SD-23: Vote For Me Or I'll Have This Polar Bear Shot

I don't think that's the message Fran Pavley wanted to convey in this mailer (PDF), but that's pretty much what I'm getting out of it. The front page is a polar bear standing on a lonely block of ice after much of it has fallen away into the sea, looking forlorn. Accompanying the picture is the text "Save a Polar Bear, Vote Carbon Free For Fran Pavley." The inside of the mailer explains why; Pavley is an environmental leader, and fighting global warming will help save the polar bears, the reasoning goes.

Now, I've already explained once why this carbon-free voting idea is kind of a joke, particularly when it's being conveyed to the public by using multiple full-color mailers. I know from my mailbox that Pavley has been far more aggressive in direct mail than her opponent Lloyd Levine. The new information in this mailer is that Pavley's campaign has "purchased carbon offsets to cover every vote-by-mail ballot in the 23rd Senate district," but I'm not getting what the metric is. Does that cover the ballots? The constant stream of mailers? The carbon used by the post office to deliver the ballots? Does it cover the fact that carbon offsets are kind of an environmental shell game that assuages liberal guilt without taking the meaningful steps needed to reduce our carbon output?

Kind of unclear from this mailer.

The California Report

Here are some California-centric notes:

• The California School Employees Association made their endorsements for the June primary. In addition to Migden, they strike of an aversion to go out on a limb. They only endorsed one Congressional candidate in a Republican-held seat (Charlie Brown), and they opted out of a lot of contested primaries in the legislative seats as well. Manuel Perez did get the endorsement in the 80th AD, however (he is a school board member, so not a big shock).

• We don't get into a lot of rural issues on the site, probably because of the bias toward writers here in urban environments. But this salmon fishing ban is a big deal along the Mendocino coast. This actually goes back to the Klamath fish kill in the beginning of the decade and Darth Cheney's efforts to ensure that. I think there are going to be a lot of angry fishermen wanting answers this fall.

• I keep forgetting to write about the State Senate primary in my own backyard of SD-23, between Fran Pavley and Lloyd Levine. Here's some background on the race to succeed Sheila Kuehl. I actually attended an environmental forum with these two last week and found them both to be really solid, with different strengths. While Pavley is an astonishingly effective lawmaker - she probably has her name on more far-reaching climate change legislation than anyone in the entire country - Levine really seems to understand the nature of the fight in Sacramento and how best to bring about sweeping change. I'm not going to be disappointed on June 3, regardless of the winner. We're hoping to get both Pavley and Levine on a future Calitics Radio show.

• Here's a user-created video of our debate protest at ABC last week. We have our own video set for release as well.



• Adam Liptak in The New York Times today: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners."

Yet we must remain "tough on crime," even though rises and falls in the crime rate are not correlative to imprisoning people (Canada's rate goes up and down roughly at the same time ours does, without a corresponding increase in the prison population).

• John Yoo won't talk to the House Judiciary Committee but it's really not his fault, you see:

In a letter, Yoo's lawyer told Conyers he was "not authorized" by DOJ to discuss internal deliberations.

"We have been expressly advised by the Office of Legal Counsel of the United States Department of Justice that Professor Yoo is not authorized to discuss before your Committee any specific deliberative communications, including the substance of comments on opinions or policy questions, or the confidential predecisional advice, recommendations or other positions taken by individuals or entities of the Executive Branch," Yoo's lawyer, John C. Millian, wrote in a letter to Conyers.

As we all know, the executive branch can ignore subpoenas and prevent Congressional oversight. Why, Yoo wrote it in a memo! But he can't discuss it. Because the executive branch follows the law. That he wrote.

Round and round we go...

"Carbon-Free Voting"

I got this mailer today:



Apparently, voting by mail is "carbon-free"! And to prove that point, the carbon-free voting people have sent me a four-page glossy mailer to tell me so. But it's printed on soy ink! And if you vote permanent absentee, you don't have to get in your car to get to your polling place! And anyway, they puchased carbon offsets to mitigate these campaign activities!

So what the hell is going on here? Why is an environmental group sending a mailer touting "carbon-free voting," which, um, pretty much doesn't exist? Well, that would be explained by the picture of Fran Pavley on the back.

Now, Fran's great. As Assemblywoman she authored the landmark global warming law that will hopefully become a model for the nation, AB32. But she's also running for State Senate to replace the termed-out Sheila Kuehl, and obviously she's interested in raising her profile. So everyone in the Senate district, my district, got this mailer. The LA Times ran a story on it.

The mailer is being derided by some, while others are questioning whether it is improperly trying to influence a state Senate election in the West L.A. area by prominently featuring one of the candidates, former Assemblywoman Fran Pavley.

"It looks dubious," said Tracy Westen, chief executive of the Center for Governmental Studies, a Los Angeles-based non-partisan group that promotes political reform in Los Angeles. "It's coordinated with her, it has her picture on it and it is going into that Senate district."

Her main foe in the race, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine, wouldn't comment for the story.

There are about 500 good reasons for vote-by-mail, and since Republicans kind of have a head start on permanent absentee organization I'm happy to see someone on the left promoting it. But calling it "carbon-free" is a stretch. And using it as a cover to tout a Senate candidate is pretty suspect.

Senator Shriver?

With respect to the Leno-Midgen battle royale, the most interesting State Senate primary in California may end up being in the 23rd District, replacing the termed-out Sheila Kuehl (who is likely to run for LA County Supervisor, as she wants to stay closer to home). Up until now, it was assumed that the race would be between former Assmblywoman Fran Pavley and current Assemblyman Lloyd Levine. Each has their base of support in different parts of the district, and that would be an interesting enough battle in and of itself. But now I hear that Santa Monica City Councilman Bobby Shriver, brother of Maria, is looking to possibly run for that seat. Shriver was elected to the City Council in 2004 (I remember getting robocalls from Ted Kennedy for a City Council race), has been a music and television executive, and co-founded the Debt AIDS Trade in Africa organization and the RED Initiative with Bono and others. His donor list reads like a Who's Who of Hollywood celebrity, and he wouldn't have any problem raising money (he spent more than $350,000 to win a City Council seat in a city of around 90,000).

However, there is a bit of tension between Shriver and the progressive grassroots community. The dynamic in Santa Monica is between the beachfront hotels, who want pro-business policies forwarded, and SMRR (Santa Monicans for Renters Rights), who are more in line with citizen concerns. The beachfront hotels unsuccessfully went after Councilmember Kevin McKeown (easily the most progressive) in 2006 with an aggressive and vindictive campaign that included dishonest TV ads. That same group of business interests backed Shriver with huge dollars in 2004. Now, Shriver and McKeown don't vote all that differently. But that perception, combined with the fact that Shriver really hasn't had much interest in engaging with the local grassroots, has strained relations. And Pavley is certainly their candidate in this race. The high name-ID of a Shriver throughout the district and his ability to bring in big money will be formidable, but the grassroots connections for both of the other candidates will be an obstacle. This is going to be an outstanding race.

SoCal Report (Silent T)

A few things in the part of the state that gets sun which caught my eye:

• Full public financing of municipal elections will be on the agenda at tonight's Santa Monica City Council Meeting. Solidly progressive City Councilman Kevin McKeown raised this issue earlier in the year and couldn't get a second, but they ran a staff report, and both Common Cause and the League of Women Voters are pushing this hard. Just like everything else, we'll need to win the Clean Money battle from the bottom up.

• This complete crackup of the Minuteman Project is so hilariously predictable that it should be a reality show. I can't wait for the twists and turns and the backstabbing. You put a bunch of power-hungry authoritarians in the same group, who knew that they'd start fighting each other for control? Fascinatin'.

• You might want to think twice before eating in LA - the biggest produce wholesaler in the city, the 7th Street Market, was cited for multiple violations, including rat infestation. Never been, not going now.

• I wish I had the time to write the badly needed very long series of articles about the proposed LNG terminal off the coast of Malibu. This would be an environmental disaster for the coastline, yet the Governor has given tacit support to BHP Billiton to build it. This blog is a great resource for this story. Look at this part:

Environmental Protection Agency political appointees used non-existent analysis and misled the public when they reversed course and rejected tough smog rules for the proposed Cabrillo Port liquefied natural gas terminal off the Malibu coast, the chairman of the House Investigations Committee said Monday.

Rep. Henry Waxman also accused top EPA officials of refusing to hand over key documents detailing the 2005 decision by a White House political appointee to overrule regional EPA officials on a key decision about whether the Cabrillo Port proposal can go forward.

The news from Washington comes as BHP Billiton and its lobbying firm have hired another two close associates of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his wife, Maria Shriver, to press the case behind the scenes for Cabrillo Port. That facility faces key licensing decisions next month, and could be operating on Malibu’s coastal horizon in three years.

It looks like Assemblyman Lloyd Levine has withdrawn his support for the LNG Terminal, which is key.

• New op-ed columnists at the LA Times. Surprise, there are less now than there were - cost-cutting rulez! Also, somehow, Jonah Goldberg kept his slot (then again, I actually like his op-ed today), though Arianna Huffington, Adam Hochschild, Gustavo Arellano (Ask a Mexican!) and Sandra Tsing Loh come aboard as "contributing editors," which I think means they'll write op-eds but won't be paid as staff op-ed writers.

The Death of the Earth

OK, let's bring Fluff Friday to a screeching halt.

The IPCC report on global warming is one of the darkest and most hopeless things I've read in a long time. Not only does it acknowledge climate change as a major problem, not only does it confirm with a 90% degree of certainty that it's man-made, but it pretty much says that we're so far gone that it cannot be stopped and all we can do now is prepare for the major challenges to the planet in the future. They of course try to put a brave face on it, but you can almost see the downcast stares embedded in the soundbites. In fact, they admit that.

Global warming is so severe that it will "continue for centuries," leading to a far different planet in 100 years, warned a grim landmark report from the world's leading climate scientists and government officials. Yet, many of the experts are hopeful that nations will now take action to avoid the worst scenarios.

They tried to warn of dire risks without scaring people so much they'd do nothing — inaction that would lead to the worst possible scenarios.

"It's not too late," said Australian scientist Nathaniel Bindoff, a co-author of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued Friday. The worst can be prevented by acting quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions, he said.

The worst could mean more than 1 million dead and hundreds of billions of dollars in costs by 2100, said Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of many study co-authors. He said that adapting will mean living with more extreme weather such as severe droughts, more hurricanes and wildfires.

"It's later than we think," said panel co-chair Susan Solomon, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientist who helped push through the document's strong language.

The best we can hope for, according to the report, is a 3-degree rise in the planet's temperature by the end of the century. Without acting now and taking drastic measures, that goes up to 11 degrees. That would basically rise sea levels by 23 inches or more, and wipe out entire island nations and tens of thousands of miles of coastline. And this could grow to as much as 20 FEET.

Here's the bold action called for by the world's biggest polluter:

In Washington, Bush administration officials praised the report but said they still oppose mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The problem can be addressed by better technology that will cut emissions, promote energy conservation, and hasten development of non-fossil fuels, said Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman.

They won't even fix the fucking levees in New Orleans, you think they'll get on board with the kind of leadership needed to fight climate change?

Now, I could claim that the science is still sketchy and nobody knows what the future will bring and collect by $10,000 from Exxon Mobil and go home. But if you live within a mile of a major ocean like I do, you tend to take these things a bit more seriously. And there's something that every one of us can do to at least mitigate these effects. They're teaching it in schools in Britain. Wal-Mart is urging its staff to become carbon-neutral and pushing to sell 100 million low-energy light bulbs. Here in California, Assemblyman Lloyd Levine wants to ban traditional light bulbs by 2012 and sell only fluorescents in the state. And the new Attorney General, Jerry Brown, is continuing a lawsuit started by Bill Lockyer against the leading automakers, seeking damages for their selling cars that emit heat-trapping gases. Things are starting to happen, and people are taking responsibility.

But there's a whiff of this being entirely too late. For too long we ignored the effects of driving gas-guzzling cars, of leaving lights on indoors, of allowing major manufacturers to spew soot into the air. For too long we figured that our grandchildren wouldn't be impacted, and anyway winter comes every year, followed by summer, so what's the problem? For too long we had the attitude of myopic idiots like Dennis Miller, saying things like "One degree isn't going to turn the Arctic into Phoenix, capiche?" We acted like Americans are prone to act, caring about nobody but ourselves, and essentially we broke the planet. And even now that it's broken we won't fully commit to the effort to fix it.

Part of me thinks that alarm can often be tempered by advancements in technology (like giant space mirrors!), and you can see positive results like in how we dealt with the now-rare issue of acid rain. But part of me thinks this is such a big and abstract issue that it'll take a million Al Gores to wake up the public. And the sleep is too deep, and the clock has already struck midnight.

There, NOW I've killed Fluff Friday dead!

UPDATE: Mr. Gore goes to Washington:

Former Vice President Al Gore has accepted an invitation to testify next month in a congressional hearing on the highly controversial issue of climate change.

Gore will appear at a joint hearing on Wednesday, March 21. He will be the only witness to appear before the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality and the Science and Technology Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. Gore served on both committees during his House tenure representing a Tennessee district.

It'll be interesting to see Gore's reaction to the IPCC report, because he typically strikes a note of optimism about the crisis, that we can do something in the next 10 years to reverse its effects.