My just-after-Earth Day message is this: There is an alligator in my lake.
Actually, that may not quite true, the little fellow—between two and three feet in length—may be a Spectacled Caiman or a species that goes by the name of Cuvier’s Dwarf Caiman. All three of these crocodilians are available in the pet trade, and Missouri, where my lake is located, has the most spectacularly lax regulations for exotic pets in the nation. Sure, you have to ask your county sheriff if you can have something truly dangerous like a tiger or hyena, but from the number of people with cougars on a patio or margays on a leash, those local law enforcement types are pretty darn affirmative on the idea. Besides, having a unapproved dangerous animal in your backyard is just a Class C misdemeanor, so the maximum fine is $750—a pretty small risk if you’re sending for that lion you always fancied. Reptiles below 8 feet in length are peachy keen, no permit required.
But Missouri’s ridiculous animal laws aren’t the main thing I wanted to get across. The main thing is that there was an alligator in my lake last year. So, unless someone has made a regular habit of stocking my tiny lake with the things, that means this small alligator managed to overwinter in my lake. In Missouri.
Which is, amazingly enough, all too possible. The American Alligator is capable of surviving in quite cold water, well below the point at which its cousin the crocodile would succumb. And truthfully, the water here was just not that cold. Not this year. The temperature through the winter wasn’t just warmer than usual, it beat the average temperature by double digits. In mid-February it was 78 degrees.
We were’t alone. 2016 was the warmest year on record. It beat out 2015 to take the crown. Which beat out 2014.
That doesn’t mean alligators are coming to your town soon. Instead it means thousands more acres of forest lost to pine bark beetles. It means you could be visited by little demons known as oak leaf itch mites. It means massive die-off of trees from Hawaii to Maine. It means that the Zika virus will edge ever northward. It means Americans will discover the joys of tropical diseases like dengue fever, a mosquito-borne illness so intensely painful it’s also known as “breakbone fever.”
It means that ignoring climate change is a threat to our agriculture, our health, our environment, our cities, our coastlines, and even our military. And those who don’t believe can come over for a visit … and dangle their toes in the water.
Okay, I hope you all had a great science march. Let’s read some pundits.
Dan Levitan on the big goals of an equally big march.
By participating in this form of activism, you are not necessarily taking a political side, or somehow jumping the gun on what research and honest inquiry will reveal, but you are literally aligning with reason and truth and evidence over denial and magical thinking.
It is absurd to claim that politics and science can forever stand separately, staring at each other from across the room, but it is just as absurd to claim that by joining this movement any scientist or citizen is permanently sullied as partisan or lacking in objectivity.
The rules at present seem to be that anyone who is anti-science can lob all the bombs they want, and scientists aren’t allowed to swat them away without being told they’re politicizing science. That’s certainly how the media plays it.
John Kerry with some Earth Day optimism.
I know that on Earth Day 2017, that future feels a little less certain, and understandably so. But — for the same reason 1970’s people-powered activism turned power structures upside down — something big has already begun around the world that can be slowed but not stopped.
The U.S. energy market is in the middle of a fundamental transformation — and that’s true regardless of Washington’s policies. Last year was the third consecutive year in which renewable technologies — especially wind and solar — made up more than half of the new generating capacity added to the U.S. grid. And it’s clear that the energy transformation is truly global. Last year roughly twice as much was invested in renewables capacity worldwide than in fossil-fuel generation.
Meaning there’s no market for additional coal. Meaning the only way that Trump could bring back coal jobs would be to declare the farcical need for a massive national coal reserve, perhaps by filling the Grand Canyon with the stuff and … please forget I said anything.
Bill McKibben on Trump’s fatally bad timing.
President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people. …
We have only a short window to deal with the climate crisis or else we forever lose the chance to thwart truly catastrophic heating.
We’re about to be up to our collected asses in metaphorical alligators—if not the physical sort. We need to not just meet the standards set by the Paris agreement, but exceed them.
But everything Mr. Trump is doing should slow that momentum. He’s trying to give gas-guzzlers new life and slashing the money to help poor nations move toward clean energy; he and his advisers are even talking about pulling out of the Paris accords. He won’t be able to stop solar and wind power in their tracks, but his policies will slow the pace at which they would otherwise grow. Other presidents and other nations will have spewed more carbon into the atmosphere, but none will have insured, at such a critical moment, that carbon’s reign is extended.
Trump has even cut the money for the “Energy Star” program that rates the efficiency of appliances. Somewhere, there’s probably a fossil fuel executive who’s pleased as punch that you can’t tell how much power that new fridge might waste … but he’s the only one.
Jacquelyn Gill on why there are no bystanders in the war on science.
When science is for everyone, it is transparent, accessible and broadly communicated. It has direct benefits to public health and our economy, contributes to a culture of innovation and discovery, and supports education and engagement at all stages of life. The intersections between science and politics may feel new, but they’re not. The outcomes of scientific research have always extended well beyond the lab and the boardroom. Our work has implications for our environment, public health, civil rights, economics, education and national defense. This means science has always been political. And I believe that this is a feature, not a bug.
Whenever someone shouts that something should not be politicized, it’s because it already has been — to the advantage of the person doing the shouting.
Mary Shannon Little on how the culture of Fox News is a lot more pervasive than Fox News.
Almost as shocking as how long it took Fox News to fire Bill O’Reilly was the almost-as-sexist coverage of his ouster by competing cable news networks. Mostly male panels discussed what this meant for President Trump and speculated whether action would have been taken had it not been for the media coverage of $13 million paid to buy silence from O’Reilly’s accusers and the consequent flight of dozens of advertisers. Only the occasional female panelist attempted to explain that Fox News was not unique in failing to implement its zero-tolerance policy and that two high-profile terminations could not change a corporate culture.
To be fair, most news networks would still have all male panels if the subject was the appropriateness of wearing culottes with white pumps before Memorial Day.
Little describes her own experience with frequent, and unchecked, sexual harassment. Worth a read, even if you’ve been on the receiving end.
Leonard Pitts bids farewell to Bill.
O’Reilly, a pugnacious conservative who was the mightiest oak in the forest of cable news blowhards, was felled by a report in the New York Times three weeks ago that detailed how Fox paid out about $13 million over the years to make multiple accusations of sexual harassment go away. An uproar ensued, and advertisers deserted his top-rated program by the dozens.
Small wonder. The accusations, which O’Reilly denies, read like a manual on how not to behave in a 21st-century workplace. O’Reilly is said to have made unwanted advances, tried to plant an unwanted kiss, and backed up his demand for sexual favors by making threats or even taking action to blunt women’s careers. One woman said he called her and described sexual fantasies involving her. She said it sounded as if he was masturbating.
Now O’Reilly will have no choice but to run for political office, where “locker room talk” is perfectly acceptable.
Richard Wolfe on why Trump’s missing armada isn’t all that funny.
Less than 100 days into this presidency, it is blissfully clear what kind of leader Trump is. He has made the awesome transition from a neophyte candidate into a neophyte president; from a man who bluffed and blustered his way in TV debates to a man who bluffs and blusters his way through international crises.
Here is a small-time businessman who knew nothing about foreign affairs, who has grown into a nuclear-armed president who knows nothing about foreign affairs. He used to fire B-list celebrities on TV; now he just fires off tweets and Tomahawks after watching TV.
Any nation that has a neighbor they don’t like but not enough explosives to knock them off should try this technique. First create a fake Twitter account pretending to be the supreme ruler of your erstwhile neighbor. Make a joke about Trump’s hair. Wait.
Dana Milbank on the real key to the Trump doctrine.
There has been much speculation about Trump’s nonsense talk about his “armada.” Administration officials suggested a miscommunication between the Pentagon and the White House. Others suspected deliberate psy-ops against North Korea and China.
I put the question to my former colleague Tom Ricks, military writer and national security specialist at the New America Foundation. Ricks’s hypothesis: Trump didn’t have any idea where his armada was. “He probably saw it on TV.”
Donald Trump’s entire policy is this: Watch Fox and Friends. React. That’s it. There is nothing more.
Trump, who tends to eschew security briefings, spends much of his day watching Fox News, often tweeting about what he sees. And Fox News was beating the drums of war in the days and hours before Trump spoke of his armada:
Please, Fox News, run some footage of those flying ships from the Avengers. I want to hear Spicer explain where they’re going.
David Cohen has an idea for what to do about North Korea that doesn’t involve nukes or phantom ships.
In dealing with North Korea, the Trump administration should look to Iran. Specifically, it should take a page out of the Obama administration’s Iran sanctions playbook and apply against North Korea the tool used successfully to bring Iran to the nuclear negotiating table — “secondary sanctions” on those who do business with the regime.
“Taking a page out of the Obama administrations playbook” will never work. Now, if Trump was told that he was stealing a page from Obama and getting all the credit, then he’d be on board.
North Korea is not, by any stretch, “sanctioned out.” Despite a broad set of international and U.S. sanctions, North Korea has gotten off relatively easy, especially as compared with Iran. That is largely because the United States has historically been reluctant to impose secondary sanctions to isolate North Korea, particularly against China, the regime’s principal legitimate trading partner. Certainly, the Trump administration should do its best to bring the Chinese government on board. But if China drags its feet, President Trump should proceed anyway.
I can’t tell you that this is the best idea. I can tell you its at least an idea that doesn’t involve killing many, many people very, very quickly. So I think I like it.
Isaac Fish reminds us of the best possible reason not to go to war with North Korea.
Trump is president.
Thanks. That’ll do.
Kathleen Parker on the dangers of Bad Trump, Worse Trump.
Theories, nevertheless, abound as the world wonders, no doubt with fear and loathing, what the president of the United States is going to say or do next. It does seem at times that Trump won’t be satisfied unless and until he has managed to prompt a nuclear confrontation with some nation — or two. ...
Let me clarify: Trump is rattling his borrowed saber because that’s what he does. The bully in chief no longer has to file lawsuits to try to evict widows from their homes for monetary gain. Now he has a military — the world’s most powerful, to be precise — and can decide over chocolate cake to fire missiles at Syria.
Trump likes to watch things go boom. Now, just what kind of desert goes with a tactical nuclear strike. Nothing fancy — a couple of miniaturized shells that barely top the teens when it comes to kilotons delivered to target. Cheesecake? Sounds like cheesecake.
So, at last count, Trump had North Korea threatening a “super-mighty pre-emptive strike,” Russia sending equipment to the North Korean border and China making military preparations just in case. Meanwhile, Iran, which exerts power in nearly every pit of Barbary, chuckles.
I have not whistled the “Duck and Cover” tune so much since the mid-60s.
And, oh yeah, after another week of self-indulgent refusal to soil his little hands with actual political commentary, Ross Douthat has joined George Will and Maureen Dowd in the not-even-bothering-to-look box. Those who have wished for this penalty for many a year may now celebrate.
Seriously. Missouri law allows you to keep a “lion, tiger, leopard, ocelot, jaguar, cheetah, margay, mountain lion, Canada lynx, bobcat, jaguarundi, hyena, wolf, bear, nonhuman primate, coyote or deadly or dangerous reptile over eight feet long” with permission of the county sheriff. Go wild, folks. Go wild.