Whenever I read about Ron Dermer, I just think the guy’s name suits him so well. It sounds like a high school putdown. I can just hear Alicia Silverstone in Clueless: “come on, Tai. don’t be a Dermer…”
***
I used one of my three free FT reads this month to take in A tipping point for Japan’s foreign policy. The author, David Pilling, lays out the difficulties Japan PM Abe faces in responding to the hostage crisis. Mainly, it seems a matter of overcoming or bypassing a pacifist constitution and public (and am I wrong in reading a bit of a sneer in that word pacifist?)
First, I don’t buy the main premise here — that one kidnapping would force Japan to change the way it interacts with the rest of the world. And Pilling’s choice of phrases (and options) bothers me a bit. He seems to be suggesting a faux Chamberlain-at-Munich crisis that I frankly don’t see for Japan.
“Mr Abe is trying to nudge Japan towards taking a stand“
“the nasty business of defending Japan has been outsourced to the US”
“geostrategic faultlines have widened with the rise of China and the 9/11 attacks on the US” [Wait. Who should Japan be preparing to attack as a consequence of 9/11?]
“He will try to use the incident as evidence that Japan needs to stand up for itself more. Unlike many other nations, it has no commando unit ready to mount a rescue mission [wh-aaa-ttt???] nor any constitutional leeway to take military action against foreign forces who seek to harm its nationals.”
I am the first to admit I am not an Asia expert, nor am I the target audience of the FT, but maybe as such I can be helpful and point out some of the erroneous and/or dangerous presumptions here. First, “taking a stand” and “standing up for itself.” This is the language of the schoolyard, completely lacking in nuance. Kinda neocon too? So very 2001, at any rate. To me these phrases smack of the toxic atmosphere of reckless belligerence in the months after the attacks on the towers and the Pentagon. Every pundit found his inner Churchill and fourteen years and trillions of dollars later it appears, to me anyway, that all the mad energy, mobilization, death and destruction made the world a way worse place.
But then again these things created a fine living for a lot of folks.
To certain (most) readers of the Financial Times, I suppose, a highly militarized Asia is a terrific opportunity. Contracts! Hardware. Security Expertise in demand! It’s almost like people are forgetting why a pacifist Japan is a good thing. It is. Japan needs “a commando unit ready to mount a rescue mission” like a fish needs a bicycle.
I am trying to knock these morning dispatches out in an hour, so won’t say any more about Andrew Bacevich’s Save Us From Washington’s Visionaries except that it’s a good companion piece to this. Doing nothing: always an option.
One more good thing to read about Jonathan Chait’s hissy from Belle Waring. It’s substantive, but the funnest part is this:
Or, perhaps, that Jonathan Chait has a skin so thin that he cries when someone gets the butter knife out of the drawer anywhere within six blocks of his apartment, and is also so allergic to his own tears that he then needs to use his EpiPen and ARE YOU HAPPY NOW BLACK FEMINISTS
Also, a perceptive commenter mentioned that Phil Och’s “Love Me I’m a Liberal” is relevant to this discussion, and so it is….
***
Hamilton Nolan at Gawker reportsInside Higher Ed’s finding that “the richest universities in America had a great year last year.”
This is not all that surprising, considering the fact that prestigious universities play a key role in the creation and perpetuation of America’s ever-more-entrenched class system. It is only right that those catapulted to great wealth and power by elite universities would give something back, so that their own children might also be able to achieve outsize wealth and power one day. Last year was a record one for donations to colleges: a total of $37.5 billion, up nearly 11% from the year before. Of course, most of that was not going to your local community college. Inside Higher Ednotes that “The top 20 colleges in fund-raising brought in more than $10 billion. That means that 28.6 percent of the total was given to fewer than 2 percent” of schools.
… Not much to say about all this except to point out that if all that money had been donated to real charities, tens or hundreds of thousands of human lives could have been saved, but instead we have the Stanford Alumni Association.
that all that money is not going to faculty, who are increasingly adjuncts and other types of part-time staff frequently making very small amounts of money (like me, at one of these top 5 universities). Instead, it’s going to pay the salaries of a cancerous administration that metastasizes almost daily, to fund unnecessary (and some necessary) building projects, and to secure outside consultants, PR firms, and other contractors to ensure that the billions keep on coming.
I might add that the donors get a nice deduction from their generosity to institutions that largely serve their ilk, and this is $37.5 billion that will not find its way into any federal institutions that, theoretically at least, could direct it to needier people and projects.
***
Full disclosure, I am to some extent a product of one of those institutions of higher learning, though my experience was no doubt quite different from today’s students’. Were I 18 today, and not 30-some years ago, I would probably not even have been able to entertain the thought of going to Notre Dame. It’s true that part of my scholarship back then was funded by a private donor to the University. But kids, there was also something called the NDSL….
I have not been back on campus in some time, but would like to some day. To judge by the elegant appointments of the posh fortress that is the local tony private college, attending such a place has more in common with staying in a high-end resort that it does with my memories of Salisbury Steak in the dining hall and trying to hear lectures over the banging of the radiators in O’Shaugnessy Hall.
Speaking of the hallowed halls of Our Mother, I’m kind of in love with what has been happening with their men’s basketball program, which has gone from unrated to a possible ACC championship and a high seed in the NCAA tournament come March. I am probably one of the few people in the U.S. to have watched every miserable game of ND’s 2013-14 season, a year marred by the suspension of one Jerian Grant….
Grant is back, and has been performing some mighty heroics on the court, and I could go on and on about what he did last night to Duke. There were the wicked pullup jumpers, one easily from 35-plus feet, the slashing drives and precise assists, including the dime to Vasturia to win the game. You can watch the highlights on ESPN, if you have any interest.
They are about to play a big game on Sunday, apparently.
This was pretty funny.
But don’t forget that
http://www.salon.com/2015/01/28/we_are_all_amoral_football_hypocrites_brain_injuries_billionaire_tax_breaks_and_our_indefensible_super_bowl_parties/
That there is a very descriptive link, and a good piece. Don’t enjoy the Super Bowl! I grew up a Vikings fan so was always pretty sour about the game.
Mike Ditka and the tragic Dave Duerson:
Ditka expressed concern about his former charges, whose bodies and minds have been ravaged by the game, including the late Dave Duerson, who took his own life in 2011, leaving behind a brain deformed by chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Ditka then went a step further. He admitted that he wouldn’t let his own sons play football. “That’s sad. I wouldn’t. And my whole life was football,” he told host Bryant Gumbel. “I think the risk is worse than the reward.”
Also this:
Lost amid all the scapegoating was a far more shocking story: the NFL’s admission in federal court documents that it expects up to 30 percent of its former players to suffer chronic brain injuries. To put this in the reductive language favored by tabloids: nearly a third of the employees in America’s most famous workplace will wind up brain damaged.
***
I tried to hide from chatter about that Chait piece in New York, but today Alex Pareene has a funny and substantive response, and I feel better about it all.
I especially liked the conclusion:
In Chait’s narrative, left-wing political correctness threatened American democracy once before, in the 1980s. But it was vanquished by a brave man from a place called Hope:
Bill Clinton’s campaign frontally attacked left-wing racial politics, famously using inflammatory comments by Sister Souljah to distance him from Jesse Jackson.
That Chait, in 2015, is still praising Clinton’s “Sister Souljah moment” as a heroic victory in the war against political correctness is telling. What was that moment but the drawing of a party line against expression deemed offensive? Bill Clinton attacked Souljah for her speech. He performed outrage for the sake of identity politics. The attack on a rapper most Americans had no familiarity with was simply part of Clinton’s cynical scheme to signal to aggrieved whites that he was not beholden to the black community. The culmination of that scheme was the execution of mentally impaired black man named Rickey Ray Rector. If that’s the variety of American liberalism that political correctness threatens, please direct me to the local thought police recruitment center.
I have a feeling this is the first salvo in the 2016 election war between “leftists” and the “shut up and vote for whichever Clinton is running” liberals….
***
I got a “promoted” tweet from someone named Josh Block warning about Iran and the bomb and terror. I am still happy Iran does not have a nuclear weapon and is not trying to make one. Israel having numerous nukes keeps me awake at night however. And there’s still only one country that has “deployed” nuclear weapons on a civilian population, twice. So there’s that.
In other, related news from the twitter:
Forensic investigation into Gaza assault finds most victims were crushed to death in their homes http://t.co/zkhBl4kiJc
The changes could be particularly dramatic in the oceans, says Luis Zaman of the University of Washington in Seattle. The seas are filled with algae and other microorganisms that get their energy from sunlight. Directly or indirectly, they feed all the animals in the sea. But they are “constantly battling viruses,” says Zaman, and that keeps their numbers down.
“Without these viruses, it is hard to say what exactly would happen,” says Zaman. “One possibility is that the oceans would turn into thick green mats, like the ones you see on small ponds by the road.”
This would be bad news for everything else in the ocean. “Take out all of the parasites across the ecosystem, and it probably will collapse,” says Zaman. “It might take a while, and it might oscillate wildly between states of lush vegetation and barren desert, but it almost certainly wouldn’t end well.”
I also really enjoyed this from a scientist Jones quoted: “There is so much to be gained from being a parasite.”
Halfway through a winter where I’ve been woodsman and cowherd, dad, cook, and basketball coach. Nothing remotely lucrative in any of that, and it can’t go on forever. But I’m strangely contented. I think.
I’ve dropped much of the electric fencing and my little herd, 34 head with two calves yet to come, is free to wander off my 20-some acres to graze the much larger expanse my wife’s family leases to corn and bean planters in the warmer months. My truck is in the shop and it’s too muddy to drive anyway, so this week I’ve been locating the herd by driving around the perimeter in my Subaru, and then walking from where I park to where they are. It’s an awful lot of walking.
I’m a little anxious about the big red cow with horns, who has chronic issues with her hooves and has trouble keeping up with the others. I’ve been expecting her to calve any day now for the past month. I should have sold her long ago, but she’s something of a pet to me and I’m (still) not hardheaded enough for this business.
There is not much I can do for the cattle besides count them and check for lameness and hope to stumble across a cow when she’s ready to calve. I curse having to trudge over this stubble (some days for miles), especially when it’s bitterly cold, but even then, after 15 minutes of brisk perambulation, my body warms and the mood edges gradually into a sort of low-key euphoria. At first I think the landscape is hideous, corn stalks and ruts and bean hulls, but then again, after a while I recognize the variegation, I become familiar with the genera in the treelines–walnut, cherry, oak, hackberry. I make a note of downed trees to cut up later, as well as any standing and easy to access hedge, or osage orange, trees. Their distinctive yellow wood burns well–hot and sparky–and seasons quickly.
Like the desert, I imagine, you just have to stare at this landscape of crop residue a while, and it comes to life. Rabbits dart in front as I walk through the wash areas, where the cows still find plenty of green grass to graze, a complement to their hay and the corn and soybeans they scavenge. The starlings are of course ubiquitous, and this time of year there are flocks of geese flying over and landing near the ponds, and just yesterday I noticed, for the first time this year, a gathering of exotic, weird and beautiful sandhill cranes.
I may be repeating myself with this lament but here goes. I grew up in Minnesota, and we had real winters, son. From November to late March, we had snow and ice and inside our galoshes we wore two pairs of socks with a bread bag between them. There was rarely a thought of staying inside before supper. Fifteen below, we played hockey.
Of course winters up north haven’t been quite the same in recent years, and it’s also possible that my memories are not what they should be. But no matter. I can say without any doubt that in Kentucky, in the 20-teens, we don’t have winter as such. We have mud season. I don’t know if saison de la boue is a thing in French, but it should be. I can’t get my kids to go outside, even when the weather’s fine.
My attention span is not what it might be, and I have read maybe parts of three books this winter. I spend a great deal of time in the evenings with one eye on a college basketball game, and the other on my twitter feed. I want to break myself from my addiction to myriad bits of data and opinions on issues over which I have no control. Some mornings I wake up and have to check my bookmarks to remember what article I was reading from 11 to midnight. How many words have I gobbled up on the Charlie Hebdo killings, and to what end? Women and minorities are underrepresented in the Academy Award nominations. And…? American Sniper is a massively popular movie this year, apparently.
Just reading what I’ve written I can see that what I called contentment is at best an intermittent thing. There are truly idyllic aspects to the way we live, but worries, regrets and concerns storm to the forefront of my consciousness when I think about the world outside of our agrarian idyll. My dreams are about separation and scission (excellent word, also a great book of stories) with the occasional aviation disaster thrown in. Are those the dreams of a contented man?
I might venture that it’s contentment, with an awareness of its unsustainable nature. Waiting for the health problems of middle age to raise their heads. Raising three children with the knowledge that their future prospects range from murky to outright scary. Wondering what our beautiful part of Kentucky, officially the outer Bluegrass region, will look like when and if world temperatures rise another couple of degrees, which is not unlikely.
Let’s just call it a kind of serenity, walking a tightrope on a windy day over an abyss. I’m fine with it.
Been slowly digesting Elite Meat (heh), in the New Yorker food issue. I found Dana Goodyear’s profile of Anya Fernald, CEO of sustainable meat purveyor Belcampo, pretty appealing–most of it, anyway.
“I live in a bubble and I’m trying to create a bubble,” Fernald told me. “I recognize that we’re creating a product that is financially non-viable for a lot of people. But I’m also prepared for when the health impact becomes undeniable and people decide to reprioritize their budgets. I think my bubble’s going to get bigger. Not because I’ll find more rich people—I think more of the rest of America is going to decide this is worth it.”
In most respects, I am all thumbs up about her venture. She seems charismatic, savvy and energetic, and has worked with diverse food economies and systems dating back to the late 90s, when she advised a consortium of Sicilian cheese makers. Belcampo meats are not cheap, and yet her declared (perhaps contradictory) goal is to bring sustainably raised meat to the widest possible public. “I want to be the next Safeway,” she states at one point.
I happen to be a big fan of some of her specific approaches to raising beef:
Unlike some grass-fed purveyors, who make a virtue of leanness, Fernald slaughters her animals later in their lives, when they have put on more weight and show the marbling usually associated with the feedlot.
Me too! I keep a herd of cows, and don’t slaughter till around the two-year mark. I love fat! Also, I religiously rotate pastures (though I lack the resources for the more intensive mobbing practiced at Belcampo. Would like to try someday, though). I have a stack of back issues of Stockman Grass Farmer. Often, I market my steers directly (as Fernald did once, from the back of a van).
So … Fernald and I are in the same line of work. Basically. But for the minor matter of a $50 million investment from Todd Robinson, she could be me, I her.
Parts of this profile read like something you’d see in Vogue:
On the morning of the meeting, I found Fernald, wearing a silk wrap dress and snakeskin heels, at a standing desk in the middle of Belcampo’s office in Oakland, her laptop propped on a pile of cookbooks from the high-integrity British mini-chain Leon.
Elsewhere, Goodyear describes a kids’ lunch as “bias-cut hot dogs, meant for the under-fives” and recounts savoring a “sausage, packed in a pig bung, which had cured for three months in a nineteen-forties root cellar.” Pretty easy to make fun of, I know. In the past I’ve written about how that sort of foodie preciousness has led to attacks on the whole idea of challenging the conventional food model (also, here). (To be clear, I’m more or less pro-food, anti-foodie.)
Even benign things like humane care of animals can be taken to absurd extremes:
The last sounds a Belcampo animal will likely hear are “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, sh-h-h,” whispered by a handler it has known since birth. After that, the “knocker,” equipped with a bolt pistol and headphones, renders it unconscious with a pop.
I’m never at ease with the idea of sending off animals I’d raised since birth to the building that turns them into meat. (Worse, of course, is having to dispatch them yourself). I can usually turn my back and walk away when I bring my steers in for processing. Once, though, when dropping off an old cow at the stockyards, I remember watching the hands unload her, and felt a major pang of guilt/sadness/regret as she hurried her gait up the ramp, eager to please, a good cow to the end. Hey, killing intelligent animals you spend a lot of time with is a sad thing. But saying “Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, sh-h-h” to a steer before stunning it? (… “the animal-whispering results in meat that is pure of stress-induced dark streaks.”) Well, if it makes you feel better about what you’re doing, fine. But this is more marketing point than science. A modest amount of stress is not going to ruin your meat. (I’m a big softie with my herd. Maybe this is me being defensive about not whispering to my cows in their final moments….)
And then there’s labor relations. In one anecdote, Fernald pays a visit to the processing facility, “the part of the company with the most failed drug tests and the greatest turnover” and can’t get the damn rustics to partake of the joy that is head cheese. One employee politely declines a sample of the brain delicacy, and returns to his repast of ketchup and spaghetti.
***
My bigger problem with Elite Meat is the quasi-messianic fervor the entrepreneur (and the scribe) have about what is at bottom a business venture.
“Our goals for 2014 and 2015,” Hanna-Korpi, an upbeat woman in her thirties wearing oversized eyeglasses and a short black dress, said. “Achieve eighteen million in revenue in 2015. How do we do it?”
The subhead ponders whether steak can Save the Planet. Where does that even come from?
That’s something for another post, I guess. At bottom, I have to address the fact that I am jealous –yes, I said it–of Fernald’s ambition and scale, and the fact that she can get 10 grand out of a single steer…. or that she has a $50 million stake from a single backer.
I find some aspects of her operation highly questionable, like spending $1.3 million on a single winter’s hay just so she can raise cattle in California, where there is basically no water. Ah, but $50 million can cover up a lot of strange decisions….
Seriously, as a farmer, I’m watching what Fernald is doing with interest. She’s passionate and connected and I do hope she succeeds in her populist goals–in making sustainable and humanely raised meat into something ordinary families buy for weeknight dinner (just not every night). The food movement needs charismatic salespeople. Me, I can’t convince my neighbors to pay $15 for pasture-raised chickens. If she can change American attitudes towards meat and make her revenue goal of $18 million, more power to her. Also, I bet her parties are a lot of fun.
The talking about the penultimate play of the Notre Dame-Florida State game Saturday night will go on for years, decades. Like arguments about JFK assassination conspiracy theories, or about how the towers fell in 2001, pretty much nothing will be achieved by the endless back and forth, but that never stops the obsessed. Check any comments section in articles about this game. Occasional substantive points do come up, but the comments invariably devolve into your basic trolling abusiveness. The guy who painstakingly makes his case in one post, tells another poster to suck his dick down the page.
I’ve had a couple of days to think about it. For what it’s worth, in my personal Zapruder film of the game, this grainy screen cap tells the whole story. PJ Williams, FSU’s #26, is the man on the grassy knoll, or the guy with the umbrella. (Were they the same guy???) Williams appears to be responsible for Corey Robinson (#88)* and for reasons known only to him, he chose to move to the middle on the snap. I don’t think he was on the same page as his teammates (#3 and #8). His move inside left two defenders to cover three ND receivers on the right side of the field. LOOK WHERE WILLIAMS IS RELATIVE TO HIS MAN ROBINSON. (ALL CAPS–another indicator I’ve become one of the crazies)….
Prosise and Fuller, the two ND receivers “engaging with” FSU’s defenders, could have stepped back off the line, bowed, and waved Williams through, and Williams would never have come near Robinson. This contact everyone is yammering about, which to me looks pretty clearly initiated (and sustained) by FSU’s backs, is irrelevant. Williams lost his man, who was wide open and walked into the end zone. All the TV talking heads in the world saying The Refs Got It Right won’t nullify that.
So there. I’ve spoken my piece. FSU won. They played great. Both teams did. It’s over. A big setback for Notre Dame, no doubt. If they are to have a chance of making the four-team playoff, the Irish will have to win out, which they would have had to do that even if they got the W in Tallahassee. With Arizona State and USC road games looming (and believe me, they could still stumble against Navy), that looks like a pretty tall order. But not an impossible one.
College football is one of the great grotesque and excessive but infinitely appealing spectacles of the western world, like rock ‘n’ roll or the World Cup or Paris Fashion Week or the Academy Awards. All that training, all that extreme body modification, all that money. ND’s program looks pretty pristine compared to FSU’s, but that’s a long way from saying it’s clean, or even a remotely rational use of resources.
My senior year at ND, back from a Year Abroad, which turned me into an intolerably affected pseudo-European, I sold my football season ticket booklet for something like $49, face value. I used to think I was above it all. But the older I get, the more I realize I’m not.
And see, I haven’t even mentioned THIS!!!!
UPDATE: Today (Monday) I just came upon a pretty good video analysis of The Play from South Bend sports talk host Darin Pritchett, that describes the FSU defensive assignments differently. He may well be right. Doesn’t change my point much, but just wanted to mention it.
Fall Break! Heather and the kids have gone south, to Pine Mountain, for a couple of days, and I am on my own.
I shock myself by how I take advantage of this opportunity–by doing pretty much what I would do otherwise.
I did cook a massive ribeye, for myself, smoking up the entire house. It was of course delicious, and I probably made little snorting noises while wolfing it down, but I could not even finish it! I pretty much fell asleep in front of the teevee while watching the replay of Alabama vs. Ole Miss on ESPN, and then felt compelled to rewatch Stanford vs. ND on DVR.
College football is still an evil enterprise, a gross misuse of tax dollars, particularly in poor states (like Alabama and Mississippi) that could otherwise go to improving the living conditions of tens of thousands. But this weekend I brushed all that aside. College football was a massively entertaining spectacle. (“I like my football, on a Saturday”)…. And Katy Perry surfaced, bizarrely, in Oxford on Saturday to make it even more so.
Is that great, or what? I should add that my liberty, such as it is, is constrained by the mixed blessing of having a young puppy in the house to entertain, to feed, to keep out of mischief, and to clean up after. What kind of freedom prohibits one from sleeping in? Or to get any serious reading done…
Today is simply glorious weather-wise. 75 and sunny. The cows are in the field closest to the house, so I’m always aware of them munching away in the background.
I had a go at the wood pile for a couple of hours. Preparing it so that the kids can stack it neatly, their big chore for the week. I have a feeling it won’t go well the first time, but I’m determined to get them involved in the process. I’ve got a fair bit put up, but a lot of it is fairly green.
Threw a bunch of stuff away. Came upon an old commonplace book from the early 80s, where, among other things, I noted every word I didn’t know in Ulysses, wrote down the definition, and used it in a sentence. Hierophantic. Entelechy. Archon. Parturiate. The attention span is not what it once was….
A few years ago I went Goodwill-crazy and bought lots of clothes items I had no need for (but they were SO CHEAP!) Today I put about two dozen dress shirts into a big contractor bag.
This cardinal has been banging into the same window every day for over a week now. I imagine it is misinterpreting its own reflection.
Look, you know that I am not exactly a fan of Obama. I do think most of the venom directed his way is … confused.
But it works both ways. Those who denounce the president as a secret socialist Black Muslim revolutionary, well, nothing’s going to change what they think about THAT, no facts or evidence anyway.
Not surprisingly, there is a corresponding hardheadedness among pro-Obama partisans. I have had dozens of fruitless arguments over the past seven years with a certain type, someone who decided long ago that Obama was a good man with the best interests of the country at heart. Full stop. This notion is more postulate than something that can be tested or changed by things that happen in the world. A key sub-precept of this mindset is that Obama “gets” global warming, and that were it not for the bravery of the man in the Oval Office, America would be overrun with predatory despoilers of our land, waters, and air.
SOMERSET, Colo. — The desolate stretch of Highway 133 crests a Rocky Mountain pass and settles into a valley where some of the world’s most valuable coal is located — and the landowner is the US taxpayer.
If there is a “war on coal” by President Obama, as his critics say, then this might be a place to wage it. Obama has, after all, approved regulations designed to cut global-warming carbon emissions by nearly one-third, and he is preparing to attend a Sept. 23 United Nations climate summit at which he will renew his call for world action to fight climate change.
But here in the Rockies and across much of the West, Obama may be the coal industry’s critical, if unlikely, ally. The administration has rejected calls to place a moratorium on leasing public land to mining firms — even though such leases account for 40 percent of coal mined in the United States. Nor is the administration much interested in blocking exports of coal from such leases to countries where it could be burned without antipollution controls. Or in significantly raising the price of the billions of tons of publicly owned coal now sold at what critics consider bargain rates.
This is war?
The story takes us back to June, when Obama, laudably defying Congressional inaction, “approved regulations requiring a cut in carbon emissions from power plants from 2005 levels by 30 percent in 2030.” Not surprisingly, that made his supporters feel quite superior while simultaneously getting Boehner’s knickers in a twist. Predictably, the speaker denounced, via a spokesman, the president’s “devastating war on coal.”
Yet with far less fanfare, 17 days after the regulations were issued, a scene unfolded in a Denver courtroom that would have surprised those who believed Obama a coal industry foe.
The Obama administration’s lawyers (from the Bureau of Land Management and Department of the Interior) sat at the same table as lawyers for Arch Coal, and supported a shady land deal that would enable Arch to extract 12 million tons of coal.
The central issue in the case was why the Obama administration had failed to account for the impact of global warming from the coal lease, sometimes known as the social cost of carbon. A key piece of evidence worked in favor of the environmentalist legal team. A Bureau of Land Management economist had written an e-mail that said “placing quantitative values on greenhouse gas emissions is still controversial.” He wrote that estimates on the impact of methane emissions, which routinely occur during mining, ranged anywhere from $5 to $800 per ton of coal. Rather than strike a middle ground, as it often does in calculating the cost-benefit analysis, the bureau opted to leave out the “carbon cost,” while including the positive economic impact of mining.
US District Judge R. Brooke Jackson sounded stunned by the government’s actions.
“If you only look at the problem from the standpoint of the great benefits to employment and taxes and all those things and you don’t even try to look at what it’s going to cost in terms of global warming, the day is going to come when it’s too late to think about global warming,” Jackson said, according to a court transcript. (The Globe paid for the transcription, which otherwise was not publicly available. [Hmmmmm….])
But the Obama administration’s lawyer, David Glazer, stood with Arch Coal. Glazer told Jackson that the government should not “monetize” the impact of global warming.
The judge sounded incredulous.
“Doesn’t somebody sometime need to take very seriously what the effect that these greenhouse gases is on the world that we live in?” the judge asked Glazer.
Glazer sought to shift the blame away from the administration.
“Absolutely, and I would say that that’s Congress,” Glazer said. “Obviously it’s something that a lot of people care deeply about, and a lot of people have different opinions about, and I think it’s going to take that kind of level of activity on the political level.”
Congress, of course, had failed to pass legislation to control greenhouse gases, which is what prompted the Obama administration to maneuver around the congressional inaction by issuing regulations to cut carbon emissions.
In the end, Glazer and the Obama administration lost the case. Glazer did not respond to a request for comment.
In a scathing ruling issued on June 27, the judge wrote that the administration’s failure to consider the impact of carbon emissions was “arbitrary and capricious.” Jackson ridiculed the administration for insisting that predicting the impact of carbon emissions was “impossible” because tools to assess the impact “are presently unavailable.” In fact, the judge said, such tools are available but the administration failed to use them. He accused the Obama administration of delivering a “factually inaccurate justification for why it omitted the social cost of carbon protocol.”
The government “prepared half of a cost-benefit analysis, incorrectly claimed that it was impossible to quantify the [carbon] costs, and then relied on the anticipated benefits to approve the project,” Jackson wrote. He ordered that work on the mine be suspended.
…. The case, while receiving little national notice, has shaken the coal industry and the Obama administration. As the White House decides whether to appeal, environmental groups are planning to launch lawsuits against the Obama administration in an effort to stop much larger leases in Wyoming and Montana.
“This could have a big impact,” said Nathaniel Shoaff, a Sierra Club attorney involved in similar lawsuits. “This is the first time I’m aware of that a federal court has invalidated a federal agency decision because it didn’t take into account social cost of carbon.” If the Obama administration doesn’t start taking into the account the climate-change impact of coal leases, Shoaff said, “we will start using this decision to force them to do it.”
That is exactly what alarms the coal industry.
What alarms me is that Obama is going to bat for them.
It also alarms Senator Ed Markey, who has been fighting for more than 30 years to put a moratorium on coal leases which he argues, persuasively, are sold far too cheaply, undercut Obama’s stated greenhouse gas goals, typically are awarded to lone bidders, and amount to taxpayers subsidizing the coal industry.
And then there’s this:
Markey said he is frustrated that he has had less success with his supposed allies in the Obama administration than he did during the Reagan era.
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