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Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

by Andrew Karolitz Posted on June 28, 2013

Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

By John Upton

AAAARRRRGGGHHHH North Korea and nuclear bombs and other countries and stuff!!!!

Americans are less concerned about this climate change thing than other people around the world.

The Pew Research Group this week released the results of a worldwide survey of 37,653 residents of 39 countries, revealing that just 40 percent of Americans view global warming as a major threat to their country.

Across all countries surveyed, by comparison, 54 percent view global warming as a major threat. Concern was highest in Latin America and lowest in the U.S., with concern among Middle East residents nearly as low as those in America.

From the survey’s findings:

Concern about global climate change is particularly prevalent in Latin America, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asian/Pacific region, but majorities in Lebanon, Tunisia and Canada also say climate change is a major threat to their countries. In contrast, Americans are relatively unconcerned about global climate change. Four-in-ten say this poses a major threat to their nation, making Americans among the least concerned about this issue of the 39 publics surveyed, along with people in China, Czech Republic, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and Pakistan.

It’s not that Americans aren’t sitting around worrying about stuff. We’re plenty worried. But what’s keeping us up at night is Islamic extremist groups, nukes in North Korea and Iran, and the growth of China’s power and influence.

Here is a summary of the survey results:

Pew Research Global Attitudes Project

Click to embiggen.

Is it weird that we’re more worried about North Korea than about global climate change? Oh well, at least we’re more likely to fret about climate change than about America’s power and influence.

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Americans are more worried about North Korean nukes than climate change

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Sen. Reid proposes chopping $4 billion in oil subsidies to help the economy

by MayeskiLatouf679 Posted on January 30, 2013

Sen. Reid proposes chopping $4 billion in oil subsidies to help the economy

By Philip Bump

A bit of surprising news this morning: The economy actually shrank in the fourth quarter of 2012. It was only down by an annual rate of 0.1 percent, but it had been expected to grow by 1.1 percent. And it didn’t drop because of burdensome regulation or slow job growth. It dropped because of the Pentagon.

From The Washington Post:

[F]ederal defense spending fell at an astounding 22.2 percent annual rate in the quarter, which subtracted 1.28 percentage points from GDP growth. That was in part a reversal from the unusual 12.9 percent gain in the third quarter. But when the two quarters are averaged together, the defense sector was a drag on the economy in the second half of 2012 — and that’s before a “sequester” of automatic defense cuts goes into effect this year if Congress doesn’t act to avert it.

That “sequester” is the result of a poison pill that Congress administered to itself. Last year, knowing full well that Congress couldn’t be trusted to get anything done without some sort of threat hanging over its head, Congress decided to force Congress to act, passing a bill that created huge, automatic spending cuts unless Congress got its act together and figured out a budget package. Well, Congress was not smart enough to avoid Congress’ trap, so now those $1.2 trillion in budget cuts are slated to go into effect.

At the end of 2012, the Pentagon saw those cuts looming; this week, it announced 46,000 layoffs. If the full weight of the cuts go into effect, the damage to the economy could be severe.

Enter Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) with an idea. From Environment and Energy Daily:

Reid said Senate Democrats would discuss their plan to deal with the looming cuts known as “sequestration” at their party retreat next week. But during his weekly media briefing yesterday, he hinted that perennial efforts to eliminate tax preferences for oil and gas companies could offset some of the cuts. Rather than slash spending, Reid said Democrats were coalescing around an approach that would “pay for” the sequester with additional revenue. …

But Democrats in Congress and President Obama have previously proposed eliminating about $4 billion per year in permanent tax incentives claimed by the oil industry, such as the so-called Section 199 domestic manufacturing tax break and the “intangible drilling costs” deduction. The push has been expected to resume as part of this year’s budget battles.

The first thing I’ll note is that $4 billion is a little bit less than $1.2 trillion, so some other measures might need to be implemented. The second thing I’ll note is that cutting those tax incentives for the oil and gas industry is maybe the most obvious and theoretically simple budget cut that has ever existed in the history of this great Republic, and yet somehow, time after time, it doesn’t happen. I understand that members of Congress from both sides of the aisle would rather not antagonize a powerful and wealthy industry. But it’s so obviously the right decision and the arguments against it are so obviously weak — it will damage Exxon’s profits? it’s too small to make any difference? — that it’s utterly baffling that so little progress has been made.

Reid is tying two different issues together for the sake of playing politics. Allowing the sequester to move forward is a bad idea, as this morning’s numbers showed. Continuing to hand $4 billion in incentives to oil companies is a bad idea, as the entire recent history of the United States has shown. The proper course of action on both of these things is so obvious as to induce headaches.

Then, it is also obvious that writing massive cuts into law to try and force yourself to act on avoiding massive cuts is stupid. And so here we are.

Update: Right as we published this story, the White House piled onto the idea:

“The idea that you need to subsidize an industry that has enjoyed record profits — that taxpayers have to subsidize it — just doesn’t make sense in a time when we have to make choices about how best to use our resources,” White House spokesman Jay Carney said during a Wednesday news conference.

Making it more likely that an end to oil subsidies will be a negotiating chip for a unified Democratic push moving forward — as it has been before.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Sen. Reid proposes chopping $4 billion in oil subsidies to help the economy

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Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

by nension Posted on January 24, 2013

Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

By Philip Bump

Reuters / Danny Moloshok

This guy! We haven’t seen Robert Murray since around election time and, to be honest, we missed him. He’s the closest thing we’ve got in the 21st century to an evil 19th-century coal baron, hellbent on profit and laughing heartily at the misfortunes of the poor. He’s retro. That’s always fun.

Last time we heard from Murray was when he sent a prayer to his local West Virginia paper lamenting how the reelection of Barack Obama meant he had to fire a bunch of his staff. (Was it the staff that he docked a day’s pay to appear in a Romney ad? Was it the staff he forced to contribute to his political action fund? We may never know.) So, wiping away big fucking crocodile tears, Murray wrote these powerful words:

The American people have made their choice. They have decided that America must change its course, away from the principals of our Founders. And, away from the idea of individual freedom and individual responsibility. Away from capitalism, economic responsibility, and personal acceptance. …

Lord, please forgive me and anyone with me in Murray Energy Corp. for the decisions that we are now forced to make to preserve the very existence of any of the enterprises that you have helped us build.

Then: boom, pink slips, because Obama is killing coal and hates white people, probably. Boo-fucking-hoo, Robert Murray is so sad.

Anyway, here’s the update. From New Republic reporter Alec MacGillis:

I was surprised when I got reports from Ohio this week suggesting that operations at the Red Bird West mine, the one whose shutdown was announced with such fanfare last summer, are now picking up again. “It’s opened back up…they’re hiring people,” said Gary Parsons, a former superintendent at the mine who worked there for five years before being laid off with the announcement of the shutdown last summer. Parsons himself has not been called back, and is planning simply to retire early, but he said he had talked to several locals who were taking steps to get hired back on. He said he did not understand why, after the big headline-making closure last year, things were perking up at the mine. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “They said they was going to close the mine down.”

Another former Murray employee confirmed that operations were picking back up at Red Bird West. “They’ve called back some hourly folks. They’re definitely starting it back up,” the former employee said. What explained the reversal? This former employee conjectured that presidential campaign politics may have played a role. After all, announcing the shutdown of the mine a few months before Election Day was not helpful to Obama, who dearly needed to win Ohio. “In my opinion, it was all for politics,” the former Murray employee said. “It was just a show of politics to try to scare people, to get votes for [Murray’s] candidate…I felt they were playing politics from day one, and they certainly didn’t waste any time starting back up again.”

If this is true — and it would take as much for me to believe it is as it would take to convince me that I exist on this planet Earth — it’s almost admirable in its sheer, egregious shittiness. For all of the handwringing and wailing and moaning done by Obama opponents about how horrible he was making the economy and how doomed we would be if he won reelection (all while unemployment dropped and the Dow soared), it takes a special kind of scumbag to actually lay people off to prove your point. Much less to invoke the name of Jesus in doing so. Lord, please forgive Robert Murray for possibly closing a mine and firing people just so his massive investment in Mitt Romney might be substantiated.

When speaking to MacGillis, the company denied it was reopening the facility. However:

The only work going on at the mine, they said, was “reclamation” required as part of any shutdown. “We’re required to put things back together. We’re picking up some remnants of coal, some coal that was left over, as we clean up the place,” said Gary Broadbent, a senior attorney for the company. He said that there were 42 or 43 people at the mine doing this work, and while the work could go on for a few years, there would be no expansion at the mine, which at its peak employed more than 200 people. …

[T]he company’s current account would appear to be at variance with the announcement last summer, when Broadbent said that the mine would “gradually be closed through late September or early October,” with no mention of a possibly years-long reclamation project. After all, if the head count was really dropping from only 56 to 43, odds are the move would not have made the headlines it did.

Oh, and an addendum:

A former Murray employee in Utah informs me that people are being hired back at the Murray operations there, too, just a couple months after the big post-election layoffs. The former employee said about 25 had recently been hired back on. Murray officials demurred when asked about any uptick in activity at the Utah or Illinois mines where the post-election layoffs occurred. “I’m not intimately involved with the hiring or firing of employees,” said Broadbent.

Lord, when Robert Murray appears before you for his final judgment, feel free to use any and all information from Grist’s archive to make your decision. If you need me to appear as a witness, I will do so happily.

Sorry. Not when he appears before you. If.

Source

Is Obama’s Coal-Country Nemesis Hiring Again?, The New Republic

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Hey evil coal boss: Is it also Obama’s fault if you’re hiring workers back?

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