The answers (I won’t make you wait) are 100 and 98.  No statistically significant number of scientists deny the Earth is growing warmer.  About two percent deny humans are the cause.  Many of that minority are funded, directly or indirectly, by fossil fuel industries.

Kudos to presidential candidate Jon Huntsman, Jr. for saying at the Republican debate last night, “in order for the Republican Party to win, we can’t run from science.”  He probably wasn’t going to win the nomination in any case, so why spend the next six months pretending to live in La-La land?

Pollsters for the other Republican candidates could have told Mr. Huntsman that adhering to good science is bad politics.  A few hours before the debate, Kevin Drum reported in Mother Jones that most Americans don’t know that global warming science is a settled issue.  He cites the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication as saying that less than 20 percent of Americans know there is scientific consensus on global warming.  Reading that, I had unsettling flashbacks to the “Elvis is alive” mythconception so popular in the mid-80s.

We don’t need reminding in Vermont.  We’ve had two hundred-year floods since May.  The last one, courtesy of Hurricane Irene (Why Irene?  Why not Exxon? Or Cheney?), destroyed 700 homes and washed out hundreds of roads and bridges.

Such calamities are never welcome, but in this third year of massive recession and government budget shortfalls, this is a real economic gut punch to the state.  Inns are closed, festivals have been cancelled, leaf-peeping season – which despite its too-cute name, is extraordinarily important to the tourist economy – will undoubtedly suffer.  (It was shaping up to be a less-than-stellar display this year anyhow, as it is whenever the summer months are dry.  Ironic, isn’t it?)

We’re also an agricultural state and crops contaminated by floodwater are unsafe to consume for both humans and beasts.  That applies to acres of cattle feed and dozens of streamside community-supported-agriculture farms in this localvore-loving state.  The dairy farmers were late getting their crops into the fields and missed their first cut of hay because of heavy spring rains.  (Ironic again?  You’re goddamned right it is.)

Contractors were already hard-pressed to finish planned road construction projects before winter, now we have several hundred new projects that beg completion before the punishing blizzards arrive.  Given the extent of damage all along the East Coast, even if we had the money to bring in workers and equipment from out of state, I doubt they could be found.

This is what the much-scoffed-at-by-right-wing-politicians computer models predict for the northeast.  Warmer and wetter, but the wetter doesn’t happen in a steady, manageable fashion.  Huge spring deluges, then months of parched soil, then more deluges.

This flood was the last thing people need as they are laid off from their jobs, as they lose their houses.  If Bill Gates breaks his leg, he can afford the finest medical care and has a dozen gadgets to keep working as he sits on the couch.  When a low-income laborer breaks her or his leg, it’s a financial crisis – via medical bills and loss of work – which may push his or her family into poverty for years.  That’s how this flood feels in this state right now.  It’s frightening.  And yet a bunch of Republican millionaires stood on a stage last night and complained that poor people don’t pay enough taxes.

Most of those millionaires deny global warming (and evolution, but let’s leave that for another day).  Worse, perhaps because the media puts a climate skeptic in every “balanced” story, most Americans don’t know there is consensus on global warming and what causes it.

In 1944, as he watched the events he would soon turn into “1984,” George Orwell wrote, “One day there will be a big, careful, scientific enquiry into the extent to which propaganda is believed.”  Even George Orwell didn’t foresee that science would be one of propaganda’s victims.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

Pretty harsh, but a) probably true b) slagging off Arabs is still (regrettably) accepted in the US and c) Newsweek is a dying enterprise, what has it got to lose? The revolutionary virus is spreading to Egypt and Yemen and it looks as if 2011 may be a year of great change.

Not here, though. The order in this nation’s authoritarian regime remains unchallenged. The front page of Wednesday’s New York Times drove that message home.

“Financial Crisis Was Avoidable, Inquiry Finds,” read one headline. A federal panel charged with studying the 2008 financial meltdown reported that a combustible mixture of risk-taking and deceit by Wall Street and lax oversight by public officials, both Democrat and Republican led to the catastrophe.

Not we needed a federal commission to tell us that, but it’s always nice to have the obvious confirmed. What’s not nice is that many of the bozos who got us in this mess are still in charge and worse, there has been next to no action by the Congress to put back in place the regulations that were demolished in the run up to the crisis. The ones that had kept us out of turmoil for a half century.

On the other side of the page, “Sway of N.R.A. Blocks Studies, Scientists Say.” It’s practically the same story as the financial folly. In the wake of yet another semi-automatic killing spree, not only can better gun control laws be not be enacted, we can’t even have honest inquiry into the way Americans use guns.

Here in Vermont, a state legislator, taking note of a rash of teen handgun suicides, is proposing a bill to require law enforcement officials to determine how a gun was stored if said gun is used to kill or wound a person. Chance of passing: zero. Chance of even getting a hearing: zero. (You might think, “Wow. Even in Vermont,” but Vermont has some of the most lax gun laws in America.)

The third member of the unholy triumvirate – the oil companies – was absent from Wednesday’s page one, but the pattern’s there: 2008 – financial meltdown and no strengthening of financial laws; 2010 – massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and no strengthening of environmental laws or safety standards; 2011 – madman kills six, wounds 13 and no discussion even of strengthening gun laws.

Newsweek talks tough when it comes to decrepit Arab regimes, but the Mafia-style government here at home is far more robust and you won’t find an observation like that in the print or electronic pages of the major news media. It’s not all the fault of the media, though. No one here is marching in the streets, demanding change. We’re all waiting for the Super Bowl.

© Mark Floegel, 2011

What we had was a five-way contest for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. Our four-term (two-year terms) Republican governor is declining to run for re-election and anyone with ambition and a “D” after their name saw this as their opportunity. (Our congressional delegation consists of two Ds and a lefty I, none of whom is over 90, so no one expects those seats to open soon.)

A five-way primary campaign and everyone was so… nice. Perhaps it was a Canadian contagion; we are a border state. The rivers flow north, the manners head south. Debate after forum, the five limned policy differences so precise one had to be a wonk to appreciate the nuances. (“Oh and before I finish, I’d like to thank my fellow candidates for the great campaigns they’re running…”)

So, of course the national media didn’t pay attention. Where’s the conflict? Who’d care about that race? Vermonters, apparently. Despite moving the date of the primary from September to August for the first time (“Everyone’ll be on vacation!”), voter turnout exceeded all predictions. About 70,000 ballots cast. (“Seventy thousand? I had more people than that in my high school!” I know, I know, but it’s Vermont. We’re tiny.)

Election night served up a three-way tie, with the margin of less than 700 votes between first (Peter Shumlin) and third place (Deb Markowitz) finishers (less than 200 votes between the top two – Mr. Shumlin and Doug Racine). The lead among the top three shifted throughout the evening, allowing each victory party to boogie down, at least for a while.

Two days later, everyone’s still nice. The second and third place finishers have not conceded and are waiting until the vote is made official (probably early next week) before deciding to ask for a recount (as is their right). But it’s good, all five candidates appeared at a unity rally Wednesday, hugging and mugging for the cameras and although there were speeches plenty, none of the candidates took the mike. Political pantomime. When’s the last time you saw that?

The supposed beneficiary of all this neck-and-necking is the Republican candidate Brian Dubie, who’s been Lite Guv for the past eight years and unseen in public throughout the primary season. Although invited to participate in several of the debates with his Dem counterparts, he’s passed on every opportunity. He was to finally meet the Democratic nominee in debate tonight, but now that’s been postponed until 26 September. (Democrats in some form of disarray, Republicans hiding from the public and press – we have that in common with tea-party states.)

As Jimmy Breslin said of the ’62 Mets bullpen, I think he’s afraid to come out. I think the only way our Lite Gov could make his profile lower would be by transferring his residency to another state. The rare glimpse the public gets of his goings-on is when his campaign treasurer is forced to file a fiscal disclosure form, revealing Mr. Dubie is socking away gangs of cash. (He is, after all, Republican.) He was for a while running ads on the New York Times web site saying that Vermont is in 47th place among states friendly to business.

Not to harsh your mellow Brian, but

a) isn’t that what every Republican says about his or her state? (“We HAVE to stop being so mean to business! They paid for this ad!”)

b) ummm, you and your GOP overlord have been running state government for the last eight years. If things are that bad, ain’t it your fault?

c) as one of the Dems, I think it was Doug Racine, pointed out, the states Republicans think are “good for business” exploit their workers and trash their environments. There’s a reason we don’t live in Alabama and it’s not maple syrup. (Well, partially.)

So anyhow (cutting off the digression and getting back to the main point): conventional political wisdom is wrong. Vermont proves American politics don’t need name-calling, mud-slinging or outlandish costumes to engage voters. Multiple-candidate primaries don’t turn people off (although they may confuse them). The decline of decorum in American politics is not the fault of tee vee, it’s the fault of cynical political operators.

The bottom line is good news – we can act like adults if we choose to.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Our legislators all have other jobs – they’re farmers and business people, professors and attorneys. There’s a law on the books that says a person cannot be fired from his or her day job because she or he is attending to legislative duties. Wealthy professionals are over-represented in the Vermont legislature, but show me a legislature where they’re not. All in all, I think we do pretty well.

Still, I sense an unvoiced inferiority complex when it comes to our legislature. We have New York just to the west and Massachusetts to the south and while we all thank good fortune every day that we are not those states, there’s a certain junior varsity air to the whole undertaking.

So what? The point of a legislature is not offices and staffers or worse, to provide a space for lobbyists to hang out all the year through. The point is to make good government and then go home. That’s what the Vermont legislature does in 16 weeks (more or less) each year.

Yesterday, the Vermont Senate, on a vote of 26-4, became to first legislative body in America to close a nuclear power plant, Vermont Yankee, which is owned by the Entergy Corporation of New Orleans, Louisiana.

The plant, first opened in 1972, is scheduled to close in 2012. Entergy Louisiana, which bought Vermont Yankee in 2002, wanted the legislature to extend its permission to operate another 20 years.

The Louisiana folks have – to be honest – run the place into the ground. A cooling tower collapse, a transformer fire, a crane dropping high-level radioactive waste, missing fuel rods – it would be funny if it wasn’t tragic.

The latest fiasco has been leaks of tritium and cobalt-60 that Entergy cannot neither find nor plug for the last seven weeks. We do know the leak is from an underground pipe – a pipe Entergy Louisiana officials swore under oath did not exist.

Yesterday Curtis Hebert, new guy in Vermont (the old guy got sent on vacation after the leak) held a (sorta) press conference before the Senate met. He read a statement and refused to take questions. The statement said lawyers hired by Entergy to conduct an “independent internal investigation” found Entergy officials didn’t lie to regulators about the supposedly nonexistent leaky pipe. (Translation: “We’re not dishonest, we’re incompetent. Can we please keep running a nuke in your state?”)

The snow flew all through the day, heavy flakes that accumulated like wet cement. Town meeting, our annual exercise in direct democracy, is next Tuesday and we always seem to get a blizzard within a week of town meeting.

Inside the statehouse, a holiday atmosphere reigned. Some two hundred supporters of closing Vermont Yankee crowded the halls. Entergy Louisiana had trucked in 50 plant workers the day before, but none we present for the actual debate. Off looking for the leaks, I suppose. A public gallery runs the perimeter of the Senate chamber. Citizens sit so close, they can reach out and tap legislators on the shoulder.

Extra police officers were in the halls to help with crowd control, but environmental organizers kept everyone headed where they needed go. I saw one police officer cooing to a year-old baby who had a “Retire Vermont Yankee as Planned” sticker on her snugli. A delegation of Russian citizens on a cultural exchange passed through the crowd with their interpreter. Their eyes were wide in amazement. Doesn’t look like this back home, does it folks?

The final vote – 26 to 4 – is in keeping with conversations I’ve had with fellow Vermonters in the last few years. Most people know the time for nuclear power is past and look forward to a renewable energy future. A few people disagree, are dug in and put out that they constitute such a small minority. It’s OK, they’ll get over it. We’ll welcome them back. It’s Vermont, after all. We’ll be living together for the rest of our lives.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

Adrienne and I have lived in Vermont for 12 years, or for one-tenth of the recorded history of weather. The newspaper published a list of the 20 largest snowstorms in Burlington history. It’s reasonable to assume we have witnessed 10 percent of those storms, but that assumption would be incorrect. According to the National Weather Service, I have witnessed 65 percent – or seven – of Burlington’s 20 worst snowstorms.

What gives? Global warming. It’s counterintuitive to think of snowstorms and global warming in the same sentence, but the long-term forecast for this part of the world is warmer and wetter.

In Vermont’s traditional weather pattern (and by “traditional,” I mean the way things used to be), the six weeks from New Year’s Eve until St. Valentine’s Day were the window for sub-zero temperatures. “As the days lengthen, the cold strengthens,” was the post-solstice proverb, according to David Ludlum in The Vermont Weather Book, published in 1985. (I keep a copy on my bookshelf, for sentimental reasons.)

When we first moved here, I remember the temperature plummeting between Christmas and New Years and no one wanting to stand outside and watch the midnight fireworks.

This year, all through our record storm, the thermometer hovered between 15 and 30 degrees. Mercifully, it stayed closer to 20 than 30, which meant the prodigious amounts of snow I was manually shifting were light powder instead of heavy cake.

None of which is to say that it can’t be 20 or 30 in Vermont in January or that it still won’t be below zero for some or all of the next five weeks (or even beyond). No single storm or season should convince us of anything, but snow rarely falls in sub-zero weather. For one thing, the lack of clouds contributes to the piercing cold.

When I opened the paper to see that I’ve been here for 65 percent of Burlington’s worst winter storms, it doesn’t prove anything, but it does seem to be an indication that things are changing and quickly.

I did a quick search of these commentaries (because I can’t remember what I write from month to month). The last time I used the term “warmer and wetter” was in July of last year. Spring and early summer had been all but washed out. It stayed that way through the end of July. August was the only bit of summer we got last year. “Global warming – hogwash!” some of my neighbors scoffed, just as they did last week, up to their hips in snow.

You’re free to believe or not believe, act or remain inert, as you see fit. I once heard a woman say to a Buddhist, “I don’t believe in reincarnation.” He answered, “Reincarnation either exists or it doesn’t, what you and I believe has nothing to do with it.”

Same goes for global warming, with an important exception. Unlike reincarnation (which may or may not exist), if global warming exists (and I believe it does), it is we who have brought it into existence and it is we who will determine its severity. Some scientists doubt the existence of global warming. Some scientists doubt the existence of evolution. The proportion of doubting scientists in each case in is infinitesimally small.

For now, I will enjoy the snow and the winter. I am a child of the north and having spent a decade of my life away, I have an appreciation of it, especially the profound silence of the two-day blizzard. I promise myself to wear winter like a cloak and savor it as it passes away.

© Mark Floegel, 2010

The sun was shining through the weekend, so farmers followed the adage and made hay. Global warming models show the northeast getting warmer and wetter, which is a better fate than the drought modeled for much of the continental U.S. Still, it will take some adjusting. As good a growing season as this has been, it’s been lousy for hay. Farmers lost a cut because it was too wet to bring it in and so it rotted in the fields.

Some fight back with technology. There’s a baling technique that will supposedly allow farmers to bale wet hay in plastic. If you live in the country and see those things in fields that look like overgrown marshmallows, they’re hay in plastic bales. The idea is that the plastic creates an anaerobic (i.e. “no oxygen”) environment, which means even wet hay won’t rot. Supposedly.

Problem is, the global warming model also means more hailstorms in the northeast and the hail punctures the plastic and there goes your anaerobic environment. Bottom line, literally, is that hay is selling for four dollars a bale this summer, up from two dollars a bale last year.

The price of hay isn’t making headlines in Vermont, but the price of heating oil is. Most people in Vermont heat their houses with heating oil. (Only two of our 14 counties have access to natural gas.) Most people sign their annual contracts for heating oil in July, when the price is at its annual low. This July, the price of heating oil is around five dollars a gallon. The average home uses 800 gallons each winter. That’s $4,000 to heat your home from late October to late April (if you’re lucky).

New England states received $313 million in federal aid for heating last winter and will ask for one billion dollars for this winter. (Meanwhile, the feds are bailing out the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac mortgage companies to the tune of $75 billion. Oh, and John McCain’s going to balance the budget by 2012, but he doesn’t say how.)

In other news relating to meaningless promises, the leaders of the industrialized world met at the G-8 summit in Japan and promised to cut global greenhouse emissions in half by 2050. The first notable aspect of this promise is that by 2050 not only will all those people be put of office, but in the grave for 15 or 20 years. One can almost hear them mocking us from the great beyond.

The other interesting feature of the promise is that the “leaders” never defined the “whole” that the “half” will be measured by. By 2050, they promised to cut emissions “in half.” Half of what? This year’s emissions? Or half of 1990 emissions, which is the base year the Kyoto process has been working with?

James Hansen, director of science at NASA and one of the few honest people in the federal government who still manage to find access to the news media, was in Japan too. He brought along a presentation on where we stand in relation to global warming with some of the most recent data available anywhere. (You can see it here and read a letter from Dr. Hansen to Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda here.)

Dr. Hansen, who probably knows more about global warming than anyone on Earth, warned we have 10 years to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. By “worst consequences,” he means before we start a worldwide planetary chain reaction we can’t stop. He gave us the warning two years ago and since then, we’ve only managed to make things worse.

We have eight years left. Coincidentally, the next eight years span two presidential terms of office. Much is made in the news about the choices we face this election year. The choice we make will determine what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan. The choice we make will determine tax policy and the size and shape of the deficit. The choice we make will determine the composition of the Supreme Court.

Try this on for size: The choice we make will determine if our species survives.

© Mark Floegel, 2008