Salem Political Snark

Salem needs to get past "blah, blah, blah" about climate change

As 2022 draws to a close, I'm hoping that 2023 is when Salem's city officials get past what climate activist Greta Thunberg calls the "blah, blah, blah" approach to reducing the world's greenhouse gas pollution.

Meaning, lots of talk, very little action.

The Salem City Council has passed a Climate Action Plan. It includes these goals:

• By 2035, GHG Salem emissions shall be reduced to 50 percent of the citywide greenhouse gas emissions for the baseline year of 2016, and
• By 2050, Salem should be carbon neutral.

But the Climate Action Plan isn't being taken seriously by city staff and the City Council. We're still in the "blah, blah, blah" stage. Lots of talk, very little action. 

For example, there's an effort underway to bring commercial air service back to the Salem airport, even though this has been tried several times with no success. 

Since air travel is one of the worst things people can do, greenhouse gas pollution-wise, the notion of bringing commercial air service to Salem should have been rejected by city officials as soon as it was raised.

But no, this bad idea is stumbling onward. Fortunately, our local 350.org chapter has started a petition, Oppose Costly and Polluting Commercial Air Service in Salem. I urge you to sign it. It'll just take a minute or two.

In the November 28, 2022 issue of The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert has a terrific story, "A Vast Experiment: The Climate Crisis from A to Z." The theme of the letter "B" is blah, blah, blah. Here's what Kolbert said:

On September 28, 2021, at the Youth4Climate conference, held in Milan, Greta Thunberg took the stage. Sitting near her was the city’s mayor, Giuseppe Sala, wearing a mask. Thunberg, who is five feet tall, could barely be seen over the lectern. She had removed her mask and was smiling.

“Climate change is not only a threat, it is above all an opportunity to create a healthier, greener, and cleaner planet which will benefit all of us,” she began. “We must seize this opportunity—we can achieve a win-win in both ecological conservation and high-quality development. . . . We need to walk the talk; if we do this together, we can do this.

“When I say ‘climate change,’ what do you think of?” she went on. “I think of jobs—green jobs.” This received a round of applause.

“We must find a smooth transition towards a low-carbon economy,” Thunberg said. “There is no Planet B. There is no Planet Blah—blah, blah, blah; blah, blah, blah.” Her listeners, including Sala, started to realize that they’d been had. The applause died down.

“Build Back Better—blah, blah, blah,” Thunberg continued.

“Green economy—blah, blah, blah.

“Net zero by 2050—blah, blah, blah.

“Net zero—blah, blah, blah.

“Climate neutral—blah, blah, blah.

“This is all we hear from our so-called leaders: words—words that sound great, but so far have led to no action,” Thunberg said. “Of course we need constructive dialogue, but they’ve now had thirty years of blah, blah, blah, and where has that led us?”

It was thirty years ago that the world’s “so-called leaders” gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the so-called Earth Summit. Everyone agreed that radical change was needed. To avert disaster, global CO₂ emissions, which were then running at around twenty-two billion metric tons a year, would have to be reduced, eventually almost to zero. How this would happen, no one really knew. Still, the goal of preventing “dangerous” warming was enshrined in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which President George H. W. Bush cheerfully signed.

“Some find the challenges ahead overwhelming,” Bush said. “I believe that their pessimism is unfounded.”

A follow-up conference of the parties, or cop, took place in Kyoto in 1997. By then, annual global emissions had risen to twenty-four billion tons. After much back-and-forth, it was agreed that something had to be done. The Kyoto Protocol, an addendum to the Framework Convention, laid out specific emissions-reduction targets for countries to meet.

“I am both determined and optimistic that we can succeed,” Vice-President Al Gore told the diplomats gathered in Japan.

After Kyoto, global emissions kept on rising, only faster. By 2009, they’d climbed to thirty-two billion tons a year. That fall, President Barack Obama flew to Copenhagen for yet another conference of the parties—cop15. “I believe that we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of this common threat,” he declared.

By 2015, emissions had increased to thirty-five billion tons a year. At that year’s cop—No. 21—held in Paris, it was decided that, at last, really and truly, it was time to get serious. “The decisions you make here will reverberate down through the ages,” the United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, told the delegates. Nevertheless, emissions continued to rise. In the past thirty years, humans have added as much CO₂ to the atmosphere as they did in the previous thirty thousand.

At some point during all the “blah, blah, blah”-ing—it’s hard to say when, exactly—climate change ceased to be a prospective problem and became a clear and present one. Since Rio, the Arctic ice cap has shrunk by two-fifths. Greenland has shed some four trillion metric tons of ice, and mountain glaciers have lost six trillion tons. Heat waves are now hotter, droughts deeper, and storms more intense. In some parts of the world, the wildfire season never ends.

One conclusion to draw from this pattern is that the world isn’t going to avoid “dangerous” warming. Global leaders will continue to gather at cops—this year’s, in Sharm el-Sheikh, just concluded—and to speak loftily about “net zero” and “a low-carbon economy.” But nothing will change, and, as a result, everything will change. There will be large-scale crop failures. The Greenland ice sheet will start to collapse—it may already be collapsing—and, owing to sea-level rise in some places and desertification in others, large swaths of the globe will become uninhabitable.

This conclusion is not, however, the one that Thunberg chose to draw when she spoke at the Youth4Climate conference. “Right now we are still very much speeding in the wrong direction,” she told the crowd in Milan. “But, of course, we can still turn this around—it is entirely possible.

“The leaders like to say, ‘We can do this,’ ” she went on. “They obviously don’t mean it, but we do—we can do this. I’m absolutely convinced that we can.”

Or, as Thunberg might put it, Blah, blah, blah.

If a Democratic president acted like Trump, how would liberals react?

Today the January 6 committee held its final meeting to lay out criminal referrals to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. 

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol accused former President Donald J. Trump on Monday of inciting insurrection, conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an act of Congress and one other federal crime as it referred him to the Justice Department for potential prosecution.

The action, the first time in American history that Congress has referred a former president for criminal prosecution, is the coda to the committee’s 18-month investigation into Mr. Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election that culminated in a violent mob of the former president’s supporters laying siege to the Capitol.

The criminal referrals were a major escalation for a congressional investigation that is the most significant in a generation. The panel named five other Trump allies — Mark Meadows, his final chief of staff, and the lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Kenneth Chesebro — as potential co-conspirators with Mr. Trump in actions the committee said warranted Justice Department investigation. The charges, including a fourth for Mr. Trump of conspiracy to make a false statement, would carry prison sentences, some of them lengthy, if federal prosecutors chose to pursue them.

The committee’s referrals do not carry legal weight or compel any action by the Justice Department, which is conducting its own investigation into Jan. 6 and the actions of Mr. Trump and his allies leading up to the attack. But the referrals sent a powerful signal that a bipartisan committee of Congress believes the former president committed crimes.

Clearly this is a historic moment. As the above excerpt from a New York Times story says, never before has Congress referred a former president for criminal prosecution. Such didn't happen even with Nixon after his Watergate scandal was revealed. So says a TIME magazine story.

No congressional committee ever issued a criminal referral to the Department of Justice for Nixon. Rather, the reverse occurred, as Leon Jaworski, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating Nixon, sent Congress a “roadmap” laying out evidence of criminal violations Nixon was believed to have committed including bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Because Nixon was a sitting president, Jaworski initially believed it made more sense for Congress to move forward with impeachment proceedings, than trying to prosecute Nixon in a court of law. Facing impeachment in the House, cratering support from his fellow Republicans, and looming criminal charges from a grand jury, Nixon resigned from office before facing prosecution.

So two Republican presidents have come closest to being prosecuted for crimes committed during their time in the White House. Nixon found little support from fellow Republicans, while Trump still enjoys considerable support from his base, though it is steadily slipping.

The question of how Democrats would respond to a Democratic president being credibly accused of crimes as bad as those committed by Trump interests me. 

My wife, a Democrat like me, believes that members of our political party wouldn't stand for the outrageous behavior that Trump engaged in during his four years in office (thank heavens it wasn't eight).

Laurel thinks that Democrats care more about ethics than Republicans, who are more prone to being concerned about maintaining power in the sense of "ends justify the means." In large part I agree with her. 

Republicans do appear to fall in line behind a leader more than Democrats do. This makes them vulnerable to a malevolent leader like Donald Trump who has been able to maintain much of his base in the Republican Party even as evidence of his numerous crimes accumulates.

My own view is a bit less confident in the willingness of Democrats to hold a Democratic president accountable for serious wrongdoing while in office. (Compared to Trump, I don't see what Bill Clinton did to be anywhere near as serious.)

I do believe that a Trumpian candidate wouldn't make it very far in Democratic presidential primaries. Democrats care about ethics. They also care about electability. I suspect that this would prevent a Trump-like Democrat from ever becoming president.

But if he or she did, another factor would come into play, the same one that helped Trump remain popular among Republicans during his time in office: producing results. 

I try to imagine how I'd react if a Democratic president had managed to get several liberal Supreme Court justices confirmed; passed major legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ban assault weapons, increase taxes on billionaires, make Puerto Rico and the D.C. states, and other Democratic priorities -- then was enmeshed in a major scandal.

Would I be more willing to overlook the scandal because of all the good the Democratic president had ben able to accomplish? Sure, I would. And I think lots of other Democrats would feel the same way.

Thus while I'm fine with being critical of Republicans who stand by Trump no matter what horrible things he does, I have to admit that while I'd never be OK with a Democrat who acted just as badly, I'd overlook some ethical failings if that leader was able to produce significant benefits for the nation. 

Which means I can't be totally holier-than-thou when it comes to Republicans defending Trump, though I am confident that I'd be less willing to go along with a Democrat doing everything Trump did while in office.

We must keep supporting Ukraine, says Nicholas Kristof

This isn't the cheeriest time in Oregon. It's cold. We're approaching the shortest day of the year, so it's dark a lot.

But imagine that a malevolent foreign power who wants to make Oregon part of their country was attacking our electricity infrastructure with missiles and drones, causing our state to suffer massive electrical blackouts in winter.

And those attacks keep happening. As soon as we make repairs and get the lights and heat on again, the foreign power strikes another time, plunging a large share of Oregon's population back into cold and darkness.

Oh, and to make matters worse, that foreign power isn't only attacking civilian areas from afar. It first invaded Oregon eight years ago and has been fighting to take more of our territory ever since -- committing horrendous war crimes such as torture, rape, bombing of hospitals and schools.

What I just described is only imagination for Oregon. But it's reality in Ukraine. 

Nicholas Kristof, after unsuccessfully attempting to run for Oregon governor this year, has returned to his job at the New York Times as a columnist. Yesterday the Times published a great piece by Kristof, Are We in the West Weaker Than Ukrainians?
Download Opinion | Are We in the West Weaker Than Ukrainians? - The New York Times

I highly recommend that you read the whole column, especially if you have some doubts that the United States should continue supporting Ukraine in its fight against Putin's Russia invasion. Here's some excerpts.

“We will beat the Ukrainian out of you so that you love Russia,” a Russian interrogator told one torture survivor I spoke to in Ukraine, before he whipped her and raped her. That seems a pretty good summation of Vladimir Putin’s strategy.

It isn’t working in Ukraine, where Putin’s atrocities seem to be bolstering the will to fight back. That brave woman triumphed over her interrogators, albeit at horrific personal cost.

But I worry that we in the West are made of weaker stuff. Some of the most momentous decisions the United States will make in the coming months involve the level of support we will provide Ukraine, and I’ve had pushback from some readers who think President Biden is making a terrible mistake by resolutely helping Ukraine repel Russia.

...The fundamental misconception among many congressional Republicans (and some progressives on the left) is that we’re doing Ukraine a favor by sending it weapons. Not so. We are holding Ukraine’s coat as it is sacrificing lives and infrastructure in ways that benefit us, by degrading Russia’s military threat to NATO and Western Europe — and thus to us.

“They’re doing us a favor; they’re fighting our fight,” Wesley Clark, the retired American general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. “The fight in Ukraine is a fight about the future of the international community.”

If the war ends in a way favorable to Russia, he argues, it will be a world less safe for Americans. One lesson the world would absorb would be the paramount importance of possessing nuclear weapons, for Ukraine was invaded after it gave up its nuclear arsenal in the 1990s — and Russia’s nuclear warheads today prevent a stronger Western military response.

“If Ukraine falls, there will certainly be a wave of nuclear proliferation,” Clark warned.

For years, military strategists have feared a Russian incursion into Estonia that would challenge NATO and cost lives of American troops. Ukrainians are weakening Russia’s forces so as to reduce that risk.

More broadly, perhaps the single greatest threat to world peace in the coming decade is the risk of a conflict in the Taiwan Strait that escalates into a war between America and China. To reduce that danger, we should help Taiwan build up its deterrent capacity — but perhaps the simplest way to reduce the likelihood of Xi Jinping acting aggressively is to stand united against Russia’s invasion. If the West falters and allows Putin to win in Ukraine, Xi will feel greater confidence that he can win in Taiwan.

...In arguing for the West to stand with Ukraine, I’ve emphasized our national interest in doing so. But we have values at stake as well as interests, for there is also a moral question to face.

When one nation invades a neighbor and commits murder, pillage and rape, when it traffics in thousands of children, when it pulverizes the electrical grid to make civilians freeze in winter — in such a blizzard of likely war crimes, neutrality is not the high ground.

Let’s not let Russia beat the Ukrainian out of us: The world could use a spinal transplant from brave Ukrainians.

Raphael Warnock for president. Someday.

It was quite a night for political aficionados like me yesterday.

I settled in to watch MSNBC's coverage of the Georgia runoff election between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker around 5 pm. Between then and 8:30 or so, when the Senate race was called in favor of Warnock, I went through a bunch of ups and downs until the final Big Up.

I'm resisting talking about the lead changing hands, because this is an inaccurate way of describing what happened. 

An election night isn't like a football game where the outcome is uncertain as the teams each score in an unpredictable fashion. The election result is decided once the polls close. All that remains is the counting of votes.

In this case, Warnock jumped out to an early lead because early voting and absentee ballots were counted first. Then Walker took the lead as lots of smallish conservative counties released their results. And just as in previous Georgia elections, Warnock ended up victorious when votes from the large Atlanta-area counties were counted.

I felt really good when MSNBC, along with CNN and Fox, called the race for Warnock. It would have been horrible if Walker had won. Herschel Walker was a great football player. He was a disastrous Senate candidate.

Walker was one of the least qualified people to ever run for the Senate. Aside from the fact that he had zero political experience, Walker lied incessantly, was ignorant of basic facts about the world, almost certainly paid for at least two abortions even though he claimed to be pro-life, and was accused of violence against women.

So it says a lot about the dismal state of the Republican Party that even with all of his failings, Walker still got almost 49% of the vote. 

Given what a strong candidate Raphael Warnock was, Walker should have been trounced. But tribalism runs strong in the Republican Party.

And I have to admit that while Democrats aren't nearly as inclined to support a deeply flawed candidate, if my party put forward someone with credentials as bad as Walker's, and electing that person would markedly help the Democratic agenda, I'd be tempted to vote for them.

Fortunately, Warnock came out on top. I left the TV on so I could watch his victory speech. (Shared below via You Tube.) 

Wow, really impressive. Raphael Warnock is a preacher, so it isn't surprising that he speaks well. But both what he said and how he said it went way beyond "well." We're talking Obama-level speechifying here. Warnock can even sound a lot like Obama in his cadence and tone of voice.

As an atheist, I'm not wild about winning candidates who praise God in their victory speech. Seems like they should also praise God if they lose, which I bet happens only rarely. Warnock spoke, if I recall correctly, about everybody having a spark of the divine in them. 

But then he said something like, "If those words don't appeal to you, that's fine; we've got a big tent." And pleasingly, said that another way of putting it is that everybody has value. Nice. This showed me that while Warnock is deeply religious, he recognizes that we live in a pluralistic society where Christianity is just one of many options, including no religious belief at all.

It's hard to see Warnock being a presidential candidate in 2024, since he was just elected to a full six year Senate term. (Yet didn't Obama serve only two years in the Senate?) I can easily see him as a candidate in 2028 or later, though. He sure seems to have a bright political future ahead of him.

Here's his victory speech.

Peter Fernandez' retirement is good news for Salem

Peter Fernandez, the thoroughly sleazy Public Works Director for the City of Salem, announced he's retiring effective January 6, 2023. 

This is cause for joy among those of us who follow goings-on at City Hall closely enough to be aware of what a disaster Fernandez has been during the fifteen years Salem has had to put up with his lies, dissembling, and poor decisions.

It's remarkable that Fernandez wasn't fired long ago, given how poorly he's performed as Public Works Director. This shows that Salem is willing to put up with a lot of crap, so long as the crap-producer is part of the Good Old Boys/Girls Network.

Hopefully the new City Manager, Keith Stahley, will hire a replacement for Fernandez who is much better suited for the job -- ideally someone who isn't now a Public Works manager, since those people have the stench of Fernandez associated with them.

From what I've said so far, does it sound like I can't stand Peter Fernandez? I sure hope so, since that's exactly how I feel.

Here's nine blog posts that I've written about Fernandez' failings. The first one set the stage for my subsequent criticisms of Fernandez, so I'll share a fairly lengthy excerpt from that post.

Sad stump with flower memorial to needless killing of this U.S. Bank tree

(1) Outrage: the true story of Salem's U.S. Bank tree killings

This is a case study of how city government shouldn't work. 

Here the Public Works Director, Peter Fernandez, ignored the law, facts, expert advice, advisory committee recommendations, and lots of public testimony so he could keep a back-room verbal promise to the U.S. Bank president, Ryan Allbritton, to cut the five large, healthy, beautiful trees down. 

The extra-legal promise itself is bad enough. Worse, Fernandez made that promise two years before the bank started the required process of filing an application to remove the trees. 

Even so, Public Works Director Fernandez was all set to order that the trees be pruned, rather than removed, until bank president Allbritton reminded him of that "just between us" deal they'd made together. It didn't matter that Albritton was unable to give a single coherent reason why the trees needed to be killed.

After Fernandez spoke with the bank president, everything changed. 

Allbritton got an unusual second chance to argue his extremely flimsy tree-killing case. He lobbied city councilors, who weren't bothered by Allbritton's mention of the verbal promise.

Maybe because this is the way the City of Salem habitually does things under its current leadership -- working out deals with special interests behind the scenes, then going through a show of holding public hearings and issuing a formal decision.

Like I say throughout the report, outrageous. There's more juicy details in the 18 pages, of course.

Download Outrage - Salem's U.S. Bank tree killings

The report includes an opinion letter from my land use and environmental law attorney which demolishes (1) Public Works Director Fernandez' false claim that he was obligated by an ordinance to allow the trees to be cut down, and (2) the repeated inaccurate assertion by City staff that Fernandez' decision couldn't be appealed. 

(2) Why Salem's Public Works Director should be fired

(3) City Manager is OK with a developer illegally removing trees

(4) Salem City Council bamboozled by staff on Taybin Road property purchase

(5) Neighborhood association criticizes city officials for not enforcing tree ordinance

(6) City official issues tree removal permit 105 days after they were cut down

(7) Shady stuff associated with Salem City Council agenda item

(8) Devastating critique of Salem's Urban Forester program by a job applicant

(9) Key questions remain about Salem's botched response to toxic algae water problem