Madison, WI city council adopts plan to cut carbon emissions by 80 percent over the next 35 years. Madison would also cut energy consumption overall by half in 15 years and get a quarter of its power from renewables in 10 years. Thus Madison exemplifies the putatively conservative values of responsibility, accountability, and local rule -- but the question on my mind is, how will the allegedly-conservative Gov. Walker try to undermine this project? Will he insist on dedicating even more state funding to investigating "wind turbine syndrome," perhaps?
In a related note, Los Angeles city council mulls a bill that would mandate that the municipal electric utility figure out how to get to 100 percent renewable power. A big job in a bigger city than Madison, but the L.A. Dept. of Water and Power has already begun work on that task, which is a good sign. I have heard, also, that southern California is very sunny, and is also near the largest ocean in the world. There might be a few renewable energy ideas in there somewhere -- and no Scott Walker around to try to gum up the works.
Michael Stein, writing at TruthOut, describes the trials and tribulations of the Louisiana shrimping industry. Having lately fought through Hurricane Katrina and the Spillageddon in the Gulf, Louisiana shrimpers now find themselves competing with cheaper foreign imports. Odd that Louisiana's politicians don't find this a reason to battle both "free" trade deals that enable all this dumping and embrace the vigorous food safety regulations that would turn cheap shrimp away at the port. And Jesus Mary and Joseph let's all stop pretending that Donald Trump really opposes "free" trade. If he wins, he'll do whatever Our Glorious Elites want him to do, and he'll forget all his supporters in the shrimping communities.
Noting that what Presidents say is fairly important to Americans, Mitt Romney says a Donald Trump Presidency would bring us "trickle down racism and trickle down bigotry and trickle down misogyny." Mr. Romney is approximately 100 percent right about all of that -- Barack Obama made gay marriage more palatable to Americans merely by discussing his change of heart about it, just as George W. Bush before him made climate change denialism mainstream -- but Mr. Romney's statements still fit in too snugly with Republican establishment policy that would, at best, be inadvertently racist, and at worst be aggressively racist without being so gauche as to be so obvious about it like Mr. Trump is.
Finally, Oxford, MS native Jake McGraw writes about how folks should really go about "changing Mississippi." He argues that what works in other states -- like boycotts by celebrities, state governments, athletic organizations, and corporations -- won't work in Mississippi because it's "among the most economically and socially isolated states in the country" and it's "still dominated by small communities and big families," which means the state "simply doesn’t have enough to lose." Thus, he tells us, the only activism that has ever changed Mississippi comes from folks willing to actually go there and work on the ground. I suspect all of that is true -- and I also believe a certain amount of shame and shunning is our duty as Americans.
Comments