If you aren't sure who Alex Pareene is, you weren't alone. A little poking around quickly revealed that Alex is a political writer for Salon. Formerly he held a similar position at Gawker. Pareene has written A Tea People History (with illustrator Ian Huebert) and The Rude Guide To Mitt. In short, Alex will never be mistaken for a Deep Thinker. He's standard fare, a typical political hack, although I also discovered that he has a sense of humor. That's always a plus in my book.
In so far as a political writer for Salon, or any writer for Salon for that matter, is necessarily a helium-filled lightweight, Glenn Greenwald excepted, I was puzzled to read Pareene's Earth still probably doomed no matter which way court rules. Alex wrote this before the "momentous" Supreme Court decision which kept Obamacare intact.
Don't worry, even if the Supreme Court strikes down Obamacare, we're still destroying the planet
Cheer up! Even if the Supreme Court strikes down the ACA and in doing so essentially invalidates almost the entirety of the post-New Deal welfare state, we can take solace in the fact that the blatant partisanship of the Roberts court will be a mere footnote in the future history of how we allowed our entire planet to be irreparably damaged. Sure, it’s infuriating that a simple majority of ideologically conservative justices with lifetime appointments are abusing the extra-constitutional power of judicial review to advance partisan Republican policy goals, but on the other hand, soon Washington, D.C., will be much more underwater than it currently is...
Heat waves and freak weather events are almost definitely going to continue happening with greater frequency across the U.S. and the world, regardless of the majority’s opinion of the scope of the Commerce or Supremacy Clauses. Even if, against the odds, the Roberts court manages to uphold the ACA, or even to find the individual mandate unconstitutional while preserving the rest of the bill’s reforms and subsidies, there is still a pretty good chance that the country and the world will face mass droughts, floods, famine and extinctions as this century draws to a close. With the global average temperature already .8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, it is exceedingly unlikely that humanity will manage to keep the planet from warming by less than 2 degrees, which most scientists predict would be fairly disastrous for many people, even if Antonin Scalia writes a very strongly worded dissent to their models.
If carbon emissions continue rising at the current rate — a possibility many scientists refuse to countenance because they incorrectly believe the world to be ruled by sensible people — it will basically mean the end of the civilization, with 6 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, at which point most of the animals will probably die and there will be no food. Not even government-mandated broccoli, lol!
... Unless greenhouse gas emissions peak really soon and then steeply drop off, we’ll likely reach that apocalyptic point of no return sometime around when John Roberts dies of old age while waiting for a white Republican president to appoint his successor.
With various world leaders pointedly not making the trip to Rio to attend the 20-year reunion of a worldwide summit that did nothing to halt the growth of greenhouse gases or the threatened destruction of much of the planet’s biodiversity, it is more apparent than ever that no one in a position to do anything to ameliorate climate change has much interest in doing so. (Maybe we should rename “climate change” “the deficit”?) So no matter which way the court ends up ruling this week, no matter how craven or blatantly partisan the court’s conservatives act, it is pretty likely that we are all screwed in the long term regardless.
This was definitely confusing. Let me point out right off the bat that some climate models predict 6°C (centigrade) of warming by 2100 if Business-As-Usual (BAU) continues until that date. In so far as the chances of BAU continuing to even 2050 are effectively zero, we needn't worry about this dire shake & bake scenario. The great Permian Mass Extinction (about 251 million years ago) is very likely off the table, at least from global warming alone (but there are always those pesky positive feedback loops).
That said, I was puzzled about the fact that Pareene didn't seem to blame Republicans for human inaction on global warming as liberal (or "progressive") writers typically do (at least in this article). Without irony, he finished up by saying—
So no matter which way the court ends up ruling this week, no matter how craven or blatantly partisan the court’s conservatives act, it is pretty likely that we are all screwed in the long term regardless.
Yes, it is! And not just pretty likely, it's very, very likely, the odds being something like 0.990/1, meaning there are ten chances in a thousand humanity will be "saved" by 2100. In the longer term, who gives a fuck what the Supreme Court did last week? Americans are and will be screwed. What was Alex thinking when he wrote this? Was he on drugs? Liquored up? Did he simply have a extremely rare moment of clarity? An epiphany? WTF?
To douse the flames of my confusion about Alex's state of mind, I went to the comments section of his article. That was much more satisfying—these were the simpletons I have come to know and love!
The first comment by "Beans and Greens" was typical—
If the only beings who would suffer and die from the effects of global warming were conservative Republicans, I could follow the headline's advice and not worry.
Unfortunately, billions of innocent people and other animals will suffer and die as well, which makes acquiesing to further global warming intolerable.
The question is how to combat the death cult of conservative Republicans? Voting doesn't seem to work. Street protests do not work. Well-meaning boycotts and conscientious shopping do not work. I expect the answer will be violence, and that this violence will erupt when people start watching their own children suffer. That is going to happen, and it's nothing to look forward to.
And now, let Salon's residents global warming deniers and related crackpots do their thing.
Reading further through the comments, I took note of a few valiant attempts to remind Salon readers that policies which destroy the biosphere enjoy considerable bipartisan support.
Still, it is unsurprising that the overwhelming majority of the comments were like the first one. Keeping growth issues like global warming in the political realm (good liberals versus evil conservatives) makes these issues seem manageable to imbeciles like "Beans and Greens" who want the warming to selectively kill off conservative Republicans, leaving liberal Democrats intact. In a concession to reality, he (or she) admits that it is unfortunate that "billions of innocent people" will die in any case.
So there you have it—Alex Pareene, doomer. I don't expect a repeat performance from him anytime soon.
Perhaps it's just a momentary episode of lucidity.
Posted by: Wanooski | 07/01/2012 at 12:04 PM