This morning Chris and his guests discussed collective efforts on climate change and how lawmakers in congress are responding. Plus, we look at the environmental recovery efforts, human costs, and government response to the BP oil spill two years later. Also, a discussion on the widening inequality gap in America and a proposed Farm Bill that would cut billions of dollars in food stamps from the budget.
Joining Chris were:
Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and Republican governor of New Jersey from 1994 to 2001.
Sam Seder (@samseder), host of the Majority Report podcast.
Victoria DeFrancesco Soto (@drvmds), director of communications for Latino Decisions.
Bob Herbert (@bobherbert), senior fellow at Demos.
Antonia Juhasz (@antoniajuhasz), oil & energy analyst & activist and author of The Tyranny of Oil.
Paul Douglas (@pdouglasweather), meteorologist and founder of weathernation tv.
:: Blogged by Brett Brownell (@brettbrownell), Up w/ Chris Hayes web & video producer ::
Leave a Comment:
Chris : calmeth down. Dont host as if on pheno-barbs ! When the guests start blabbing over each other, exert some AUTHORITY! Just say, "Hey, you > shut the fuk up. Someone else is talking."
I agree. But my beef is he doesn't let the "guests" finish their thoughts, he is so wary of making sure to take the commercial breaks he has to rush them along.
Have fewer guests, and let them express their opinions completely.
If you have 4 people at the table, do you really need to bring in another guest via satellite??
And the new quirk is saying you are going to come back to a guest after the break, but then monopolizing the talking points and switching topics.
Dear Chris Hayes and Brett Brownell,
I love “Up with Chris Hayes”. I saw the April 21 show focusing on Climate Change and feel I need to comment. I am an MSNBC-watching moderate liberal who only watches FOX News when I need a jolt to my blood pressure. However, on Global Warming, I am a PhD Chemical Engineer that unfortunately has to agree with what the Glenn Beck’s and Rush Limbaugh’s often have to say. It really hurts!
Before dong more shows like April 21, please read “State of Fear”, a novel by Michael Crichton and “The Deniers” by Lawrence Solomon. Both raise excellent questions about the science of both sides of the argument. Don’t arbitrarily allow yourself to accept the “settled science” that CO2 emission is driving any changes you think you see. Have your staff take each of the points made in these books and research them to try to debunk the science that these skeptics profess. Bring scientists from both sides onto your show and have them debate the individual points with facts. Don’t allow innuendo or inference. Don’t allow either side to debasing the other because they are funded by greedy big oil or by tree-hugging cap and taxers.
Doesn’t it pique your interest that this started with the claim that CO2 would cause global warming, but when global warming did not occur during the period 2000-2012, they shifted to calling it CO2 induced Climate Change. Isn’t it interesting that the hockey stick temperature rise curves (developed by Michael Mann) showed by Al Gore in his movie, was the prime exhibit for the impending disaster. However, now that this curve has been shown to be scientifically inaccurate and has even been dropped from the IPCC reports, the conclusions it led to has stayed the same. There is a driving force out there that has the answer before it has identified the questions.
Also, please stop using clips from Jim Inhof and the like to show how moronic the Climate Change skeptics are. Just because he says stupid things, doesn’t mean he has guessed wrong on which side is right. Go to the Climate Scientists that are skeptics. Try Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Go to the University of Colorado and their Sea Level group. Go to Richard Lindzen at Harvard or Nir Shaviv, an Israeli Astrophysicist. Go to the “Polar Bear Study Group” <pbsg.npolar.no/> and look at what they know about the 19 Polar Bear population groups. Their predictions are that if the ice all melts, some of these bears are in trouble. They are basing it all on the melting of the ice, not on reduction in observed Polar Bears. There is a lot of “REAL SCIENCE” out there that says CO2 is not a proven culprit of future disasters.
There may be a real problem. But if there is, it’s link to CO2 is purely circumstantial. There are other proposed theories that seem to be totally ignored.
Also please don’t complain about the skeptics using last years cold US winter as an example of global warming being over, while you use the example of a very hot Boston Marathon to show that global warming is here. It hurts your credibility to treat weather like climate for your purposes. Those are weather events. The least you can do is to look at global temperature for these periods. (<)
The doomsaying is coming from mathematical models. However, these models have never even been able to forecast even close. They are based on assumptions about the feedback effect of cloud formation that are a major player in global warming. (See <drroyspencer.com>). The science on the feedback is certainly not settled.
I love watching MSNBC. However, everyone on the station has decided that CO2 is causing Climate Change. They discuss how to reduce CO2 and what will befall us if average global temperature climbs 9 degrees. You need to spend more time asking whether that “settled science” is really settled.
Best regards,
Dave Matz, PhD
"I am a PhD Chemical Engineer that unfortunately has to agree with what the Glenn Beck’s and Rush Limbaugh’s often have to say. It really hurts!"
Oh dear god. Yet ANOTHER engineer who thinks his degree in how to build a chemical processing plant means that he knows something about global warming.
"Before dong more shows like April 21, please read “State of Fear”, a novel by Michael Crichton and “The Deniers” by Lawrence Solomon. Both raise excellent questions about the science of both sides of the argument."
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA!!!! Your quoting Michael Crichton??!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
"Have your staff take each of the points made in these books and research them to try to debunk the science that these skeptics profess"
Or they could just take five minutes to read the MANY pages devoted to debunking his claims.
"Doesn’t it pique your interest that this started with the claim that CO2 would cause global warming, but when global warming did not occur during the period 2000-2012, they shifted to calling it CO2 induced Climate Change."
No, because that decade was the warmest in US history so saying there was no warming during that period WOULD BE A LIE.
"However, now that this curve has been shown to be scientifically inaccurate"
FALSE. It has in fact been shown to be accurate and those who have attempted to disprove it have been show to be LIARS.
Also, please stop using clips from Jim Inhof and the like to show how moronic the Climate Change skeptics are. Just because he says stupid things, doesn’t mean he has guessed wrong on which side is right.
Did he guess wrong when he said that the Copernican heliocentric theory that the earth revolves around the sun was a JEWISH CONSPIRACY? Science isn't a guess like you say. Science gives us FACTS about the world.
"Try Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama, Huntsville."
Do you mean CREATIONIST Roy Spencer? Who is on the nine-member board of the antiregulation, Scaife- and Bradley-funded Marshall Institute? That Roy Spencer?
"Go to Richard Lindzen at Harvard"
The Richard Lindzen who has been COMPLETELY DISCREDITED and is a laughing stock of the scientific community?
"There may be a real problem. But if there is, it’s link to CO2 is purely circumstantial. There are other proposed theories that seem to be totally ignored."
For good reason. IT IS A FACT that warming is happening and IT IS A FACT that CO2 causes global warming and IT IS A FACT the human activity is the cause of the warming we can now observe. You are a very poor chemical engineer if you don't know that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. This is NOT up for debate.
IT IS A FACT that global warming is caused by humans putting CO2 into the environment.
"I am a PhD Chemical Engineer"
And I am an Astronaut.
Dear Dave, Do you also not believe in evolution? Did you know that the Earth is not flat? Do you have a high school diploma?
Yours truly,
William PhD
Why is it the champions of 'debunking' global warming are the political stooges of the oil companies. How is it that conservatives do not want to conserve natural resources, oh thats right $$$$$. Try a mental game call oil doomsday juice. America is addicted to doomsday juice, we can only produce about 50% of the juice we need and we are transerferring wealth internationally to get more juice from unstable regions of the world which gain political importance and power from having juice. There are ways to use less juice and get off the addiction, but its so profitable that those that sell the juice want to always have increasing production because whether the juice come from the homeland or we have to import it increase juice sales mean more profits. (this is why reagan dismantled carter's energy policies)
Ulitmately there is only so much juice in the world increasingly difficult to produce and it will one day run out, so it continues to go up in price. Also juice is so important that people buy and sell future orders of juice just to drive up the price on margins like pre depression stock buying. Like voting on tuesday (slow farm day) and long summer vacations for children (needed on farm and not sent to school inwarm weather) we drink lots of juice just because we always have. The people that sell the juice tell us that it is good and necessary even though there are other perhaps better things to drink.
Not that a small brained conservative will ever read this or ever get this far if they did, but we can remove CO2 from the discussion and realize its a matter of national security to get off the friggin juice. The sooner we are off the juice, the sooner iran and iraq become as inconsequential as ethopia, and our military which is half of our running deficit, the other have being the tax cuts brought about by the stool pigeon of the juice makers (bush tax cuts).
So without the military budget and without the bush tax cuts we would not have a budget deficit. Why are the children of the juice (paul ryan) suggesting we accelerate the two policies which exacerbate the deficit? Oh because the rich juice makers want more in a reckless persuit for more juice and money without regard to the cost, or the impact on society overall. This is the definition of a parasite, the rich are parasitic, not the poor.
The only cost they are worrying about is the cost of putting orange juice on the table of the children of the working poor. You know all the people that used to be unionized make enough to pay tax and have healthcare and pensions from their jobs. The very jobs the juice coalition raided to make even more money (see romney's fortune).
We've evicerated the working class, we blew up the economy and now we are blaming the poor for not making enough money to pay rent or buy food, while simultaneously having no regard for the earth from which we came. Any building more than a decade or so old is using almost twice the energy to heat and if its an air conditioner thats 15+ years old up to 10 times the electricity than is actually necessary to cool.
So it seems profits from juice are even more important than national security, this makes REPUBLICANS ENVIRONMENTAL TERRORISTS! NAZIS EVEN - no clean air for you hahahahahahaha
Hey, I noticed that one of the first pictures on this morning's show was attributed to "stormfront.org". That is a very well known white power site; I don't imagine you folks subscribe to this ideology and maybe you need to tell your interns to find better sources for your pictures.
It really doesn't have any impact on the particular picture, which is some generic green jobs pic, but it's not a great organization to give publicity to, and one your main demo (liberals/progressives) probably have a low opinion of.
Earthquakes associated with wells drilled for fracking water wast!
Great chart. "stabilization triangle" Easy to understand. Great job Chris. Clear clear clear. Cultural and social shift. "work with each other"
"many small things"
Chris, all I can say about Mr. Matz's comments is that there are even a few PhDs that believe in god so that degree is no assurance of knowledge outside one's field. However, it might not matter since using coal and Nat gas for power will likely be replaced soon. Read about the progress on LENR at e-catworld.com
It would just be so efficient and effective to prepare logically and methodically (creating the needed millions of jobs along the way) to stop contributing to global warming and make needed reforms as opposed to the much more expensive and haphazard, uncoordinated, reflexive, and temporary process of forced adjustments required by an Emergency Response.
Obtuse US corporations and current dysfunctional and conflicted Congress have created the Worst Management Team Ever.
Christie Todd Whitman lied her butt off about Reagan and climate change on UP! with Chris Hayes.
Whitman:
"It was Ronald Reagan who made climate change a regular part of the national security council discussions. He recognized that this was something that was going to impact the way we deploy our navy... that this was something we couldn't afford to ignore. And yet we hear that it is Republicans that hate climate..."
She never ever gave any credit to Jimmy Carter, or even said his name. She credited Nixon and Reagan as champions of the war against global climate change. And now for the truth:
/
The documentary "A Road Not Taken" chronicles the story of the 32 solar panels that President Jimmy Carter installed on the roof of the White House in 1979, the same solar panels President Ronald Reagan unceremoniously removed.
The documentary depicts the 1979 installation of the solar panels to heat water for the staff cafeteria at the White House as one of the most visible symbols of the energy policies of the Carter administration, which did more than any other before or since to promote the goals of alternative energy and conservation. And, for Carter, the dual causes of renewable energy and energy independence were always high on his agenda. In early February 1977, just two weeks into his presidency, Carter gave a national televised fireside chat, wearing a yellow wool sweater and promoting a national energy policy as a top priority for his administration.
Over the next four years, Carter turned this commitment into a multitude of programs and initiatives. Carter created the Department of Energy, taxed oil company profits, improved automobile fuel efficiency, invested heavily in the Solar Energy Research Institute (the precursor to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), cut America's oil imports in half, and increased U.S. use of renewable energy like solar power with a goal of generating 20 percent of all energy consumed in America from renewable sources by 2000.
Carter laid out a route for America's energy future that - while still needing traditional fossil fuels - promoted cleaner alternatives and conservation.
However, after Carter was out of the White House, President Reagan not only removed the solar panels from the roof, he systematically dismantled Carter's alternative energy and conservation initiatives. Reagan became the anti-Carter in almost every way on energy policy. Reagan slashed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's budget by 90 percent, halved the Energy Department's conservation and alternative fuels budget, eliminated the wind investment tax credit, reduced spending on solar photovoltaic research by two-thirds, slashed energy tax credits for homeowners, and reduced fuel-efficiency standards for cars.
Due largely to Reagan's policy reversals on alternative energy, the United States fell far short of Carter's goal of getting 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2000, achieving about only one-quarter of that target, even less than what Carter's policies had achieved by the early 1980s. In retrospect, it is clear that Reagan made reckless policy choices that had grave consequences for American energy security, for the environment and for the future survivability of life on planet Earth.
I remember Reagan saying that we didn't need renewable energy sources. He said all we had to do was turn loose the oil companies to charge whatever they wanted and do whatever they wanted and we would achieve energy independence through our own drilling. Even though we had already reached peak oil output by 1970.
Regan was a fool who reversed course on Carter's energy policy and is largely responsible for the mess we are in now. Yet Christie wants to make him out to be a champion of countering global climate change. Give me an effing break already! Talk about re-writing history.
Bob Hebert & Sam Seder both such excellent guests! Their knowledge is wide-ranging, and they bring complex insight tp bear in addressing the topic and engaging other guests in discussion and debate. Thanks for bringing in reasoning representatives from the right, this is the kind of discussion I have with my Republican relatives. Although I suspect this is how most left-right discussoions happen in families & communities, we NEVER seethe reasonable spectrum reflected anywhere else in the media. Refreshing!
Chris, while your segments were great on saturday you followed and allowed the same double speak spin, especially as to Witman, that everyone allows on climate change and global warming. Can't blame ya as you're young and didn't grow up in and into what we once were as a country but especially as to alternative and clean energy which would have brought about other innovations as to our environment. Witman kept mentioning her dear leader reagan, sorry but it All started with him. Carter not only had been talking about it but doing as to solar, think the white house, reagan along with the rest of the corporate special interests put a Stop to an industry we had started building, solar and wind, and the innovations that were already starting, right about the same time we started shipping our trades off shore. We were building and installing solar on homes etc, the excuses then were energy is cheap they were expensive, some forty years ago, I was installing or on projects where they were, then that was blocked. Today the meme's are. like Witman said, humans cause all of it, that isn't what's said, We Humans are causing the rush of change in the environment. Today's meme's are the denial of the reality, but more important by doing so a whole number of industries, or a number under one umbrella. Countries that once envied what we were building now have not only our once trades but the experienced workers of thus the innovations that come from and are moving rapidly away from us as to economic growth. It's about economic growth, clean growth, whether one believes in the reality of the damage we do or not!!!!!
There is extremely little private investment, free market supply side reagonomic capitalism, happening here, but going on oversea's, while public investments are constantly being blocked! This isn't my parents time, I grew up in and into till that new capitalism, where government and private worked almost hand in hand, still corruption in the private especially at that time, in rapid growth and sharing the profits of the labor!
“Chris, all I can say about Mr. Matz's comments is that there are even a few PhDs that believe in god so that degree is no assurance of knowledge outside one's field.” How true! I rather questioned having Christine Whitman on the show discussing the forthcoming catastrophic climate change caused by humans, overpopulation for one, which the ignoramus Republicans continue to deny. “Chris : calmeth down. Dont host as if on pheno-barbs ! When the guests start blabbing over each other, exert some AUTHORITY! Just say, "Hey, you > shut the fuk up. Someone else is talking." I agree, besides MSNBC has too many advertisements that interrupt intelligent discourse of the guests. I forget, did anyone mention the urgent need for human population control? I guess you could have had a representative from the Roman Catholic Church that condemns contraception and abortion in the illogical breath! However, enjoy the show and look forward to it on the weekends!
When I was a young man in college during the 1970s I saw in an instant how solar panels and electric cars could replace fossil fuels and was highly criticized by the head of the Engineering department for holding such views. Some people can just see these things and others have a hard time ever finding it at all. As recently as 2005 I was still having arguments on-line with engineering phds from UCLA that were bragging about how smart they were and that renewable energy would never work because it was too inefficient.
But renewable energy does work and as far as the lack of efficiency argument goes they are efficient enough and that’s all that matters. When the choice is I can stay with fossil fuels and become extinct or I can switch to not so efficient renewable energy and live well just not as efficiently, it seems obvious to me that the correct choice is you switch to renewable and put solar panels on every roof top.
Once installed, a solar panel will generate electricity for 25 to 30 years with very little maintenance. Gas engines need to be fed fuel constantly. Coal burning power plants need to be fed coal constantly. That needs to be factored into anyone’s argument.
And then here’s where the efficiency argument really falls apart. You need to consider the other costs of burning fossil fuels such as health care costs from using fossil fuel. Toxic, deadly, pollution is generated from burning fossil fuels that shorten life and kill people and food and wildlife. Oil spills are never really cleaned up but instead linger on for decades killing the food supply. Breathing highly toxic chemical dispersants is bad for everyone’s respiratory system. Exploding oil rigs at sea, exploding pipe-lines, kill people and pollute the environment.
Then consider that we are fighting wars that we probably would not be fighting if the Middle East was not oil rich. Then factor in all of the costs associated with war including weapons, deaths, taking care of the disabled and injured after the wars for the rest of their lives, expensive private contractors.
When you factor in all of these externalities then the big picture of fossil fuels starts looking pretty grim.
Even if you don't get climate change (your phd keeps getting in the way) you might be able to understand the safety, the energy independence, the foreverness (billions of years) of renewable energy versus the finite supply of fossil fuels which will run out.
There is a fundamental difference in the way Republicans see the world and react to it. The “True Believers” as Eric Hoffer called them, find it more important to fall in line behind their leader, their belief system, their general, and not be swayed by anyone or anything else, not even science, not even the facts. Loyalty to the cause is more important to the “True Believer” than anything else. If you are not loyal to the cause you are not a patriot, you are a traitor.
The “True believer” sees all issues as black and white and our country is never wrong. What determines right or wrong is loyalty to the cause, to the country.
This narrow world view acts as a filter that actively screens out any other truth there is in the world because it is not the truth that matters, what matters is being a true believer in the country, the party, the cause.
Many of us on the left have no belief in the one true religion; or the one true country; or the one true economic system. We like to think for ourselves, look at the facts, draw our own conclusions, make adjustments as needed. What is morally correct is what is best for all of the people all of the time and not some failed economic system.
Do we have a consensus here that Eli Lake is a total f--king wanker?
Hi Chris, love he show, good content, keep it up. you want to have some fun with Rachel check this out, I sent an e-mail to Rachel on May 25 2010 with an out line to close the oil well in the gulf and did not even get a response from her. After that I sent a white paper to the OilSpillSolutions@Hq.Doe.Gov on June 30 2010 and they used it on July 11 2010, the you tube video is Raw-video: BP places cap over leaking well. Then BP added the cap to close the well on July 13 2010. On July 14 2010 I received a e-mail saying that they didn't need it but I know they used it. All that matters is they closed the well. Keep it up.
Thanks so much for this show on climate change. There is far too little media attention to this crucially important topic. Please keep at it and keep asking how we can create change. I love your energy and concern.