Articles by David Roberts

Yeah, protect the environment and what else?

Political junkies (hi) may want to check out this Democracy Corps poll and strategy memo (PDF), called "Toward a Democratic Purpose." There's a lot in there to chew on, but one salient fact for our purposes : The public is very clear on the fact that Democrats are the party that protects the environment. They are also very clear on the fact the Republicans protect the interests of corporations and the rich.

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, you're not going to get much electoral traction by pounding on those two facts. People already know. Again, all you enviros out there: People already know. Whatever your elevator pitch, it shouldn't be based on the facts that progressives love the environment and conservatives love the rich.

What are people up in the air about? They are uncertain of who will most help the middle class, and although they think Dems are fiscally responsible, they also suspect Dems are bad for economic growth.

The lesson here is to link the environmental message already in people's heads to the other leverage points that can sway them.

Can environmentalists tell a story about how environmentally responsible policy helps the middle class and stimulates economic growth? If not, they better get on it, and quick. 2008 will be here before you know it.

(Via Matt Yglesias, who's got more thoughts on the matter.)

Global warming … maybe you’ve heard of it?

Let's be honest. Global warming is a dreary subject. Even for those of us -- and by "us" I mean "just about everyone in the world except for the U.S. executive branch and a few industry-funded skeptics" -- who take it seriously.

Nonetheless, new evidence about climate change trickles out every day. It can be hard to keep track, especially 'cause of the dreariness. So Tom Engelhardt has done a real public service by gathering all that evidence into one essay.

He also addresses, toward the end of the essay, why it is that most Americans seem so unwilling to think about climate change, even when they know it's real -- i.e., he addresses the dreariness, and has some interesting stuff to say:

Instead, it's quite clear that, faced with various scary scenarios, we've become a can't-do nation; that conservatism has really meant a kind of conceptual hunkering down when it comes to anything but the present moment; and that an increasingly fierce imperial holding-on when combined with a sense of futurelessness and helplessness has consigned the environmental movement to the antlers of a dilemma.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Bush’s budget

In the Daily Grist today, we cover a story about the farm subsidy cuts in Bush's new budget. Due to the nature of that venue -- just the fact, ma'am! -- we don't express any skepticism about the news.

So let me do it here: It's bullshit.

Nobody in their right friggin' mind thinks agricultural subsidies -- which Bush raised in his first term -- are going to get cut in his second. This is a circus sideshow, meant to distract attention from the grossly regressive cuts elsewhere in the budget.

The most dastardly way of reading the much-ballyhooed cuts are as a backdoor attempt to cut foodstamps. Here's how it works: Bush recommends that the USDA cut subsidies; Congress appropriates an amount for the department commensurate with the cuts; powerful ag-state Senators defend their subsidies; to come in within its new budget, the USDA cuts food stamps instead. Brilliant, no? That's what Ed Kilgore and Sam Rosenfeld suspect -- what Kilgore calls a "two-cushion shot."

Matt Yglesias, however, points out that the budget already contains explicit cuts in food-stamp funding, so maybe the ag-subsidy cuts are the kind that Mark Schmitt describes, known to all concerned, including the administration, as purely symbolic and never to become real.

Whatever the case, in this draconian budget -- particularly damaging to public health -- ag-subsidy cuts are no reason to take heart.

Evangelicals

Glenn Scherer's much-cited piece "The Godly Must Be Crazy," which argued that far-right Christian evangelicals are hostile to environmental protection, is apparently not the end of the story. The Washington Post's Blaine Harden finds evidence that evangelicals are going green. Joel Makower discusses the issue, as does the Progressive Blog Alliance. Sustainablog also points us to more info at Harvard's Forum on Religion and the Environment and Rev. Larry Rice's essay "As the Giant Sleeps ... Creation Suffers."

This strikes me as a subject in dire need of some empirical -- as opposed to anecdotal -- research. Just how many evangelicals are the raving End Timers Glenn describes and how many the "creation care" types Harden describes? There's an anthropological flavor to a lot of this reportage, which just goes to show how poorly understood the evangelical community is, particularly in light of their extraordinary political influence.