Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
Chris Mooney, - The Washington Post
Stephan: This is the latest on solar and after reading it I was left with a sense of anger at how thoroughly the carbon energy industries control the governments of Canada and the United States. A 10 year old could read this story and the proceeding one about the tar sands pipeline and tell you that smart money would be backing solar, not trying to force an aging 20th century technology onto an unwilling electorate.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 19: Solar panels cover the employee parking lot on the Patagonia corporate headquarters campus in Ventura, California on Friday, September 19, 2014.
Credit: David Walter Banks/For The Washington Post
It is widely known that among all the sources of alternative energy, the one with the greatest potential is solar. How could it be otherwise? Staggering amounts of solar radiation strike the Earth each day; the only trick is capturing more of it.
In a new report, the Environment America Research and Policy Center seeks to visualize and quantify this potential as it pertains to the United States. The report argues that the U.S. “has the potential to produce more than 100 times as much electricity from solar PV and concentrating solar power (CSP) installations as the nation consumes each year.” It adds that every […]
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
LIBBY WATSON , - Media Matters for America
Stephan: This is the media face of the carbon energy industries, and their blatant disinformation program. As a life long researcher and academic I find the idea that there is a cabal of scientists trying to promote a false story in order to get rich from funding climate change research and remediation belly laugh absurd. Have you met a lot of multi-millionaire climate researchers? Neither have I. According to the government the annual median income of a PhD senior atmospheric scientist with 22 years of education and 10 years of post-doc experience is $89,260. Not chump change to be sure but, for a typical family of four, hardly an income that buys luxury.
Carbon energy interests pour tens of millions of dollars annually into creating confusion and misunderstanding and, as a result, Americans who watch outlets like Fox News have voted for politicians, who themselves are vassals of carbon energy interests, and are dedicated to doing nothing about climate change.
Fox News provided American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Jonah Goldberg a platform to attack climate scientists as profiteers who are “financially incentivized” to advocate climate change action, without disclosing AEI’s own financial incentive to undercut action on climate change. AEI has taken over $3 million from ExxonMobil, and once offered money to scientists to write articles criticizing a UN climate change report.
On the November 18 edition of Your World with Neil Cavuto, Goldberg argued that climate scientists have a conflict of interest reporting on climate change because they are “deeply invested in the whole industry of global warming” for their university programs. Goldberg also called climate scientists and advocates “people who are financially incentivized to go one way.”
Though host Neil Cavuto did disclose that Goldberg is a fellow at AEI, he did not mention AEI’s ties to the oil industry or its history of offering money to climate scientists to write articles undermining a climate change report. In 2013, The Union of Concerned Scientists reported that AEI received $3.04 million from ExxonMobil between 2001 and 2011. According to ExxonMobil’s website, in 2012 the company also donated $260,000 to AEI.
In 2007, The Guardian reported that AEI offered scientists and economists $10,000 to write articles that “emphasize the shortcomings” of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate […]
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Saturday, November 22nd, 2014
Scott Kaufman, - The Raw Story
Stephan: I actually have five other similar stories about newly elected Republican politicians, and I chose this one because the Speaker of the House in Nevada is one of the most powerful positions in the state. I think we need to face up to the fact that the Majority Minority Trend is inflaming a level of racism I have not seen since the late 1950s. The linkage of the Republican Party and racism is a subject corporate media won't touch but I think it has become a major factor in American politics.
Ira Hansen
Credit: Facebook
Nevada’s next House speaker is likely to be the most controversial in the state’s history, the Reno News Review reports.
According to the paper — which investigated 13 years’ worth of columns Ira Hansen wrote for the Sparks Tribune — the incoming Speaker of the House has the potential to be the most controversial in the state’s history given his print record of disliking blacks, gays, the state of Israel, most Nevadans, and even his Republican colleagues.
For example, he wrote that he composes his columns beneath a Confederate flag, “in honor and in memory of a great cause and my brave ancestors who fought for that cause.” Hansen devoted columns published around the federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. to attacking the civil rights leader, writing that “King’s private life was trashy at best…King Jr. is as low as it […]
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Friday, November 21st, 2014
Joseph Stiglitz, PhD, Nobel Laureate Economist - Washington Monthly
Stephan: This is one of the best and most unvarnished assessments of what is happening in the United States I have read in some time. I urge you to read it and think about what it is saying. The great irony and tragedy is that the suggestions this essay contains are what Americans just voted NOT TO DO. By electing Republicans voters have assured that nothing substantive will be done about climate change. Nothing will be done about ocean acidification. Far too little will be done ending the era of carbon energy, and there is an excellent chance that even the modest benefits arising from the ACA, a Rube Goldberg structure of healthcare designed to assure profit continues as the main priority will be undermined, if not eliminated. Our schools will continue to deteriorate and be privatized. The Gulag will continue privatizing. More children will be homeless and hungry. And inequity will almost certainly increase as subsidies for the rich and corporations are increased and taxes on them decreased. Just look at Kansas for a glimpse of the future. And it was all voted for by those who bothered to vote at all.
Credit: Washington Monthly
A rich country with millions of poor people. A country that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, but in which a child’s prospects are more dependent on the income and education of his or her parents than in other advanced countries. A country that believes in fair play, but in which the richest often pay a smaller percentage of their income in taxes than those less well off. A country in which children every day pledge allegiance to the flag, asserting that there is “justice for all,” but in which, increasingly, there is only justice for those who can afford it. These are the contradictions that the United States is gradually and painfully struggling to come to terms with as it begins to comprehend the enormity of the inequalities that mark its society—inequities that are greater than in any other advanced country.
Those who strive not to think about this issue suggest that this is just about the “politics of envy.” Those who discuss the issue are accused […]
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Friday, November 21st, 2014
Robert Reich, Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley - Nation of Change
Stephan: Robert Reich has written an excellent assessment of the implications of the wealth disparity that is destroying American democracy and the myth of America as an upwardly mobile middle class society.
The richest Americans hold more of the nation’s wealth than they have in almost a century. What do they spend it on? As you might expect, personal jets, giant yachts, works of art, and luxury penthouses.
And also on politics. In fact, their political spending has been growing faster than their spending on anything else. It’s been growing even faster than their wealth.
According to new research by Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold over 11 percent of the nation’s total wealth. That’s a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, before the Great Crash.
We’re talking about 16,000 people, each worth at least $110 million.
One way to get your mind around this is to compare their wealth to that of the average family. In 1978, the typical wealth holder in the top .01 percent was 220 times richer than the average American. By 2012, he or she was 1,120 times richer.
It’s hard to spend […]
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