TheMillerCircle.org

OWS Transition?

For an update on the status of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement and perhaps learn something about where it is going, you can visit last Friday’s  Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, where excerpts from a panel discussion can be viewed. The panel discussion was sponsored by The Nation and held in the New School University in New York City, with the title “”Occupy Everywhere: On the New Politics and Possibilities of the Movement Against Corporate Power.” The participants include film maker Michael Moore, author Rinki Sen, Patrick Bruner (“veteran” OWS organizer), economic journalist William Greider and author Naomi Klein, with moderator Richard Kim. The video consists of excerpts from the discussion of what the movement has accomplished, where it is headed, what it needs to do for future growth and what needs it must fulfill if the bright promise they have aroused, that of changing the world, can gain any more traction. To begin with of course, the latter issue is not trivial and no one comes close to seriously expressing the magnitude of the problem. But so far, the incremental  steps that have been taken, such as the “99 percent” deeply resonate with all ages, and have created thirst for action that is more than just “occupy.”   Historians often express the view that the historical record of public arousal and activism against social injustice are not directly related to hard times per se, but emerge when the narrative that kept people down runs out of explanatory power. When hard times first come, people think they have to double down and work harder to get by (or maybe in the case of many Americans, they align themselves more clearly with God and religion–it’s their fault for not being a better provider–their faith hasn’t been strong enough to be rewarded by God) and finally, when multiple iterations of this strategy have failed, groups are formed that begin to articulate a better vision of tomorrow and coalesce into a more nationally identifiable  movement. That is what the OWS movement has brought to our door–they articulate the long-standing grievances we have with how our civil society has been structured and run in the last several decades.  And, they emphasize that the richest country in the world can afford to do better, can afford to do the things that they are talking about. The most boring among us have become the most rich and powerful and they have their boot on our neck. They want to establish an aristocracy so they can pass on their wealth to their offspring (no more inheritance taxes for one thing). The OWS movement is addressing issues that, economically, began in the 1970s, if not earlier. Let’s face it, at the moment, OWS is the only game in town;  after a little more than two months, the movement seems safely launched: it will surely oscillate a bit with the seasons, but one expects to see a process of growth and continued renewal and the “99 percent” is already a permanent member of our national lexicon. It’s a beautiful cutoff. The movement has already had detectable success in the November elections, particularly in Ohio. Patrick Bruner emphasized that by following Google Trends, the words used by the OWS movement have been sharply on the rise.

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UC Berkeley Earth Temperature Website

As reported in a NYT editorial this past week, University of California at Berkeley physicist Richard Muller accepted money from the Koch Foundation (funded by Charles and David Koch) to carry out research designed to challenge the issue about whether the Earth was really warming or not. Apparently Muller thought that those reading the huge array of temperature gauges around the world didn’t know how to read them, so he wanted to make sure that the numbers were right. To make a long story short, extensive measurements (1.6 billion readings from 39,000 instruments) resulted in confirmation of the idea that the Earth is heating up: since 1950, land temperatures have increased by about 1 degree Celsius or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, matching previous findings by the National Academy of Sciences, and numerous other federal agencies and independent American and British researchers.

The Berkeley group has a website that explains these data, how they were obtained, but not so much on what they mean. At this moment, the group has submitted four papers describing their results to peer-reviewed journals. The budget for this research project was $600,000 of which the Koch Foundation provided about 1/4 of the funding. Scientists are always deeply suspicious when resources from the oil and gas industry fund research related to global warming. Do the papers being submitted have to be reviewed by the Koch Foundation before they are submitted? The results of this investigation confirm measurements that we have been familiar with for a very long time–the planet is getting warmer.

I seriously doubt that this new information, precisely confirming what we have known for years, will influence the Koch Brothers, whose wealth comes from the oil and gas industry. This is not an issue about science–that issue has been resolved to the satisfaction of the best scientists on our planet. But, it is an issue of influence through train-wreck capitalism and whether the form of neoliberalism practiced by the Koch Brothers and the oil and gas industry, is willing to send the planet over a cliff, because, as capitalists, they need 3 percent profit each year to be comfortable. The Koch Brothers spent heavily to roll back California’s new environmental regulations through proposition 23,  voted on in the election of 2010. In that election, 61% of Californians voted against proposition 23 and thus in favor of a much tougher environmental regulatory reform. You can learn more about this victory for the environment here.

Although the leading author of this work, Richard Muller, a physicist from UC Berkeley has has credentials in astrophysics and nuclear physics, he is not a climatologist and an article in the Huffington Post seems to portray him as jumping on and off the band wagon of contrarianism. I was unable to find either his name or reference to his  papers in James Hansen’s book  “Storms of My Granchildren: the Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Change to Save Humanity,” about which I have written previously.  Hansen is the leading scientist in the world on global climate change and if he sometimes sounds as an alarmist, it’s because we should all be alarmed. The planet will be changed for what we have added to the atmosphere and the question we will have to address is whether we are going to leave for our children and grandchildren a planet that will be harder to live on or whether we can rationally address this issue and begin to do something about it. Right now the future looks bleak about our ability to respond. But, the issue is not about the science, it is about the vicious form of capitalism we have and whether we will allow this system to destroy our future. The longer this goes on the harder it will be to fix it.
RFM

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Bartonsville Bridge in Vermont, Washed Away in Floods of Irene

Shortly after hurricane Irene touched down in New York, it was moved down a notch from a class 1 hurricane to a tropical storm. I read and heard comments about how “is that all you got,” implying that Global Warming, which might have contributed to the severity of the storm, was overly hyped. This is Al Gore’s fault.  It has been argued that when Irene made landfall in North Carolina, it lost some of its punch, which effectively saved New York City from major flooding due to the storm surge–the effect of high winds bringing in much higher levels of sea water. Parts of New York City are only a few feet above sea level. But we now have to appreciate that Global Warming hurricanes are different from the garden variety we used to see but may never or very rarely see again. The effect of warmer water and warmer air allows the size of hurricanes to increase in diameter and hold more water as moisture in the atmosphere. So, when such a storm hits land, it can deliver more water through rain and we now appreciate that, while the storm surge that is driven by wind velocity was not what New York City had planned for (you had to be impressed with Mayor Bloomberg’s emergency city planning and evacuation–post Katrina of course), the amount of rainfall  that got distributed to inland regions of the East Coast was historic. Several days after the storm, more than a million homes along the East Coast were still without power. In Vermont, the Bartonsville Bridge, a classic covered bridge design, built in 1871, with a 158 foot lattice span, was eaten all at once, sliding into the Williams River. A video of the event is available on You Tube. Upstate New York and Vermont suffered heavy damage and loss of many bridges, some of which will probably not be replaced, at least not in their original classic architecture. The loss of the Bartonsville bridge says to me that, at minimum, a once in 140 year storm hit Vermont and the Bartonsville Bridge. Yet, I don’t see this kind of expression mentioned and I don’t see much evidence that the press or even the meteorologists are willing to ascribe Irene to Global Warming: which daring soul will be the first? Can we get that event on You Tube or is it likely to be rejected as too controversial?

RFM

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