ARI PHILLIPS, - Climate Progress
Stephan: Willful Ignorance is a powerful force, no one can deny that. The truth is you can't save people from their own stupidity. I simply do not understand how anyone can be a Republican. In its modern incarnation it is a party created by Jonathan Swift and, just when I think the party cannot reach deeper depths of mordant satire -- I am proven wrong, and it does.
There is no mention of climate change in the 2012 Texas GOP platform and the Environmental Protection Agency is identified as an agency that should be abolished. The 2014 temporary GOP platform, revealed this week, no longer calls for the EPA to be abolished, but rather demands the elimination of onerous environmental regulations. It also mentions climate change:
While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, ‘climate change” is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice” initiatives.
With the announcement of the EPA’s new rule for regulating the carbon emissions from power plants this week and the release of detailed studies from the IPCC along with the National Climate Assessment this year, climate change is emerging as one of the hottest political battlegrounds this summer. The Texas Republican Party, whose 2014 convention kicks off this Thursday, has now officially staked their claim as enduring climate deniers.
‘With the announcement of the draft EPA carbon rule this week, it’s clearly a hot topic,” Luke Metzger, founder and director of Environment Texas, told […]
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Stephan: One of the central lies told by the carbon interests and their minions in government is that converting to renewables will be too expensive and will wreck the economy. It is lies. Lies straight from the pit of hell, as Republican Representative Paul Broun from Georgia's 10th District says about evolution, genetics, and climate change. It is easy to see the parallel worlds in this example. Here is some clarifying truth.
Source
A Survey of State-Level Cost and Benefit Estimates of Renewable Portfolio Standards, NREL
51 businesses, 21 organizations in letter to Kasich: S.B. 310 will be harmful to Ohioans' electric bills, burgeoning renewable industries, Columbus Business First
Federal researchers examined the 29 states where renewable portfolio standards (RPS’s) have been in place for more than five years. They concluded that these standards, which require utilities to generate a certain percentage of power from clean sources, led to the development of 46,000 megawatts of renewable capacity up until 2012 – and that they raised electricity rates by an average of less than 2 percent.
(If you’re wondering why California’s green line extends above and below the zero-cost line, it’s because the researchers used two different methodologies – one suggested that the state’s ambitious standard resulted in net costs, while the other suggested that it actually resulted in net savings.)
The researchers, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also examined other studies that have attempted to quantify the economic impacts of RPS policies: ‘A number of the studies examined economic development benefits annually or over the lifespan of the renewable energy projects, with benefits on the order of $1-$6 billion, or $22-30/MWh of renewable generation.” RPS’s can also help make electricity prices more stable, the researchers note.
And, as there’s more to life than electricity prices and economic development, it’s worth noting that RPS’s also contribute […]
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Stephan: Even in the ethical swamp that is the American Congress today one rarely see hypocrisy at this level. It is impossible have a functional democracy when you have people like these in positions of governmental power.
At least six politicians have now deleted tweets they sent about Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.
All of them sent tweets offering initial praise of Bergdahl’s release, only to later backtrack and pull the posts off the web. But thanks to Politwoops, a website from the Sunlight Foundation, the Internet never forgets.
They include four Republican members of Congress, one Democrat and the Republican state senator who won Iowa’s five-way Senate primary on Tuesday night. That’s two more than the four Mashable reported on Tuesday.
See who’s scrambling to run from the spreading Bergdahl backlash.
Senator Thad Cochran (R-Miss.)
Cochran Bergdahl Tweet
Senator Thad Cochran, who is locked in a runoff with a tea party challenger in the Mississippi GOP primary, deleted a pro-Bergdahl tweet on Wednesday sent three days prior that welcomed the freed POW home from the clutches of the Taliban.
Senator Cochran tweeted, “Welcome home, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. A grateful America thanks you for your service.”
It was pulled early Wednesday afternoon. In it’s place now stands a tweet with a link to a statement questioning the decision to negotiate for Bergdahl’s release.
“While we can appreciate Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s service before he went missing in Afghanistan and the prospect of his reunification with family and friends, […]
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HARVEY WASSERMAN, - Truthdig
Stephan: Here is the latest on Fukushima. As usual it is not good news. Too bad the corporate media no longer considers this a story.
The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening even though the melted-down nuclear power plant’s seaborne radiation is now washing up on American beaches.
Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific.
At least three extremely volatile fuel assemblies are stuck high in the air at Unit 4. Three years after the March 11, 2011, disaster, nobody knows exactly where the melted cores from Units 1, 2 and 3 might be.
Amid a dicey cleanup infiltrated by organized crime, still more massive radiation releases are a real possibility at any time.
Radioactive groundwater washing through the complex is enough of a problem that Fukushima Daiichi owner Tepco has just won approval for a highly controversial ice wall to be constructed around the crippled reactor site. No wall of this scale and type has ever been built, and this one might not be ready for two years. Widespread skepticism has erupted surrounding its potential impact on the stability of the site and on the huge amounts of energy necessary to sustain it. Critics also doubt it would effectively guard the site from flooding and worry it could cause even more damage should power fail.
Meanwhile, children nearby are dying. The rate of […]
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PAUL BUCHHEIT, - Truthout
Stephan: Here are some bitter truths about the country America has become.
The severing of our society into a plutocracy and a peasantry is so far along that statistics almost cease to have meaning. But the facts have to be told, to help explain the sickening sense that we’re becoming a nation without a middle class, paralyzed by the inequality deniers and excuse makers who refuse to admit there’s something wrong with their free-market capitalist system. The extremes are becoming almost intolerable.
1. A Broken System of Compensation: The Combined Salaries of 350,000 Pre-School Teachers Is Less Than That of Five Hedge Fund Managers
Pre-school teaching may be our nation’s most important job. Numerous studies show that with pre-school, all children achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most.
Hedge fund managers, at the other extreme, are likely to bet on mortgages to fail or on food prices to rise.
It’s a frightening commentary on our value system that the total income of over a third of a million pre-school teachers is less than the combined income of just five big-money speculators.
2. Diminishing Support for Society: The 1% Made More From Their Investments in 2013 Than the Entire Cost of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Safety Net
America’s wealth grew […]
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