Beat And Battered

By David Roberts

A T-shirt: “The Bible talks all about St. Paul. It doesn’t mention Minneapolis.” Civic pride!

By Gar Lipow

John McGrath, a contributor to Grist, made an important comparison between how the internet contributes to making urban legends look legitimate and how it is used in spreading climate chaos denialism:

It highlights the odd dynamic of the Internet: tiny, vocal, crazy-ass minorities can nevertheless be numerous enough on the Internet to appear more impressive than they are.

So we get never-ending rumors about Barack Obama’s birth, and now no doubt Sarah Palin’s daughter. We get the spectacle of the media inventing 9 out of 10 angry Hillary supporters of the PUMA mold, and of course we get it in larger ways too: the “controversy” over climate change is just this phenomenon writ slightly larger.

Journalists need to develop new filters for the Internet age, and one of them is this: just because a nominally large number of people say something, doesn’t mean they’re important.

The difference is that spreading doubt about the causes of climate chaos is more important to bigger interests and is a long-term rather than short-term project. It is well-funded with paid full-time staff devoted to spreading urban legends aimed specifically at delaying action. Nevertheless, the process is essentially the same, as McGrath said, only on a larger scale.

By Sean Casten

Wisconsin’s five regulated electric utilities have asked to have fuel increases in gas and coal costs automatically passed along to their customers rather than wait until they can file a formal rate case.

Their regulator said no.

In a bizarre bit of doublespeak, the utilities argued that passing 100 percent of fuel volatility risk along to their customers would be good because:

Executives at several Wisconsin utilities said the changes could benefit shareholders and customers by reducing volatility.

It certainly would reduce volatility for their shareholders. But customers?

Not surprisingly, consumer groups have opposed the measure, again raising the specter of risk-shifting from shareholders to consumers. While they don’t make the link between risk and equity returns, it is the natural next step.

More problematically, one has to wonder why energy efficiency isn’t yet part of this conversation. A utility with 100 percent fuel pass-through and a 30 percent efficient fleet has no more incentive to conserve (nor penalty to waste) than one with a 50 percent efficient fleet. Take efficiency in the most holistic way possible as [total electricity out] / [total fossil fuel in] and this is a snub not just to efficiency, but also to renewables. It’s a logic that only makes sense if there are no opportunities to enhance the efficiency or renewable use in their fleet, which is, of course, nonsense. It is, however, implicit in the regulatory conversation to date.

And the conversation isn’t over:

Utility representatives said they expect more work on the fuel-cost issue to take place in 2009 … We Energies spokesman Brian Manthey said Friday the utility isn’t disappointed that the matter has been delayed until 2009, since the company still expects work to continue on a plan to change how fuel charges can be altered. The company would be more concerned if the commission were backing off altogether from changes to the fuel rules, he said.

Call me naïve, but shouldn’t we be focusing on how to alter fuel use as opposed to fuel charges?

By Kate Sheppard

The Huffington Post did some digging on the church that Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin spent most of her life attending. Apparently the church films and posts all of its services.

In June, Palin gave a speech to the graduating class of commission students at her former church, Wasilla Assembly of God. In the video, she weaves together religion and her energy plans, asking the audience to pray for the natural-gas pipeline project she’s been pushing. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said.

Ed Kalnins, the senior pastor of Wasilla Assembly of God, reportedly believes that the “End Times” are upon us. On the day Palin appeared at his church in June, he told the crowd, “I believe Alaska is one of the refuge states in the last days, and hundreds of thousands of people are going to come to the state to seek refuge and the church has to be ready to minister to them.”

Some “End Times” believers tell folks that they should welcome the storms and droughts that result from climate change as signs of the Second Coming. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, for instance, advises Christians to respond to climate change by “look[ing] inwardly” and making sure they are “spiritually prepared to meet the End Times.”

Perhaps not so surprising, then, that Palin isn’t convinced about anthropogenic climate change?

By David Roberts

Hey folks,

this is post #13 of my 30 day challenge.

In my previous post people were wondering why I had chosen a datasource for my implementation of the Akismet API. Some people felt Models, Components or even Behaviors could be more appropriate.

Indeed, about 2 years ago I did a previous Akismet implementation using a Model. But that always felt wrong. In CakePHP Models are meant to abstract a relational database table. To map its associations, to define its validation rules and provide easy CRUD functionality.

Unless the web service you’re dealing with is a REST interface for CRUD operations, using a Model for its abstraction is way overkill.

So what about Behaviors? Behaviors are meant to abstract re-usable CRUD, validation and association tasks. A behavior might interact with a web service, but should not be the primary means of abstracting it.

Components are tempting. They indeed seem like a good choice for certain tasks. But their strength lays elsewhere. Components are good for abstracting functionality shared among multiple controllers. Often times they aren’t even necessary because the logic one is trying to abstract has its place inside the model. Also:

Components are not globally accessible nor do they have a built-in mechanism for configuration like datasources do.

So I am fairly convinced that most web services are best abstracted using datasources. They make it easy to store the API key in your database.php file (which is not semantically perfect but lets be a little forgiving here). They can be accessed from a Component, Controller, Model, Behavior or any other part of your application and that makes a ton of sense. Because some services may allow you to upload data, resize pictures, transform text, detect spam, aggregate information, validate identities - all things that are best done in different places of your application.

There are some imperfections to the whole thing and some web servies might require the combination of a datasource (for the protocol) and a model (for the CRUD abstraction), but if you are in doubt - start with a datasource.

If you are interested in learning, check out some of the datasources we have published so far:

• Akismet SPAM detection
• Amazon Associate Web Services
• Google Analytics

– Felix Geisendörfer

By Joseph Romm

A friend forwarded me an email titled "Gustav and Hannah" that was written to environmental activists by one of the top environmental leaders in this country. I am going to write on it at length because it is illustrative of the catastrophic messaging failure of the environmental community on issues of climate, government action, and energy. I strongly believe other progressives must not make the same mistakes.

Here are key quotes from the email about "three potential areas where the message of the national environmental community" could supposedly be counterproductive:

1. Our first concern relates to the fact that any particular hurricane hitting Louisiana is not an example of how global warming is making everything worse …. Blaming this particular hurricane on global warming runs the serious risk of coming off as opportunism in a community that knows full well that hurricanes are a normal fact of life, and could well set back attempts to engage this community on the issue.
2. Second, a hurricane hitting Louisiana is not a good example of how federal flood policy has encouraged people to build in the way of danger ….
3. Third, hurricane damage in Louisiana is not an example of how additional OCS drilling is a bad idea. Such an argument puts the national NGO community in the position of attacking an existing and major job creating force in a conservative state.

While I think these three points range from wrong to dead wrong, this preemptively muzzling email is all the worse because it does not put forward what message environmentalists should be pushing. Let me (partly) address both of those problems, starting with the last point.

OFFSHORE DRILLING

The email author writes: "Using any damage to the existing infrastructure as an example of why offshore drilling is bad may very well be perceived as an attack on the existing industry and people employed in it." Duh! If the hurricane causes oil spills, then that is in fact an example of the dangers of drilling offshore. More importantly, it might at least make it harder for the GOP to keep lying about what happened three years ago (see TP’s "McCain Falsely Claims Katrina And Rita Did Not Cause Significant Oil Spillage").

Obviously, McCain and the GOP think that creating the misimpression that offshore drill rigs or onshore infrastructure are impervious to strong hurricanes helps their case — since they keep telling the same lie over and over again long after the facts have been made available to all. I’m guessing that at least on the messaging side of things, they are a lot savvier than the environmental leader who wrote this e-mail.

Secondarily, does it matter whether the spill comes from an offshore drill rig or from onshore infrastructure? Of course not.

The ecosystem doesn’t care where spilled oil comes from. If we are going to do offshore drilling from, say, the Carolinas, then those states will need to build a new infrastructure to bring the oil to where the refineries are. If hurricanes were to hit and damage that infrastructure and release oil, it would still be an environmental disaster.

Third, by the author’s logic, any attack on offshore drilling "may be perceived as an attack on the existing industry and people employed in it." So what? Most of the environmental community opposes coastal drilling. If it has to self-censor its most effective arguments, it really should go back to college debating and leave the real political debates to those who know how to do it.

Of course, the primary messages on drilling are that

• We already opened 80% of the offshore areas for drilling back in 2006 and since then oil prices doubled;
• Opening our coastal plains to drilling will never have any impact whatsoever on the prices Americans pay at the pump; but
• Because there is so little additional oil in the OCS that isn’t open for drilling, a compromise that includes a multiyear extension of renewable tax credits, plus a big push on plug-in hybrids, could be a reasonable idea, especially as long as conservatives block any action that does not include drilling.

FEDERAL POLICY

The email author writes: "There’s a huge equity and class issue problem with using coastal Louisiana as an example of how we must reform federal flood policy or the insurance system that can only be handled sensitively, not as a ‘lesson’ right after a disaster." This is the kind of absurd red herring argument that conservatives try to claim progressives make.

The real issue here is that the federal government has refused to take the necessary action to preserve the vital wetlands that protect against hurricanes and that the federal government has refused to build the levees strong enough to protect the citizens of New Orleans against a Category 5 hurricane making landfall, which is certainly inevitable. Heck, Gustav, a "mere" Category 2 at landfall, came close to breaching at least one levee.

The real issue here is that the government’s refusal to take the necessary action to protect a major U.S. city like New Orleans from a superhurricane shows the whole notion we can or will adapt to catastrophic global warming is absurd. If we won’t adapt to the realities of having one city below sea level in hurricane alley, what are the chances we are going to adapt to the realities of having all our great Gulf and Atlantic Coast cities at risk for the same fate as New Orleans — since sea level from climate change will ultimately put many cities, like Miami, below sea level? And just how do you adapt to sea levels rising 6 to 12 inches a decade for centuries, which well may be our fate by 2100 if we don’t reverse greenhouse gas emissions trends soon. Climate change driven by humans GHGs is already happening much faster than past climate change from natural causes — and it is accelerating.

Of course, the primary messages on federal energy policy is that we can’t solve our energy problems without strong progressive policies, as even uber conservative T. Boone Pickens admits but that conservatives like John McCain (and Sarah Palin) have long bitterly opposed such policies, no matter how they lie about such support today.

HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING

The email author writes: "Blaming this particular hurricane on global warming runs the serious risk of coming off as opportunism in a community that knows full well that hurricanes are a normal fact of life, and could well set back attempts to engage this community on the issue."

As I have written about at length (see here), this statement reflects one of the great messaging triumphs of the global warming deniers. The right wing have succeeded in browbeating much of the media (and the environmental community) to not talk about the connection between global warming and extreme weather. The journalist Ross Gelbspan has a long discussion of this in his great 2004 book, Boiling Point.

While it is almost certainly true that global warming makes any particular hurricane stronger, the issue has not ever been whether a particular hurricane can be blamed on global warming. Other issues are much more important and deserve elevation by progressives during times of extreme weather.

One key issue is that the devastation from a strong hurricane — particularly of a city that is mostly below sea level — is the shape of things to come in a globally warmed and flooded world. And I just
finished a 2-parter on the impact of globally warmed waters on all future Gulf hurricanes.

Another key issue is just basic climate messaging, which in this case should be "Global warming makes the weather more extreme." If even the Bush administration accepts that basic fact of climate science, why shouldn’t the environmental community stop self censoring itself on this issue?

This is simple stuff. As the climate changes because of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, the weather becomes more extreme. That’s what climate change is. I understand why deniers don’t want the rest of us talking about the connection between global warming and the surge in extreme weather events that has been documented statistically by scientists — including NOAA’s National Climactic Data Center (NCDC). That would shut down most discussion of climate impacts today and for many years to come. But I don’t understand why major environmental leaders play along.

It is now officially absurd to take the view of the deniers or would-be censors. Back in June, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (aka the Bush Administration) issued Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate that acknowledged the basic climate science:

Changes in extreme weather and climate events have significant impacts and are among the most serious challenges to society in coping with a changing climate.

Many extremes and their associated impacts are now changing …. The power and frequency of Atlantic hurricanes have increased substantially in recent decades, though North American mainland land-falling hurricanes do not appear to have increased over the past century. Outside the tropics, storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are becoming even stronger.

It is well established through formal attribution studies that the global warming of the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced increases in heat-trapping gases. … There is evidence suggesting a human contribution to recent changes in hurricane activity as well as in storms outside the tropics, though a confident assessment will require further study.

In the future, with continued global warming, heat waves and heavy downpours are very likely to further increase in frequency and intensity. Substantial areas of North America are likely to have more frequent droughts of greater severity. Hurricane wind speeds, rainfall intensity, and storm surge levels are likely to increase. The strongest cold season storms are likely to become more frequent, with stronger winds and more extreme wave heights.

Is it so hard for the environmental community to say what the Bush administration has already acknowledged? Especially with multiple hurricanes bearing down on the U.S. coast?

Environmentalist have, to a large extent, taken themselves out of the political messaging game as it is now played. They have been playing slow pitch softball, while conservatives have been planning major league baseball. That is one of many reasons 450 ppm is not even close to being politically possible. That is one of many reasons I have never considered myself an environmentalist.

In any case, progressives must not follow environmentalist down the path of wishy-washy messaging.

By Kate Sheppard

Remember the Bridge to Nowhere? Last week, in her VP acceptance speech, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told the crowd, “I told Congress, thanks but no thanks on that bridge to nowhere.”

Turns out she was for the bridge before she was against it. The bridge (actually called the Gravina Island Bridge) was the mother of all ridiculous federal earmarks, bringing in a $223 million set-aside in 2005.

While campaigning for governor in 2006, she was pro-bridge, saying to Ketchikan residents while on the campaign trail that she could felt their pain when other politicians called them “nowhere.” And in a televised debate in Oct. 2006, while she was campaigning, she also said, “I do support the infrastructure projects that are on tap here in the State of Alaska that our Congressional delegations worked hard for.” She later decided to use the bridge funds for other projects, not long before her name started circulating as a possible candidate for VP.

Outcry against the bridge prompted Congress to later remove the earmark designation, but the state still got the same amount of cash to be used at their discretion for transportation. And the Palin administration has spent “tens of millions of dollars” of that money on a road on Gravina Island … that is meant to link up to the bridge, which still doesn’t exist.

Meanwhile, McCain has used the bridge repeatedly as an example of the evils of earmarks (though when he had the opportunity to legislate on the issue, he never specifically criticized the project, and he was absent for key votes on its funding it). As for Palin, many Alaskans are miffed that she’s dissing their bridge.

By David Roberts

I have dropped into some sort of wormhole in the spacetime continuum. In the past hour or so, I ran into some guys from Reason magazine, including Matt Welch (a bit of a hero of mine). Then we were accosted by an incredibly enthusiastic delegate from Mass., who discussed his disappointment about Romney not being chosen as veep. Then we were accosted by another incredibly enthusiastic delegate who was, he said, "a huge, huge fan of your magazine! I watch the mailbox every day!" (We let him think we were with Reason too, so as not to ruin his evident joy. Apparently he used to be a "liberal douchebag" in college, but Ayn Rand cured him.) Then Dan Savage — Seattle’s own hyper-homo advice columnist — showed up, to the obvious delight of the Reason guys. Now I’m drinking beers with a giddy libertarian delegate, a homo socialist, and two libertarian journalists.

I don’t think we’re in Kansas any more.

By Kate Sheppard

St. Paul is absolute madness, despite the fact that most of the official proceedings were canceled for today. Nearly 10,000 anti-war protesters marched peacefully on the convention earlier today, the largest rally scheduled for the Republican National Convention.

But apparently there was some violence later in afternoon. Someone broke out the window of a police car with a sign, and apparently some blocked traffic. Things were exploding, cops were tear-gassing and shooting rubber bullets, somewhere around 100 protesters were arrested or detained. Police in riot gear have been running all over the city, and I was just down on the riverfront earlier when police on horses surrounded a group of protesters. Total, utter madness.

All traffic in and out of downtown was blocked off for some time. Things are open again now, but the barriers around the Xcel Center, where the main official events are slated to take place, pretty much divides the city in half. I walked a two-mile loop around the Xcel Center to meet David, who was only two blocks away as the crow flies. I’ll have some RNC Day One photos up later from the streets of St. Paul, as well as interviews with delegates and other attendees. Stay tuned.