tagged w/ Rubber Dodo Award
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Oklahoma senator continues all-out anti-science crusade in a year of extreme heat and drought
By Bob Berwyn
SUMMIT COUNTY — Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe this year joins a list of dubious anti-environmental characters in receiving the Rubber Dodo award, given annually to those who have done the most to drive endangered species extinct.
The award is given each year by the Center for Biological Diversity. Previous winners include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2011), former BP CEO Tony Hayward (2010), massive land speculator Michael Winer (2009), Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (2008) and Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne (2007).
When it comes to denying the climate crisis — the single-greatest threat now facing life on Earth — James Inhofe has few peers. The Oklahoma Republican is the ringleader of anti-science climate-deniers in Congress and a driving force behind the tragic lack of U.S. action to tackle this complex problem.
“As climate change ravages the world, Senator Inhofe insists that we deny the reality unfolding in front of us and choose instead to blunder headlong into chaos,” said Kierán Suckling, the Center’s executive director. “Senator Inhofe gets the 2012 Rubber Dodo Award for being at the vanguard of the retrograde climate-denier movement.”
This year is on track to become the warmest on record; some 40,000 temperature records have been broken in the United States in 2012 alone, while Arctic sea ice melted to a record low. According to conservation activists, this summer’s record droughts, crop failures, massive wildfires, floods are unmistakable signals that manmade global warming is tightening its grip, threatening people and wildlife around the globe.
“Senator Inhofe’s pet theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax would be hilarious, if only he weren’t an elected representative of the American people,” Suckling said. “If he were, say, a performance artist, it’d be really funny. But sadly he has the power to affect U.S. climate policy. The United States has a chance — and a duty — to take significant steps to slow the climate crisis, and a brief window of time before it’s too late for us to do so. Deniers like Inhofe, in positions of leadership, are dooming future generations of people to a far more difficult world.”
More than 15,000 people cast their votes in this year’s Rubber Dodo contest. Other official nominees were Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, who put a rider on a must-pass bill that stripped Endangered Species Act protection from wolves, and Shell Oil, a company bound and determined to pursue dangerous oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean.
Background on the Dodo
In 1598, Dutch sailors landing on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius discovered a flightless, three-foot-tall, extraordinarily friendly bird. Its original scientific name was Didus ineptus. (Contemporary scientists use the less defamatory Raphus cucullatus.) To the rest of the world, it’s the dodo — the most famous extinct species on Earth. It evolved over millions of years with no natural predators and eventually lost the ability to fly, becoming a land-based consumer of fruits, nuts and berries. Having never known predators, it showed no fear of humans or the menagerie of animals accompanying them to Mauritius.
Its trusting nature led to its rapid extinction. By 1681 the dodo was extinct, having been hunted and outcompeted by humans, dogs, cats, rats, macaques and pigs. Humans logged its forest cover while pigs uprooted and ate much of the understory vegetation.
The origin of the name dodo is unclear. It likely came from the Dutch word dodoor, meaning “sluggard,” the Portuguese word doudo, meaning “fool” or “crazy,” or the Dutch word dodaars meaning “plump-arse” (that nation’s name for the little grebe).
The dodo’s reputation as a foolish, ungainly bird derives in part from its friendly naiveté and the very plump captives that were taken on tour across Europe. The animal’s reputation was cemented with the 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Based on skeleton reconstructions and the discovery of early drawings, scientists now believe that the dodo was a much sleeker animal than commonly portrayed. The rotund European exhibitions were accidentally produced by overfeeding captive birds.Oklahoma senator continues all-out anti-science crusade in a year of extreme heat and... more
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Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not spare her from being singled out yesterday as America's environmental enemy of the year.
The Centre for Biological Diversity awarded Palin its Rubber Dodo award for her insistence - despite evidence to the contrary - that the polar bear population was rising across the Arctic. The Arizona thinktank condemned the Alaska governor as a "global warming denier".
"Governor Palin has waged a deceptive, dangerous, and costly battle against the polar bear," Kieran Suckling, the centre's director, said. "Her position on global warming is so extreme, she makes Dick Cheney look like an Al Gore devotee."
The slap comes less than a week after Palin belatedly admitted the possibility of a human factor in climate change, in her first television interview since she was chosen as John McCain's running mate.
The conversion was followed by further revelations of Palin's tenuous relationship with scientific fact. News reports yesterday said that Palin bought a tanning bed and moved it into the governor's mansion soon after her election. A few months later, in May 2007, she issued a proclamation during skin cancer awareness month urging Alaskans to take preventive measures. "Skin cancer is caused, overwhelmingly, by overexposure to ultraviolet radiation from the sun and from tanning beds," she said in a press release.
McCain had skin cancers removed in 1993 and 2000, and is religious about using sun screen and wearing a hat outdoors.
Sarah Palin may have seen the light - sort of - on climate change but that did not... more
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