George W. Bush

How will you dress for the Bush Depression this winter? Me, I'm counting on my slightly tattered but super-toasty flannel-lined OshKosh overalls--so old they were actually made in OshKosh. That, and the sweaters I'll be wearing à la Jimmy Carter, since our thermostat and our bank balance will both be chillingly low.

President Carter tried, and failed, to make cardigans and conservation cool during the seventies energy crisis. He warned of "the serious consequences of our long delay in creating a comprehensive national energy policy" in a speech announcing the Emergency Natural Gas Act of 1977, and called on us all to buckle down and bundle up:

Sadly, the sole American family willing to heed Carter's "make do with less" message was the Waltons, who, alas, resided only in the corn pone-filled cranium of Earl Hamner Jr. Two years later, a frustrated Carter asked, plaintively, "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" He blamed the loss of community and the rise of materialism in our culture:

Again, Carter channeled the Waltons while the rest of us stayed glued to the oily exploits of the Ewings. We bought into the more-is-more mania, and our collective carbon footprint expanded exponentially. Houses and cars and waistlines grew bigger, while an endless geyser of consumer goods gushed all around us. Will it ever run out of steam?

Consider this astounding statistic I came across in the October issue of Organic Gardening: In 1995, the average number of food items sold in supermarkets was 3,000; by 2006, it had jumped to 45,000. And most it is cartons and cans and clamshells filled with industrially grown stuff that's been processed to death and then schlepped over land and sea. That's why Michael Pollan's "eater's manifesto," In Defense Of Food, advises us to avoid supermarkets altogether and seek out fresh food from local farmers--and our own front yards--instead.

Sure, some folks will continue to fill their cupboards with Campbell's soup--the only stock that didn't tank when the Dow sank. But more and more Americans are rejecting pre-fab faux foods in favor of DIY dining. Today's New York Times cites a report that, as of May, "53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before," driven by the rising cost of convenience foods. Hey, when you're unemployed, there's plenty of time to hone those handy Depression-era skills like how to make your own stock, grow your own veggies, and can tomatoes.

We're reverting to old-timey modes of transportation, too--there's been a dramatic spike in bike sales and train travel in recent months. And many of us are buying less, learning to make do, and turning off the lights when we leave the room. We are, at last, achieving Jimmy Carter's dream of a simpler, less-stuff driven life--a dream, by the way, that he shared with another recent U.S. president, George H. W. Bush.

Poppy Bush declared back in 1992 that he wanted to "make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons". How gratified he must be to see that Waltons-style austerity is finally in vogue. And all it took was his son's catastrophic stewardship of our country.

I give President Bush an “A” for his new global warming initiative—an “A” for apathy. Admittedly, this is progress over the “A” he earned in his first term for being Adversarial-with-a-capital “A” when it comes to climate change. He’s a chip off the old blockhead; remember how Bush Sr. derisively nicknamed Al Gore “Ozone Man”? Junior picked up where Poppy left off on the campaign trail in 2000, gleefully mocking Gore’s proposed tax breaks for solar panels, or, as he drawled out contemptuously in his faux-hayseed twang, “Foe-toe-vole-TAY-ICK panels.”

As students go, Duh-bya’s not what you’d call a quick study; in fact, he’s fond of boasting about being a “C” student in college, and as Commander in Chief he’s up to his neck in “C’s”: a “C” for cronyism, a “C” for corruption, a “C” for craven indifference to the Constitution, Katrina victims, and all us ink-stained wretches whose names don’t end in “Inc.” To be fair, the Blunderkind-in-a-Bubble has earned a “B” or two as well, most notably for belligerence and blind faith.

And yet, over the weekend, the beltway pundits gave Bush a pass on his bald, I mean, bold new proposal to meet with the rest of the world’s greatest greenhouse gas emitters to advance his agenda of establishing voluntary, or “aspirational,” goals to tackle the problems of greenhouse gas emissions, without imposing the stifling constraints of actual commitments.

Give me a “B” for baffled. The bar gets set ever lower while the sea levels rise. This administration’s moved at a glacial pace when it comes to coping with climate change, to employ a slightly anachronistic adjective that now suggests rapidly melting ice caps more than slow moving bureaucrats.

"The world is on the verge of great breakthroughs that will help us become better stewards of the environment," President Bush announced as he unveiled his proposal-to-hold-meetings-to-craft-a-plan-to-formulate-an-agenda-to-set-goals-to…hey! It’s getting really hot in here, could we, like, open a window or crank up the AC, or something?

Actually, we already have the tools we need to tackle this urgent problem NOW, according to Bill McKibben, who must be hoarse after hollering about our ever hotter planet for nearly twenty years, from his chilling, prophetic 1989 warning about global warming, The End of Nature, to his newest shout-out to sustainability, Deep Economy (note to Oprah—how about a plug for this book and a plug-in hybrid giveaway?)

What we haven’t got, as McKibben noted in an article earlier this year for the Sierra Club, is a leader willing to call for serious conservation and a radical rethinking of our willfully wasteful way of life. Because that would require asking Americans to sacrifice, and that’s just such a buzzkill. Much better to hitch our Hummers to a star in the far-off galaxy of Mañana:

How many Bushies does it take to change to fluorescent light bulbs, anyway? No one knows, because they’re hellbent on wringing every last dirty drop of oil out of the soil before they’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into a greener, cleaner future.

I share McKibben’s conviction that we’ve got to tap into people power to curb our collective carbon footprint. Bush’s free market free-for-all is just a way to stall, a perfect display of White house window dressing. Sunday’s Independent offered a helpful translation of Bush’s transparent attempt to head critics off at the impasse that’s sure to come at this week’s G8 summit in Germany:

Well, that’s the Decider for you, taking decisive inaction.

Looks like Stephen Colbert’s not the only one putting grizzly bears “on notice.”

Global warming, not content with destroying the polar bear’s natural habitat, has apparently got it in for the grizzlies, too. Thanks to climate change, pine beetles are ravaging Yellowstone National Park’s whitebark pinetrees, on whose seeds the grizzlies depend to get through the winter.

Colbert’s fond of saying that these “godless killing machines” are one of the greatest threats facing America, but according to today’s NY Times, it’s the other way around; our failure to seriously address global warming threatens the grizzlies’ survival.

Bears have been eating seasonally since way before the locavores came along and made it trendy, and in the late summer and fall, the pine seeds are “arguably the most important fattening food available to grizzly bears,” according to the federally funded Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. The Yellowstone grizzlies don’t have the berries or salmon that bears in other regions rely on; they need the seeds to make it through the winter.

But rising temperatures are “revving up the beetles’ metabolisms,” reports the Times, speeding up their rate of reproduction. This “adaptive seasonality” enables them to infest areas that were previously out of their range. Tactics such as quarantines or burning infested trees have proved ineffective.

The beetles have already had a catastrophic impact in British Columbia, which they invaded in the 1990’s. The infestation has yet to peak, but it already appears to be the largest forest insect blight ever seen in North America. New computer projections show most Western whitebark pine forest ranges being wiped out by global warming, the one exception being the Wind River Range in Wyoming, which is expected to remain cold till around 2100.

The grizzlies will have to relocate or find other sources for food, i.e., adapt or die.

So what kind of bear is next on the climate change hit list? I hate to tell you, because it’s a breed whose habitat we share--the teddy bear.

Teddies, a relatively new species, have been around for just over a century, dating back to 1902 when a political cartoon depicting Teddy Roosevelt refusing to kill a bear cub on a hunting trip inspired toymakers to replicate the cute lil’ cub. Teddy bears began to proliferate, and their population shows no sign of declining, for now.

Their Republican namesake was our first environmental president, committed to conserving natural resources and preserving wilderness. According to Wikipedia, Roosevelt "set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined, 194 million acres.”

President Bush, by contrast, gave lip service in his State of the Union speech last Tuesday to the notion of becoming "better stewards of the environment," but his administration’s track record on environmental issues is literally criminal.

Congress will hear evidence today from two private advocacy groups that the Bush administration pressured government climate scientists at seven federal agencies to downplay the threat of global warming. And over in the Senate, Barbara Boxer’s holding a meeting to discuss mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions, a strategy Bush rejects on the grounds that it threatens economic growth.

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush mocked Gore’s proposed tax breaks for solar energy, spitting out the words “photovoltaic panels” with a contempt that would have been more appropriate for, oh, I don’t know, child molesters, or corrupt corporations that overcharge the Pentagon.

Now he touts the wonders of technologies like clean coal and cellulosic ethanol, which is all well and good except that clean coal is prohibitively expensive, and cellulosic ethanol is still in development, so neither technology is about to be employed on any significant scale.

To say that Bush and his oily cronies have failed to be proactive on climate change is to grossly understate the problem; they have, in fact, aggressively fought every attempt to make our country less dependent on fossil fuels, going so far as to alter the research provided by their own agencies when the answers didn’t suit them (sound familiar?)

Of course, simply deleting those pesky passages containing inconvenient truths only exacerbated the problem, delaying the day of reckoning that much longer.

On Friday the United Nations will issue a report from 500 of the world’s top scientists which, according to ABC news, paints “a grim outlook on the effects of global warming and emphasizes that scientists are more convinced than ever that humans are causing it.”

The report “raises new fears that the earth's climate is changing faster than anyone thought possible… significant changes in the climate could start happening within the next 10 years.”

The grizzlies might survive by heading for the hills, but what about the rest of us? Stephen Colbert may be terrified of teddies, but I’m siding with the bears on this one. As Pogo the possum said, “we have met the enemy and he is us." It’s high time we put ourselves on notice.

So your brother's bound and gagged
And they've chained him to a chair
Won't you please come to Chicago just to sing
In a land that's known as freedom how can such a thing be fair
Won't you please come to Chicago for the help that we can bring

We can change the world
Rearrange the world
It's dying - to get better

Graham Nash’s “Chicago” might seem like a pretty stale chestnut as protest songs go, but I can’t get it out of my head ever since I started thinking about next year’s Yearly Kos, the blogger convention set for next August in Chicago.

Nash’s song, written after the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention and the subsequent Chicago Eight trial, evokes some eerie parallels to our current state of affairs.

The country was still reeling from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy when the 1968 DNC convened. The Democratic party was torn between presidential nominees Sen. Eugene McCarthy, who called for an immediate withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam, and then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey, who shared President Johnson’s hope that the Paris Peace Talks could bring the conflict to an end.

Our invasion and occupation of Iraq may well go down as one of our greatest military disasters ever, with far worse repercussions for our nation’s future than Vietnam. As much as it pains me to agree with the Donald, I totally concur with what Trump told Maureen Dowd the other day:

Americans sent Bush a message on November 7th, but it’s bounced back, marked “Return to Sender; Recipient in Denial.” Bush is contemplating sending more troops to Iraq at a time when polls show a substantial majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of the war.

Oh, sure, the Decider’s stressed about the fact that his “decisions have caused young men and women to lose their lives.” According to yesterday’s NY Times:

So Bush fiddles with the remote while the rest of us burn. One fed-up fellow—in Chicago, ironically--literally set himself on fire to protest the war. The AP gave the following account of Malachi Ritscher’s self-immolation:

Ritscher’s suicide barely received mention in the news, which was presumably preoccupied with more pressing matters such as Britney Spear’s panty deficit. Ritscher left a note which read, in part:

“Your future is what you will choose today.”

Ritscher killed himself on November 3rd. Four days later, a majority of Americans voted for change. If only Ritscher had opted to set the world on fire, instead of himself.

Who knows how we’ll ever extricate ourselves from the Middle East, now, but we’ve got to get serious about achieving energy independence. As Bill McKibben writes in the Jan./Feb. issue of Sierra magazine, we already have a number of solutions to address the energy crisis:

McKibben cites “the technology of community” as “the most useful technology of all.” He’s talking about the blogosphere in general and Daily Kos in particular. The title of McKibben’s piece, Energizing America, is a nod to the Kossack-created Energize America project, “a remarkably comprehensive energy strategy that pays full attention to political reality.”

Cultural theorist Douglas Rushkoff echoed McKibben’s belief that we have the technology now to shrink our carbon footprint on CNN last Friday:

“We need new attitudes and behaviors, not new light bulbs and reactors,” writes McKibben, noting that Europeans use only half as much energy as Americans do simply because they have a different mindset:

Maybe that explains why the impetus for Energize America came from a Kossack on the other side of the Atlantic, Jerome Guillet, aka Jerome a Paris. An investment banker who analyzes the economics of energy projects for a living, Guillet’s been sharing his insights about energy issues on Daily Kos and the transatlantic blog European Tribune for years.

Guillet is a perfect example of why McKibben says our “best chance may be some leadership from the bottom.” His December 23rd diary on Daily Kos credits his fellow Kossacks who helped to launch Energize America, adding:

So it turns out that the most promising form of alternative energy is people power. Capraesque, yes, and corny, I guess, but better than corn-based ethanol!

Yes, I know Gwyneth Paltrow’s denying she said that the British are “much more civilized and intelligent” than Americans, but if she’s afraid to say it in public, I’m not.

The Brits I’ve known have invariably been better informed about current events, more environmentally aware, and less obsessed with money and material things than your average American. As Paltrow reportedly said, “they don't talk about work and money, they talk about interesting things at dinner."

Now Paltrow’s insisting she’s “proud to be an American.” Me too--I’m just ashamed of our current administration and the people who put them in power. Hey, even self-proclaimed conservative Andrew Sullivan didn't vote for Bush the second time round. But then again, Sullivan's a Brit.

Not to gloss over the glaring flaws in Britain’s culture (soccer hooligans, the Spice Girls, and Marmite all come to mind,) but I’ll take Tory leader David Cameron over any of our Republicans, any day.

Cameron seemed to be channeling Al Gore when he spoke out about climate change recently. Now, he’s echoing Michael Pollan, announcing that it’s time to “take food seriously” because it affects so many aspects of our lives, from the carbon emissions generated by shipping food around the world to the health care crisis brought on by the obesity epidemic.

“Food matters to our countryside, as small local producers struggle to compete with large multinationals,” Cameron observed at a farmers’ market in East London. “There’s a price to be paid” for junk food, he added, “in our health, our environment, and our culture.”

Cameron grows his own vegetables and is on a campaign to bring Brits better access to fresh, quality food, as well as cooking skills and basic knowledge of food and nutrition. He’s called for a ban on advertising junk food to kids, too.

Meanwhile, Prince Charles just launched the Accounting for Sustainability project, an initiative to encourage business, voluntary groups and public sector organizations to put environmental issues at the core of their activities, and come up with meaningful ways to measure the sustainability of their endeavors.

Duchy Originals, Prince Charles’ own organic food company, is already tracking the greenhouse gas emissions created by the growth, production and distribution of its products, and plans to make the information available to consumers.

Prince Charles has also vowed to reduce his own King-sized carbon footprint. He’ll make his multiple homes more energy efficient and opt for commercial flights and trains over private planes and helicopters. He’s switched his fleet of Jaguars to biodiesel, and his staff from cars to bicycles.

Imagine the Boy King of Crawford doing any of that. Charles, who’s championed organic and biodynamic agriculture for more than two decades, owns several organic farms, while our mini-me monarch has a ranch that produces nothing but brush for Bush to whack.

Admittedly, it takes an awful lot more forethought and planning to cultivate crops than to hack things back. Farming is hard work, kinda like trying to sow the seeds of democracy in the Middle East. It’s all well and good to uproot weeds and tyrants, but if you leave your fields fallow too long, you’ll be faced with a bumper crop of highly invasive insurgents blown in on the wind.

Is England still the “green and pleasant land” of William Blake? Its conservatives are certainly an awful lot keener on conservation than ours. Well, at least we’re spared the spectacle of Karl Rove on a bike.