Pelosi turns on Harris, low key

 Like everyone else, Nancy Pelosi is looking for reasons for why the Democrats lost the election.  Her preferred candidate seems to be Kamala Harris, though she disguises this by making it look like she is swiping at Joe Biden:

“We live with what happened,” Pelosi said.

Pelosi was speaking to the Interview, a New York Times podcast, in a conversation the newspaper said would be published Saturday in full. 

“Had the president gotten out sooner,” Pelosi remarked, “there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. 

“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

Note, "there may have been other candidates in the race" - in other words, the Democrats were lumped with a useless candidate who klutzed her way to defeat.

Nope, Nancy.  The blame needs to be shared about more equally.  If Biden shouldn't have been in the race, he should have bene told that long before the disastrous debate.  The damage was done in those months before, where the upper echelons of the Democratic Party were trying to cover up Biden's mental decline.  And 'upper echelons' definitely includes you, Nance.  

Stop trying to distract us by pointing at Harris.

I should probably have blogged a bit more over the last four or five years.  Might have got more people thinking right.  The world really seems to have gone to shit since I went on hiatus.

Electoral Disfunction

I know it may seem an odd and obvious thing to break a year's worth of radio silence over, but how come the British Conservative Party MPs (and to be fair, the Labour Labour Party, when they have their leadership shenanigans) get to use a different and better way electoral process than the British people use for choosing MPs? 

Instead of a 'winner' takes all system, where whoever get the most votes in a single ballot, no matter how miniscule that total is, they get to use a series of run offs, with a dwindling pool of candidates - effectively Alternative Vote.

(To answer the question posed in the opening paragraph - the British electorate had a referendum on Alternative Vote a few years back and rejected it because they were uncomfortable with counting to five.  Which begs the question(s) - first, have they changed their mind now 63% of MPs represent Labour, based on a feeble 33% of the vote - the most unrepresentative result in British electoral history?  And second, if the answer to the preceding is "No" - can we take that as an admission they think their MPs are just lots cleverer than the British people? )

Had MPs been required to use the same antiquated, nonsensical First Past The Post as the rest of us, Robert Jenrick would have elected leader quite some time ago, based on a whopping 23.7% of the vote; or if they had continued the idiosyncratic "Members get to choose from the final two" concept, the options would have been Jenrick or Badenoch - a very grim choice for anyone who isn't outright bonkers.

Unsurprising

 From the Guardian:

The Observer understands that as well as backing away from its £28bn a year commitment on green investment (while sticking to the overall drive to achieve clean energy by 2030), Labour will not seek to legislate on the creation of a new national care service in its first king’s speech.

Instead, it will focus on a fair pay agreement for care workers as well as issues of recruitment and retention, as part of a wider workers’ rights bill. Its plans for a complete overhaul of social care will, however, be presented as a longer-term mission taking at least 10 years and two parliaments.

In addition, despite Keir Starmer’s previous promises to abolish the Lords in a first term, it is expected to commit only to limited changes. This is likely to mean legislating only for the abolition of the remaining 91 hereditary peers.

Starmer appears to be on a mission to underwhelm and disappoint our (already very low) expectations.

Keir Starmer's abstract thinking

The grey man of British politics ... Original picture, ITV News

Anushka Asthana has written a generally favourable profile of Keir Starmer in the Guardian.  It is lightweight stuff, pandering to the typical Guardianista, though reading between the lines one can - perhaps - detect Asthana's frustration at the weak porridge Starmer serves up.

This, in particular, stuck out:

For many, growth is a longer-term solution, so what about other more immediate choices, such as taxing people’s wealth? I turned back to Blair, reading this quote: “It’s not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money.” Did he disagree with that?

“No,” Starmer responded without hesitation about Beckham or a similarly rich footballer today. “I don’t disagree with that.”

But if you are prime minister, I went on, would you want to take more money from the super-rich (non-doms aside) and redistribute it to the poorest? Again, a “no”, without hesitation. “That isn’t how I want to grow the economy.”

Starmer argued that while, of course, Labour believes in redistribution: “I don’t think redistribution is the sort of one-word answer for millions of people across the country”.

So what is his multi-word answer for those struggling millions?

Dignity and respect.  

I kid you not.

He spoke of the dignity and respect of skilled work. “So I’m afraid if it’s just redistribution, I think that fundamentally disrespects people.”

 So all Starmer has to offer the working class is ... abstract nouns.

Its barely disguised Thatcherism, with 'dignity' and 'respect' of 'skilled work' hinting at their evil twins - the undignified, unrespectable spectacle of unskilled work or - Heaven forbid - unemployment.   Politically, we're a cat's conscience away from the least dignified and most unrespectable part of society - Daily Mail caricatures of dole bludgers.  I suspect many people struggling to make ends meet will take the 'disrespectful' benefits of redistribution, Keir.

(It is no surprise that Peter Mandelson also appears, like some grisly revenant, shaking his chains and gibbering.)

Mandelson's influence on Starmer is manifest.  Asked about the Hartlepool byelection defeat Labour suffered under his leadership, he responds by invoking the 2019 General Election, rather explaining how his party lost a byelection in 2021:

“When the electorate reject you as badly as they did in 2019, you don’t look at the electorate and say: ‘What are you thinking?’ You look at yourself and change the party.”

While he makes the usual noises about the futility of opposition, he neglects the salient lesson.  The 'moderate' wing of the Labour Party squandered a brilliant opportunity after the 2017 General Election.  They couldn't bear the fact the membership wanted Corbyn as leader.  Applying his own logic for a moment, the electorate rejected the 'moderate' candidates twice.  Decisively.  But the anti-Corbyn faction (the party) didn't change.  They simply set out punish the membership for making the wrong choice.

Remember 1998?

You might recall 1998 was once the hottest year on record.  

This is literally what it was like in 1998.  I was there. 
Now EVERYTHING is on fire, all the time.

It held this distinction for several years.  Climate change deniers would point to it (starting in 1999) and say that, yeah, maybe there had been some warming but it had clearly stopped and now the world was cooling because, otherwise, why weren't the years after 1998 hotter?

They managed to keep this nonsense up until about 2005, which was either just marginally hotter or in a dead heat (pun intentional) with 1998.  then, they started it again with 2005 as the reference point.  Though the game became a bit repetitive and dull as every three or four years after than there was a new record.

Yeah, I used it in yesterday's post as well.  Fucking sue me.

With the (unsurprising) news just in that 2023 is the hottest year on record, it is worth taking a moment to reflect that every single one of the years in the Top 10 hottest years is one of the last ten years.  

I imagine it has been like this for a while, but I haven't been paying too much attention.  But every year from 2014 onwards is in the current Top Ten:

Ponder that for a moment.  The last ten years, every last one of them, have been hotter than every other year on the instrumental record.

2014 is, handily, and Number 10 and 2023, helpfully, at number 1 (with a very hot bullet); in between those two chronologically neat bookends, they are a bit jumbled up.  But the point is, every single one of the last ten years is there.  

Even the relatively chilly 2014 was hotter than every other year in that record.

There are sane conservatives

It's just that their political representatives are ideological fanatics, in thrall to the Fox News / News Max / Breitbart demographic, bought by big business or just willing to say and do anything to advance their careers.

They wouldn't be allowed to write it if it wasn't true.

From the Guardian's coverage of the less-than-thrilling debate between De Santis and Haley:

A question about climate change, and what each candidate is willing to do about it, has – as expected – yielded little useful information. 

DeSantis promised to tear up the “Biden’s green new deal” while Haley said she opposed “extremes” in policy and transitioned the conversation over to the topic of crime. 

Last summer, during the first Republican presidential debate, a pointed question from a young activist elicited slightly more interesting results. Alexander Diaz, a young conservative who is part of the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), a youth conservative group that pushes for action on the climate crisis, asked candidates what they would do to improve the party’s standing on climate policy. None of the candidates at that time raised their hands to affirm that climate change was real.

So, there you go.  Even though 2023 was just declared the hottest year on the instrumental record AND all the top ten years are the last ten years, one candidate wants to nix climate action just because a Democrat did it, and the other can't actually talk about it at all.  And neither is actually willing to say they think it is happening.

And the terrifying thing is they are both infinitely better options than the goon who (unless the courts save the Republican Party from its membership's atavistic urges) is back to his favourite trick of implying people he doesn't like aren't proper Americans.

We're screwed

 ... The only question is, how badly.

2023 was the hottest year on record, 1.48C above the pre-Industrial Revolution average.

The planet was 1.48C hotter in 2023 compared with the period before the mass burning of fossil fuels ignited the climate crisis. The figure is very close to the 1.5C temperature target set by countries in Paris in 2015, although the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken.

Scientists at the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (CCCS) said it was likely the 1.5C mark will be passed for the first time in the next 12 months.

So, very roughly, 0.1C pre decade for the last 150 years.

The Guardian also reproduces this nice graph:

Obviously, those still banging the denialist drum will claim 'natural variation' - but note the period from the 80s to the 90s.  Then there were several exceptional years (so many you might wonder if the term 'exceptional' is the right one).  Fast forward to 2000-2010 period - every year of that decade was as hot or hotter than the 'exceptional' years of the 80s.  

If the trend holds, it takes a decade for the exception to become the norm.  So when the Guardian points out "the global temperature would need to be consistently above 1.5C for the target to be considered broken" that will be 'achieved' by 2034.

We've got a rapidly diminishing opportunity to limit the disaster engulfing us.  But it is diminishing very, very rapidly.