Tag: climate change
What Global Warming? Ask Phoenix
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Projected high temperature today in Phoenix, Az., where wild and agricultural lands have been paved over with heat-holding concrete and asphalt to such an extent that eight-hour nights don’t allow enough cooling, and heat builds daily in the narrow canyon area.
Santorum: When I Said Obama Believed in a ‘Phony Theology,’ I Was Referring to Climate Change
After disparaging Pres. Obama’s religion in remarks to a tea party crowd in Ohio, GOP frontrunner Rick Santorum went on television yesterday in an attempt to walk back his statement that the president believes in “some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.”
Santorum said on the CBS “Face the Nation” program yesterday that he wasn’t questioning Obama’s Christian faith in claiming the president subscribes to a “phony theology,” the phrase he used in a speech to Tea Party activists in Ohio.
“I was talking about the radical environmentalists,” Santorum said. “That’s why I was talking about energy. This idea that man is here to serve the earth, as opposed to husband its resources and being good stewards of the earth, and I think that is a phony ideal.”
Climate science is a theology? Is Rick Santorum really that dumb? Well, yeah. Remember that Santorum was labeled the “Dumbest Member of Congress” when he served in the House in the 1990s — and just last month an aide to Sen. John McCain opined that “For pure, blind stupidity, nobody beats Santorum. In my 20 years in the Senate, I never met a dumber member.”
The Unconvincables: Gov. Rick Scott Denys Climate Change
I’ve not been convinced that there’s any man-made climate change. Nothing’s convinced me that there is.
— Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R-Tea), who presides over a state where 95 percent of the population lives within 35 miles of the coast, and where, by the turn of the century, the waterline will be between 2 and 5 feet higher.
The Fire Next Time: Can We Build a Recession-Proof Economy?
As we climb out of the recession, which we clearly are and were before the freshmen Republicans in the House took their oaths of office last week, it’s a good time to remember we are not all on the same page about how we got into an economic mess, nor about how to go forward from it.
There are people out there who believe, thanks to FOX News and Rush Limbaugh, that the whole housing market collapse was because of groups like ACORN trying to help people who couldn’t afford them buy houses.
Keefe: ‘We can either summon the collective will to invest in our common future or continue to stumble along hoping the next asset bubble temporarily bails us out while entering into a period of long national decline’
There are others, like me, who witnessed the mortgage crisis from closer to the inside and know firsthand that the wealthy led the way into economic ruin with such instruments as no-money-down mortgages, interest-only mortgages, five-year balloons, and other highly creative arrangements dreamed up for folks who wanted to make even more profit by flipping second and third and fourth houses than they were by investing in shaky stocks.
Most of those in the latter group were just one slow-selling property away from bankruptcy and foreclosure, which we all got to find out together. Of course, most of them will just wait out the seven or so years it takes to clear one’s credit record if one is of a certain income bracket, and go forth to sin again.
And since we’ve never collectively gotten straight about the causes, why should we expect to agree on the remedies? Sadly, we shouldn’t.
Joseph F. Keefe, president and CEO of Pax World Mutual Funds, says we can’t fix what’s wrong in this country, or in the world, by looking for the next boom. (Emphasis that follows is added.)
