The Kansas City Star, Sept. 26

Rep. Sam Graves, put down your burger, straw and look at realities of climate change

Last week, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world - including in Kansas City - demanded action on climate change.

Rep. Sam Graves, a Missouri Republican, decided to mock their concerns with a press release.

“Burgers and Straws Aren’t the Problem,” the headline read. The essay attacks the Green New Deal, the ambitious package of environmental and economic reforms offered by progressives in the Democratic Party and others.

“The Green New Deal isn’t about the environment at all,” Graves wrote. “It’s about making America a socialist country.”

For a congressman representing an agricultural district, the word “socialist” is an interesting choice. Taxpayers have already sent the nation’s farmers $28 billion in emergency subsidies under President Donald Trump, twice the cost of the car makers’ bailout a decade ago.

Reasonable people can disagree over the breadth of the Green New Deal, and the cost. Some of its provisions - moving toward clean, renewable energy sources, for example - make sense. Other parts, including job and wage guarantees, are longer-term projects.

But the changing climate is a real phenomenon, with real-world consequences. And Graves’ screed isn’t really about the Green New Deal; it’s about trying to make America safe for polluters and carbon-based energy providers.

Graves’ record on environmental matters is clear. In June, he supported an amendment aimed at limiting enforcement of methane emissions. He supports drilling in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, Alaska, and off the coast of Florida.

He opposed the Clean Power Plan. He supported the Keystone XL pipeline. He has a lifetime rating of four from the League of Conservation Voters.

Graves’ answer to climate change? Let the private sector do its work. “We don’t need sweeping mandates that ignore economic reality and the differing needs of our communities,” he said in February.

Yet he is not above using the power of the federal government to protect some constituents. He’s offered legislation, for example, to remove fish and wildlife protection from the management manual for the Missouri River.

Graves suggests, falsely, that protecting wildlife leads to flooding. “Flood control must be the top priority for the Corps of Engineers, along with navigation,” he said in April.

The congressman seems blissfully unaware that climate change will make extreme weather events, like flooding, worse. Reducing pollution from cars and aircraft will do more to protect Missourians than killing fish or other wildlife.

Hundreds of thousands of people are telling Rep. Graves and his colleagues that the future is about a planet our children and grandchildren can inhabit. Perhaps he can put down his hamburger and soft drink long enough to listen.

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The St. Joseph News-Press, Sept. 25

The climate change debate should revolve around science.

How much is the world’s temperature rising? What’s causing it? Most importantly, how fast should we address this problem and how much should be sacrificed in short-term economic gains?

The reason a solution remains elusive isn’t because old people live in a fairy-tale world, as 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg suggests at her now-famous United Nations speech. It’s because climate change is viewed as a political problem, with all the baggage that entails, rather than one with a scientific or technological answer.

Perhaps this was inevitable ever since Al Gore got involved after losing the 2000 race for president. Maybe there’s an alternate universe where Gore wins Florida and Texas Gov. George W. Bush leads a crusade to save the planet.

That’s not the world we inhabit right now.

We live in a world where a teenager takes the microphone and tells an older generation: “How dare you. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money. You are failing us.”

Here’s another inconvenient truth: Despite fawning worldwide media coverage, Thunberg’s speech does not belong with great oratory of the past.

Imagine a world where Martin Luther King Jr. stands in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Instead of saying, “Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred,” he points a finger at white America and says, “You have failed us.”

Imagine that Winston Churchill, instead of invoking “Our Finest Hour” after the Dunkirk evacuations, tells the House of Commons, “We are on the brink of extinction.”

What if Americans suffering through the Great Depression turned on the radio and heard President Roosevelt say that their dreams of future prosperity were nothing more than a fairy tale?

Maybe Thunberg got the science right, though some will debate whether mass extinction is imminent. But she did little to advance the cause of rolling back climate change. In fact, she set the movement back, not because of what she had to say but because of how she said it.

An inability to uplift and offer hope, while still outlining a critical problem, means both sides retreat to their rhetorical corners. Now, she’s added a generational wedge to go along with the one between the political left and right.

In terms of tone, Thunberg’s performance brought up memories of a tantrum at a U.N. General Assembly nearly 60 years ago. At least she didn’t pound a shoe on a desk, but she did imply that capitalism would be swamped instead of buried this time.

Time proved Khrushchev wrong. We’ll see how it goes for Thunberg. Climate change is a problem that must be taken seriously, but it might be time for a new spokesperson.

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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 26.

Missouri won’t track opioids or restrict guns. Death rates surge accordingly.

Missourians’ average life expectancy dropped by about one-tenth of a year in 2018, says a new state report. It sounds insignificant but for this detail: Virtually all that change comes from deaths among young people. For Missourians 15 to 44, life expectancy has dropped by an astounding 30% since 2012 - with the bulk of it attributable to opioid overdoses and firearms. In all, Missouri’s life-expectancy rate is fully 1½ years shorter than the national average.

In the dry language of data, the report by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services’ Bureau of Vital Records presents an alarming portrait of a state in which people die too young from drugs and gun violence run amok. Might this have something to do with Missouri’s notably lax policies regarding prescription drug monitoring and gun safety? It’s a fair question.

In the decade between 2008 and 2018, opioid-related deaths in Missouri spiked almost 250%, from 468 to 1,132. The report attributes that spike overwhelmingly to fentanyl, an especially powerful opioid that has worked its way into the heroin market in both prescription and illicit forms. “The use of fentanyl is a particular problem in the St. Louis area,” the report notes.

The same could be said of gun deaths, of course, as St. Louis faces an epidemic of fatal shootings, with more than a dozen children among the victims.Statewide, according to the report, firearms-related deaths - homicides, suicides and accidents - rose from 811 to 1,312 between 2008 and 2018, a more than 60% increase.

Why is Missouri seeing more of these kinds of deaths, and more than the national average? Two factors should be considered - both tied to a state government controlled by a Republican supermajority that has substituted hard-right ideology for serious drug and firearms policies.

Missouri remains the only state without a statewide system to monitor drug prescriptions to ensure opioids aren’t being harvested from pharmacies for illicit use. St. Louis County has established its own, more limited monitoring system, which other counties have joined. But a statewide system has been consistently blocked by right-wingers obsessed with the scourge of government intrusion from such a database - as if Missouri isn’t facing an actual scourge of overdose deaths.

Similarly, on guns, Missouri lawmakers have stripped out regulations to the point that St. Louis police have virtually no tools to use against people walking around the city fully armed, with no permit required. Even felons who aren’t supposed to have guns can easily get them through private sellers since Missouri refuses to require universal background checks on all purchasers.

There’s no way to know how much of this is cause and effect. But given these ideologically driven policies (or lack thereof), it would be surprising if Missouri wasn’t awash in shootings and opioid deaths.

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