According to the Raw Story and an article in the Bangor Daily News, Maine’s ultra-right-wing governor Paul LePage has appointed one of his political cronies, Bill Beardsley, as head of the state’s education commission. Beardsley is a creationist. Can it get much more ridiculous than that?
But it’s worse, for the governor is a creationist as well. As the Daily News reports (their bolding):
Beardsley and LePage are both on record supporting the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in Maine public schools.
Dating back to 2010, when the two were sparring for the GOP nomination with several other hopefuls, the candidates were asked about creationism in a televised debate.
The debate’s moderator, Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s Jennifer Rooks, asked, “Do you believe in creationism, and do you think it should be taught in Maine public schools?”
To the question, which was asked in a “lightning round” format, which gives candidates limited time to answer, LePage responded, “I would say intelligence, uh, the more education you have the more knowledge you have the better person you are and I believe yes and yes.”
Beardsley answered simply, “I would teach creationism.”
Also in the same debate, Rooks asked candidates, “Do you believe global warming is in large part caused by human activities?” To which Beardsley replied, “I believe we should be focusing on our economy rather than chasing after issues that haven’t been proven in science.”
Because Beardsley is replacing a retiree, his appointment lasts only six months, but the governor can reappoint him, subject to the later approval of the Board of Education and the State Senate. Let’s hope he’s deep-sixed then, and doesn’t do too much damage in the interim. Meanwhile, Maine’s teachers and university professors should be applying heavy pressure to the governor and legislature.
UPDATE: According to the October 20 Portland [Maine] Press Herald, Beardsley has walked back his statement on creationism:
On Monday, [Beardsley] said he doesn’t believe schools should teach creationism in science classes, and that he will not put forward any effort to change Maine’s current science standards to include creationism, the idea that the universe and life originated as a result of divine intervention.
“There’s a place for religion and a place for science,” Beardsley said. “Do I believe in science? Of course I believe in science. My mother was an astronomer. Am I a person of faith? Yes, I happen to be a person of faith.
“I keep my faith separate from my secular work,” he added.
He said the Maine Department of Education doesn’t independently determine what is taught in classrooms. The state sets standards, while local school districts select the curriculum used to teach those standards. The state, for example, does not dictate the books teachers use in the classroom.
Well, that’s better, but the news isn’t all good:
A bill to update Maine’s science standards last year passed the Legislature, but LePage vetoed it. In his veto message, LePage said there was not enough funding to ask schools to review and update the science standards.
h/t: MonkeyBusiness via Progressive Secular Humanist
When I read this to my colleague he said, ‘So in less than seven days he will destroy Mine education’…
‘Maine’ trying to type too fast. We would have hoped for better things in the North East US!
Yes! Creationists are central US sequestered by the evolutionists. Therefore, they can’t get out, and we are moving in!! Get with the programme, Maine!!
🙂
They’re just a couple crazy Mainiacs….
b&
Groan!
I hate this ridiculous “person of faith” line that all these god botherers use. Don’t they realize that most of these faiths condemn the others to Stygian gloom?!
Not to mention they’re bragging about how credulous they are. I wonder how many of the faithful would be interested in investing in the prime Arizona oceanfront property I’ve got for sale…?
b&
Today is the anniversary of William Miller’s ‘end of the world’ which might amuse you…!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment
What would be worse is finagling to have the Maine taxpayers money invested in AOP. A little like starting up a system of Casinos to finance the public schools.
Casinos to finance public schools?
You mean like how California set up its state lottery in the years following Prop 13 in order to help fund schools?
I was in high school when the first lottery money was spent. We got a bunch of English textbooks that all but one of the English teachers thought was a pile of shit, and the Driver’s Ed classroom got a VCR and a TV to replace the film projector. Meanwhile, my geometry class was still in one of several years-old “temporary” trailers set up on one of the sports fields. Before Prop 13, the increased attendance at the school would have meant increased tax revenues with which proper facilities could have been built….
b&
‘one of several years-old “temporary” trailers’
As a baby boomer I remember the trailers. In the early 60’s there weren’t enough bricks in the country to keep up with our demographic. Or, so I supposed.
They have a habit in the Florida Legislature of cutting the education budget by the exact amount contributed to it by the lottery. They sold the lottery to the public as a means of raising revenue for education, but it has never been used as anything other than an off-set for budget cuts.
People don’t even get upset about education spending around here anymore, or the fact that the schools are funded nearly 100% by residential property taxes. The legislature has sold the public so thoroughly on fiscal austerity that Floridians act like paving a badly needed new road or fixing a bridge in disrepair makes one akin to Chairman Mao.
Considering that so many of the residents of Florida are retired and have not had any children in a long time, it’s not surprising that many of them don’t care about education, especially if their grandchildren live up north.
People can be very self-centered and not very altruistic.
Some of us who are, as we might say, geriatrics husks of our previous reproductive selves, are still strong supporters of the education of the next generations. Not everyone in this demographic are so selfish as to consider school taxes to be an unjust burden. Jus’ sayin’.
totally with you, rick!
Yes, it’s tantamount to saying “I make all my decisions based on emotions and those emotions vary from day to day. So, in other words, I whimsically just do whatever I want.”
Sounds like what god would be like, if he existed.
Paul LePage is despised by many in Maine, including most of his fellow Republicans. They have overridden his veto on some issues in the past.
How can it be a veto if it can be overridden?!
The US Congress works the same way. Some legislatures require two thirds to override a veto, others require three quarters.
“Oh I’m going to use my ‘veto’!”
“Well I’m going to use my ‘veto’ to veto your ‘veto’!”
Veto is Latin for “I forbid”. Veto power is something that comes from the Roman Republican government.
Maine otherwise seems to be the last bastion of the old, moderate eastern-establishment wing of the Republican party — at least in the US Senate, with Susan Collins and, not long ago, her wing-woman, Olympia Snowe. The last extant heirs to the noble legacy of Margaret Chase Smith.
Yes Beardsley, there is a place for religion. Somewhere over the cuckoo’s rainbow.
Recommended state motto change:
Maine. The New Texas.
Of course, it does seem like Beardsley will end up choking on his own faith rather than pandering it to the citizens of Maine.
ouch!
“I believe we should be focusing on our economy rather than chasing after issues that haven’t been proven in science.”
Scary. I wonder if this blatant fool understands the billions (trillions?) of dollars climate change has already cost the world economy. It can’t be stated enough how disastrous to life and liberty religious people in power are.
The top companies worldwide, the ones the smart money is investing in, are those that are already doing things to minimize their carbon footprint, and taking other positive actions BEFORE they’re required to by inevitable future legislation. They will be ready. Companies that are still ignoring the reality of climate change will fail at a much higher rate. It is simply sound business practice to make your company as green as possible.
I agree, it is sound from an economic standpoint and good for PR.
As for the holdouts, it’s worse than that. Exon is now known to have known of the danger of anthropogenic global warming in the 1970s which makes them legally liable for damages the world incurs. Bernie Sanders is now calling for their legal prosecution. He compares the situation to the prosecution of big tobacco in the 80s and 90s.
Could you imagine doing to big oil what we did to big tobacco? Now that would be a historic victory. I can see it happening one day when entire areas of the world begin to submerge. But even if Sanders wins, I doubt anything like that could happen in the next decade.
There’s a big difference between oil and tobacco. Tobacco is just a vice; questions of addiction aside for those already hooked, there’s absolutely no downside to giving it up. In stark contrast…civilization is literally built from oil. No oil, no energy, no plastics, no fertilizer, and on and on and on. Remove oil without replacing it and civilization instantly goes away. And the only potential replacements for oil are quite expensive, with none currently available in anything even remotely approaching the scale necessary.
We could and should have begun the transition away from oil (and coal and the rest) long ago, but it’s not at all clear that you can bootstrap a civilization such as ours without it. Or that we’ll be able to reboot civilization if we don’t make the transition to solar fast enough….
b&
I find it hard to believe that the carbon released from the manufacture of plastics and fertilizer is anywhere near that released by combustion uses. Once the combustion problem is solved, we could likely tolerate the minor pollution from those other sources. That should not be a concern.
I don’t really know, but I suspect the transition from carbon to renewables can and likely will take place within a very short time, not a century, but more like 20 years. Although we seem strongly tied to coal and oil right now, the substitutions are rapidly getting underway without much fuss in the background of American politics. A single strong commitment from the people of the world could shift the economy virtually overnight.
Plastics don’t contribute significantly to atmospheric CO2 pollution, but they’re a major source of other forms of pollution. Same with fertilizers, another major petrochemical product.
I wouldn’t be too sure about that. The technology is there and has been for quite some time…but the economics? And the politics?
A basically-inevitable result of changing from an oil-based economy to a solar-based one is that energy production will become local and distributed. You won’t get your electricity from the power plant on the other side of town, and you won’t drive your car to the gas station to refill. Instead, you’ll get your electricity directly from your own rooftop and plug your car in at home just like you plug in your mobile phone today.
That’s fantastic for people…and literally end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it catastrophe for the wealthiest organizations in the entire history of humanity. Said organizations aren’t going to go down without a fight, and they’ll likely take the rest of the world with them if need be.
…and the simple economic challenges are huge, too. We still need those plastics and fertilizer and what-not, and it’ll be some time after we’re all driving electric vehicles before we’ll be able to build up the infrastructure to have sufficient excess solar energy to make plastics from atmospheric CO2. But, in that interim period…who’s going to pay to keep drilling oil for such a smaller market? And how are farmers going to afford the resulting inflated costs for fertilizer and tractor fuel, and how are the rest of us going to afford to pay the farmers when they pass those costs on to us?
This really is an existential crisis for civilization, and the odds of us surviving it are not on our side. It’s not game over yet, and there’re a few faint glimmers of hope (such as some of the reaction to the diesel scandal)…but any impartial bookie would be betting against us right now.
b&
“but the economics? And the politics?”
You are right, but the economics of solar energy is just getting started. The expense comes from the difficulty in producing large quantities of pure silicon wafers and that problem is being addressed by labs all over the world. I predict that within 5 years, solar cells will drop 50% in price due to innovations in manufacturing. You can fully energize your house (and car) for $10,000 instead of $20,000. The bottom will drop out of oil.
“…and the simple economic challenges are huge, too.”
Look to Adam Smith’s invisible hand here. As oil becomes overpriced against solar, the market in plastics and fertilizers will adjust upward for sure. But that will only drive more innovation. Today’s economy is a sea of waste and inefficiency from a carbon point of view.
Look to the UN climate change conference as a starting point. It takes place this November and December. Commitments from most countries be very much better than last time around, and will fall short of important goals, but they will form a basis for very rapid change. The U.S. has not really lead this movement up to now, but I think we are just about there.
You’re already too late with your prediction. The panels themselves are, and for some years have been, the cheapest part of the installation. The expense comes from the labor — labor requiring licensed electricians with high-voltage DC certification plus roofing skills. And whole-house installations are already closer to $10K than $20k.
But the Great Hand isn’t going to do us much good. We’re soon going to be faced with an untenable paradox…where both the cost to mine hydrocarbons and to manufacture hydrocarbons from atmospheric CO2 using solar energy will be more expensive than anybody can afford to pay, and where the market price for oil is going to be too low to be able to pay for the mining operations.
The Great Hand is powerless in such situations. Its magic only works in elastic markets…but when there’s no elasticity….
b&
My numbers may be off, but my optimism remains. I think in 5 years we will be well on our way to eliminating CO2. The writing is on the wall.
I hope you’re right. I really do.
But a mere five years? I just don’t see it.
Well…let me run some numbers.
This page seems to be roughly in line with what others are reporting:
http://solarcellcentral.com/markets_page.html
Annual growth rate in the 25% range, with a total by now of roughly 200 GW installed.
That 200 GW is going to have to be peak capacity — what the panels would produce at noon on the equator pointing straight up. Realistically, you’re going to get the equivalent of about five hours per day of such light…call it 20%, or about 40 GW of actual power output averaged over the year.
25% annual growth is a doubling period of 2.8 years. Let’s be generous and make the math easy and call it a 2.5 year doubling rate — which (inversely) works out to about a 28% growth rate.
So, five years gets us two doublings, to 160 GW from solar.
How does that stack up?
This Wikipedia chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_energy_consumption.svg
is measured in exawatt-hours per year, which is close enough to 100 terawatts for our purposes.
Meaning, in five years, solar’s 0.16 terawatts still won’t be a blip on the radar.
So…five years?
No. Five years from now things will be much the same as they are today. The numbers will have moved, but not noticeably from a day-to-day perspective. Today, mine is the only house on the block with solar panels. At those growth rates and considering the density of installations in this neighborhood…I’d expect maybe one more house on the block to have solar panels in five years.
Maybe in a generation things will be different; at these growth rates, the majority of houses in my neighborhood would have solar panels by then…but I have real problems imagining a sustained 28% annual growth rate for any industry once it’s past its infancy…and that’s especially the case with a looming massive global depression as oil prices start to skyrocket, and long before we consider the active political opposition from vested interests in oil.
b&
I think the future is hard to see. Current rates of change are deceiving. From the beginning of WW2, the U.S. economy turned pretty much around from consumer to military in 2 or 3 years. That’s what I think will happen in the energy sphere. Governments and populations are just now coming around to seeing the problem and beginning to address it. I think the moon landing project is another example of what can be accomplished in a short time. My guess is energy from carbon will become a thing of the past when the worlds smartest scientists from across the globe work together to change things. It will be lead by commitment to do something rather than let the world descend into heat catastrophe. Then technology will find an answer. Only technology can solve the problems technology has brought us.
I hope your worng and I’m right.
Great point1 Furthermore, his statement obviously contradicts his own belief in creationism since….there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support such a belief!
Maine is fairly high on the list of unchurched and secular states. This is somewhat surprising.
Same question I would have. One of the studies on this I checked shows Maine at 25% unaffiliated and evangelical down at 15%. Appears the minority in Maine got the upper hand.
It seems like rural voters have more sway. I’ve no mathematical proof of this and I may well be wrong, but my perception is that voters in the least populous, typically most conservative areas, tend to sway elections at the state level. There are multiple states in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans, that have extreme right-wing legislatures and/or Tea Party Governors. Maine being one of them.
That is due to gerrymandering. The districts are selected so that some of them are a heavy concentration of Democrats. The more numerous districts are slightly favored for Republicans, so that they can have more districts and more power.
The courts have ordered Florida to redistrict because they were gerrymandered so unfairly. Florida has a majority of Democrats but the legislature is heavily Republican.
Don’t I know it too.
Lincoln Diaz-Balart had a district that ran exactly the width of Alligator Alley for miles so he could claim wealthy suburbs in northwest Dade and wealthy retirees in Collier County in his district.
Oddly enough he had a terrible conservation record, which is disappointing given that most of his district was the Everglades.
Brother Mario ain’t any better. And I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this Curbelo chap who’s replaced him. (Ileana, on the other hand, can be refreshingly moderate — at least on matters aside from policy toward Cuba.)
She also supports same sex marriage, a rarity amongst Rethuglicans.
Her district has included South Beach and parts of the Keys. I’m sure that’s contributed to her epiphany on SSM.
And I thought I lived in a bizarre country.
Recently author Stephen King have LePage hell after the latter claimed in a public speech King had moved to Florida to avoid paying the taxes in Maine. (Florida has no income tax at all.)
Although King owns a home in Florida, he is registered as a resident of Maine and boldly proclaimed he had proudly paid “every penny” of his taxes and was pleased to do so to give back to the community. King challenged LaPage to retract his statements, but LePage falsely denied he said them.
http://www.pressherald.com/2015/03/26/lepage-i-didnt-say-stephen-king-doesnt-pay-taxes-so-no-apology/
My second comment here in one day bringing Stephen King into the discussion, and I’ve only read 5 of his novels.
Reading that article, LaPage sounds like a real a-hole!
“person of faith”
Is the general population ever going to realize that gullibility is not a virtue.
Only when the general population stops being gullible.
/@
I tried to write a comment about the governor of my state, but this article in Politico is a good summary.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/maine-lepage-america-craziest-governor-goes-off-the-rails-120320
He’s definitely Trumpesque. It’s what I imaging a Trump administration would look like. Good God!
I do like some of his humor and showmanship. Using a pig squeaky toy to show contempt for the legislature’s pork laden budget. I can see he will always win the clown vote.