- The role of the media has clearly been re-focused to just making money. Fox News is the exemplar.

- I was quite disappointed that Obama didn't try to do climate-change stuff early enough in his first term: Instead, he went after health-care first. Maybe he figured that he'd get enough done there that he would have momentum to carry through the rest of his agenda. A few key deaths on the senatorial side (specifically Ted Kennedy) made his slim majority inoperable, and the Republicans have dug their heels in against any progress of any kind. I am hoping that the GOP don't take the Senate, at least; the situation for the House of Reps looks very grim. If elections go as currently projected, the best that can happen for a couple of years is a holding action.

- Or maybe there will be some environmental disaster that blows apart the political stall: Remember that what popped GWB's balloon was Katrina, essentially an accident of nature. Yes, it exposed the incapability of the Administration; but it was an accident in the sense that if it had hit ground 50 miles or so away, it wouldn't have smashed New Orleans, and the Bushies would still be dreaming of competence.

- It's quite a change to think that perhaps the best hope for climate-change progress in the US is the fact that China seems to be spending real money on climate-change technology (or so I see in The Economist). Maybe the US will wake up and smell the coffee, at some point.

There's a lengthy article in the New Yorker examining how and why climate change legislation failed in the Senate:

As the World Burns (by Ryan Lizza)

As Neal says, Katrina was a remarkable punctuation point; the fact that it took an act of nature to expose vacuous swagger is perhaps a uniquely American phenomenon? Oops, my  exceptionalism is showing again...

This election is another fearsome inflection point, a test of whether a maelstrom of inchoate resentments can be harnessed and ridden to dominance by a gang of money-men.

Apathy and unrealistic dreams of instant gratification on the part of Democrats are the double edges of the weapon that will bring victory to the GOP.

The problem is that the majority possessed by the Democrats was thin: Not just in numbers, but also in solidity. There were basically centerish states that the Democrats carried because of Obama's appeal. These guys were not willing to take a bullet for the party, because they knew they would have a hard time justifying it to the voters of their district/state.

Of course, theses guys are mostly gonna get kicked out anyway. So their lack of courage didn't buy them anything either.

If they had had any cojones, they would have decided, "I'm probably out in the next election no matter what I do. Might as well go out with a bang, and vote for what will help the country."

But I think politicians don't tend to think along such lines.

Robert, to your remarks I'll reply or add that if blame is to be found, a lot of it may be located where bad faith resides. This country works on good faith; the Constitution can't function unless it's respected at a basic level. On a more prosaic plain the extra-Constitutional "gentleman's" agreements in the Senate permitting the filibuster only worked if indeed the opponents on opposite sides of the aisle behaved as gentlemen.

As they were prepared to abandon faith with their country even as they entirely ceased to behave as gentlemen, the GOP  put the Democrats in a position of having  to consistently produce lock-step party solidarity in order to pass any legislation. Such monolithic party behavior is an unattractive thing in itself, permitting of no dissent, allowing no expression of intra-party discussion with teeth. Were it not for the abuse of the filibuster, various Democrats might have been able to act with a little more independence on individual votes, meaning more bills could be agreed on for up/down votes, etc. The GOP relied on the filibuster to make useful compromise impossible.

Not to excuse the Dems; I've got problems with their courage as well as what I believe is their underestimation of citizens' ability to grapple with truth if it's explained properly. But at the end of the day, the GOP have been exposed as quite willing to torch our government if doing so fits their narrow interest. The filibuster is just another log on the pyre. 

Depressing is definitely the best way to describe American politics these days.  It was so encouraging in '08 with Obama elected and Dems getting a majority in the House and supermajority in the Senate.  But things went downhill so quickly.  Putting health care ahead of climate was a mistake.  Letting Baucus dictate the health care bill was a mistake.  I wish Obama had taken control and said "here's what the health care bill needs to look like", but he let Congress handle it, and they took way too long.

And the Republicans did what they do best.  They lied and misinformed the public, feeding off their fears.  They remained a solid unit in opposing absolutely everything the Democrats tried to get done.  This was particularly effective with their filibuster abuse after Ted Kennedy's death and Scott Brown's election (and Martha Coakley completely blew that election which she should have won easily).  Democrats did what they do best too - they were completely ineffectual.  They should have hammered Republicans as obstructionists.

And now despite offering no solutions over the past 2 years (to the problems which they mostly caused), despite blocking progress for their own political benefit, the American public is going to reward the GOP with gains in Congress and quite possibly a House majority.  It just makes me embarassed to be American that we can be so stupid as a whole.  The analogy that Republicans drove the country into a ditch is quite appropriate.  They then obstructed all Dem efforts to fix our problems.  And because Dems didn't take our country from a massive recession to prosperity in the span of less than 2 years while the GOP blocked their every effort, we're going to elect more Republicans?

I agree with Robert - the media is largely to blame.  They've become stenographers, with every story "he-said, she-said" (or just he said) without any effort to verify if what the parties are saying is actually correct.  The media is the enabler allowing Republicans to misinform the public.  It's sickening.

As Paul Krugman pointed out, for the last few years some of us have been thinking that "Fox News works for the Republicans."

Such cynicism! How wrong we were!

In fact, a look at the panel of FN commentaters who are also likely presidential candidates, and Rupert Murdoch's millions in donations to the GOP, lead instead to the conclusion: "The Republicans work for Fox News."

Now, doesn't that make you feel better?

It's good to know that the media cannot be corrupted by the GOP - because the GOP has already been corrupted by the media.

P.S. Has this point already been made on The Colbert Report, or will it show up there in a week or two?

Thanks for spoiling my lunch hour, nealjking.  I should have known not to read that...

Frankenstein's Monster is nice way of thinking of the Tea Party. A misshapen assemblage of parts crudely stitched together then electrified with inchoate anger and xenophobia. The giggling megalomaniac in this case is the GOP, which imagined this agglomerated force of nature could be controlled. We've already seen a number of mainstream GOP careers ripped apart as the creature has gone out of control, it having been unleashed under supposedly controlled circumstances in town hall meetings over the past year only to promptly break its chains and barge off on a spree of mindless destruction. The industrialists funding the GOP laboratory don't care, yet.

Seriously, Tea Baggers won't have enough power to create, but they'll have enough to  paralyze or even destroy. 

Come to think of it, perhaps the Tea Party will play the role of the Lib Dems in the UK, a relatively small catalyst enabling the unleashing of vast pent-up ideological forces. Electoral reform was so important to the Lib Dems they were prepared to apply a match to the torch the Tories planned using on UK civil society. Oops, LD were suckers and don't even have the guts to admit it.  "Deficit" my ass, this is just Thatcherism having the "pause" button released.

Not quite the same in the U.S. case, I suppose. The Tea Party does not seem prepared to cooperate with anybody, even themselves in the sense of knowing why they want to be elected, as opposed to the Liberal Democrats. All the same, they can take away the Democratic majority in the House and they will in the end frequently caucus with the GOP because TP members and "leaders" are ignorant and therefore maximally gullible. 

Beyond my ravings, people looking for analysis of the Tea Party might find this to be worth reading:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/drbob/Comment%20on%20the%20Tea%20Party.pdf

By Bob Altmeyer:

http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Who really knows, James? For my part, I laughed when Reagan was nominated, failed to learn when he was elected, laughed even harder when George Bush was nominated and then began to harbor serious doubts. After all, Bush appears to have randomly killed at least 100,000 people by following his imagination, in the process made Tony Blair a co-conspirator in what by any measure is a crime of epic scale.  Is anything out of the question, after that? A wry grin is the best I can manage now.

My mother said "We will abide" when Reagan was elected, but apparently she did not guess we were facing seemingly numberless episodic bouts of stupidity, as though our intelligence waxes and wanes like the tide. Even worse, the excursions are becoming deeper and more frequent, more resemble psychosis than plain lack of intelligence.

James Wight:

There are not enough TPers to take over the government by themselves, so they will need to cooperation from the Republicans to do anything massive.

I think even most conservative Republicans would hesitate before pulling the trigger. There's a big difference between screaming for blocking "big government" when you're outside than when it's your own "big government".

That said, it's possible that climate research could come under a lot of scrutiny and face funding reductions. We probably need to raise its profile as a national security issue (as the CIA has mentioned previously).

Ha, you think US politics is nuts??

Everything is being cut here in the UK.

Science by less than 10% and that is a small cut compared to other areas of public spending.
The only good thing is that there is still support for renewable energy, although that is some what patchy.

There is a smart grid test project being set up that will try out new technologies and to see how the grid will handle the change:

http://www.newenergyfocus.com/do/ecco/view_item?listid=1&listcatid=32&listitemid=4490§ion=Solar

The UK seems to have been taken over by cut-onomics, completely ignoring Keynes.

This will not happen in the US, because as soon as someone tries to cut something major, the people benefit from that will scream bloody murder.

The Tea Party seems to basically be pawns of Fox News.  They think what Glenn beck tells them to think.  There was a fascinating example where Glenn Beck told his viewers the US Chamber of Commerce is "fighting for small businesses" and "They are us".  There is of course no truth to these claims - the Chamber is comprised of big businesses.  Many companies left the Chamber in recent months because of its global warming denial and attempts to kill climate legislation in the USA.

But because Beck told them to, so many of his Tea Party viewers went to donate to the Chamber that they crashed its website.  And of course most Tea Partiers think global warming is a scam, Obama is a socialist, Obama wasn't born in the USA, Obama is a Muslim, we need to dismantle every government agency and program, etc. - whatever Beck and other Fox News personalities tell them.

The good news is that a large number of Tea Party candidates are going to lose.  The bad news is that a number will be elected.  And enough Tea Party and other Republican candidates will be elected to give Republicans the majority in the House of Representatives, which will basically bring our already ineffective government to a halt.  They may very well begin a climate science inquisition.

It will be a case of "be careful what you wish for".  Americans have this irrational fear of government programs until they realize that they benefit from those programs.  Fox News tells them 'government is bad', so they believe it, until the government programs are killed and people feel the consequences.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the Republican Party too, because they have an internal rift.  The Tea Party is much more like the Libertarian Party than the Republicans.  Republicans want Tea Party votes, but they don't really want the Tea Party agenda.  Most likely although they'll get a few candidates nominated, the Tea Party won't get the results they want.  So they question becomes whether the Republican Party will move even further to the right, alienating moderates, or whether they'll remain somewhat sane, alienating crazy Tea Partiers.  I think they'll have serious problems in 2012.

John,

I absolutely agree that there will be a hailstorm of climategate crap after the November elections, or at latest in the new congressional term.

Maybe somebody should think about / imagine the kinds of things that could come up, and the kind of responses that will be needed: Specifically, can SkS provide material and TOOLS for generating a response, to people who may be OUTSIDE the SkS community? 

That would mean that we wouldn't have to do everything ourselves, but facilitate other being able to join the fray.

For example, if Cuccinelli is still pursuing Mann in a legal suit, what could we provide that would facilitate people shining some light on that?

(This is kind of an open-ended question.)

Thinking just from a grassroots point of view, I think the Firefox add-on could play a large part in the following:

1. Alert us to new blog posts rehashing climategate arguments
2. Send lots of Firefox Add-on users to these threads where they can use the Add-on for both content (so they can post the facts in a comment) and links to the relevant rebuttal pages
3. Hopefully if we have enough users on the case, it means we can get comments posted early in the discussion threads which can have a significant effect on a blog post's impact
4. More links to SkS rebuttal webpages means those pages are more likely to come up when someone googles a climategate topic
   

The election results were mixed.  The House of Reps was an utter disaster, with Republicans gaining a significant majority in a 65-seat swing, even larger than most projected.  The Senate on the other hand was better for Dems than projected.  There are 3 seats still undecided, but it looks like Dems will probably win 2 of them (Colorado and Washington), and Alaska is down to Murkowski (moderate Republican) vs. Miller (Tea Party psychopath).  At the end of it all, Dems may hold 53 seats when most were projecting just 51.

Tea Party candidates lost in Nevada, Colorado (probably), Delaware, and hopefully Alaska.  The Tea Party nomination of Sharron Angle in Nevada saved Harry Reid's butt - any other candidate would have defeated him.  It appears that the Tea Party helped Republicans in the House, but hurt them in the Senate.

Perhaps most importantly, California resoundingly rejected Prop 23, which would have killed our state climate bill.  In fact, it was defeated by the largest margin of any Proposition on the ballot this year, 61.3% to 38.7%.  A major victory for climate hawks.  We also elected Democrats to the Senate and governorship by double-digit margins.  An embarrassing day to be an American, but a proud day to be a Californian.

The other point about California:

- A pretty good environmentalist, Barbara Boxer, was re-elected to the Senate over the million$ spent by ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina, who refers to concern about AGW as "worrying about the weather".

- Someone who is sensible (if occasionally wacky in his youth), Jerry Brown, was elected governor over the 160 Million$ (personal bank account) spent by the ex-CEO of Ebay.

Yes, California rocks.  We also passed a proposition to change voting requirements on the annual state budget from 2/3rds to a simple majority.  Hopefully this will help with some of our economic woes, so deniers can stop claiming our economy is in the crapper because of our environmental policies.  I hate that argument.  It's like saying people in Japan live longer because they eat a lot of rice.  The two statements are true but are not causally related.

Those were some ugly climate quotes.  I think my IQ just dropped reading them.

The UK politics of cuts are quite scary: but we do need to save a lot of money somehow. Science cuts fo 10% over 4 years were the best we could hope for I think...

Annoyingly they're keeping a 'Feed in Tariff' which pays ridiculous money to domestic solar roofs. The subsidy is about 10 times what offshore wind needs, or about 20 times what nuclear or onshore wind does. It's absolutely ridiculous, but it's currently a vote winner so they're keeping it. We'll end up paying billions for an embarrassing amount of renewable energy and we'll get a backlash in a few years: "see, the daily mail told you renewable power was worthless" :/ 

The full page is here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol330/issue6006/news-summaries.dtl

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/25/us/politics/25browner.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/25/newt-gingrich-epa-should-_n_813873.html?ir=Green

nealjking- "I was quite disappointed that Obama didn't try to do climate-change stuff early enough in his first term"

~ ~ ~

Heck he didn't mention it once in his State of the Union speech this evening

So now the EPA should be eliminated - they can't even image it having a valuable, heck necessary function.

And they want to do away with IPCC funding too - when are they going to start shooting down satellites?

This not a pretty picture.

http://www.grist.org/article/2011-01-21-gop-presidential-contenders-ways-to-screw-climate/P10

This is completely off-topic for SkS, but I personally found it hilarious:

http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/82634/preliminary-breakdown-the-gop-contenders

The entry of Jon Huntsman into the Republican primary field has created strong competition for what has to be a tiny number of Republican voters who want a nominee who's both sane and Mormon:

Note that while the GOP field has two sane Mormon candidates, which is probably two more than there's room for, the "sane, non-Mormon"and "insane Mormon" fields are wide open. I'm not sure who's the best fit for the former category, but the latter is just screaming for Glenn Beck.

A bitter GOP-led hearing on EPA's climate regs highlights an intractable ideological division over whether CO2 rules will create jobs and prosperity

http://solveclimatenews.com/news/20110211/deep-ideological-divide-jobs-drives-fight-over-epas-co2-authority?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A%20solveclimate%2Fblog%20%28SOLVECLIMATE%20NEWS%3A%20Daily%20Climate%20News%20and%20Analysis%29

Energy research and environmental regulation among areas hardest hit in proposed budget plan.

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110210/full/news.2011.84.html

Blog Post, February 12, 2011, 10:10 am

Eat the Future

The public says it wants to see government spending cut — and the Tea Partiers really, really want spending cut — but people don’t want to cut any program they like; and they like almost everything. What’s a conservative to do?

The obvious answer, once you think about it, is to eat the future: to cut spending in a way that undermines the nation’s long-run prospects, but doesn’t impose all that much pain on voters right now.

And that, as best as I can tell, is the running theme in the cuts proposed by House Republicans. The proposal is, deliberately I think, hard to read and interpret; I hope and assume that the good folks at CBPP will do the detail soon. But on a quick read, here are some of the cuts that jumped out at me:

WIC 1008 million

Food for Peace 544 million

NOAA 450 million

NASA 579 million

Energy efficiency and renewable energy 899

Science 1111 million

Nuclear nonproliferation 648 million

Federal buildings fund 1653 million

Homeland security administration 489 million

FEMA, various, around 1.2 billion

EPA clean water and drinking water about 1.8 billion

Community health centers 1.3 billion

Centers for disease control 900 million

WIC is nutritional aid for pregnant women and women with young children; let’s cut that, because the damage to the nation from malnourishment is a problem for future politicians. NOAA is weather and climate — hey, what we don’t know can’t hurt us. Nuclear nonproliferation — well, we probably won’t feel the pain of a terrorist nuke assembled from old Soviet fissile material for a couple of years. FEMA — well, how often do hurricanes hit New Orleans? CDC — with luck, by the time plague hits someone else can be blamed.

Don’t start thinking about tomorrow.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/eat-the-future/

Right ok, so consensus climatology is being attacked by all sorts of powerful Washington people these days.

What avenues are available to regular folks to influence what is going on in Washington these days?

There's a new player on the scene in the US and Canada:

http://www.citizensclimatelobby.org/