Abbreviated pundit round-up: Rio+20 earth summit kicks the can down the road. Again

^{Visual source: Newseum}

Charles Pierce:

The climate crisis is this phenomenon writ large. There is an entire intellectual industry'largely financed by entire extraction industries'dedicated to climate-change denial. There are national politicians. hi there, Jim Inhofe!'whose careers depend on believing really crazy stuff about why the Arctic is going away. (The Economist ran a judicious account of the disappearing ice-caps this week, judiciously remembering to mention the economic advantages of our new "access to precious minerals" and the sudden existence of an actual Northwest Passage: "In the long run the unfrozen north could cause devastation.But, paradoxically, in the meantime no Arctic species will profit from it as much as the one causing it: humans. Disappearing sea ice may spell the end of the last Eskimo cultures, but hardly anyone lives in an igloo these days anyway. And the great melt is going to make a lot of people rich." I'm reassured.) There are more than a few people in positions of power who believe that the whole climate-change event is a scenario dreamed up by a) scientists who want to get rich, and b) United Nations bureaucrats who want to herd us into apartment blocks and control our local zoning boards. That's where our old friend, Agenda 21, comes into thing, playing the role assayed by the gun-crazy from Alabama in the Fast And Furious story.

Bruce Jones on the Rio+20 Earth Summit:

The hard truth is, of the unrealistic and unhelpful voices on multilateral process, the environmental lobby stands out. In watching Rio unfold, I was struck by the sheer number that would be present. Consider this: The total number of people in Rio for the summit roughly equaled the number of soldiers that Britain sent to French beaches on D-Day. Is there any question about which was the more credible mobilization?

David Roberts:

There is no longer any question of preventing climate change. Some 98 percent of working climate scientists agree that the atmosphere is already warming in response to human greenhouse-gas emissions, and the most recent research suggests that we are on a path toward what were once considered 'worst case' scenarios.

Mac Margolis:

That they produced a document at all was already something of a triumph, an effort hailed by Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff as a 'victory for multilateralism.' [...]

To others it was a pearl of underachievement. No new targets were set for slashing gases such as carbon dioxide and methane that scientists warn are overheating the atmosphere. When developing nations proposed creating a $30 billion fund to back green jobs and environmentally sustainable initiatives, the richest countries played deaf, distracted perhaps by the euro-zone crisis.

Doyle MacManus thinks Mitt Romney has an arithmetic problem: His defense numbers don't add up with the rest of his program.

Paul Krugman gives us another old date to be wary of:

Among economists who know their history, the mere mention of certain years evokes shivers. For example, three years ago Christina Romer, then the head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, warned politicians not to re-enact 1937'the year F.D.R. shifted, far too soon, from fiscal stimulus to austerity, plunging the recovering economy back into recession. Unfortunately, this advice was ignored.

But now I'm hearing more and more about an even more fateful year. Suddenly normally calm economists are talking about 1931, the year everything fell apart.

Jimmy Carter:

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation's violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

Tom Philpott:

Deeply flawed, yet not as bad as it could have been, the Senate farm bill now goes to the House. There, Tea Party stalwarts bearing sharp knives will hack away at it'targeting anti-hunger programs like SNAP and the Know Your Farmer initiatives, while leaving the handouts to Big Ag intact. But, who knows, maybe the House version, too, will energe not quite as bad as expected.

Richard Kim says David Blankenhorn recent about-face on marriage equality is okay as far as it goes, but it doesn't go half far enough:

As the founder of the Institute for American Values, Blakenhorn has attacked single mothers, championed federal marriage promotion as welfare policy, railed against cohabitation and no-fault divorce and opposed access to new reproductive technologies. One of his institute's latest crusades has been against anonymous sperm donors because it leads to 'fatherless' children, an abiding preoccupation of his. Suffice to say, I don't agree with any of this. I think divorce can be a great thing'as anyone leaving an abusive marriage might confirm. And I think all the debates over which type of family produces the best outcomes for children ought to be meaningless as a matter of state policy. Gay or straight, single or married, let's try to create the conditions in which all families can succeed. Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he's now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians. I want to scramble that circle.

Richard Wolff says there is an alternative to capitalism. It's the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation in Spain, proof that a broken system that creates vast inequality is not the only choice.