From the trenches

Photo taken by GMU Associate Professor Todd La Porte

 

Embracing Jetson-like technology, our class- conferenced with UC Berkley PhD Student Esther Conrad about climate adaptation strategies for watersheds.

Loyal blog readers, I promised a post from the trenches. Grad school is basically one enormous bowl of Pho. You can see that there’s good stuff in it, but it requires so much effort getting through the boiling brothy stuff that when your finally there you say “fuck it, just give me some ice cream.” 

Alright, let’s start this post over, because grad school has nothing to do with Vietnamese soup.

I’ve learned a lot, and it may take a couple of posts, but I want to disperse some pearls of knowledge, for your benefit. 

The first thing is, though the U.S. government sucks fuck at being able stave off any sort of environmental problems, state and local governments are kicking ass and taking names in the environmental arena. “To date more than 700 American local governments and nearly all state governments have engaged in some form of climate change policy making” (U.S. Conference of Mayors). 

And get this, states are working toward the big picture, capping carbon emissions. “Twenty-one states are actively involved in establishing regional zones for capping and trading carbon emissions from electrical utilities” (Rabe 2008b; Pew Center on Global Climate Change 2007).

There are some big ideas at work. Though a backlog of info is required to qualify this next statement, it gets at the general trend of dealing with environmental issues. The federal government is at an impasse when it comes to climate change, any sort of overarching legislation that the government could pass won’t happen (A) because its political suicide to have your name attached to anything containing the phrase “climate change” (I’ve got to thank our Fox “News” viewers for that one) and (B) because at this point anything the government actually did pass could actually hinder the environmental movement. This is because it would probably be too soft. Any bill that actually makes it through Congress comes out on the other side so badly hacked up and altered that it lacks any substance and bears little resemblance its original form. I wouldn’t want a federal “dud” to restrict the eco-fury of the glory states like Oregon or California, which set the agenda for the rest of the degenerate states out there.

  ***Read following paragaph for an example, or skip following paragraph if you have Steve Bert ADHD***

(I’m thinking of what happened under California’s lead, when fourteen states banded together to win a U.S. Supreme Court case designed to force the federal government to allow states the discretion to establish the world’s first carbon dioxide emissions standard for vehicles. Bush originally rejected California’s waver before the successful collective effort put him in his place. If the federal government has any role besides getting overturned it would likely err on the side of being too soft to have any meaningful ecological impact. For those of you environmentalists who think Obama is on our side, please realize he operates under the guidelines of economic primacy and has already showed his hand many times with his eagerness to drill.) 

With state and local governments circumventing our sham Congress and our president who is caught in the web economic primacy, we’ve got the stage set for our current framework for understanding and dealing with environmental issues: climate adaptation. 

This post has been a long one so we’ll get to that goodie soon. 

Ciao and farewell for now, 

Steve