More Hard Times for Liberals

With the limited exception of those of us lucky enough to live in Vermont, this is a lousy time to be a liberal. And it's not going to get any better.

After years of battling Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, Democrats and Progressives in the Legislature have the luxury of working with new Democratic Gov. Peter Shumlin. While Shumlin has put the kibosh on increasing taxes for the super-rich -- he knows that would be political poison in his first term – he has otherwise set a remarkably progressive tone.

In addition to his persistent opposition to renewing the license for Vermont Yankee and his support of marriage equality, Shumlin is making all the right liberal noises about diversifying agriculture beyond the overemphasis on dairy farms. He's pushing ahead on the long campaign for single-payer healthcare and greater broadband Internet access.

Outside the cozy confines of the Green Mountains, however, the picture is a much darker one.

Pres. Obama’s one liberal accomplishment may prove to be the expansion of affordable healthcare for millions of Americans. Beyond that, his record on hot-button liberal issues, such as "card check" legislation making it easier for unions to organize, is disappointingly thin. The record includes some outright reversals, such as the chickenhearted decision to deny fair and constitutionally mandated trials to many terrorism suspects.

When it comes to foreign policy, the best that can be said about Obama is that he looks like Bush Lite. He seems to feel it's OK to spend $1 billion on a bombing campaign to support a rebel Libyan force that is largely unknown to the U.S. And his weary supporters seem willing to go along, even as Obama further expands executive power at the expense of the constitutional mandate that reserves to Congress the right to make war.

Worse yet, last week's collapse in the face of Republican demands for recovery-crippling cuts in federal spending is probably just another step in a long retreat led by Obama.

While Gov. Shumlin is proving nearly as liberal as he appeared during the campaign, it’s obvious by now that Obama never really was a liberal. He is a charismatic and canny politician, and one of his great political strengths is that he can be many things to many different kinds of people.

That's not lying, by the way. It's called electability in a center-right country.

With conservatives chipping away at healthcare reform, it will be a generation or more before any president is brave or stupid enough to take on healthcare once again. That
means the long-held liberal dream of single-payer healthcare is essentially dead for Baby Boomers.

The Republican assault on government and the Great Society now includes a frontal attack not just on Social Security, but also on Medicare and Medicaid. If it succeeds, the elderly of tomorrow will have to pay for much more of their own healthcare. And let’s not even talk about the fate of the poor who have to rely on Medicaid, where minimal healthcare services are diminishing and even disappearing.


The middle class will also take it on the chin. Do you appreciate knowing your commercial plane won’t crash in flight? The Federal Aviation Authority is facing millions in cutbacks that will affect its ability to help ensure flight safety.

Got a kid who might need financial aid to get through college? Education Pell grants are on the chopping block, too.

The persistent cry from conservatives is that we can't afford these kinds of services anymore. Yet emerging unscathed from all of the budget-cutting discussions is the "defense" budget.

With Obama’s recent decision to bomb Libya, the US is now involved in three wars. As satirist Andy Borowitz noted, even if the government were to shut down in a budget dispute, the US would continue to provide government services to Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Neither party seems willing to ask if the bloated military budget, which grew by more than 7 percent last year, could be cut as we try to bring down federal spending. Yet U.S. military spending has nearly doubled in the last decade and is six times greater than that of China, which ranks second. (Source: the respected Stockholm International Peace Research Institute).

Even most Democrats have given up on questioning the continuing occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now the old social issues are back on the table, too.

One of the debates that nearly shut down the government last weekend was the GOP's push to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood. That was allegedly done to curb Planned Parenthood's ability to provide abortions. But the organization receives no federal funding for abortions and, according to the Guttmacher Institute, taxpayer-financed support for family planning prevented nearly 2 million unwanted pregnancies in 2006.

Cutting funding to Planned Parenthood would only increase the number of women who choose to terminate their pregnancies.

The Republican majority, heavily financed by the US Chamber of Commerce and other conservative special interests, has bought into the myth that global warming isn't real.
The GOP threatened to shut down the government in part over the party’s insistence that the EPA stop regulating the carbon emissions that are a primary cause of climate change.

I wish I could find a silver lining in all these dark clouds. The reality, though, is that liberalism and activist government continue their long sunset in America.

If that’s ever to change, we’ll have to endure the failure of drastic budget cuts and the human and environmental toll that will follow. Maybe it will take a couple more environmental disasters like Hurricane Katrina. A Supreme Court majority that decides to outlaw abortion would wake up a lot of women to what's been going on.

In the meantime, I'm holing up in the Green Mountains.

Getting to 350 Amid All the Carbon

With the beginning of the end in sight for this most recent economic crisis, Big Thinkers are turning their focus back to even bigger problems – climate change chief among them.

Again here, Vermonters can lead the way to a better life, as we have done historically on independence and abolition, and more recently on child healthcare and marriage equality.

This time around the stakes will be a lot higher than they were in one Vermont Republican senatorial primary, when the key question was how many teats there are on a cow.

In the U.S., Congress is struggling with a “cap and trade” bill that might slightly cut carbon emissions, which come primarily from burning oil and coal. Yet few leaders are ready to vote for what is truly needed: a tax on carbon to drastically cut emissions, with a corresponding dividend regularly paid back to every American.

Internationally, the focus is on a meeting of the “G20” leaders in July. After that, everyone is gearing up for the December meeting in Copenhagen that will supplant the Kyoto goals on global warming.

And in places as far flung as Lebanon, India and South Africa, an intrepid band of activists, who have their roots in Addison County, is organizing a planetary effort to place in every thinking person’s mind the number 350 – that is, 350 parts per million of carbon.

Scientists have concluded that 350 ppm is the maximum amount of carbon the atmosphere can hold and still support human life as we know it.

Here’s the bad news: We’re already above 380 ppm and rising. There is so much carbon already loaded into the atmosphere that many levelheaded experts think we can’t avoid at least some of the drastic impacts.

Left unchecked, climate change will melt the icecaps, flood our coastlines, imperil our food supply, bring us Katrina-level hurricanes on a regular basis, and drive many species into extinction. Nature’s rich beauty will fade to deserts, dead seas and autumnal maples that are a drab brown.

Against that backdrop, a tribe of climate-change activists gathered earlier this month at Middlebury College to contemplate “getting to 350,” achieving a better life organized around sustainable communities rather than unsustainable consumption.

(For more on the basics and to see what you can do, see www.350.org.)

Organized by the steadfast professor Jon Isham, the conference drew native Vermonters, a few hangers-on like myself, and Midd grad activists who, like our president, are proud to call themselves organizers. They spend their days and nights lobbying Congress and the G20 nations, impressive young adults who earned their climate stripes as students here.

We heard top NASA climatologist James Hansen lay out the irrefutable evidence that unless we act now, catastrophe awaits us. We contemplated the frightening gap between the destruction that the science says is approaching, and the public’s heedlessness of this threat.

One recent national survey on the top issues found Americans don’t even rank “the environment” in the top 20. Indeed, many conference participants confessed in private that they feel humanity will only take meaningful action to curb climate change once the inevitable catastrophes and “die off” begin to occur.

Looking battle-hardened and prophetic, Ripton resident Bill McKibben was Skyped into the conference from New Zealand. He’s been there and in many other nations as part of the 350 campaign, organizing surfers and scuba divers, mountain climbers and ordinary citizens, to gather in hundreds of events on Oct. 24.

On that day six weeks before the Copenhagen conference, we’ll convene in iconic natural settings and simple parks and squares around the glob, in hopes of impressing those three simple digits –3-5-0 -- upon the world’s consciousness.

Surprisingly, the mood at the conference was a hopeful one though we contemplated the most dire of fates.

The younger activists reminded us that climate change is both peril and opportunity, because it is forcing us to rethink how we organize our communities and our economy. And in this movement as in so many past ones, the youth have a lot to teach their elders.

Gatherings like this one inevitably focus on Big Ideas and Big Projects. Lew Milford from Clean Energy Group pointed to the need for “distributed innovation” around the globe to developing carbon-free energy. Charles Baron from Google, a Middlebury College grad, mapped out the search giant’s commitments to help meet its energy needs by developing massive geothermal energy production.

But in this inevitable focus on Big Ideas, a couple of them were overlooked.
Along with Native American climate activist Kandi Mosset of the Indigenous Environmental Network, I gently reminded the conference that the local food movement is already making a difference well beyond the conference rooms. (For more on how this is happening in Vermont, see “On the Importance of the Local” by Suzanne Richman, at www.vtcommons.org).

Another idea that was overlooked, as it usually is, was the ever-unpopular topic of population control.

Hansen for example, proudly showed us photos of his young grandchildren, as he called for a moratorium on new coal-fired plants and outlined the carbon-reducing virtues of “fourth generation” nuclear power.

Yet that kind of nuclear won’t come online for decades. And during that time the human population is exploding toward 10 billion – a number that itself portends unending climate change.

There was nary a word from Hansen or anybody else about taking the pressure off the planet in the coming decades by reducing our numbers.

As urgently as we need to get to 350, in my view we also need a “getting to 4 billion” conference. The goal: Figure out how we can, by reducing our numbers from the present 6 billion-plus, take full advantage of the challenging opportunities that climate change presents us.

More from activists on the meaning of climate change

This is the third of three *short* videos on what some of the nation's top climate activists have to say about what climate change means to them. *Scroll down for the other two videos.* I recorded these clips at the recent "Getting to 350" conference at Middlebury College. www.350.org.

350 parts per million is the maximum amount of carbon our atmosphere can hold and still support life as we know it. We're already at 380-something -- and rising.

Turn up your speakers to hear this. Young Faith Isham appears twice in this clip (my goof), but there are a couple more clips after hers and she's worth listening to twice anyway.

STEP IT UP -- We Need You Saturday,. April 14

Just a few days left to make your plans for Saturday, April 14.

That's when, in more than 1,000 different actions around the country, thousands of us will gather to do cool things -- and demand that the nation Step It Up and do something NOW about climate change and global warming.

Please join us. Find a local event just waiting for you to attend and have fun. Go to www.stepitup2007.org and use the "zip search" function to find out what's going on in YOUR backyard.

This is the best way I know to get energized and feel hopeful that we CAN do something about global warming, that we can pull back from the brink of environmental catastrophe for millions of people around the globe. That we'll leave our kids with a green living planet and not a watery, dying hulk.

It's up to each and every one of us to step it up. Learn more at www.stepitup.org. And please joins us on April 14.