now we’re getting too far along without one,” DesJarlais tells the woman, according to a transcript of the recording obtained by HuffPo. “This is not fair to me. I don’t want you in my life,” the woman says. “Well, I didn’t want to be in your life either, but you lied to me about something that caused us to be in this situation, and that’s not my fault, that’s yours,” DesJarlais responds. The woman counters, “Well, it’s [your] fault for sleeping with your patient.”

DesJarlais, who currently holds an edge over Democratic challenger Eric Stewart, beat sitting Democrat Lincoln Davis in a nasty 2010 race that included other skeletons from the doctor’s 2001 divorce. Their couple’s divorce filing “included allegations that he held a gun in his own mouth for hours in one instance and that he ‘dry fired’ a gun outside his wife’s bedroom in another,” charges DesJarlais denied at the time.

But this is a whole other thing, based on the transcript:

“You told me you would have time to go with me and everything,” the woman complains.

“I said, if I could, I would, didn’t I? And I will try,” DesJarlais says. “If I can [find] time, you’re saying you still will?”

“Yeah,” the woman answers. […]

“Well, we’ve got to do something soon. And you’ve even got to admit that because the clock is ticking right?” he says at another point.  

Craziest of all is that DesJarlais allegedly made the tape himself, in an attempt to save his marriage. According to DesJarlais’s 2010 opponent, the cheating doctor’s ex-wife confirmed the recording’s provenance: “She said he did it himself. She said the doctor did. She said, ‘He recorded it and let me listen to it,’” Davis said. “She confirmed to me that Scott DesJarlais is the one who actually did the recording, and let her listen to it.”

DesJarlais does not deny the call’s existence, but gave deflection a shot in a statement: “Desperate personal attacks do not solve our nation’s problems, yet it appears my opponents are choosing to once again engage in the same gutter politics that CBS news called the dirtiest in the nation just 2 years ago,” he said. But he brought this one upon himself.

There we go, blame that evil CBS for desperate personal attacks, i.e., truth, and false allegations of gutter politics. That will distract most rank and file Republicans for sure. Not sure what it will do for most non-Republicans.

Note that the fine people of Tennessee voted the DesJarlais scumbag into Congress, knowing about his fornications and pro-abortion mindset. Banning abortions is fine for everyone except Republican politicians and other wealthy and/or powerful elites. Their sanctimonious claims of moral superiority do not apply to themselves. 

Poor Democratic challenger Eric Stewart. He doesn't stand a chance in Tennessee. He is an unworthy, immoral, evil Democrat. They are not chosen by God. For their immorality and evil, God condemns all Democrats to eternal screaming agony in hell. That is according to Republican Party Christian nationalists and GOP propaganda generally.

Fornicators of a feather flock together

😍

Where's Jeff Epstein when you need him?

The Church invasion of the State

A report by Rolling Stone has been picked up by several other sources. The reporting appears to be factually accurate and genuine, but take this with caution until other sources have independently verified it. It feels highly plausible in view of the total lack of ethical standards that most Republican politicians and elites routinely operate with. RS writes:

SCOTUS Justices ‘Prayed With’ Her — Then Cited Her Bosses to End Roe

A right-wing evangelical activist was caught on tape bragging that she prayed with Supreme Court justices. The court’s majority cited a legal brief that her group filed while overturning Roe v. Wade

At an evangelical victory party in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the downfall of Roe v. Wade last week, a prominent Capitol Hill religious leader was caught on a hot mic making a bombshell claim: that she prays with sitting justices inside the high court. “We’re the only people who do that,” Peggy Nienaber said.

This disclosure was a serious matter on its own terms, but it also suggested a major conflict of interest. Nienaber’s ministry’s umbrella organization, Liberty Counsel, frequently brings lawsuits before the Supreme Court. In fact, the conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights, cited an amicus brief authored by Liberty Counsel in its ruling.

In other words: Sitting Supreme Court justices have prayed together with evangelical leaders whose bosses were bringing cases and arguments before the high court.

Nienaber is Liberty Counsel’s executive director of DC Ministry, as well as the vice president of Faith & Liberty, whose ministry offices sit directly behind the Supreme Court. She spoke to a livestreamer who goes by Connie IRL, seemingly unaware she was being recorded. “You actually pray with the Supreme Court justices?” the livestreamer asked. “I do,” Nienaber said. “They will pray with us, those that like us to pray with them.” She did not specify which justices prayed with her, but added with a chortle, “Some of them don’t!” The livestreamer then asked if Nienaber ministered to the justices in their homes or at her office. Neither, she said. “We actually go in there.”

Nienaber intended her comments, broadcast on YouTube, to be “totally off the record,” she says in the clip. That’s likely because such an arrangement presents a problem for the Orlando-based Liberty Counsel, which not only weighed in on the Dobbs case as a friend of the court, but also litigated and won a 9-0 Supreme Court victory this May in a case centered on the public display of a religious flag.

The Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. [no surprise in that non-response] 

Nienaber told Rolling Stone, “I do not socialize with the justices.” Yet she has posed for photos with Justices Kavanaugh and Thomas, calling the latter a “friend” in a Facebook post, praising him for “passing by our ministry center to attend church and always taking time to say hello.”

In addition to her proximity to conservative power players, Nienaber has championed the plaintiffs who have brought right-wing religious causes before the Supreme Court. Ahead of oral arguments, she prayed with Joe Kennedy, the football coach who recently succeeded in his suit to allow prayer during football games. Liberty Counsel also filed an amicus brief in that case, calling on the court to rule that the school district “engaged in viewpoint discrimination against Coach Kennedy’s private speech.”

As usual for Republican politicians in hot water, the Supreme Court did not respond to a request for comment. The good old KYMS (keep your mouth shut) propaganda tactic once again comes to the rescue of the corrupt, the immoral, the mendacious and the fascist.

This is exactly what a slow fascist coup looks like. We are witnessing in real time a greedy, aggressive Christian nationalist political wealth and power movement that now has the power to destroy all Church-State separation. Destroying it is the agenda, regardless of public opinion or the health of democracy. 

To be logged in the WTH files:

Supreme Court Justices 'Prayed With' Anti-Roe Activist Before Ruling . https://t.co/2zzwMyIvyg

— Katie S. Phang (@KatiePhang) July 6, 2022

Nienaber praying outside the Supreme Court in 2007 

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Freeze Peach for bringing the RS article to my attention.