Memo of the Day
Dear Mr. President:
I would like to express my concern regarding reports that the Administration may believe it has the unilateral power to commit the government of the United States to certain standards that may be agreed upon at the upcoming United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of Parties 15 in Copenhagen, Denmark. The phrase “politically binding” has been used.
Although details have not been made available, recent statements by Special Envoy on Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission reduction program. As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country.
I would very much appreciate having this matter clarified in advance of the Copenhagen meetings.
Sincerely,
Jim Webb
United States Senator
Anticipating the argument of his right-wing constituents, and making it his own. Very shrewd.
Comment by Rojas — 12/2/2009 @ 2:06 pm
It’s about time that the checks and balances actually check and balance.
I still loathe Jim Webb though.
Comment by Liz — 12/2/2009 @ 5:21 pm
Well, he’s certainly a man’s man.
And by that I mean he hates women. :)
Still, on the issues, he’s one of my favorite Senators.
Comment by Brad — 12/2/2009 @ 5:36 pm
Why do you loath Jim Webb? Anything to do with his chauvanistic conduct while a professor at our alma mater? My understanding, and I admit to very limited knowledge on this, and I am thus willing to be corrected (by any of the men here at least) is that he has made his apologies on that issue, and regardless of his true private thoughts, at least expresses a more modern, tolerant, open etc view with regard to issues that might be considered feminist.
For me, I am thrilled to have him rather than Allen, and doubly thrilled by his frankly brave position on prison reform.
Comment by Jack — 12/2/2009 @ 9:10 pm
I do like him on the issues and will probably vote for him again, but it’s really hard to get around things like this:
“The Hall, which houses 4,000 males and 300 females, is a horny woman’s dream.”
“Women Can’t Fight” was written in November of 1979. The first class of women hadn’t even graduated from the Academy yet and he was making these pronouncments.
I admit it, I hold a personal grudge and will always hold a grudge. I was the only woman in my leadership class, 18 years old, and this article was read out loud. Then the instructer, an 0-3, made me stand in front of the class and defend my right to be there and encouraged my classmates to challenge that right. I had to answer all of their questions and not lose my temper because that would have made it worse. I just hated Webb so much in that moment, because no one else ever had to do that. We didn’t read why black men can’t fight or why Asian men shouldn’t be allowed in school, or white men being too refined. It’s a really vivid memory and the resentment is there.
It’s a very difficult thing to get past, and I can admit that I agree with a lot of his positions, but I am not a big enough person to ever respect or like the man.
Comment by Liz — 12/3/2009 @ 12:08 am
Thought it might be that, and I agree that his position was neanderthalish. One good thing we can say is that at least USNA fired him, or got him to resign, whatever, almost immediately, iirc.
Wow, I’m almost at deja vu point regarding your leadership class story. Though I was a company officer, I taught a Surface Warfare Practicum class to the SWO selectees in their last semester. (Heh, I was an 0-3) We were doing some sort of combination public speaking/naval issues thing, where each student had to present some issue. I had a female mid choose to address some opinion piece in a naval publication dealing with pregancy rates on aircraft carriers nearing deployment, written from a triumphalist “this is why we should not have women in the navy” perspective. Though I was generally on “her side” in terms of belief and sentiment, the mid did a frankly poor job of addressing or countering the issues, effectively repeating how it was just wrong. I challenged her to define why, and she ended up breaking down. I was stunned and wholly unprepared for it. The whole incident left a terrible taste in my mouth. I wanted to yell at that mid “Don’t you realize you are reenforcing percieved stereotypes!” Totally sucked. Ah well, different situation. Sounds more like your plebe leadership instructor should have been given some remedial training. That’s a pretty shitty instructional method grounded in personal biases.
Comment by Jack — 12/3/2009 @ 12:50 pm
Back in the climate change issue, he doesn’t seem to disbelieve in climate change, but he wants to take the big energy approach to it and not compel big energy to do the right things through fines and penalties.
Subsidies are his thing. Subsidies for Nuclear.
http://www.dailypress.com/news/opinion/dp-ed_energy_edit_1119nov19,0,498126.story
Billions in loan guarantees and billions for publicly funded, privately owned R&D.
I’m kind of veering towards Nuke support as a stop gap and for base load support, but money has to be put into a smart energy infrastructure. Renewables, like and solar projects (not necessarily photo electric, you can make cheap mirror fields that focus energy to amazing degrees
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1929230/melting_steel_with_solar_power/
and you can make them in your back yard
http://insidetech.monster.com/news/articles/2389 ) and wind need money while the credit has run out.
I don’t know how international treaties, negotiated by countries’ executive branches, become domestic law, but isn’t it lucky for all those conservative anti-eco warriors that the president wasn’t given the fast track trade authority Bush wanted so long ago?
Comment by thimbles — 12/3/2009 @ 1:54 pm
Man, weird to see nuke being a big thing on the environmental left these days. I remember arguing for it in the mid-90s and getting either confused stares or total aplomb.
Comment by Brad — 12/3/2009 @ 2:07 pm
Jack – yeah, I was pretty furious but never in danger of tears.
And your mid’s reaction wasn’t usual, but it did happen. It was part of the unofficial job description of upperclass women to kind of groom these tendencies out of the plebe girls because just one break down like that and it’s another point against all women in the military.
I shall stop hijacking the thread with days of yore. . . nuclear power you say?
Comment by Liz — 12/3/2009 @ 2:18 pm
Brad knows how much I hate nuclear power since we got into it on a flakey Chernobyl article he posted a while back elsewhere.
And I still stand by my arguments. Nuke tech sucks.
But the political reality is that renewables are a decentralizing tech which requires a smart grid in order to manage the ebbs and flows of many producers, the home backyard type.
And the political reality is that Obama and his advisers, and many of the other advisers to other world leaders, will not get behind changes that lead to a decentralized energy economy since the centralized energy industry funds campaigns.
So I see it as a capitulation to our banal and stupid political class who won’t advocate dramatic change even in the face of possible extinction – an threat that ever moves too slow to require an immediate response.
So on with the wasteful and dangerous nuke tech. If it’s got to be centralized power for the time being until we can get the environmental house in order, it’s got to be. I hate this terribly.
But I hate this more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
A change of 6°C over 20,000 years caused a massive collapse in the earth’s natural systems leading to a wide spread extinction event.
Based on current trends, we’re surfing the upper bound projections of the IPCC. We’re not talking 6°C change in 20,000, we’re talking 6° change in a hundred.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/17/global-temperature-rise
I hate nuclear power, but I hate the +6° world more. It is an incredible failure on behalf of government, industry, markets, hell all human institutions that we are unable to summon the political will to properly solve the problem. It’s better to spend a million per soldier in Afghanistan * 30,000
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/us/politics/15cost.html
than it is to fund the endeavors that will preserve human civilization from a catastrophe cause by a flaw in its design. We don’t manage waste. We outsource that job to the environment, since it works real cheap, but it’s not working properly anymore.
And just like the many failures in government, industry, and markets that should have lead people to take preventative steps to prevent the latest housing/bank crash, our response is to ignore the reality until it’s too late.
Oh well. There’s no use getting upset about people acting like people, the question is how do we use that behavior to produce the outcomes we need.
Which brings me back to Nukes. I hate nukes.
Comment by thimbles — 12/3/2009 @ 4:01 pm
Hey, good for you. I think nuke gets a bad rep (and we had that argument well after my nuke-advocacy days), but at the end of the day, bad rap or no, you’re right—we can either consistently use nuclear energy, where the production of energy itself causes no environmental harm but where we have to deal with the issue of waste products and the very small but still significant risk of meltdown/terrorism, or we can use processes by which raw materials are consistently consumed and the act of consumption consistently pollutes, but which doesn’t have the risk of a bad singular episode. The former has always been the smarter environmental option. Too bad that so many liberals went batshit in the 80s and 90s when discussion of exporting nuke tech to places like China and India were live. Even if the United States somehow finds the wherewithall to curb its consumption and massively sacrifice for the sake responsibility (two things Americans are quite known for), good luck getting the developing world to follow suit.
Comment by Brad — 12/3/2009 @ 5:11 pm