Daily Archives: May 8, 2014

Colorado, Friends, Weather +Climate

And the Winner Is…Bill Schmidt

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Beltane                                                                      Emergence Moon

Fortuna rode in from the western suburbs with Bill Schmidt tonight. He got hand after hand and played them well. Congratulations, Bill.

We’ve had a soaking here tonight. As I drove home around 9:30 after the sheepshead card game in St. Paul, the rain began to achieve downpour proportions.  I turned on Highway 10 headed toward Round Lake Boulevard and had the windshield wipers on full phaser.

Driving through the rain, here in the humid east, a background scene rolled past of future drives at night in the arid west. Will these storms be those of memory once we move to Colorado?

Even though we’ve set ourselves two years to make this move, there is a sense of the last time I’ll… in many things I do, including this drive in the rain. To return to the circus image, the stakes have begun to loosen and the ropes have got some slack even though the tents a long way from coming down.

Politics, US History

Off the Bench. Again.

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Beltane                                                             Emergence Moon

Met Becky Rothmeier Loewen of America Votes at the MIA today. We talked politics, what the Sierra Club wanted of America Votes and what I wanted. It was fun. Both of us shared an occasional desire to set politics aside, but as she said, “When you know you have the power to do something…” Yes, that’s the rub all right. I sit on the sidelines, then, “Oh, come on.” returns to my vocabulary and I find myself pushed and pulled right back.

From a political junkies perspective America Votes is a candy store. Great data about all the races (at least in Minnesota), in depth. People to talk to about the minutiae of segmenting demographics, messaging on mailers, which races can be swayed. Most folks don’t care about these things, but there is a coterie of folks for whom these kind of matters are their Daily Racing News. And I’m one of them.

As I said after attending the last meeting of America Votes, it’s good to see the young guns out there, eager for the next campaign. In a democracy it is apathy and indifference that spell certain defeat no matter what your political perspective. This group of folks are necessary for the full functionality of an often torpid electorate.

At 67 I realize that I’m not likely to stay on the sidelines for long, no matter where I live. It hasn’t happened yet. As I told Becky the first live election returns I recall caring about were the results of Adlai Stevenson versus Dwight Eisenhower. Those my dad and I saw, until 3 in the morning in black and white on a still uncommon consumer product called television. That was 1952.

Aging, Commentary on the news, Family, Great Work, Politics, Science, Sierra Club

The Grandchildren Project

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Beltane                                                       Emergence Moon

A shift in public opinion concerning climate change seems to be accelerating. We may be near a tipping point where acceptance of climate change science corresponds to acceptance of evolution. Yes, there will always be outliers, just like the Texas and Kansas school boards exhibit every once in a while on evolution, but the mass of us will finally hear the very clear science behind many changes impacting us already.

Proof? Jon Huntsman, former governor of Utah and a possible GOP candidate for President in 2016, wrote this remarkable sentence in an op-ed piece for the NYT: “If Republicans can get to a place where science drives our thinking and actions, then we will be able to make progress.”  Paul Douglas, local and national meteorologist and a conservative, too, has long observed the conundrum behind conservatives who refuse to conserve.

It may be that the long game for climate politics is about to bear fruit. For those patiently (and not so patiently) working on climate change related issues the era of solution based debates rather than denial and obfuscation might be coming near. This will be an exciting but also frustrating time as those only recently convinced try to digest the difficult realities ahead of us.  Those of us who’ve wanted to see forward motion will be in danger of refusing to listen to solutions that don’t fit our already existing paradigms.

It will be important to recall that our solutions have largely been developed among those of us who already agree with each other. Gaining political consensus for policy will require including those who don’t share many of our assumptions. Here’s a clear one. Nuclear energy may well be an important component of a transition to a non-carbon based energy regime. We need critical mass for the generation of electricity while renewable sources begin to catch up and storage technologies improve. We simply may not have time to ignore capable non-emitting nuclear power plants.

I’m excited that this push for solutions may happen in my lifetime and that those of us with grandchildren might help create the change. Call it the grandchildren project.