Tuesday, July 28, 2015
The GOP vs Popular Programs:
Paul Krugman: Zombies Against Medicare
"Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well...
...The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels...
...Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform..."
There are some excellent reader comments on the Krugman piece:
Bill: "One of the worst offenders of poor cost control is the pharmaceutical industry, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. By disallowing competitive bidding we all get to pay the highest cost in the world for prescription drugs."
Richard M. Waugaman, M.D: "Many physicians have known for years that we need Medicare for all. Highly profitable special interests are the reason we don't yet have such a single-payer system. Greed once again trumps the common good."
Jamesonian: "My elderly parents spent their working years in middle class jobs– a small town police officer and a bank teller– and never had the benefit of a college education. Both are alive today because of Medicare. Had that program not been in existence, neither would be able to afford the lifesaving medical treatments they're receiving three times a week. It is good to remember that in many, if not most cases, killing Medicare is tantamount to killing the elderly poor."
Paul Krugman: Zombies Against Medicare
"Medicare turns 50 this week, and it has been a very good half-century. Before the program went into effect, Ronald Reagan warned that it would destroy American freedom; it didn’t, as far as anyone can tell. What it did do was provide a huge improvement in financial security for seniors and their families, and in many cases it has literally been a lifesaver as well...
...The real reason conservatives want to do away with Medicare has always been political: It’s the very idea of the government providing a universal safety net that they hate, and they hate it even more when such programs are successful. But when they make their case to the public they usually shy away from making their real case, and have even, incredibly, sometimes posed as the program’s defenders against liberals and their death panels...
...Right now is, in other words, a very odd time to be going on about the impossibility of preserving Medicare, a program whose finances will be strained by an aging population but no longer look disastrous. One can only guess that Mr. Bush is unaware of all this, that he’s living inside the conservative information bubble, whose impervious shield blocks all positive news about health reform..."
There are some excellent reader comments on the Krugman piece:
Bill: "One of the worst offenders of poor cost control is the pharmaceutical industry, courtesy of the U.S. Congress. By disallowing competitive bidding we all get to pay the highest cost in the world for prescription drugs."
Richard M. Waugaman, M.D: "Many physicians have known for years that we need Medicare for all. Highly profitable special interests are the reason we don't yet have such a single-payer system. Greed once again trumps the common good."
Jamesonian: "My elderly parents spent their working years in middle class jobs– a small town police officer and a bank teller– and never had the benefit of a college education. Both are alive today because of Medicare. Had that program not been in existence, neither would be able to afford the lifesaving medical treatments they're receiving three times a week. It is good to remember that in many, if not most cases, killing Medicare is tantamount to killing the elderly poor."
Sunday, July 26, 2015
The 2016 Campaign (Already, Really?)
The Economist published the interesting graphic below. The U.S. imprisons an absurd number of people and it benefits the private prison industry disproportionately. Pity we don't prosecute bankers who wrecked the economy with the same vigor. We have Obama's Wall Street-friendly AG Eric Holder to thank for that, as Matt Taibbi tells us in his excellent book 'The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap'...
Climate Science Denial As A Business Strategy
Lying to the public worked for Big Tabbacco (for a while).
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS): Documenting Fossil Fuel Companies' Climate Deception
"...Spending nearly a year reviewing a wide range of internal corporate and trade group documents, UCS researchers have compiled a broader tale of deceit. The report, titled The Climate Deception Dossier, draws on evidence culled from 85 documents—including Soon’s contracts—pried loose by leaks, lawsuits, and FOIA requests.
Spanning nearly three decades, the 330 pages of documents that comprise the report reveal that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, coal giant Peabody Energy, and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change but continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be wrong. Taken together, the documents show that these six companies—in conjunction with the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s premier trade association, and a host of front groups— have known for at least two decades that their products are harmful and still have intentionally tried to deceive the public about the serious threat posed by climate change...
...One eye-opening document reveals that a coalition of 50 U.S. corporations and trade groups—including British Petroleum (now BP), Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Shell—that banded together in the 1990s to discredit climate science was told by its own scientific experts that heat-trapping gases were indeed causing global warming. Regardless, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) continued to bankroll a multimillion-dollar lobbying and public relations campaign to undermine national and international efforts to address global warming,"...
...A leaked 1998 campaign memo from this team, written by representatives from API and API members Chevron and Exxon, laid out a plan largely based on the tobacco industry’s strategy to stave off government regulation by deceiving the public about smoking hazards. Echoing that strategy, which was encapsulated in an internal tobacco industry memo that asserted “doubt is our product,” the API memo stated: “Victory will be achieved when: average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” What makes the secret API memo so revealing is how closely its tactics were implemented in the Willie Soon case. One of the API memo’s coauthors, Southern Company research specialist Robert Gehri, even negotiated one of Soon’s contracts with his employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. All told, Soon received more than $1.2 million from fossil fuel interests over the last decade and failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of the scientific papers that money underwrote. More than $400,000 came from Southern Company. ExxonMobil gave $335,000. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation kicked in another $230,000. And API contributed more than $100,000. What did they get for their money? Soon’s papers conclude that solar activity is the main cause of global warming and carbon emissions have had little or no impact. Despite the speciousness of his findings, members of Congress—notably Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—routinely cite his work to argue that climate science is a hoax..."
Libertarianism in Practice:
Edwin Lyngar: My libertarian vacation nightmare: How Ayn Rand, Ron Paul & their groupies were all debunked
"..In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras...
...The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation...
...Part of the reason this discredited, libertarian bullshit still carries any weight for Americans is because so few of us travel. Only 30 percent of Americans have passports, and if Americans do go places, it’s not often to Honduras. On the mainland of Honduras, we saw no more than a handful of Americans. I did see many more on the tourist-centric island of Roatan, but of course this slice of beach paradise is not at all representative of the larger country or its problems. It has nonstop flights from the U.S. directly to the island so you can skip all the needless reality. One can dismiss the core of near-sociopathic libertarian ideas with one simple question: What kind of society maximizes freedom while providing the best outcomes for the greatest number of human beings? You cannot start with the assumption that a Russian novel writer from the ’50s is a genius, so therefore all ideas about government and society must fit between the pages of “Atlas Shrugged.” That concept is stupid, and sends you on the opposite course of “good outcomes for human beings.” The closer you get to totally untamed, uncontrolled privatization, the nearer you approach “Lord of the Flies.” These questions about how best to provide a good society are not being asked in Honduras, but they are also ignored in the United States as a matter of routine. We have growing income inequality and government is being ever more controlled by a few extremely wealthy political donors. Our own infrastructure is far from admired worldwide, and the trend doesn’t look good from where I’m sitting. We have yet to stop our own political rhetoric to address the basic question about what kind of place and in what type of society we want to live. Society should not exist to make a few people fabulously wealthy while others starve. Almost all humanity used to live this way, and we called it feudalism. Many people want to go back to that sort of system, this time under the label of libertarian or “the untrammeled free market.” The name is irrelevant because the results are the same. In Honduras, I did not meet one person who had nice things to say about the government or how the country is run. My takeaway from the trip is that living in a libertarian paradise satisfies only a few of the wealthiest citizens, while everyone else thinks it sucks..."
The Economist published the interesting graphic below. The U.S. imprisons an absurd number of people and it benefits the private prison industry disproportionately. Pity we don't prosecute bankers who wrecked the economy with the same vigor. We have Obama's Wall Street-friendly AG Eric Holder to thank for that, as Matt Taibbi tells us in his excellent book 'The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap'...
Climate Science Denial As A Business Strategy
Lying to the public worked for Big Tabbacco (for a while).
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS): Documenting Fossil Fuel Companies' Climate Deception
"...Spending nearly a year reviewing a wide range of internal corporate and trade group documents, UCS researchers have compiled a broader tale of deceit. The report, titled The Climate Deception Dossier, draws on evidence culled from 85 documents—including Soon’s contracts—pried loose by leaks, lawsuits, and FOIA requests.
Spanning nearly three decades, the 330 pages of documents that comprise the report reveal that the world’s largest fossil fuel companies—BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, coal giant Peabody Energy, and Royal Dutch Shell—were fully aware of the reality of climate change but continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to promote contrarian arguments they knew to be wrong. Taken together, the documents show that these six companies—in conjunction with the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s premier trade association, and a host of front groups— have known for at least two decades that their products are harmful and still have intentionally tried to deceive the public about the serious threat posed by climate change...
...One eye-opening document reveals that a coalition of 50 U.S. corporations and trade groups—including British Petroleum (now BP), Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, and Shell—that banded together in the 1990s to discredit climate science was told by its own scientific experts that heat-trapping gases were indeed causing global warming. Regardless, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) continued to bankroll a multimillion-dollar lobbying and public relations campaign to undermine national and international efforts to address global warming,"...
...A leaked 1998 campaign memo from this team, written by representatives from API and API members Chevron and Exxon, laid out a plan largely based on the tobacco industry’s strategy to stave off government regulation by deceiving the public about smoking hazards. Echoing that strategy, which was encapsulated in an internal tobacco industry memo that asserted “doubt is our product,” the API memo stated: “Victory will be achieved when: average citizens ‘understand’ (recognize) uncertainties in climate science.” What makes the secret API memo so revealing is how closely its tactics were implemented in the Willie Soon case. One of the API memo’s coauthors, Southern Company research specialist Robert Gehri, even negotiated one of Soon’s contracts with his employer, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. All told, Soon received more than $1.2 million from fossil fuel interests over the last decade and failed to disclose that conflict of interest in most of the scientific papers that money underwrote. More than $400,000 came from Southern Company. ExxonMobil gave $335,000. The Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation kicked in another $230,000. And API contributed more than $100,000. What did they get for their money? Soon’s papers conclude that solar activity is the main cause of global warming and carbon emissions have had little or no impact. Despite the speciousness of his findings, members of Congress—notably Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe—routinely cite his work to argue that climate science is a hoax..."
Libertarianism in Practice:
Edwin Lyngar: My libertarian vacation nightmare: How Ayn Rand, Ron Paul & their groupies were all debunked
"..In America, libertarian ideas are attractive to mostly young, white men with high ideals and no life experience that live off of the previous generation’s investments and sacrifice. I know this because as a young, white idiot, I subscribed to this system of discredited ideas: Selfishness is good, government is bad. Take what you want, when you want and however you can. Poor people deserve what they get, and the smartest, hardworking people always win. So get yours before someone else does. I read the books by Charles Murray and have an autographed copy of Ron Paul’s “The Revolution.” The thread that links all the disparate books and ideas is that they fail in practice. Eliminate all taxes, privatize everything, load a country up with guns and oppose all public expenditures, you end up with Honduras...
...The greatest examples of libertarianism in action are the hundreds of men, women and children standing alongside the roads all over Honduras. The government won’t fix the roads, so these desperate entrepreneurs fill in potholes with shovels of dirt or debris. They then stand next to the filled-in pothole soliciting tips from grateful motorists. That is the wet dream of libertarian private sector innovation...
...Part of the reason this discredited, libertarian bullshit still carries any weight for Americans is because so few of us travel. Only 30 percent of Americans have passports, and if Americans do go places, it’s not often to Honduras. On the mainland of Honduras, we saw no more than a handful of Americans. I did see many more on the tourist-centric island of Roatan, but of course this slice of beach paradise is not at all representative of the larger country or its problems. It has nonstop flights from the U.S. directly to the island so you can skip all the needless reality. One can dismiss the core of near-sociopathic libertarian ideas with one simple question: What kind of society maximizes freedom while providing the best outcomes for the greatest number of human beings? You cannot start with the assumption that a Russian novel writer from the ’50s is a genius, so therefore all ideas about government and society must fit between the pages of “Atlas Shrugged.” That concept is stupid, and sends you on the opposite course of “good outcomes for human beings.” The closer you get to totally untamed, uncontrolled privatization, the nearer you approach “Lord of the Flies.” These questions about how best to provide a good society are not being asked in Honduras, but they are also ignored in the United States as a matter of routine. We have growing income inequality and government is being ever more controlled by a few extremely wealthy political donors. Our own infrastructure is far from admired worldwide, and the trend doesn’t look good from where I’m sitting. We have yet to stop our own political rhetoric to address the basic question about what kind of place and in what type of society we want to live. Society should not exist to make a few people fabulously wealthy while others starve. Almost all humanity used to live this way, and we called it feudalism. Many people want to go back to that sort of system, this time under the label of libertarian or “the untrammeled free market.” The name is irrelevant because the results are the same. In Honduras, I did not meet one person who had nice things to say about the government or how the country is run. My takeaway from the trip is that living in a libertarian paradise satisfies only a few of the wealthiest citizens, while everyone else thinks it sucks..."
Monday, July 20, 2015
Energy vs The Environment:
Mike Gaworecki: Nexen’s Brand New, Double-Layered Pipeline Just Ruptured, Causing One of the Biggest Oil Spills Ever in Alberta
"A pipeline at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake oilsands facility southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, spilled about five million liters (32,000 barrels or some 1.32 million gallons) of emulsion, a mixture of bitumen, sand and water, Wednesday afternoon — marking one of the largest spills in Alberta history. According to reports, the spill covered as much as 16,000 square meters (almost 4 acres). The emulsion leaked from a “feeder” pipe that connects a wellhead to a processing plant. At a press conference Thursday, Ron Bailey, Nexen vice president of Canadian operations, said the company “sincerely apologize[d] for the impact this has caused.” He confirmed the double-layered pipeline is a part of Nexen's new system and that the line's emergency detection system failed to alert officials to the breach, which was discovered during a visual inspection. At this time, the company claims to have the leak under control, according to CBC News."
Kevin Grandia: Peabody Energy to White House: Greenhouse Gas a 'Non-Existent Harm'
"In an official submission to the White House earlier this year, U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy claims that greenhouse gas is a “non-existent harm” and a “benign gas that is essential to all life.” The March 2015 submission from Peabody further claims that “while the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis.” It has become increasingly rare, especially in the last few years as countries and corporations have begun to take the issue of climate change more seriously, to see a publicly traded company like Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) making claims that are so contrary to the well-documented scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are negatively impacting our climate, health and way of living. While there are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific documents available on the impacts of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, the Peabody climate change document relies heavily on claims made in newspaper opinion articles and by organizations with known connections to the fossil fuel industry. An analysis of the 304 footnote citations in the Peabody document finds that opinion articles published in media outlets, primarily the Wall Street Journal, were cited as supporting evidence 41 times ,and groups with historical ties to the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Cato Institute, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the Global Warming Policy Foundation) were cited 64 times."
Sharon Kelly: EPA's New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print
"When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of victory may prove to be fleeting. EPA’s draft assessment made one thing clear: fracking has repeatedly contaminated drinking water supplies (a fact that the industry has long aggressively denied). Indeed, the federal government’s recognition that fracking can contaminate drinking water supplies may prove to have opened the floodgates, especially since EPA called attention to major gaps in the official record, due in part to gag orders for landowners who settle contamination claims and in part because there simply hasn’t been enough testing to know how widespread problems have become. And although it’s been less than a month since EPA’s draft assessment was released, the evidence on fracking’s impacts has continued to roll in. A study in Texas’ Barnett shale found high levels of pollutants – volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, and known carcinogens – in many people’s drinking water, based on testing from over 500 water wells. The contaminants found were associated with the shale drilling industry, but the researchers cautioned it was too soon to say whether the industry actually caused the contamination. But the association was strong, the researchers said. “In the counties where there is more unconventional oil and gas development, the chemicals are worse,” lead researcher Zachariah Hildenbrand told Inside Climate News. “They're in water in higher concentrations and more prevalent among the wells. As you get away from the drilling, water quality gets better. There's no doubt about it.” Those who might have hoped that EPA’s national study would help resolve questions swirling around fracking were largely disappointed, saying that EPA’s new draft assessment is largely a review of the current literature. EPA also heavily relied on data that was self-reported by drillers to FracFocus or to various states, leaving open questions about whether the accident rates they found are in fact under-stated..."
Katherine Bagley: Climate Censorship Gains Steam in Red States
"While plenty of people found humor in the recent news that officials in Florida and Wisconsin are censoring state workers' ability to talk about, much less work on, climate change, other states are not necessarily laughing. In fact, several political and environmental experts told InsideClimate News they could use it as a model to imitate. Florida Gov. Rick Scott became the leader of this potential trend last month when news emerged that he had ordered environmental staffers not to use the terms "climate change" or "global warming" in communications or reports. Wisconsin established a similar policy last week, voting to ban staffers who manage thousands of acres of forests from working on or talking about global warming. Experts now say that conservative lawmakers and public officials were far from embarrassed by the censorship revelations; they were emboldened by them. It could lead to a bevy of Republican lawmakers enacting similar policies in other states. "It seems like they are dusting off a playbook from the Bush administration years," a period when federal officials removed or downplayed climate change research from government reports, said RL Miller, founder of Climate Hawks Vote, a super PAC that works to elect climate-conscious candidates. "I wouldn't be surprised if other deep red states follow suit." In states with substantial conservative bases, shutting down climate action through things like censorship has become a "risk-less position for a local Republican official to take," said Walter Rosenbaum, an expert in environmental and energy policy at the University of Florida. If more leaders follow Wisconsin and Florida's lead, it "will suffocate a lot of needed public discussion on the seriousness of this issue," he said..."
Mike Gaworecki: Nexen’s Brand New, Double-Layered Pipeline Just Ruptured, Causing One of the Biggest Oil Spills Ever in Alberta
"A pipeline at Nexen Energy’s Long Lake oilsands facility southeast of Fort McMurray, Alberta, spilled about five million liters (32,000 barrels or some 1.32 million gallons) of emulsion, a mixture of bitumen, sand and water, Wednesday afternoon — marking one of the largest spills in Alberta history. According to reports, the spill covered as much as 16,000 square meters (almost 4 acres). The emulsion leaked from a “feeder” pipe that connects a wellhead to a processing plant. At a press conference Thursday, Ron Bailey, Nexen vice president of Canadian operations, said the company “sincerely apologize[d] for the impact this has caused.” He confirmed the double-layered pipeline is a part of Nexen's new system and that the line's emergency detection system failed to alert officials to the breach, which was discovered during a visual inspection. At this time, the company claims to have the leak under control, according to CBC News."
Kevin Grandia: Peabody Energy to White House: Greenhouse Gas a 'Non-Existent Harm'
"In an official submission to the White House earlier this year, U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy claims that greenhouse gas is a “non-existent harm” and a “benign gas that is essential to all life.” The March 2015 submission from Peabody further claims that “while the benefits of carbon dioxide are proven, the alleged risks of climate change are contrary to observed data, are based on admitted speculation, and lack adequate scientific basis.” It has become increasingly rare, especially in the last few years as countries and corporations have begun to take the issue of climate change more seriously, to see a publicly traded company like Peabody Energy (NYSE: BTU) making claims that are so contrary to the well-documented scientific consensus that greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are negatively impacting our climate, health and way of living. While there are thousands of peer-reviewed scientific documents available on the impacts of climate change and greenhouse gas emissions, the Peabody climate change document relies heavily on claims made in newspaper opinion articles and by organizations with known connections to the fossil fuel industry. An analysis of the 304 footnote citations in the Peabody document finds that opinion articles published in media outlets, primarily the Wall Street Journal, were cited as supporting evidence 41 times ,and groups with historical ties to the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Cato Institute, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity and the Global Warming Policy Foundation) were cited 64 times."
Sharon Kelly: EPA's New Fracking Study: A Close Look at the Numbers Buried in the Fine Print
"When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of victory may prove to be fleeting. EPA’s draft assessment made one thing clear: fracking has repeatedly contaminated drinking water supplies (a fact that the industry has long aggressively denied). Indeed, the federal government’s recognition that fracking can contaminate drinking water supplies may prove to have opened the floodgates, especially since EPA called attention to major gaps in the official record, due in part to gag orders for landowners who settle contamination claims and in part because there simply hasn’t been enough testing to know how widespread problems have become. And although it’s been less than a month since EPA’s draft assessment was released, the evidence on fracking’s impacts has continued to roll in. A study in Texas’ Barnett shale found high levels of pollutants – volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, and known carcinogens – in many people’s drinking water, based on testing from over 500 water wells. The contaminants found were associated with the shale drilling industry, but the researchers cautioned it was too soon to say whether the industry actually caused the contamination. But the association was strong, the researchers said. “In the counties where there is more unconventional oil and gas development, the chemicals are worse,” lead researcher Zachariah Hildenbrand told Inside Climate News. “They're in water in higher concentrations and more prevalent among the wells. As you get away from the drilling, water quality gets better. There's no doubt about it.” Those who might have hoped that EPA’s national study would help resolve questions swirling around fracking were largely disappointed, saying that EPA’s new draft assessment is largely a review of the current literature. EPA also heavily relied on data that was self-reported by drillers to FracFocus or to various states, leaving open questions about whether the accident rates they found are in fact under-stated..."
Katherine Bagley: Climate Censorship Gains Steam in Red States
"While plenty of people found humor in the recent news that officials in Florida and Wisconsin are censoring state workers' ability to talk about, much less work on, climate change, other states are not necessarily laughing. In fact, several political and environmental experts told InsideClimate News they could use it as a model to imitate. Florida Gov. Rick Scott became the leader of this potential trend last month when news emerged that he had ordered environmental staffers not to use the terms "climate change" or "global warming" in communications or reports. Wisconsin established a similar policy last week, voting to ban staffers who manage thousands of acres of forests from working on or talking about global warming. Experts now say that conservative lawmakers and public officials were far from embarrassed by the censorship revelations; they were emboldened by them. It could lead to a bevy of Republican lawmakers enacting similar policies in other states. "It seems like they are dusting off a playbook from the Bush administration years," a period when federal officials removed or downplayed climate change research from government reports, said RL Miller, founder of Climate Hawks Vote, a super PAC that works to elect climate-conscious candidates. "I wouldn't be surprised if other deep red states follow suit." In states with substantial conservative bases, shutting down climate action through things like censorship has become a "risk-less position for a local Republican official to take," said Walter Rosenbaum, an expert in environmental and energy policy at the University of Florida. If more leaders follow Wisconsin and Florida's lead, it "will suffocate a lot of needed public discussion on the seriousness of this issue," he said..."
