Hank Kalet

I’m going to try to kick off a new feature this week, the Saturday Playlist, which essentially will be a musical list. This week, I’m going to offer my playlist of music that has grabbed my attention this year so far. In future posts, these playlists may offer a short summary of what I’ve been listening to over the last seven days or just a couple of top picks from the week’s new releases.

These are not meant to be definitive and I am not trying to be a critic. These are just some of the albums or tracks that move me. So, this is the new stuff that has intrigued me in 2013, listed alphabetically.

• Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Specter at the Feast
• David Bowie, The Next Day
• Billy Bragg, Tooth & Nail
• Steve Earle, The Low Highway
• Hanni El Khatib, Head in the Dirt
• Frightened Rabbit, Pedestrian Verse
• Foxygen, We are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace and Magic
• Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell, Old Yellow Moon
• Shooter Jennings, The Other Life
• The London Suede, Bloodsports
• Buddy Miller & Jim Lauderdale, Buddy and Jim
• Parquet Courts, Light Up Gold
• Pillowtalk, Pillow Talk
• Son Volt, Honky Tonk
• Richard Thompson, Electric
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Mosquito

What have you been listening to?

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The news about the environment is not good.

The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported on Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.

Scientific monitors reported that the gas had reached an average daily level that surpassed 400 parts per million — just an odometer moment in one sense, but also a sobering reminder that decades of efforts to bring human-produced emissions under control are faltering.

The best available evidence suggests the amount of the gas in the air has not been this high for at least three million years, before humans evolved, and scientists believe the rise portends large changes in the climate and the level of the sea.

“It symbolizes that so far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” said Pieter P. Tans, who runs the monitoring program at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that reported the new reading.

Ralph Keeling, who runs another monitoring program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, said a continuing rise could be catastrophic. “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds,” he said.

For the entire period of human civilization, roughly 8,000 years, the carbon dioxide level was relatively stable near that upper bound. But the burning of fossil fuels has caused a 41 percent increase in the heat-trapping gas since the Industrial Revolution, a mere geological instant, and scientists say the climate is beginning to react, though they expect far larger changes in the future.

Now, more than ever before, we are reaping the consequences of our recklessness. From Superstorm Sandy, which crippled New York City and large areas of New Jersey, to a drought that parched more than half of our nation; from a flood that inundated large swaths of Australia to rising seas affecting millions around the world, the reality of the climate crisis is upon us.

Our food systems, our cities, our people and our very way of life developed within a stable range of climatic conditions on Earth. Without immediate and decisive action, these favorable conditions on Earth could become a memory if we continue to make the climate crisis worse day after day after day.

[View the story “Climate crisis — the view from the Twitterverse” on Storify]

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Kudos to Minnesota for clearing the first hurdle toward marriage equality.

A 75-59 vote Thursday in the Minnesota state House is the first step toward adoption of a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. The state Senate is expected to pass it next week and Gov. Mark Dayton is expected to sign it into law, according to The Huffington Post.

That will make 12 states that have legalized same-sex marriage, with most having done so through the courts and the vast majority being on the East Coast.

Conspicuously absent, of course, is New Jersey, which has passed marriage-equality legislation only to have it vetoed by Gov. Chris Christie. Christie opposes same-sex marriage, but has said he would allow for a public referendum —  where, if the polling is any indication, it likely would pass.

This raises some questions. The idea that a minority population must seek approval of the majority via a referendum before they can be granted their civil rights is, in an of itself, a violation of those rights. That is essentially why the state’s gay-rights groups and Sen. President Steve Sweeney (D-Gloucester) have been unwilling to support a referendum.

Assemblyman Reed Gusciora (D-Mercer), one of only two openly gay members of the state Legislature and sponsor of the original bill, long held the same opinion, though his views have evolved as the issue has stalled.

“Civil rights delayed is civil rights denied so this is our only option at this point.”

He’s introduced legislation in December — with cosponsor Upendra Chivukula (D-Somerset) —  putting it before voters, but it has not been scheduled for a vote by the Assembly Judiciary Committee and is unlikely to end up on the 2013 ballot.

There remains a chance that enough Republicans will change their votes during the December-January lame-duck session, but it will be difficult. The original marriage-equality vote was 24-16 in the Senate and 42-33 in the Assembly, but 27 Senators and 54 Assembly members are needed for a veto — a shift of three senators and 12 Assembly members. Those close to the vote say there are at least three senators ready to back an override, but finding the dozen Assembly members — of both parties — needed is going to be a tall order.

I wouldn’t expect anything to change on the issue in New Jersey at least until 2014, and even that is being optimistic.

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Politics, politics, politics.

While it seems pretty clear that there is a need to change the way we pay for political campaigns — to get the special interest (in particular, the corporate special interest) money out and to enhance participation at the grassroots — the likelihood that anything will happen, as always, is a function of the political moment.

As I report in this piece, out today on NJ Spotlight, Democrats have offered some useful campaign finance proposals. They also, as it turns out, would prefer that at least one — requiring disclosure by independent groups of their donors — not get a vote because of the impact it could have on the governor’s race.

Republicans, for their part, say they are willing to move forward with campaign finance reforms — but they have a very different definition of what they might be (target union spending and mechanisms like wheeling, the moving of money from committee to committee, that generally benefit Democrats.

All of the proposal on the table, of course, would help. We need disclosure of donors to independent groups and tighter, more global restrictions on pay-to-play that cover all levels of government. We need to limit wheeling. And we need to make sure the system is as transparent as possible.

But these remain stop-gaps, small tweaks that will leave the basic system in place. And it is the system that needs to change.

We need to encourage small donors to get involved, as this campaign is doing in New York, by matching small donations. We need public financing to limit the field and give candidates without major financial backing a shot to run. And we need to change the larger political culture, which values the opinions of big donors over voters.

I’m not naive. This is not going to be easy, but as Dena Mottola Jaborska of N.J. Citizen Action told me (quoted from my NJ Spotlight story).

“It is very expensive to run for office in this state and if you are a serious candidate you have to have a pile of cash to do so,” she said. “As a candidate, you don’t build at the grassroots or look for small donations. That is why special-interest position on issues — those who finance the campaigns — will matter more because they are the financers of the campaign.”

David Donnelly of Public Campaign Action Fund agreed.

“We have to replace the kind of dependency on big donors that exists in the current system with new dependency on regular voters,” he said. “We will still need money to run for office. But we want those people who run to have to work for it. It is a more fundamental shift — to put participation at the core, rather than just having anti-corruption at the core of our funding laws.”

Just don’t expect this to happen any time soon. Why?

As I said when I opened this post: Politics, politics, politics.

[View the story “Christie’s weight loss and the unnecessary media obsession” on Storify]