Links are not for the non-wonky at heart. You have been warned.

Thanks to SoloMother for pointing out that my font size was messed up. Turns out I forgot to close the <small≷ tag after the last footnote.

Update: Okay, apparently Obama is giving this some thought and I’m shouting at clouds again. I’m still not so comforted by the economic emphasis on reviving the credit markets with capital as opposed to deleveraging. But wilderness preservation is GOOD.

Yeah, we’ve got a Democratic President, and he’s a million times better than the Shrub. Unfortunately, while he’s going in a better direction than his predecessor, he’s caught up in sound bites and political solutions that just aren’t going to work – especially in finance and the environment. Dr. Krugman takes apart the finance problem nicely, as does Randy Waldman (Chinchillas to Yves Smith) so I’ll just back away rather than look like one of those dolts in the crowd* with the red plastic cup and a repeated, irrepressible urge to yell “YEAH.”

Anyhow. On Common Dreams, I read this about Obama’s environmental policy and found it interesting, and going in a parallel direction to my own angst about the President’s plans:

In our 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism,” we argued that global warming was an unprecedented ecological challenge that would lead to the death of environmentalism. What we meant was that the environmental movement, as America had known it for the better part of four decades, would be forced to reconsider the central role that environmental protection and nature preservation played in its politics and policy proposals.

Reaction from many environmentalists was swift and harsh. Yet, today, environmental organizations have largely relegated images of polar bears and melting ice flows to the back pages of their magazines. Green jobs and clean energy investment are the eco-ideas of the moment.

…

It was never realistic to have expected pollution regulations and carbon taxes to drive a global energy modernization project of the scale necessary to transform the global energy economy. We did not invent the personal computer by placing a “market-based cap” on typewriters nor create the Internet by taxing telegraphs and fax machines. To the contrary, government investment was largely responsible for bringing these revolutionary technologies, and a raft of others, into our lives. This included not only funding research and development at universities and national laboratories but also directly procuring and deploying cutting-edge technologies that were not yet ready for broad commercialization.

In the coming years, as recognition of the failure of carbon regulation and pricing to make much progress toward reducing global carbon emissions becomes ever more apparent, advocates for climate action, including environmentalists, will increasingly embrace a technology-and-investment centered framework. For as surely as the politics of climate and energy has forced environmentalists to abandon their nature-based rhetoric, the economic and technological challenges inherent to the climate crisis will ultimately force them to abandon their pollution-focused remedies.

This policy shift is a mixed bag. It’s appropriate in many ways for a recession in that it captures the attention of economically-battered people in a way that “save the whales” doesn’t, but it walks away from the problems that are most damaging. Folks, when you wipe out an ecosystem, it doesn’t come back. You can replant and repopulate with other critters, but the stuff that was there is gone, period. For example, you can talk all you want about using fisheries to rebuild damaged wild populations (and it’s a worthy goal), but those captive fish are going to be hit with the same systemic problems we deal with in our own living environment, and therefore any rebuilt ecology is going to differ from the original, since the new inhabitants will not quite fit the niches we intend them for (or are vulnerable to disease in a way that the wild species was not). Now these differences may be small, but critters raised in a managed environment will just plain behave and live differently when that management is removed.

Sorry for ranting, I’ll stop there. Note that I’m not railing against the people working on these problems, I’m upset that those people and their charges are being thrown under the bus (again) after seeing the light at the end of the tunnel that is the Obama administration. In some ways Obama’s multicultural background is great, but the focus on an urban world-view in the administration is painfully obvious, even if it is less damaging than the eight years under the Shrub (and it is).

Deep breath.

What I really want to talk about is air. Privately and as far as the environment goes, I’ve been running around screaming and waving my arms ever since the first time the words “clean coal” came out of Obama’s mouth. Gentle readers, I may be coming late to the Fisking, but there is no more such a thing as clean coal as there is a thing called “consensual surprise.”** Not to mention, that carbon is not the only thing that comes from burning coal, and sequestering and concentration that stuff will lead to tears down the road. Oh, and the Shrub made sure we kept poorer records of what those combustion products were doing to us, unless those products were used to make something someone sold. We didn’t need to keep an eye on that stuff anyway… oops. By the way, that incident gives us great confidence in business’ ability to capture and sequester carbon emissions, doesn’t it? Anyhow, the composition of the combustion products of coal in air vary depending on the seam that you got the coal from (duh). While there’s plenty of information on coal products you can recycle (thanks to public-private partnerships), exact studies of what is in flue exhaust that we can’t recycle are a little less prioritized, but it’s agreed on that the stuff you get when you burn coal is toxic and scary.*** The point is, that the problem is much bigger than carbon. My worry is that grudging eventual compliance with carbon emissions will lead to slackening attention to the many other problems we’re creating, and attention to full consequences of intended actions is both necessary and lacking. It’s not just the will-o-the-wisp of clean coal, either.

I’m very worried that, in the way we had administration**** who was focused on “my way (or Cheney’s way) and nothing else),” we now have a President who is committed to moderation and the status quo, at truly Broderian proportions. This is taking place mostly in the fields of finance and economics, with factors such as health of the workforce given a high priority, but factors such as human rights and the global ecosystem being hampered by a focus on a purported need to preserve the financial system we have, but especially its warts.

We need a financial system that knows when to say “Enough.” We are not going to get it by tweaking the one we’ve got; we’re sure as hell not going to get it by letting it regulate itself. What we’re doing now is somewhere between those two courses of action, which is almost worse than aggressively pursuing laissez-faire capitalism, because it’s wasting time, energy, effort, and resources on our real problems.

Why this veering off to the financial system in a rant about the environment? Because even as it distorts our priorities to the point where the world we live in becomes secondary to the made-up***** world of money, the financial system is bleeding us, and the world dry. Get on your keyboards and channel Howard Beale for a while at your Congresscritters, the President, the media, hell, your neighbors for good measure. DO get mad. Throw a few bucks at these people. Counter-protest the anti-tax nit-wits, or protest the AIG/Goldman Sachs bailouts.****** Just do something.

* There’s always at least one. Have you been “that guy?” I’ve been “that guy.” Don’t be “that guy.”

** Seriously. If you consent to follow the person into the dark room, what you’re giving is trust to that person. If you are giving consent to be surprised, then you’re giving up some of being surprised, because you’d have to know what you were consenting to in order to truly consent to it – by definition. Yadda yadda. Just ranting here. Can you tell I don’t believe in any form of consent other than informed consent, and that anything else is trust (however misplaced) or coercion? Thought so.

*** It’s creepy that if you do a search for “coal” on the EPA website, almost all of the results are industry-friendly (i.e. cheaper ways to remove the sulfur/mercury, or things you can sell), yet the only results analyzing the problem are from back in 2000 (the link from the main body is the journal report from this study).

**** It’s not just who is President. Ever. I’d argue that the President can do more sustained good (or damage) through appointments than they can through direct action. Seriously. We’d be in a lot better shape if our Treasury Secretary wasn’t a Goldman Sachs alum, because he and Larry Summers are who he’s relying on for economic policy advice.

***** It really is. Money is a symbol of value, the exchange of which has real consequences, but the rules put in place which maximize the flow of money upwards are not laws of nature. They can be changed.

****** You don’t have to call it counter-protesting. You can call it “sightseeing” or “going to the zoo” or “giving attention to those disadvantaged souls who need it so very badly” for all I care.