Matt Yglesias

Peterson: Thanks to Left-Wing Conspiracy Theorists, I Don’t Do Town Halls

If Rep Collin Peterson (D-MN) were looking for a way to mend fences with the base of the party to which he belongs after he alienated so many people with his mighty—and successful—struggle to make the American Climate and Energy Security Act more costly yet less effective, he could hardly have asked for a better opportunity than this Politico article about “birther” conspiracy theorists. All he had to do was say something funny and disparaging about a fringe element on the far-right. Instead, he decided to take the opportunity to say this:

“Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down,” said Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents a conservative Republican district in Minnesota. “That’s why I don’t do town meetings.”

Strange. Meanwhile, Dave Weigel observes that for a conservative Republicans district in Minnesota Peterson’s district isn’t actually all that conservative. Barack Obama won 47 percent of the vote there in 2008. That’s not great, but it’s not terrible either.

Collin Peterson’s Radical Plan to Dismember the United States of America

The damaging being done by Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson to the Waxman-Markey climate bill is so severe that we’ve got Neil Sinhababu and Chris Bowers both speculating that the world might be a better place if Peterson were to be replaced by an even-more-conservative Republican, merely because said hypothetical Republican wouldn’t have the committee chairmanship (vice chair Tim Holden is twenty clicks to the left of Peterson on DW-NOMINATE; still pretty conservative).

I’m not sure that’s right. I am sure, however, that it’s rare to see a member of congress who’s proposed ceding sovereign American territory to the socialistic dystopia known as Canada. And yet, Representative Peterson has done just that. Pictured on the map above is the “northwest angle,” a portion of Peterson’s district in Minnesota that’s not connected by land to the rest of the United States. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 stated that the US-Canada border would run south from the northwestern-most point of the Lake of the Woods to the 49th parallel and then west along the parallel. Since the area wasn’t well-mapped at the time, they didn’t realize that this would actually leave a tiny slice of land on the “wrong” side of the lake. But there it is. So to this day, there’s this little slice of America with about 150 people in it. And so it was until the mid-1990s when some Anglers decided they didn’t like certain fishing regulations and wanted to secede and go join Manitoba. Peterson backed this movement and sponsored a 1998 constitutional amendment that would have permitted a special referendum on Angle secession.

Collin Peterson’s Short-Term View of Agricultural Interests

Those of us who are interested in climate change but not congressional procedure junkies have been surprised to learn that comprehensive energy legislation apparently needs to make its way through the House Agriculture Committee. And those of us who aren’t House Ag junkies have been surprised to learn that the Chairman of the Committee, Collin Peterson of Minnesota, is apparently quite conservative on environmental issues. Consequently, he’s emerged as a major impediment to action. And also as the kind of guy who doesn’t seem to even understand what climate change is:

We’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had. They’re saying to us [that climate change is] going to be a big problem because it’s going to be warmer than it usually is; my farmers are going to say that’s a good thing since they’ll be able to grow more corn.

Sadly, he’s not joking about this. Back in the real-world, farmers in any given place have worked over the years to achieve a setup that’s well-suited to the climate they face. If you drastically change the climate, that’s a big problem. What’s more, as Brad Johnson points out “global warming brings not only warmer temperatures but also heavier floods.” What’s more, a recent NOAA report concluded that “even moderate increases in temperature will decrease yields of corn, wheat, sorghum, bean rice, cotton, and peanut crops.”

The agriculture system is heavily implicated in our current, unsustainable climate trajectory. Consequently, adjustment may be painful for practitioners of industrial agriculture and for communities that depend on it. But simply pretending that the problem doesn’t exist doesn’t make the problem go away. Agriculture is also heavily exposed to the potentially devastating impact of climate change. Farmers and farm communities are being done no real favors by Peterson’s attitude.