CDC’s canceled climate change conference is back on thanks to Al Gore
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
>The meeting now planned for Feb. 16 will take place outside of any government circles. Rather than at CDC, it will be held at the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta. It will be a one-day event rather than the three days originally planned.
It saddens me when government suppresses science.
Also, when you stop giving all the important, flashy stuff to the president and let Congress have a bit of limelight, you'll probably find them rising to the challenge (more than today, at least, where Congress only gets credit for the boring stuff that the president don't want).
We're talking about Climate Change, can anyone possibly believe that the Republicans in Congress for the past 6 years would have been better on Climate than what Obama achieved through executive orders? Do people just not pay attention?
Here's a quote from the official GOP platform[1]:
> Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it.
Fuck it, I'll quote the rest of the references to climate in the official platform!
> Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.
> We demand an immediate halt to U.S. funding for the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in accordance with the 1994 Foreign Relations Authorization Act. That law prohibits Washington from giving any money to “any affiliated organization of the United Nations” which grants Palestinians membership as a state. There is no ambiguity in that language. It would be illegal for the President to follow through on his intention to provide millions in funding for the UNFCCC and hundreds of millions for its Green Climate Fund.
> We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.
These people are pathological.
[1] - https://www.gop.com/platform/americas-natural-resources/
In my completely made up system, if we started at 0 and add up the number of points in favor of averting Climate Change, Obama probably added 3 for a few years with the Paris Agreement, CAFE and some of the EPA rules were also pretty beneficial, maybe net 4 over his term. Call it +10 for Obama. Trump's going to reverse many of those decisions, probably make some of them much worse within the next few years. Let's say he wipes out all of Obama's work and does 50% more 'damage' in this system. So by 2020, we're at -5.
If we had left it to the Republicans in Congress, we would have been at least at -5 every year since 2010..
So -5 net with Obama/Trump's dueling executive orders or -50 with Republicans in Congress.
Yes the system is made up and the points don't matter, but there is absolutely no way we would be in a better position. It's the height of naivety to dismiss what they promised to do and to assume they would have suddenly changed their views 180º to support action on climate change for 'the limelight'.
If the executive were less powerful, perhaps the attitudes in Congress would be different. It's hard to know how they would behave, because we haven't had that situation in living memory.
I read a good article conjecturing that the decline in civility in Congress is due to the increased pressure to essentially run a permanent election campaign. The congress people used to spend more time in Washington becoming friends, but now spend most of their time at home, campaigning. Now I can't find my source...
Since 1980, periods when both the Presidency and both houses of Congress have been under the control of one party have been quite rare, and the public usually votes out one house of Congress in the next election. Democrats in 09-10, Republicans from 02-06, Democrats in 92-94, and that's it.
(Interestingly, this is not universal throughout history. Dem's controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency under the Wilson, FDR, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Carter administrations, while Republicans controlled them during the Mckinley, Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. The last extended time period of divided control was the post-Reconstruction Gilded Age era from 1875-1897...perhaps leading credence to those who say the current time period is much more like the Long Depression, Gilded Age, and lead up to WW1 than the Great Depression and lead-up to WW2.)
The same power that made Obama good to progressives will make Trump very, very bad to them.
Republicans have repeatedly gone on record in public statements about the totality of their opposition to Obama regardless of policy considerations. Allow me to refer you to the paper cited here for some objective demonstration of the increasing polarization of US politics and its acceleration in recent years:
http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2015/04/24/poli...
Clearly, the framers contemplated the existence of Departments within the executive branch, whose Officers held Opinions about things within their purview, as opposed to being mindless robots. A great deal of legislation sets the scope and limits of such departmental authority, while directing the departments to engage in a more detailed rulemaking process of their own as opposed to everything being micromanaged by Congress.
You keep making normative statements that describe your personal political views, but I can't help noticing that you're not citing any provisions in the Constitution to back up your argument. I'm thus unsure whether you are talking about your view of the Constitution's meaning or some other scheme of governance with which you'd like to replace the existing one.
From the POV of the government itself though, the primary imperative - stronger than one policy prescription - is continued existence. And to ensure continued existence, a government needs to let through change that, if repressed, would bring down the government, while also preventing change so radical and so permanent that it destroys the government on its own.
> As the upper house, the Senate has several powers of advice and consent which are unique to it; of these include the ratification of treaties, the confirmation of Cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, federal judges, other federal executive officials, flag officers, regulatory officials, ambassadors, and other federal uniformed officers.
These people, once picked, "answer to" the Executive--because the function of the Executive is to coordinate the running (execution) of government. But they're picked by Congress, and thus the "character" of government--defined by the beliefs of the people who run it--is in large part up to the legislature.
---
Also, if I can make an analogy here, I think there's something important to understand about the role of the President within the executive.
The President's role is basically equivalent to, and in large part historically "derived from", the role of a military flag officer (e.g. a general, admiral, etc.) That is, the President is someone who:
1. coordinates a number of units that have been temporarily assigned ("attached") to them, directing those units "from above" into a strategic configuration, without knowing much about their internals; and
2. keeps a "flag staff" who are there to manage each part of their job and liase with the individual units that affect their focus, representing the flag officer in that aspect.
Each unit under the flag officer's command, though, is independently headed by someone else: someone who is part of that unit rather than imposed on it from the outside; someone who was was hired by someone else long before the flag officer got there; and someone who is just temporarily serving the flag officer because they are the representative of their unit, and their unit is currently "attached" to that flag officer's command, rather than because they consider themselves to "work for" the flag officer themselves.
This is an exact description of the Executive branch. Congress hires the people who head the "units" (departments.) The President then comes in with their staff and those "units"--and their representatives--get attached to the President, who gets their staff (e.g. the Secretary of Defense; the Finance Minister) to liase with the unit heads (e.g. the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the Chairman of the Federal Reserve.)
There's no public explanation as to why the original meeting was canceled. Referring to it as "government supressing science" is speculation.
That aside, not promoting a particular theory, practice, or direction for research isn't "suppressing science" either. It's just not promoting the particular things that you'd like promoted.
Would you say that's not government suppression of science?
That aside, nobody is preventing anyone outside of government from researching anything they'd like, publishing it, or shouting it from the rooftops. The only complaint I hear is projects and voices that specific people want heard aren't being promoted.
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/25/511572169/...
http://www.cnn.com/2017/01/25/politics/lamar-smith-donald-tr...
> argue that the agency should have gone forward with the summit unless told otherwise by the Trump administration
Which implies that the Trump administration is not officially behind the cancellation. It could be unofficially behind it, or actors within the CDC could be utilizing the new political climate to cause this cancellation - whether that's in an attempt to help these aspects of the agency avoid notice, or in attempt to suppress... Further information needed.
> Benjamin called the move a “strategic retreat” given the climate skepticism of the incoming administration.
"Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom."
They did an interview with someone from the DOE on this american life, she said that they have been removing all references to climate change on DOE projects and promoting them as something else in the hope that they won't be cancelled, she also said that there was only one climate change sceptic in the DOE and it's the new boss...
Are you down-voting facts because you don't like them? It doesn't make them any less real. Down-voting opinion, sure, but down-voting something which is simply the truth doesn't make sense. The article even had a copy of the questionnaire.
If science supported their agenda it would be hailed as the second coming.
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/65
No matter what mistakes science makes it has one fundamental virtue that politicians will never have:
Edit: I think I've discovered the irony of someone who decries science denial but downvotes my analysis rather than debating on its merits.
What? No, thats suppressing science.
Science also says walls are hard for humans to walk through, and they're not disputing that.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine an angry man tweeting 'shut up nerd,' forever.
I'd rephrase that as 'when science suits their agenda', which is not to say that their support for it will be in the least bit consistent.
Climate and Health
Widespread scientific consensus exists that the world’s climate is changing. Some of these changes will likely include more variable weather, heat waves, heavy precipitation events, flooding, droughts, more intense storms, sea level rise, and air pollution. Each of these impacts could negatively affect public health. While climate change is a global issue, the effects of climate change will vary across geographic regions and populations. CDC’s Climate and Health Program is helping state and city health departments prepare for the specific health impacts of climate change that their communities will face.
That said, I realize this was likely a joke comment. Still thought I'd point out the age factor, though.