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It’s no secret: Rick Perry is a climate change denialist. Unlike even George W. Bush, Perry’s views on climate change haven’t evolved at all during his time in office. If anything, the governor has amped up the economic fear-mongering and become even more wrapped up in conspiracy theories as primary season unfolds.

Today, the EPA released its long-expected finding that greenhouse gasses endanger the public’s health and welfare. There is a long and wending road that led to this day involving the Supreme Court, years of delay and suppression of evidence by the Bush administration, and years of regulatory review.

But the long and the short of it is that the EPA finally recognized that climate change poses a threat to Americans in the form of heat waves, drought, increased ozone, rising sea-levels, etc.

Perry had a predictable response to the decision. Here’s the first part of the statement released by the governor’s office:

It is unconscionable that unelected bureaucrats at the EPA have declared carbon dioxide a public danger despite a lack of scientific evidence to support their ruling. This action should be of grave concern to all Americans, especially Texans, in light of the recent ‘Climategate’ scandal, which uncovered data had been manipulated and destroyed in order to falsely show a preordained result.

Actually, the EPA ruling deals with six greenhouse gasses, not just carbon dioxide.

But then Perry isn’t really interested in facts. Who believes that the governor actually consults with any of the state’s many climate scientists? (None that I’ve spoken to have been contacted.)

Or, that he or his key staff people have spent any time reading the nearly 500 page EPA endangerment finding, which includes 210 pages of detailed technical background, itself based on Lord-knows how many man-hours of research and analysis by scientists and governments around the world?

The governor is doing what the governor does: Tending to his base in the Republican grassroots, with its nasty anti-scientific streak. According to recent polling, the public’s recognition of human-caused global warming is slipping as the issue has become politicized. 

As the Washington Post has noted, “The increase in climate skepticism is driven largely by a shift within the GOP.”

The horrible irony of this trend is that – pseudo-scandals like “Climategate” notwithstanding – the scientific evidence for global warming has only grown. If anything, scientists are increasingly worried that the effects of global warming could be more catastrophic and happen more quickly than thought just a few years ago.

Perry is partially responsible for reinforcing the worst tendencies of his base. It’s a deeply irresponsible thing for any politician to do.

 

Update: I ran across this quote in a story about climate researchers receiving death threats. Sad to think that the governor of the nation’s second-largest state falls into this camp.

“We have always had a very vocal minority of people who have long since decided to ignore the science and the data and take a deliberately and completely contrarian view, and who have always and constantly accused (all) climate scientists of falsehood and being in it for the money,” said Andy Ridgwell, a climate scientist at the University of Bristol.

“They have been playing Chicken Little and claiming the sky is falling in on climate science for a decade. There is nothing left that is new or different that they can (falsely) claim or accuse us of.”

Could there be hundreds of innocent people serving time in Texas prisons on faulty arson convictions?

I raise that question in a feature story — headlined “Fire and Innocence” — that we posted online yesterday afternoon. This is the fourth story in my Burn Patterns series on flawed arson convictions in Texas. (You can read the previous stories here, here and here.)

The widespread problems with forensic arson evidence has become a national story lately thanks largely to the Cameron Todd Willingham case. (Willingham, executed in 2004, was likely innocent.  If you’re not familiar with the case, go here or here.)

In my series, I’ve tried to show that while Willingham’s case — and, to a slightly lesser extent, the case of Ernest Ray Willis — are the most well-known examples of flawed arson forensics wrongly convicting Texas defendants, they’re far from alone.

Nearly 800 people are serving sentences in Texas prisons on arson convictions. How many might be innocent? Hard to know for sure. But there’s evidence that points to a number in the hundreds.

Gerald Hurst — the Austin-based fire and explosives expert who was the first fire scientist to raise questions about Willingham’s conviction — estimates that 30 to 50 percent of all arson cases could be flawed. In Texas, that would total 250 to 400 people.

I know what you’re thinking: Could it really be that high? I was skeptical at first too.

But then I looked at numbers from Texas’ State Fire Marshal’s Office, and they sent a chill up my spine.

In the past decade — as the new truth about arson forensics penetrated the fire-investigation community — the number of arsons in Texas has fallen more than 60 percent.

I’ll say that again: Arsons fell more than 60 percent in just 10 years.

In 1997, investigators found nearly 16,000 arsons in Texas. In 2007, that number was just under 6,000. Meanwhile, the overall number of fires remained fairly constant — just a lot fewer of them were ruled arson.

(You can find the Fire Marshal’s numbers here.)

What explains that? Are there just fewer arsonists running around? Seems unlikely.

The more probable explanation is that, as the new understanding of fire science becomes more well known, investigators are getting it right more often. In other words, investigators are now correctly interpreting accidental fires that would have been ruled arson in years past.

Given those numbers, it’s reasonable to conclude that 30 to 50 percent of all arson cases could be flawed.

That could mean hundreds of wrongly convicted prisoners.

Yet, so far, the only people looking at older arson convictions are nonprofits like the Innocence Project and a handful of reporters — none of whom really have the resources for a comprehensive review.

This issue desperately needs the attention of state lawmakers. They need to move beyond the Willingham controversy and look at the bigger problem.

The correction of the week comes from The Washington Post:

A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.

Here’s the original story. Hat tip on this to my colleague Forrest Wilder.

You’d be safe in assuming that if anybody’s going to completely miss the point of the Perry-Hutchison showdown in Texas, it would be The New York Times, which typically writes about Texas with all the subtlety and deft understanding of Donald Rumsfeld sorting out the cultural nuances of Iraq. But with a few notable exceptions, Sunday’s Times Magazine features a fairly insightful look at the Perry-Hutchison by Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush. (It’s online already here) . Draper nails Rick Perry. Early in their interview, the governor is rhapsodizing about Sam Houston—the anti-secessionist governor Perry so ridiculously invoked during his tea party rants about states’ rights—and notes that Houston might have been president in 1860 if his wife hadn’t stopped him from running. “Then we wouldn’t have had Abe Lincoln,” Draper reminds him. “Maybe Sam Houston would’ve been better,” Perry replies—and that’s where Draper captures the governor perfectly: “He sat back and munched on his popcorn, clearly pleased to have said something that might provoke incredulity somewhere.” That’s our chief-of-state. The man doesn’t give two shakes of a lamb’s tail about sounding intelligent or making sense. Making headlines, though—that is the thing. Draper’s read on Kay Bailey Hutchison is also reasonably astute—especially in regards to her limitations as a retail politician. “Compared with that of her backslapping opponent,” Draper notes, “Hutchison’s levity deficit is notable.” He quotes W.’s former FEMA director (pre-Brownie), Joe Allbaugh, asking the essential question that Hutchison seems constitutionally incapable of answering: Why is she running for governor? “I mean, is she running for better education? Prison reform? Tort reform? The military? What is it? She’s yet to articulate or crystallize it, and it’s gotten late in the game.” And when Hutchison cries, in response to Perry’s hammering her as a “Washington insider,” that “I’m a grass-roots person, and I’ve always been a grass-roots person!” the hopelessly out-of-touch delusions of the senator—the same ones that led her to believe she could win this race while staying in the Senate—come through loud and clear. But to say, as Draper does, that Hutchison’s “a poised campaigner who does not commit unforced errors” is implying too much. It might be true enough, if you’re referring only to the senator’s thoroughly canned and predictable way with stump-speaking. But what’s missing from this otherwise canny story is a cogent analysis of why Hutchison—once the state’s most popular politician—looks to be blowing a race she ought to have won handily against a governor who, as Draper notes, has never had high approval ratings. Hutchison’s campaign has consisted of almost nothing but “unforced errors” thus far. No halfway savvy politician would have given a date for resigning from the Senate (October or November, she said last May) without having made the decision—or then played out that decision in the nutty, back-and-forth way Hutchison then did for months. As Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka noted on Monday, Hutchison’s long-delayed decision to stay put in Washington through the primary election was the ultimate blunder—one with a whole cascade of consequences that could sink her remaining chances of unseating Perry. By opening the gate for Houston Mayor Bill White to switch from the Senate race and run for governor, she not only ensured that Texas Democrats would have a strong candidate against her if she beat Perry; she also “removed any incentive for Democrats and independents to vote in the Republican primary’—switch-over votes that she’ll need to overcome the affection for Perry among downhome Republicans. Hutchison’s suicidal choice to stay put also added fuel to the Perry campaign’s so-far successful painting of her as a creature of Washington. How do you tell Texans that you want to be their governor, more than anything in the world, when you’re not willing to leave Washington to come down and fight for their votes? The woman can protest all she wants about being “grassroots”—and sound downright silly every time she does it. But she’s put down roots in D.C. and shied away from fighting for the job she says she wants. While Draper and national reporters want to cast the G.O.P. primary as some kind of litmus test for the Republican Party’s future direction—all-white and Tea Partyish and shrinking, a la Perry, or slightly more “broad-based” and Chamber of Commercy, a la Hutchison—the real deal is turning out to be nothing ideological at all. It’s about a candidate with a passel of inherent advantages flat-out blowing them all. Hutchison’s year-long series of stupid strategic decisions has given both Rick Perry and Texas Democrats the shiniest, happiest Christmas presents they’ll find under the tree this year.

I must admit that I’ve been distressed to see McAllen at the bottom of the journalistic dog pile these past few months. First it was Dr. Atul Gawande’s story saying that McAllen had the highest Medicare costs in the nation. Next Newsweek chimed in with a story about McAllen being the worst place for allergy suffers in the nation. (After living in Austin and McAllen I can tell you that Austin has McAllen beat hands down.)

It seemed as if the rest of the nation had it in for one of my most favorite border cities. Well today, McAllen finally gets a break. NPR reports that a” highly anticipated report from an independent agency that oversees Medicare measured the program’s spending differently, and it knocks McAllen to number 14 out of 403 locales, behind three other Texas cities, including Lubbock, and parts of Louisiana and Oklahoma.”

Sometimes it’s good not to be number one.