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Climate Crisis ‘Out of Control’ as Global Temperature Breaks Record for 3rd Time in 4 Days

A woman shelters under a bag during a heatwave in Beijing on July 7, 2023. (Photo: Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

by Olivia Rosane, July 7, 2023, from Common Dreams

For the third time in just four days, the Earth sweated through its unofficial hottest day on record Thursday.

The average global temperature reached 17.23°C, or 63°F, on July 6, up from the record set Monday, surpassed Tuesday, and matched Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer. Thursday's record came after the revelation that the seven-day stretch ending Wednesday was also the hottest week in at least 44 years.

"Climate change is out of control," United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in response to Monday's and Tuesday's records, as The Associated Press reported. "If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation."

Scientists attribute the high temperatures to a combination of global heating caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and an El Niño event officially declared by the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization Tuesday.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions."

Earth's temperature reached 17.01°C, or 62.62°F, Monday and then 17.18°C, or 62.9°F, Tuesday, according to data from the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP). While these temperatures are the hottest since record-keeping began in 1979, The Washington Post explained, data from ice cores and tree rings indicate that they haven't been experienced on Earth since the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when sea levels were around 18 feet higher. The week ending Wednesday was also 0.08°F, or 0.04°C, warmer than any in the record books, according to AP.

"Such records are the predictable consequence of a short-term El Niño temperature boost coming on top of the long-term global warming trend due to mankind's greenhouse gas emissions," lead Berkeley Earth scientist Robert Rohde tweeted in response to Thursday's new record.

The University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer uses both temperature readings from the surface, air balloons, and satellites, along with NCEP forecast data, to provide daily average two-meter air temperatures, according to The Guardian.

The records it reports are considered "unofficial" by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) because they rely partly on computer models, AP explained, but the agency did not deny the impact of the climate emergency and El Niño on recent extremes.

"Although NOAA cannot validate the methodology or conclusion of the University of Maine analysis, we recognize that we are in a warm period due to climate change," NOAA said in a statement reported by AP.

There are also other indicators speaking to spiking temperatures: The European Union's Copernicus ECMWF ERA5 dataset put Monday's mean temperature at a record 16.88°C and Tuesday's at a new record temperature of 17.03°C.

June was also the warmest June on record, according to a report from the E.U.'s Copernicus Climate Change Service released Thursday, with temperatures more than 0.5°C above the 1991-2020 average. Sea surface temperatures also broke monthly records for both May and June, and Antarctic sea ice dwindled to 17% below average for a record low for June.

"We are in uncharted territory and we can expect more records to fall as El Niño develops further and these impacts will extend into 2024," Chris Hewitt, WMO Director of Climate Services, said in a statement responding to the report. "This is worrying news for the planet."

Scientists predict that the record breaking will continue into July, which is usually the warmest month of the year.

"Chances are that the month of July will be the warmest ever, and with it the hottest month ever," Karsten Haustein, a research fellow in atmospheric radiation at Leipzig University, told The Guardian, clarifying that "ever" meant in the last 120,000 years.

"I've never seen anything like it. I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

The records aren't just numbers. They have been felt in extreme heatwaves around the globe from Texas to China. Cities in China are opening air raid shelters to help people hide from heat that has already turned deadly, APreported Friday, and temperatures in Beijing surpassed 35°C for more than nine days in a row for the first time since 1961.

Temperatures were also high in Timbuktu, Mali.

"Usually, at night it's a bit cool even during the hot season. But this year, even at night, it's been hot—I've never seen anything like it," 50-year-old Fatoumata Arby toldAP. "I've been having heart palpitations because of the heat. I'm starting to think seriously that I'm going to leave Timbuktu."

Beyond high temperatures, the impacts of the climate emergency continue to be felt in other ways. In an update Thursday, Canadian officials said the country's record-breaking wildfire season—which has sent toxic smoke pouring across the border in recent weeks—continues, with nearly 5,000 people forced from their homes and more than 8.8 million hectares of forest burned, CBC News reported. That's nearly 11 times the average hectares burned in the last decade.

"This number is literally off the charts," Michael Norton, director of the Northern Forestry Centre with the Canadian Forest Service at NRCan, said during a press conference reported by Politico, "with at least three more months left in the active wildfire season."

Officials say the climate emergency is playing a major role in the unprecedented season.

"This summer, we are witnessing the effects of climate change first-hand as Canada continues to experience more intense and frequent severe weather events," Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said in a briefing reported by CBC News.

In Pakistan, meanwhile, heavy monsoon rains have killed at least 50 people in two weeks, Al Jazeera reported Friday. The deluge comes a year after devastating flooding in Pakistan swallowed a third of the country and claimed more than 1,700 lives. Pakistan contributes less than 1% to global greenhouse gas emissions, but it is one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, and scientists said that rising temperatures made last year's disaster more likely.

"Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

In response to news of broken records and weather extremes, University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said people should not be paralyzed with fear.

"Rather than being 'terrified' by this expected consequence of human-caused warming, we should be motivated to act—in particular, holding politicians accountable at the ballot box," he tweeted. "Only when we bring carbon emissions to zero does the warming stop."

There's a chance that living through this summer of extremes could help with that motivation.

"The issue of climate change doesn't often get its 15 minutes of fame. When it does, it's usually tied to something abstract like a scientific report or a meeting of politicians that most people can't relate to," George Mason University climate communications professor Ed Maibach told AP.

"Feeling the heat—and breathing the wildfire smoke, as so many of us in the Eastern U.S. and Canada have been doing for the past month—is a tangible shared public experience that can be used to focus the public conversation," he said.

 

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Olivia Rosane

Olivia Rosane is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Full Bio >

Off the Top of My Head

Barbie and Taylor Swift Prop Up US Economy

by John Lawrence

The Federal Reserve has credited Barbie and Taylor Swift with propping up the US economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced this month that Taylor Swift's tour helped boost travel and tourism in the region, a claim also made by several other U.S. cities regarding the musician's widely popular concerts. The US consumer is amusing itself to death. Meanwhile, the earth is burning up or in fact boiling. One would think that, if the climate situation were so dire, there would be an 'all hands on deck' effort to fight the war on climate change. But, nope, Americans are propping up the economy and in so doing are contributing even more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere thus hastening rather than retarding climate change. Even as some American cities - namely Phoenix, Las Vegas and Palm Springs - are sweltering under temperatures greater than 110 degrees Fahrenheit, even with the handwriting on the wall, Americans are dealing with this crisis by going to the movies and to Taylor Swift concerts. Taylor had better beware that she may get a container of coke thrown at her or even chicken nuggets while she struts about the stage. Cardi B got so mad when a "fan" threw her drink at her that she threw her microphone at the fan.

Newsflash: Americans attending Taylor Swift concerts aren't the same Americans who fought World War II. The era of Americans foregoing consumer delights in order to commit themselves to a long hard slog in the name of world peace, freedom and democracy is over. In fact, politically speaking, a major portion of Americans, not a majority hopefully, would rather be entertained by a clown like Trump than to have to ask themselves what they can do for their country as John F. Kennedy suggested. "Ask not what your country can do for you," Kennedy intoned. Well, that question has been answered. What this country can do for Americans is to provide them with entertainment like Barbie and Taylor Swift. And "what you can do for America" is to go to the movies and attend concerts spending your money in order to keep the economy afloat.

The U.N. chief issued a stark warning on climate change this week: “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” António Guterres declared in a news briefing, as scientists confirmed that July is set to become Earth’s hottest month on record. But, boiling or not, most Americans just want to be entertained and to consume all the merchandise that goes with it. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have been moving markets, quite literally. The Federal Reserve has tracked the striking effect of Taylor Swift's tour on host cities. One analysis estimates it could generate almost $5 billion in global revenue. When Beyoncé comes to town, hotels, hair stylists and bartenders all get a boost, according to Yelp. "Despite the slowing recovery in tourism in the region overall, one contact highlighted that May was the strongest month for hotel revenue in Philadelphia since the onset of the pandemic, in large part due to an influx of guests for the Taylor Swift concerts in the city," the [Federal] reserve wrote in the Beige Book, which is published by the regional banks to share information about the state of the economy.

Have Americans degenerated to the point that when given a choice between letting the earth boil and become unfit for human habitation and entertaining themselves, they would choose to entertain themselves. This is literally "amusing ourselves to death." Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. Postman sees television's entertainment value as a present-day "soma", the fictitious pleasure drug in Brave New World, by means of which the citizens' rights are exchanged for consumers' entertainment. Postman was on to something. In the current scenario, though, citizens' responsibilities are being exchanged for consumers' entertainment. In America, as we have been promised, our only responsibility is to enjoy our freedom even if that means that we succumb to the future of a boiling earth.

Off the Top of My Head

How to Turn the US From a Two Party System into a Multi-Party System

by John Lawrence

Very simply by changing from a first past the post (fptp) system in which the candidate with the highest number of votes wins to approval voting. In the first past the post system a voter can only vote for one of the candidates who are running. In the approval voting system a voter can vote for more than one candidate. In both cases the candidate with the highest number of votes wins. Taking Presidential elections as an example, the fptp system generates the 2 party system. Third party candidates mess up the system because they take votes away from the party they are most closely associated with. Ross Perot took the 1992 election away from George H W Bush since some voters most closely associated with the Republican party voted for Perot while most Democrats voted for Clinton. The second choice of most Perot voters was probably George H W Bush. Perot took 19% of the vote. Clinton won with 43% of the vote, and Bush lost with 37% of the vote. If Perot had not been in the race, Bush probably would have won. If the fptp voting system had been replaced with approval voting, voters could have voted for Bush and Perot. In that case Perot still wouldn't have won, but he wouldn't have taken votes away from Bush. For example if all the voters voting for Perot had Bush as their second favorite and voted for both candidates, Bush would have had 19% more votes thus winning the election. Perot would still have 19% of the vote and Clinton would still have had 43% of the vote, but Bush would have won having garnered 37 + 19 = 56% of the vote!

Making this simple change in the US voting system at all levels would result in a flourishing of third, fourth and fifth parties. These parties would not take votes away from the winners of the election, but would give information about which alternatives were on voters' minds in addition to the platforms presented by the major parties. Eventually, one of the multitude of parties might even replace one of the two major parties. This change of voting systems would let a multitude of parties and ideas flourish instead of cleaving all voter concerns into two parties. It would result in a loss of power for the 2 major parties and do much to decrease the divisiveness in American politics. It would allow real participation by minorities in American politics. The fptp system encourages the division of American voters into two camps in a system where hate and divisiveness can flourish. Approval voting would eliminate the possibility of third party candidates being spoilers in elections and taking votes away from the candidate who would have won if the third party candidate had not been running.

The change from the fptp system to the approval system could be done very simply. Nothing else about the American system would need to be changed, not the ballots, not the counting of votes. The only change on the ballot would be from "vote for one" to "vote for more than one." This change would encourage a multiplicity of candidates and viewpoints and would enrich the American political system. Third parties would be welcomed instead of feared. It would also tend to diminish the role of money in politics as the two party system encourages wealthy donors to give to only one of the two parties. If a viable multi-party system were in place, they would need to spread their money among a multiplicity of parties. Parties with a small number of supporters would be in the position of adding to their membership and growing into major parties based on their ideas and not on their war chests. There are many other improvements that could be made to the American democratic system, but none could be implemented more simply and have such far reaching results. And it doesn't mention in the Constitution which voting system should be used.

'Climate Upheaval': Wildfires Kill Dozens Across Mediterranean

Flames engulf the village of Gennadi, Greece on July 25, 2023. (Photo: Christoph Reichwein/picture alliance via Getty Images)

At least nine nations in northern Africa and southern Europe are struggling to contain blazes. Meanwhile, policymakers are still allowing corporate interests to pour more fossil fuels onto the raging fire of climate chaos.

by Kenny Stancil, July 26, 2023, from Common Dreams

Algeria, Croatia, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia, and Turkey.

What do these nine countries have in common? All of them are currently battling deadly infernos made worse by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.

And yet, governments worldwide continue to greenlight new coal, oil, and gas production—exacerbating planet-heating pollution and ensuring that heatwaves, wildfires, and other extreme weather disasters will increase in frequency, duration, and intensity.

Algeria and Tunisia

In Algeria, roughly 8,000 firefighters on Tuesday struggled to control conflagrations burning across 15 provinces in the country's drought-stricken north, where temperatures reached 122°F. The fires, which prompted the evacuation of more than 1,500 people, have killed at least 34 individuals so far.

"Witnesses described fleeing walls of flames that raged 'like a blowtorch,' destroying homes and coastal resorts and turning vast forest areas into blackened wastelands," The Guardian reported.

Amid heavy winds, two border crossings with neighboring Tunisia have been closed, as authorities there grapple with fires burning in the northwestern region of Tabarka.

Croatia

In Croatia, firefighters on Tuesday worked to contain blazes spreading just south of Dubrovnik, a major tourist destination. The task has been made more difficult by fierce winds in the area, which are keeping firefighting aircraft grounded.

France

In France, hundreds of firefighters were mobilized Tuesday in an attempt to control wildfires near the Nice international airport and on the outskirts of Arles.

Greece

In Greece, more than 20,000 people have been evacuated in recent days from homes and hotels as wildfires rage on the island of Rhodes.

At least three people have died so far, including two pilots whose firefighting plane crashed on Tuesday.

Italy

Italy has been pummeled by a combination of storms in the north, which killed at least seven people on Tuesday, and wildfires in the south, which have also led to multiple deaths.

"While the north was drenched, the heatwave across the south persisted, with temperatures of 47.6°C (117°F) recorded in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania on Monday," The Guardian reported. "The bodies of two people in [their] 70s were found in a house destroyed by the flames, while an 88-year-old woman was found near the Sicilian city of Palermo."

"Italian firefighters said they tackled nearly 1,400 fires between Sunday and Tuesday, including 650 in Sicily and 390 in Calabria, the southern mainland region where a bedridden 98-year-old man was killed as fire consumed his home," the newspaper noted.

On social media, Sicily's civil protection minister Nello Musumeci wrote: "We are experiencing in Italy one of the most complicated days in recent decades—rainstorms, tornadoes, and giant hail in the north, and scorching heat and devastating fires in the center and south. The climate upheaval that has hit our country demands of us all... a change of attitude."

Portugal

In Portugal, hundreds of firefighters scrambled Tuesday to extinguish blazes near Cascais, another popular tourist destination. The country is already hard-hit by drought, and wind gusts are accelerating the spread of flames.

Spain

A fast-moving wildfire in the heart of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria prompted authorities to order evacuations, close roads, and deploy dozens of firefighters and several helicopters on Tuesday.

Turkey

In Turkey, officials on Tuesday evacuated a hospital and a dozen homes in the coastal town of Kemer, where firefighters continued to battle flames.

Europe is the fastest-warming continent on the planet, which has already endured 1.3°C of temperature rise since the late 1800s. July has seen the hottest day and week in recorded history and is on pace to be the hottest month ever. 2023 will likely go down as the hottest year ever, though the potential record is not expected to last long because newly arrived El Niño conditions are projected to make 2024 even hotter.

Last year's brutal heatwaves killed more than 61,000 people in Europe alone. Existing policies put the world on track for up to 2.9°C of temperature rise by the end of the century, prompting United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to call business-as-usual a civilizational "death sentence."

"Most people still don't know what peril they are in," climate scientist Peter Kalmus tweeted last week. "This will be the coolest summer for the rest of your life, and that shouldn't be just a meme—it should be actually terrifying. The only path out of this heat nightmare is to end fossil fuels ASAP."

"Keep in mind that climate catastrophe is caused by those who run the fossil fuel industry, who have lied and blocked action for decades," he added. "It will get far, far worse until we stop them. We can stop them, but we need to get angry, take risks, and do it!"

 

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Kenny Stancil

Kenny Stancil is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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A Grim Climate Lesson From the Canadian Wildfires

Ibrahim Rayintakath

For all our plans to control emissions, humans are no longer fully in charge

By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer, New York Times, July 26, @023

You may have forgotten about the Canadian wildfires, once the smoke cleared from your American lungs and the orange disappeared from American skies. But the fires have not forgotten to burn.

In Quebec, more land was torched in the month of June than in the previous 20 years combined, with a single out-of-control “complex” there growing to 2.5 million acres — in a section of the province where, in recent years, the average total has been a tenth of that. Across the country as a whole, the total was more than 25 million acres, or about two and a half times as much land as had burned in any of the worst American seasons of the past 50 years, with most of Canada’s fire season still ahead — putting the country on track to produce more carbon emissions from the burning of boreal forest than all of its other human and industrial activities combined.

“This year is different — this year is really different,” the ecologist Merritt Turetsky says. The fire scientist John Abatzoglou calls it already “chart redefining.” The writer John Vaillant — whose new book, “Fire Weather,” looks back at the catastrophic Fort McMurray fire in 2016 and forward to an entirely new global fire regime — calls it an “apocalyptic” scenario. “I never imagined pan-Canadian fires,” he says. “We’ve compressed about 10 years of anticipated fire into one-half of a fire season.”

Believe it or not, this is somewhat by design. Nowadays, the goal of most forest management in North America is to manage fire rather than always rush to extinguish it, to focus suppression efforts around denser human settlement and elsewhere to find ways to allow some burning. In the 20th-century model, firefighters parachuted in to snuff out flames, ultimately contributing to a continental buildup of the dry forest, grassland and scrub that fire experts casually call “fuel.” Now, to reduce it, fire scientists and forest ecologists try to cultivate more of what they call “good fire.”

But whose responsibility is the carbon produced when forests burn? In the age of extreme weather and climate agreements, the world has learned to tabulate ecological guilt nation by nation — cutting responsibility for the current crisis into so many slices of pie. Wildfire emissions typically aren’t even recorded on the balance sheet of any particular country’s ledger, but according to some tabulations, in 2021 wildfires in North America and Eurasia contributed more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than any nation but China, the United States and India. And the toxic smoke exhaled from those fires increasingly travels elsewhere too, now regularly choking the air and blotting out the sun not just of cities built into nearby wildland but of major concrete megalopolises whole continents — or even oceans — away. Whose responsibility is that?

If the 20th century taught us the perversity of aggressive fire suppression, the 21st is already teaching us the limits of that lesson. A firefighting approach based on the principle that humans and human settlements should be protected but that otherwise forests should be allowed to burn is sensible if the aim is to reduce property damage and loss of life. But if the costs to human health of wildfire smoke are larger than from the fires themselves, should the goal be recalibrated? Could it be? If the aim is to manage the health of the planet by limiting the emission of carbon from wildfire, what kind of approach does that require? Is it even possible? In California, the record-setting fire season of 2020, which produced five of the state’s seven largest fires in modern history, also entirely erased its emissions gains over the previous 16 years — putting twice as much carbon into the atmosphere as had been saved by all of the state’s decarbonization policies from 2003 to 2019.

Canada has a gargantuan per-capita carbon footprint, in fact by some measures larger than that of the United States. But it is not itself singularly to blame for the changes unfurling in its own remote forests or capable of truly controlling the new megafires that result.

Partly this is a simple matter of scale: Canada is the world’s second-largest country, with a population roughly a quarter the size of Russia, which Americans often conceive as a vast expanse of uninhabited tundra. The 49th parallel is often thought of as Canada’s southern boundary, but half of Canadians live south of it, clustered just in the little outcropping wedge of Ontario and Quebec tucked between Michigan and Maine. All told, it’s estimated that 85 percent of Canadians live within 150 miles of the U.S. border — as though 284 million Americans all lived south of Los Angeles and Tampa, with the whole rest of the country untrammeled wilderness effectively left free to burn anytime lightning struck or a match was dropped or a power line fell.

But fire control is also growing harder because the fires themselves are changing. They produce such thick walls of smoke now that tanker planes sometimes can’t fly into them; they throw embers over what were once considered uncrossable fire breaks; they burn and smolder underground through winter; they get so hot that firefighters risk second-degree burns just approaching them. “The most powerful firefighting equipment that humans have — Canadair planes that cost roughly $35 million each and drop 30 bathtubs’ worth of water at a time — can extinguish fires with an intensity of up to 10,000 kilowatts per meter of fire line,” Henry Mance wrote recently in The Financial Times. “Today’s mega-fires are a different order of magnitude, sometimes exceeding 100,000 kilowatts per meter” — 10 times as intense. Water dumped from above can evaporate before it reaches the ground.

The megafires routinely produce whole new fire-weather systems, including what are called pyrocumulonimbus clouds, laced with lightning and whipped by tornadoes, which can shoot toxic aerosols all the way through the troposphere into the lower stratosphere. It was long believed that only volcanic eruptions were capable of doing this. It wasn’t until 1998 that scientists discovered pyrocumulonimbus clouds from megafires doing it too. So far this year in Canada, there have been 90 of them.

“They can’t stop these fires,” says the fire historian Steve Pyne. “I mean, they could have 50,000 firefighters there now and it’s not going to change it. We could have 200 more air tankers. Are they going to be able to stop these fires that are going? No.”

In “Under a White Sky,” the writer Elizabeth Kolbert memorably posed the paradox of climate adaptation, in which the disruption of the natural world seems to require further interventions, this way: “If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control.” But the specter of hundreds of new fires raging near the Canadian Arctic — or in Russian Siberia or the Australian bush — is a reminder that when it comes to rolling climate change, total control, at least, may be an illusion, although one on which we have intuitively erected our hopes for navigating a hotter future.

“Humans have always moved at a different pace than the natural world,” Vaillant says. “But suddenly there’s a syncing up, with the natural world now moving as fast or faster than we are — faster than humans, faster than technology, faster than history.” In the past, he says, “we’ve had a ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ attitude with nature — when it did things that we didn’t like, we suppressed them. Fire is now forcing us to negotiate.”

Negotiate with whom, though? In recent years, warming posed a number of thorny questions about responsibility and sovereignty in a time of planetary crisis: who might pay for climate damages punishing the global South but produced by emissions from the global North; how a net-zero world might respond to a rogue nation’s recklessly burning fossil fuels; what could prevent single nations from undertaking adaptations that might wreck the microclimate of their neighbors; what damage could be wrought by a single billionaire’s undertaking a global geoengineering scheme or a single terrorist cell torpedoing it.

These climate morality plays flatter our intuitive sense that humans, however irresponsible, remain in charge. But while emissions do control the planet’s thermometer, the natural world is already bushwhacking its own path through the hotter future. “We’re riding the tiger at this point,” Pyne says. “I think all of us are going to have to accept there’s going to be a lot more fire.”

Sanders Says He Opposes $886 Billion in Military Spending Amid Healthcare and Climate Crises

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) appears at a hearing on March 29, 2023 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

by Jake Johnson, Common Dreams, July 24, 2023

"As a nation, the time is long overdue for fundamental changes to our national priorities. Cutting military spending is a good first step."

Sen. Bernie Sanders announced Monday that he intends to vote against legislation authorizing $886 billion in military spending for the coming fiscal year, arguing the Pentagon budget should be cut in favor of investments in healthcare, education, housing, climate action, and other priorities.

Sanders, the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, has introduced an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would cut the U.S. military budget by 10%. Earlier this month, House Republicans refused to allow a vote on a similar amendment put forth by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.).

In his op-ed Monday, Sanders pointed to the "enormous crises" facing the U.S., including "unprecedented and rising temperatures" caused by fossil fuel use, a "broken" healthcare system in which insurance and pharmaceutical giants profit while tens of millions go uninsured, a "teetering" education system, and a dire shortage of affordable housing.

"And then there is defense spending. Well, that's a whole other story," Sanders wrote. "The proposed military budget that the Senate is now debating would increase defense spending by $28 billion to over $886 billion, an all-time record. The total is over $900 billion if you include nuclear weapons spending through the Department of Energy."

Sanders argued that in addition to being unnecessary, an even larger military budget would be actively harmful given that the Pentagon "cannot keep track of the dollars it already has, leading to massive waste, fraud, and abuse in the sprawling military-industrial complex."

"Much of this additional military spending will go to line the pockets of hugely profitable defense contractors—it is corporate welfare by a different name," the senator noted. "Almost half of the Pentagon budget goes to private contractors, some of whom are exploiting their monopoly positions and the trust granted them by the United States to line their pockets."

Sanders' opposition to the NDAA comes after House Republicans passed their version of the legislation after packing it with right-wing amendments and rejecting proposed changes aimed at reining in out-of-control Pentagon spending and cracking down on fraud.

The Senate is expected to continue working on its own NDAA this week.

As Congress prepares to authorize around $900 billion for the U.S. military, House Republicans are pushing for steep cuts across the federal government, targeting everything from education programs to climate spending to clean water funds. The House GOP proposals have heightened concerns that the government will shutdown on September 30, the end of the fiscal year.

Meanwhile, Sanders said in a statement Monday that he has had "very productive conversations" with members of the Senate HELP Committee on bipartisan legislation to address the nation's worsening primary care crisis. Sanders said he hopes to have a bill ready by the first week of September.

Last week, Sanders introduced legislation that would invest $20 billion over a five-year period into expanding community health centers. The senator said the measure would "provide the resources necessary to recruit, train, and retain tens of thousands of primary care doctors, mental health providers, nurses, dentists, and home healthcare workers."

The nation is currently hurtling toward a primary care cliff. If Congress doesn't act by September 30, community health centers across the U.S. will face a devastating 70% funding cut.

The National Association of Community Health Centers estimates that nearly 7 million people will lose access to healthcare if Congress doesn't extend the critical funding.

"As every American knows, our country faces a major crisis in primary care and a massive shortage of doctors, nurses, mental health professionals, and dentists," Sanders said last week. "Tens of millions of Americans live in communities where they cannot find a doctor while others have to wait months to be seen."

"At the end of the day," he added, "this crisis not only increases human suffering and unnecessary deaths, but wastes tens of billions a year as Americans flock to expensive ER rooms or hospitals because they could not access the primary care they need."

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Jake Johnson

Jake Johnson is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

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Off the Top of My Head

Ukraine War is First World War All Over Again

by John Lawrence

In the First World War, Britain relied on supplies from the US the same way that Ukraine is relying on supplies from the US. The only difference is that Britain first had to borrow the money from the US and then use that money to buy weapons from US defense contractors. As a result Britain went into debt and US defense contractors got rich. Now the US is just giving the weapons to Ukraine with the result that US tax payers are basically picking up the tab. I like Joe Biden and what he's accomplished with respect to the economy, but I think his open ended policy towards Ukraine is a big mistake leading to the continued escalation of the war. The war in Ukraine has become a war of attrition just like the First World War. US sanctions against Russia are having the same effect as the British blockade of German ports in the First World War. In both cases the wars of attrition slogged on. In WW 1 16.5 million people died. The winners lost more people than the losers. The war in Ukraine also slogs on with no end in sight. Both sides have too much to lose, and both have their sights set on winning. This is a formula for disaster in terms of loss of life and billions of dollars of real estate destroyed. At that point it does not matter much who is the eventual winner.

So what's the off ramp other than total victory by one side or the other? In the First World War there was a nominal winner - Britain - although both sides were losers. Both sides were destroyed and in debt. Will this be the same in Ukraine? While the war in Ukraine rages on fueled by the egos of Biden, Zelensky and Putin, more and more Ukrainians and Russians are dying. So far only Ukrainian property is being destroyed, but I think we are on the brink of seeing a further escalation in which Russian property will also start to be destroyed. Biden's war rules were that the fighting should take place only in Ukraine and not on Russian soil, a proposition which was inherently flawed as far as the Ukrainians were concerned. According to Biden's rules, Ukraine could only fight a defensive war against Russia while Russia was totally on the offense in Ukraine. Of course this does not result in a fair fight. So Zelensky will almost inevitably take the war onto Russian territory and then beg Biden for more offensive weapons with which to destroy Moscow and other Russian cities the way that Russia has attempted to destroy Ukrainian cities.

The war will become a war on civilians on both sides as the war of attrition on the battlefield stagnates since both sides will have weapons capable of causing major destruction to major cities occupied by civilians. As both sides dig in, the thought or consideration of a peace plan gets further and further out of sight. As the war escalates, the probability that Russia will use tactical nukes to end it increases just as the US used nukes in World War II to destroy the civilian populations of two Japanese cities. Putin will use the same logic, and, while the US accuses Putin of war crimes, Putin will accuse Harry Truman of war crimes since he used nukes to wipe out the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki under the rationale that it would save American lives if the US had to actually invade Japan. Putin could use much the same logic. In any event the longer the war goes on without any serious discussions of a peaceful settlement involving compromise, the more dangerous and heartbreaking will be the eventual outcome. All sides need to stop fighting and put their energy into fighting our common enemy - climate change.

We Underestimated the Speed and Scale of the Climate Crisis, Scientists Warn

A tree burns during a wildfire in the town of Palaiochori near Athens, Greece, on July 20, 2023.(Photo: Costas Baltas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

By Andy Rowell, July21, 2023

from Common Dreams

“We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions,” one expert said.

As leading climate scientists watch the devastating, breakneck speed of unfolding climate disasters unfolding across the globe—from record soaring temperatures to catastrophic flooding—many are aghast at how rapidly their worst predictions are being now being played out in real-time.

Some are also now admitting that they might well have underestimated the speed and scale of our impending climate crisis and how bad things could get.

This is deeply ironic because, for years, those scientists who sounded the alarm over climate change were attacked by the oil industry or their funded front groups for exaggerating or playing “chicken little.”

“The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range.”

But now some of the most senior climate scientists on the planet are speaking out about their concerns.

Speaking to the BBC Thursday morning, Sir Bob Watson, who is currently emeritus professor of the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “I am very concerned. None of the observed changes so far (at +1.2°C) are surprising. But they are more severe than we predicted. We probably underestimated the consequences.”

He added “The research community must be brutally honest. We are on a pathway to 2-3°C, and probably closer to the upper end of that range. We are likely to pass 1.5°C in the mid-2030’s and 2°C around 2060. Current pledges and the policies needed them are totally inadequate.”

As the BBC notes, although Watson’s “comments are candid on the state of action on climate change, many of his colleagues will agree with his conclusion that we are on course for a temperature rise of 2.5°C or more.”

And Watson’s colleagues do concur. Ellen Thomas, a Yale University scientist who studies climate change told TheGuardian “It’s not just the magnitude of change, it’s the rate of change that’s an issue.”

Thomas added: “We have highways and railroads that are set in place, our infrastructure can’t move. Almost all my colleagues have said that, in hindsight, we have underestimated the consequences. Things are moving faster than we thought, which is not good.”

Other leading scientists agree too:

Meanwhile, others are being candid that nothing will change until we reduce our use of fossil fuels. “I’ve been expecting this for 20 years,” Professor Camille Parmesan, from the National Center for Scientific Research and an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report author, told Bloomberg. “This is just going to keep happening given that we’re not reducing emissions.”

Speaking to TheGuardian, James Hansen, often seen as the Godfather of climate science, warned we are hurtling towards a superheated climate because “we are damned fools” for not acting sooner. “We have to taste it to believe it.”

He told TheGuardian: “There’s a lot more in the pipeline, unless we reduce the greenhouse gas amounts. These superstorms are a taste of the storms of my grandchildren. We are headed wittingly into the new reality—we knew it was coming.”'

“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis.”

“This does not mean that the extreme heat at a particular place this year will recur and grow each year,” he continued. “Weather fluctuations move things around. But the global average temperature will go up and the climate dice will be more and more loaded, including more extreme events.”

In a so far unpeer-reviewed scientific paper, Hansen and colleagues said: “It seems that we are headed into a new frontier of global climate,” one not seen for millions of years.

They warn: “As long as more energy is coming in than going out, we must expect global warming to continue.”

Al Gore is another who is alarmed by what they are witnessing: “Everywhere you look in the world, the extremes have now seemingly reached a new level,” he told TheNew York Times in an interview. “The temperatures in the North Atlantic and the unprecedented decline of the Antarctic sea ice, both simultaneously. We see it in upstate New York, we see it in Vermont, we see it in southern Japan, we see it in India. We see it in the unprecedented drought in Uruguay and in Argentina.”

“The climate crisis is in the main a fossil fuel crisis,” Gore added. “If the world is not permitted to discuss the phasing down of fossil fuels because the fossil fuel companies don’t want the world to discuss it, that’s the sign of a very flawed process.”

But it’s not too late to act. As Watson said: “We need to hold governments to start to act sensibly now and reduce emissions.” And its not just governments. It’s the oil industry, too; as Gore points out, this is a fossil fuel crisis. Created by the fossil fuel industry. Because their decades-old public relations strategy of denying the evidence, spreading doubt, and delaying action is the reason our world is on fire right now.

 

© 2023 Oil Change International

 

 

Andy Rowell

Andy Rowell is a staff blogger for Oil Change International in addition to working as a freelance writer and investigative journalist who specializes in environmental, health and lobbying issues. He is a senior Research Fellow at the University of Bath and Director of the Tobacco Tactics team at the Tobacco Control Research Group, which is a partner in the global tobacco industry watchdog, STOP.

Full Bio >

Phoenix Breaks Record With 19 Consecutive Days 110 Degrees or Higher

Extreme Heat

Much of the Northern Hemisphere is experiencing withering high temperatures, which scientists warn are increasingly likely.

July 18, 2023 Updated 5:59 p.m. ET

 

from the New York Times

Jacey Fortin, Isabella Kwai, Vivian Yee, Vivian Wang and Lisa Friedman

Here’s what to know about the heat around the world.

Less than two weeks after the Earth recorded what scientists said were likely its hottest days in modern history, Phoenix broke a 49-year-old record on Tuesday with the city’s 19th consecutive day of temperatures 110 degrees (43.3 Celsius) or higher, part of a punishing heat wave that spanned much of the Northern Hemisphere.

The record-breaking temperatures are being driven by emissions of heat-trapping gases, mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels and by the return of El Niño, a cyclical weather pattern.

• Even Phoenix, no stranger to sweltering temperatures, struggled to cope with the record-setting heat. “It just feels awful,” said Mazey Christensen, 20, an ice cream scooper.

• Elsewhere in the United States, hot and humid conditions were expected to worsen along the Gulf Coast and throughout the Southeast, according to the National Weather Service.

• A heat wave gripped parts of Europe and the Middle East, with the heat index — which measures how it feels — reaching 152 degrees Fahrenheit (66.7 Celsius) at the Persian Gulf International Airport on Iran’s southwestern coast on Sunday. Dry conditions have also increased the risk of wildfires, which have broken out in Greece and on the Spanish-controlled La Palma, one of the Canary Islands.

• In Asia, John Kerry, President Biden’s special envoy for climate change, met with China’s premier in Beijing on Tuesday to discuss cooperation on slowing global warming as a withering heat wave grips the country. Tuesday was the 27th day this year that Beijing has recorded temperatures above 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius), a record.

• The planet has warmed about 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century and will continue to grow hotter until humans essentially stop burning oil, gas and coal, scientists say. The warmer temperatures contribute to extreme-weather events and help make periods of extreme heat more frequent, longer and more intense.

 

July 18, 2023, 5:59 p.m. ET

US west braces for fiercest temperatures yet as ‘supercharged’ heatwave arrives

Hottest weather of the year just beginning, warns National Weather Service, as authorities prepare to protect most vulnerable

Guardian staff and agencies

Fri 14 Jul 2023 21.09 EDT

Last modified on Mon 17 Jul 2023 07.26 EDT

 

People walk under water misters in Palm Springs, California. Photograph: Caroline Brehman/EPA

After days of unrelenting temperatures across much of the region, the American west is bracing for even more intense heat this weekend with more than a third of Americans under extreme heat alerts.

California is facing a powerful heat dome, bringing sweltering conditions expected to build on Friday and through the weekend, in central and southern parts of the state. The National Weather Service warned many residents they should prepare for the hottest weather of the year as desert area highs could exceed 120F (48.8C).

Death Valley national park was expected to equal or surpass its heat record of 130F (54.4C). Las Vegas could see three consecutive days with a high of 115F (46C), which has happened just once before, the NWS reported. Phoenix, which has endured a two-week stretch of temperatures above 110F (43C) with little relief in the evening hours, is expecting its hottest weekend of the year.

“We’ve been talking about this building heatwave for a week now, and now the most intense period is beginning,” the National Weather Service wrote on Friday.

The brutal heat comes as the US grapples with extreme weather across the country from the unforgiving temperatures of the west to tornadoes in Chicago and historic flooding in Vermont. Joe Biden has pledged to help communities prepare as Americans experience “the devastating impacts of the climate crisis”.

The heat could carry on into next week as a high pressure dome moves west from Texas. Forecasters warned that the long heatwave is extremely dangerous, particularly for older people, unhoused residents and other vulnerable populations. Officials across the west have repurposed public libraries, senior centers and police department lobbies as cooling centers, especially in desert areas.

“This weekend there will be some of the most serious and hot conditions we’ve ever seen,” said David Hondula, Phoenix’s chief heat officer. “I think that it’s a time for maximum community vigilance.”

The heatwave is already sending people to the hospital in Las Vegas – emergency room doctors reported treating dehydrated construction workers and passed-out elderly residents.

“This heatwave is not typical desert heat due to its long duration, extreme daytime temperatures and warm nights. Everyone needs to take this heat seriously, including those who live in the desert,” the National Weather Service in Las Vegas said.

This weekend there will be some of the most serious and hot conditions we’ve ever seen

David Hondula

In Palm Springs, where temperatures could climb to 120F (48.8C) this weekend, many homeless people in the desert city were left to contend with the heat on their own, with just 20 indoor beds at the lone overnight shelter.

John Summers, a homeless resident, climbed through a dry riverbed Thursday to seek shade at an encampment: “I basically just use water as much as I can. And hit shade. And, you know, the mall, wherever they’ll let you in,” he said.

Roman Ruiz, the city’s homeless services coordinator, said homeless residents struggle daily just to find a place with enough shade.

“I don’t know how anyone can do it really,” he said. “I feel so bad and yet there’s not much I can do.”

Meanwhile in northern California, cooling centers in and around Sacramento planned to offer some extended evening hours. In the small Central Valley city of Galt, about 25 miles south of the state capital, the police department planned to open its air-conditioned lobby through the warmest hours of the weekend.

Pet owners were urged to keep their animals mostly inside. “Dogs are more susceptible to heat stroke and can literally die within minutes. Please leave them at home in the air conditioning,” David Szymanski, park superintendent for Santa Monica mountains national recreation area, said in a statement.

Meanwhile the wildfire season is ramping up amid the hot, dry conditions with a series of blazes erupting across the state this week, Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the Natural Resources Agency, said at a media briefing this week.

The climate emergency is “supercharging” heat waves, Crowfoot added. California has instituted a $400m extreme heat action plan to protect workers, help vulnerable communities and assist local communities in opening cooling centers.

People looking to cool down in California’s many rivers should be wary, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said, noting that waterways swollen from the epic Sierra Nevada snowpack remain dangerous as there is still snow left to melt.

“Be aware that the water will still be icy cold despite how hot the air will be and could be flowing very fast, much faster than usual for mid-July,” he said.

The Federal Debt Trap: Issues and Possible Solutions

Posted on July 14, 2023 by Ellen Brown

 

from Web of Debt blog

First posted on ScheerPost.

“Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.” 

Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget deficits will average around $2 trillion per year. By 2029, just the interest on the debt is projected to exceed the national defense budget, which currently eats up over half of the federal discretionary budget. In 2029, net interest on the debt is projected to total $1.07 trillion, while defense spending is projected at $1.04 trillion. By 2033, says the CBO, interest payments will reach a sum equal to 3.6 percent of the nation’s economic output. 

The debt ceiling compromise did little to alleviate that situation. Before the deal, the CBO projected the federal debt would reach roughly $46.7 trillion in 2033. After the deal, it projected the total at $45.2 trillion, only slightly less – and still equal to 115% of the nation’s annual economic output, the highest level on record.

Acknowledging that the legislation achieved little, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after the vote that he intended to form a bipartisan commission “so we can find the waste and we can make the real decisions to really take care of this debt.” The NYT Editorial Board concluded:

Any substantive deal will eventually require a combination of increased revenue and reduced spending …. Both parties will have to compromise: Republicans must accept the necessity of collecting what the government is owed and of imposing taxes on the wealthy. Democrats must recognize that changes to Social Security and Medicare, the major drivers of expected federal spending growth, should be on the table. Anything less will prove fiscally unsustainable. 

The Elephant in the Room

Omitted was any mention of trimming the defense budget, which currently accounts for more than half of the federal government’s discretionary spending and nearly two-thirds of its contract spending. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who cast the sole dissenting vote on the recent $886 billion defense budget in the House Armed Services Committee, has detailed some of the Pentagon’s excesses. For decades, he writes, legacy military contractors have charged the federal government exorbitant sums for everything from fighter jets to basic hardware. Lockheed Martin, for example, has used its monopoly on F-35 fighter jets to profit from maintenance that only they can provide, with the work needed to support and upgrade existing jets projected to cost taxpayers over $1.3 trillion. TransDigm, another contractor responsible for supplying spare parts for the military, was found to be charging the Pentagon more than four times the market price for their products. 

Rep. Khanna concludes, “Keeping America strong starts at home. It means ensuring access to quality, affordable healthcare and education, strengthening our economy with good-paying jobs, and giving Americans the tools they need to pursue the American Dream.… Bloated military spending is not the answer.… We can’t continue to sign a blank check to price-gouging defense contractors while Americans struggle here at home.”

In an address to the UN Security Council on Ukraine aid on June 29, 2023, Max Blumenthal added fuel to those allegations. He said:

Just June 28th, as emergency crews work to clean up yet another toxic train derailment in the United States, this time on the Montana River, further exposing our nation’s chronically underfunded infrastructure and its threats to our health, the Pentagon announced plans to send an additional $500 million worth of military aid to Ukraine…. 

This policy, … which sees Washington prioritize unrestrained funding for a proxy war with a nuclear power in a foreign land … while our domestic infrastructure falls apart before our eyes, exposes a disturbing dynamic at the heart of the Ukraine conflict – an international Ponzi scheme that enables Western elites to seize hard-earned wealth from the hands of average U.S citizens and funnel it into the coffers of a foreign government that even Transparency International ranks as consistently one of the most corrupt in Europe. 

The U.S. government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. The American public has no idea where their tax dollars are going. And that’s why this week we at the Grayzone published an independent audit of U.S. tax dollar allocations to Ukraine throughout the fiscal years 2022 and ’23.

Among other dubious payments they found were $4.5 million from the U.S. Social Security Administration to the Kiev government, and $4.5 billion from USAID to pay off Ukraine’s sovereign debt, “much of which is owned by the global investment firm BlackRock. That amounts to $30 taken from every U.S citizen at a time when 4 in 10 Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency.”

The Black Hole of the Pentagon Budget

The Pentagon failed its fifth budget audit in 2022 and was unable to account for more than half of its assets, or more than $3 trillion. According to a CBS News report, defense contractors overcharged the Defense Department by nearly 40-50%; and according to the Office of the Inspector General for the Defense Department, overcharging sometimes reached more than 4,000%. The $886 billion budget request for FY2024 is the highest ever sought.

Following repeated concerns about fraud, waste and abuse in the Pentagon, in June 2023 a bipartisan group of senators introduced legislation to ensure the Defense Department passes a clean audit next year. The Audit the Pentagon Act of 2023 would require the Defense Department to pass a full, independent audit in fiscal 2024. Any agency within the Pentagon failing to pass a clean audit would be forced to return 1% of its budget for deficit reduction. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) observed that the Pentagon “and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement for decades.… [W]e have got to end the absurdity of the Pentagon being the only agency in the federal government that has never passed an independent audit.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said the Pentagon “should have to meet the same annual auditing standards as every other agency…. From buying $14,000 toilet seats to losing track of warehouses full of spare parts, the Department of Defense has been plagued by wasteful spending for decades. … Every dollar the Pentagon squanders is a dollar not used to support service members, bolster national security or strengthen military readiness.”

But defense audits have been promised before and have not been completed. In 2017, Michigan State University Prof. Mark Skidmore, working with graduate students and with Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, found $21 trillion in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015. As reported in MSUToday, Skidmore got involved when he heard Fitts refer to a report indicating the Army had $6.5 trillion in unsupported adjustments (or spending) in fiscal 2015. Since the Army’s budget was then only $122 billion, that meant unsupported adjustments were 54 times the spending authorized by Congress. Thinking Fitts must have made a mistake, Skidmore investigated and found that unsupported adjustments were indeed $6.5 trillion. 

Four days after Skidmore discussed his team’s findings on a USAWatchdog podcast, the Department of Defense announced it would conduct its first-ever department-wide independent financial audit. But it evidently failed in that endeavor. As Bernie Sanders observes, the Pentagon has never passed an independent audit. It failed its fifth audit in 2022. Whether it will pass this sixth one, or whether the audit will lead to budget cuts, remains to be seen. The Pentagon budget seems to be untouchable.

Off the Top of My Head

"Everyone's Crying Peace on Earth Just as Soon as We Win This War" - Mose Allison

by John Lawrence

Note from the future: One of the last humans evacuating planet earth, Elon Musk, writing the last chapter of the human race from his space hut on the moon: "Well, I guess it's up to me to write the last chapter of human history. I personally was able to escape planet earth as temperatures soared into the 150s. People had been forced into caves deep in earth to escape the heat. However, the war in Ukraine still raged on. Each side was intent on winning that war. More and more resources were poured into weapons. The US defense budget soared into the trillions of dollars. Some of us more enlightened ones said, 'Wait, wouldn't it be more important to take that money and put it toward fighting climate change, our common enemy. Climate change is the enemy of both NATO and Russia. No, the power structure said, it's more important to win this war. As the fighters in that war were dying of heat exhaustion rather than enemy bullets, they were some of the last humans to hold out on the surface of earth. Air temperatures were buckling roads and railroads. Even tanks and drones were melting in front of their eyes. It came down to hand to hand combat as guns were useless in the severe heat. Soldiers got second degree burns just from touching anything metal. But the war raged on. Ukraine was promised a path to NATO membership at the end of the war, but the brush along that path was burning furiously. It's doubtful if Ukraine would have made it all the way along that path to NATO without burning up first."

Musk continued: "You know the human saga reminds me of the fairy tale about the frogs in a pan of water. The water temperature was gradually increasing, but frog A insisted on staying in the water until his frog army was able to defeat Frog B's army. He reassured baby frog that as soon as his side won, they would all jump out of the water and be safe. But first they had to win this war. But baby frog said, 'Aren't you devoting all your time and energy to winning the war when, if both sides cooperated instead, you could devote your resources to lowering the temperature of the water.' No, said Frog A. Frog B is despicable We want all this land. We're not going to cede any of it to Frog B's tribe. But baby frog insisted, 'Who cares who owns what land if the whole pan of water which is our collective habitat burns up while you guys are still fighting? Your budget for cooling the water is miniscule compared to your defense (offense?) budget. If you just got along with other frogs you wouldn't need such a large defense budget. You could devote that money to global water cooling. This is the only pan of water we've got!.' I assure you, Frog A said, that as soon as we win this war, we will devote all our resources to cooling this pan of water."

Musk continued, "Well the moral of the story is that the human race was not able to get its act together even when they faced a common enemy. Each year even after global temperatures reached 140 degrees in some parts of the world for 100 days at a time, neither side in the Ukraine war would stop fighting. In fact that war would have gone on for the next hundred years, but, unfortunately, earth would not have been inhabitable by humans for another hundred years. It was not more than a decade later when temperatures reached 150 degrees for days at a time in most parts of the world. All the glaciers had melted in Antarctica so sea levels had risen more than 10 feet inundating Miami, London, New York City, Tokyo and New Orleans not to mention many other less noteworthy cities. No one could get property insurance any more; the insurance companies all went bankrupt. FEMA had run out of money. Flash floods left hundreds of thousands homeless. Those who had bought those old missile silos in Montana were lucky. They were safely ensconced underground where the temperatures were cooler. People crowded into Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico and Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. After these caves reached capacity a detachment of former marines stationed at the entrance shot anyone trying to gain entrance. Survivalist skills were highly in demand."

"As the last fighter on the battlefield in Ukraine died of heat stroke, NATO and Russia declared the war was over. It was undetermined who actually won. The path to membership in NATO for Ukraine was littered with dead bodies, many of whom had died from heat exhaustion. Ukraine itself was littered with tanks and other metallic weapons of war which seared the flesh of anyone foolish enough to touch them."

Off the Top of My Head

Certain Places Are Already Becoming Unlivable

by John Lawrence

Today it's supposed to be 121 degrees in Palm Springs, 115 degrees in Phoenix, 108 degrees in Athens. If you don't have air conditioning in those places, you are at high risk of dying. Thousand year floods are becoming annual events. And yet last year the human race pumped more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than ever before. Is this nuts or what? The human race will not become obsolete due to Artificial Intelligence; there is another much more deadly and imminent scenario - global warming. The Washington Post reported in an article entitled Floods, fires and deadly heat are the alarm bells of a planet on the brink:

The world is hotter than it’s been in thousands of years, and it’s as if every alarm bell on Earth were ringing.

The warnings are echoing through the drenched mountains of Vermont, where two months of rain just fell in only two days. India and Japan were deluged by extreme flooding.

They’re blaring from the scorching streets of Texas, Florida, Spain and China, with a severe heat wave also building in Phoenix and the Southwest in coming days.

They’re burbling up from the oceans, where temperatures have surged to levels considered “beyond extreme.”

And they’re showing up in unprecedented, still-burning wildfires in Canada that have sent plumes of dangerous smoke into the United States.

Scientists say there is no question that this cacophony was caused by climate change — or that it will continue to intensify as the planet warms. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions, particularly from burning fossil fuels, have raised Earth’s temperature by about 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Unless humanity radically transforms the way people travel, generate energy and produce food, the global average temperature is on track to increase by more than 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit), according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — unleashing catastrophes that will make this year’s disasters seem mild.

It's the problem of the frog in warm water. As the temperature of the water is increased, the frog doesn't jump out because the water warms so gradually. Eventually, the water gets so warm that the frog wants desperately to jump out but he can't. The water is too hot for him to move so, as the temperature keeps on increasing, he eventually boils to death. This is the exact metaphor for what is happening to the human race in its relatively short existence on planet Earth. As the human race developed and urbanized, towns and cities were built adjacent to water sources. This means that every babbling brook is potentially a source of catastrophic floods because such immense amounts of water are dumped out of clouds that the babbling brook infrastructure cannot contain it. As sea levels rise many great cities also will soon be under water as soon as the Antarctic glaciers melt.

Meanwhile, the human race is amusing itself to death. Instead of an all hands on deck effort as was seen in World War II, we are seeing increasing demands for tourism, entertainment and increased consumption in the developed world. That world will just crank up the air conditioning as the world warms until such time that the electric grid fails. Then those without a personal generator will be doomed. In the undeveloped world, they don't even have adequate potable water or a decent sewage system let alone any kind of air conditioning. They will be the first to succumb. Eventually the human race will run out of options even as those in more favorable locations continue to consume and amuse themselves. Then later only the rich will survive.

When Climate Change Hits Home

Flooding in Stony Point, New York

By David Gelles

New York Times, July 11, 2023

Seth Harrison/USA Today Network/via Reuters

Even if you’ve been paying attention to climate change, it can sometimes feel very far away, distant in both space and time. But on Sunday night, as I was writing my first edition of this newsletter, it came roaring into my kitchen.

I was with my family at our 100-year-old cabin in the Hudson Valley, north of New York City. It had been pouring for fourteen hours, and our ceiling started leaking. Then, around midnight, a wall of water flooded the house.

Many of my neighbors fared even worse. One woman died and dozens had to be rescued as a slow-moving storm system produced widespread flooding in New York State and New England.

We know that man-made climate change is making extreme weather like this more severe. Warmer temperatures enable air to hold more moisture, which leads to more intense rainfall and flooding.

On Monday, the New York governor said such climate-fueled disasters were “the new normal.” In general, the United States is nowhere close to ready for the threat of catastrophic flooding, especially in areas far from rivers and coastlines.

On the other side of the country, much of the Southwest is baking under a heat dome. Major cities have been choking on smoke from Canadian wildfires for a month now. Off the coast of Florida, ocean temperatures are reaching into the mid-90s Fahrenheit.

June heat in Phoenix. Temperatures are expected to be above 110 degrees Fahrenheit (or above 43 degrees Celsius) again this week.  Caitlin O'Hara/Getty Images

This is not just about millions of Americans, of course, but billions of people around the globe. Over the weekend, Delhi recorded its wettest July day in 40 years, Beijing residents flocked to underground air raid shelters to escape the heat, and floods carried away cars in Spain.

The planet is entering a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, scientists say. Greenhouse gas emissions, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels, have already heated the Earth by an average of 1.2 degrees Celsius (or 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) compared with preindustrial levels. Now a powerful El Niño system in the Pacific Ocean is releasing a torrent of heat into the atmosphere. The warmest days in modern history occurred this month. That all sets the stage for more damaging heat waves, floods, droughts, wildfires and hurricanes.

Yesterday, as I spoke with climate scientists for a story about the storm that walloped my house, they all sounded the alarm about what was coming in the months ahead.

“We are going to see stuff happen this year around Earth that we have not seen in modern history,” one meteorologist told me. “It will be astonishing.”

Abnormal as the ‘new normal’

Each of these anomalies creates new risks, threatening human health and biodiversity. Yet with disasters piling up and headlines blurring together, there is another profoundly dangerous risk: apathy.

As temperature records break and extreme weather becomes commonplace, the abnormal can begin to seem ordinary. That’s an all-too human reaction to adversity. We’re masters of adaptation, and can learn to endure even the most uncomfortable situations.

But in this case, indifference would be the biggest disaster of them all. Growing inured to the signs of a planet on fire would do more than blind us to the damage we’ve already done. It would also delay critical action at a crucial juncture.

Because as bad as things are, there are still real causes for optimism.

After decades of inaction, a monumental effort is finally underway to confront climate change. Wind turbines and solar panels are rapidly displacing fossil fuels. Sales of electric vehicles, heat pumps and induction stoves are soaring. Across government, business and civil society, there is a concerted, coordinated push to reduce emissions, protect nature and help humans adapt to a hotter planet.

The grand project to decarbonize the world economy can be seen as the biggest collective action in human history. On the agenda is nothing less than the remaking of the world’s entire energy and transportation systems, not to mention vast overhauls of the building blocks of modern life. And it all needs to happen with a pants-on-fire urgency as the planet heats up.

That may seem daunting, and it is. Progress is not happening nearly fast enough, and many obstacles remain. But it’s also the opportunity of a lifetime. Should we succeed, we’ll be creating a world with better air quality, more green space, healthier ecosystems and less waste.

It’s a head-spinning moment, one that requires us to honor two seemingly contradictory truths at the same time.

Yes, the fragile ecosystem that sustains human life is in trouble.

And also yes, we have many of the tools needed to get ourselves out of this mess.

Your part of the story

It’s this tension — between hope and despair, between urgency and inertia, between a world remade and a stubborn status quo — that will animate this newsletter in the months and years ahead.

I won’t be doing it alone. Manuela Andreoni, my co-pilot for this newsletter, is based in Brazil and brings us an essential international perspective and a voracious curiosity about climate and the environment. You’ll also be hearing from the Times’ new weather team as well as other reporters from around the newsroom.

My colleague Somini Sengupta has been shepherding this newsletter, sharing her keen insights twice a week. From here on out, we’ll be arriving in your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and chiming in with additional rapid-fire analysis when news breaks.

And we want to hear from you. You can email the Climate Forward team and tell us what’s got you worried, what’s giving you hope and where we should be looking for the next big story.

A push to wean China from coal

President Joe Biden is trying to repair relations with China after months of increased tensions, and climate is among the top issues on the agenda. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen both discussed climate issues in recent visits to Beijing. And climate envoy John Kerry is scheduled to arrive on Sunday.

The diplomatic push reflects an inescapable truth: The United States and China are the world’s industrial superpowers. And any chance at staving off the worst effects of climate change will require both of them moving in the same direction.

“The U.S. and China together make up about 40 percent of emissions,” said my colleague Lisa Friedman, who is following Kerry to Beijing. “They are also the two biggest investors in clean energy.”

China has more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined and is the biggest manufacturer and user of wind turbines — a major reason why clean energy has become so affordable for all countries in recent years.

But fossil fuels still make up the majority of China’s energy sources. It consumes over half of the world’s coal, and continues to approve new coal plants at a rapid pace. The Chinese government’s goal is to continue growing the economy while avoiding problems like the power failures the country faced during a heat wave last year that disrupted several supply chains.

China’s investments in renewable energy appear to be sufficient to enable it to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, as it has pledged. But there are concerns about how high emissions will go before they start to decline.

U.S. officials are urging China to accelerate that energy transition and phase out coal. And after the Biden administration secured hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate America’s transition to clean energy, they may finally have some leverage.

“What many analysts are saying is that the U.S. just did a big move on climate change,” Lisa said. “Now, it’s China’s turn.” — -Manuela Andreoni

Off the Top of My Head

Was the War in Ukraine Worth Not Giving Putin Assurances That Ukraine Would Not Join NATO?

by John Lawrence

In an interview with Fareed Zakaria President Biden said this:

"I don't think [Ukraine] is ready for membership in NATO, but here's the deal. ... I don't think there's unanimity in NATO about whether or not to bring Ukraine into the NATO family now at this moment in the middle of a war. ... The very first time I met with Putin two years ago in Geneva, and he said I want commitments on no Ukraine in NATO, I said we're not going to do that because it's an open door policy. We're not going to shut anybody out. NATO is a process that takes some time to meet all of the qualifications and from democratization to a whole range of other issues so in the meantime though I've spoken with Zelensky at great length about, at length about this and uh one of the things I indicated is the United States would be ready to provide while the process is going on - and it's going to take a while - while that process is going on, to provide security ala the security we provide for Israel providing the weaponry they need, the capacity to defend themselves if there is an agreement, if there is a cease fire, if there is a peace agreement and so I think we can work it out but I think it's premature to say, to call for a vote you know in now because there's other qualifications that need to be met including democratization and some of those issues."

So since Ukraine was not ready for NATO membership when Biden met Putin two years ago, why wouldn't Biden give Putin assurances that Ukraine would not be admitted to NATO at least for some period of years? That in and of itself might have forestalled the war so that Putin would not have invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Or Biden could have persuaded NATO to admit Ukraine to NATO two years ago and that in and of itself might have deterred Putin from invaded Ukraine. Clearly, Putin invaded Ukraine because it was not a member of NATO, and so his invasion would not have amounted to a full scale confrontation with all of NATO's forces. Also clearly, since Ukraine was not in Biden's mind ready to join NATO, Biden could have given Putin assurances that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO. Then at such time as Ukraine was deemed fit to become a member of NATO the US could have gone back on its assurances. It wouldn't have been the first time the US had made a commitment and then broken it. In fact when the Soviet Union dissolved itself in 1989, Gorbachev was given assurances that NATO wouldn't move "one inch eastward," an assurance that was clearly broken during the Clinton and George W Bush administrations when NATO moved aggressively eastward.

So was the war in Ukraine in which there have been as of June 2023 25,170 civilian casualties, with 9,177 killed and 15,993 injured, really worth not givving Putin assurances? By the end of 2022, an estimated 5.9 million people were internally displaced by the war, while nearly 5.7 million refugees and asylum-seekers from Ukraine were recorded across Europe. The damage to housing facilities from the Russian invasion of Ukraine was estimated at 50 billion U.S. dollars between February 24, 2022, and February 24, 2023. Further 36 billion U.S. dollars were recorded in losses from damages to infrastructure. Was the war in Ukraine worth Biden's refusal to give Putin "assurances?" The United States has appropriated approximately $115 billion in emergency funding to support Ukraine since February 24, 2022. Could that money have been better spent? Since Russia’s invasion in February of that year, Ukraine has become far and away the top recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It’s the first time that a European country has held the top spot since the Harry S. Truman administration directed vast sums into rebuilding the continent through the Marshall Plan after World War II. All of this does not even count the inflation caused the world by the sanctions against Russian oil and the disruption of Ukraine's grain crops. And even now the war grinds on with the possibility of Russian tactical nuclear bombs being used in Ukraine or the largest nuclear power plant in Europe being destroyed.

Biden's opening the door for the war in Ukraine was based on the principle that he couldn't give Putin assurances that Ukraine would never join NATO. War based on principles, my friends, is never worth it. He should have given Putin assurances even if he was crossing his fingers behind his back.

U.S. Truckmakers Reach Deal to Phase Out Polluting Diesel Big Rigs

California Pact Could Speed Transition to Electric Commercial Trucks in 2030s to Reduce Particulates and Other Pollution

By Timothy Puko

Washington Post, July 6, 2023

 

A truck engine is tested for pollution that leaves its exhaust pipe in California near the Mexican border in 2013. (Mike Blake/Reuters)

 

Some of the largest manufacturers of heavy trucks and engines in the country have agreed to accept a California plan to ban sales of new diesel big rigs by 2036 under a deal aimed in part at thwarting potential litigation and maintaining a single national standard for truck pollution rules.

The deal averts a costly court battle with the biggest industry players and eases the transition to clean electric commercial trucks in California, the largest market in the country, and potentially other states. The agreement covers manufacturers including industry giants such as Ford, General Motors, Daimler and Cummins, as well as the Truck and Engine Manufacturers Association, an industry group. All are agreeing to implement the California plan regardless of how it may fare in the courts.

The coalition, known as the Clean Truck Partnership, was born out of more than three months of negotiations between the industry and the California Air Resources Board, which has been pushing new rules to lead the country on cleaning up heavy trucks. California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) heralded the deal as a major step toward reducing air pollution and emissions that warm the planet.

“California has shown the world what real climate action looks like, and we are raising the bar yet again,” Newsom said in a statement. “Today, truck manufacturers join our urgent efforts to slash air pollution, showing the rest of the country that we can both cut dangerous pollution and build the economy of the future.”

Diesel-powered commercial trucks are a major source of air pollution nationwide, in particular affecting people living near ports, warehouses and other facilities involved in intensive shipments of goods. In California, heavy-duty trucks account for nearly a third of nitrogen oxide pollution and more than a quarter of fine particle pollution in the state, according to the California Air Resources Board.

Both of these pollutants are linked to asthma, other respiratory illnesses and premature death. Black and Latino people constitute a notable proportion of California residents living near the state’s ports — which are among the busiest in the country — and are vulnerable, state officials said. The deal could have broader implications. Several other states often follow the clean air rules of California, and because of its size, automakers often produce cars for sale nationwide to meet California standards. That has helped make California a trendsetter in reducing the air pollution emitted by cars and trucks for decades.

Eight states have adopted a precursor to the California plan, accounting for about 25 percent of the American truck market. The states that regularly adopt California regulations were briefed on the new deal at the end of the negotiations. The manufacturers said they are committed to switching to big rigs that produce no emissions, and they touted provisions to harmonize California rules with a recent proposal by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit nitrogen oxide emissions.

The industry for years has tried to make the rules set in Washington and Sacramento as near-identical as possible. That includes a 2019 deal the California Air Resources Board struck with several makers of passenger cars to meet stricter state rules, undercutting a Trump administration plan to relax federal gas-mileage standards.

 

Competence isn’t enough. Biden must also confront America’s economic bullies.

“Bidenomics” and “competence versus craziness” won't hack it.

Robert Reich

Jul 5, 2023

 

Friends,

It seems likely that the two major contenders for president next year will be Joe Biden and Donald Trump.

What will be their messages?

Biden has framed that choice as competence or craziness. His new “Bidenomics” blueprint makes clear that America has done well under his quietly competent leadership — featuring significant public investment, taming of inflation, and rebirth of manufacturing.

Trump has framed the choice as strength or weakness.

 

I’d rather have someone in the White House who’s competent (even if weak) than someone who’s crazy (even if strong).

But I fear voters may choose strength over competence.

Strength is one of the central narratives of America. In the mythic telling, America was borne from grit, guts, and gumption.

You probably learned it in school: We fought for our independence. We “tamed” the frontier. We won the Revolution. We prevailed in World Wars I and II.

The story conveniently leaves out slavery and genocide, as well as the more recent tragedies of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Latin America. But it’s deeply engrained in the American mind — far more so than is competence.  

Besides his Big Lie, Trump’s most dangerous con has been that America needs a strongman, and he fits the bill.

For Trump, every issue boils down to strength or weakness. Trump admires strongmen. He seeks dominance. He despises vulnerability.

Although he has never mentioned “social Darwinism” (I doubt he even knows the term), it’s the snake oil Trump sells — survival of the fittest, success to the mightiest, victory to the strongest. Life is a competitive struggle. America will be great only if we reward the strong and punish the weak.

Trump’s base — along with millions of other working Americans — feel bullied by a system that has marginalized and diminished them.

Trump blames liberal Democrats, Marxists, socialists, “coastal elites,” the Deep State, the FBI, the Justice Department, the IRS, and the Mainstream Media, along with non-whites and immigrants.

This angry base includes men who feel they’ve lost ground to women’s growing economic and political power.

Trump’s base wants a strongman who will bully these bullies.

 

Trump acts the part of a heroic brawler who’s loathed by the establishment but loved by the masses. His vindictiveness toward cultural elites makes his followers feel vindicated. “I am your voice,” he said on July 21, 2016. Many believed him then and still do.

It’s all a show, of course. Trump is a billionaire grifter who as president gave away trillions in tax cuts to billionaires and continues to rake in money from his time in office. But the more indignant Trump makes the cultural establishment, the happier his base, because their indignation makes them feel vindicated.

Finally, you can bet that Trump and the Republicans will magnify every sign of Biden’s frailty — his occasional difficulties pronouncing words, his slow gait, his moments of confusion. And they will do whatever they can to project Trump’s vitality.

So, I fear “competence or craziness” won’t do it.

The best way for Biden and the Democrats to counteract Trump’s “strength or weakness” is by taking aim at the real bullies of America — the C-suite oligarchs, Wall Street plutocrats, billionaire monopolists who have been riding roughshod over the vast majority of Americans.

End their big-monied corruption of our democracy. Stop their monopolizing of the economy. Prevent them from using their economic power to raise prices. Call a halt to their firing workers without notice, shipping jobs abroad, and busting unions.

“Bidenomics” could create hundreds of thousands of good manufacturing jobs. That’s good, but not sufficient.

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a rigged economic system.

To counter Trump’s fake battle with cultural elites whom he accuses of undermining America’s moral core, Biden should mount a real battle against economic elites who have shafted America’s middle and working classes.

What do you think?

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Three reforms to restore trust in the Supreme Court

On the anniversary of Dobbs and the revelations about Alito

Robert Reich

Jun 24, 2023

 

Friends,

Trust in the Supreme Court has hit a historic low. A Quinnipiac poll last week found that only 30 percent of registered voters approve of it.

Why don’t Americans trust the Supreme Court?

Because its opinions appear arbitrary, capricious, and partisan. Just look at Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which reversed Roe v. Wade a year ago today — and with which the majority of Americans disagree.

 

And because Supreme Court justices have been subject to bribery.

Last week, ProPublica detailed how billionaire Paul Singer, a GOP megadonor, flew Justice Samuel Alito to Alaska on Singer’s private plane at no cost. The trip would have cost Alito an estimated $100,000, not including accommodation, food, and wine.
 
Alito never disclosed any of this, apparently violating federal financial disclosure rules applying to all federal officials, including Supreme Court justices.

And Alito failed to recuse himself from participating in a case of financial significance to Singer.
 
In April, ProPublica revealed that billionaire Republican donor Harlan Crow gave Justice Clarence Thomas free luxury vacations and other gifts over a 20-year period — none of which was disclosed by Thomas.

Crow also purchased two houses from Thomas and agreed to let Thomas’s mother live in one of them at no cost. In addition, Crow paid the private school tuition for a student Thomas has described as a person “he is raising as a son.”

Thomas has failed to recuse himself from participating in cases of financial interest to Crow.

Orchestrating these bribes has been Leonard Leo, who last year received an unprecedented $1.6 billion donation to continue his work stacking the courts with ideologically conservative jurists. Leo played a pivotal role in the selection of the three Supreme Court justices appointed by Trump.

 

What to do to restore trust of the highest court? Congress should enact three reforms:

1. A code of ethics

Every federal judge has to sign on to a code of ethics — except for Supreme Court justices. This makes no sense. Judges on the highest court should be held to the highest ethical standards.

Congress should enact a code of ethics on Supreme Court justices. It would: (1) ban justices from receiving personal gifts from political donors and anyone with business before the court, (2) clarify when justices with conflicts of interest should remove themselves from cases, (3) prohibit justices from trading individual stocks, and (4) establish a formal process for investigating misconduct. 

2. Term limits

Article III of the Constitution says judges may “hold their office during good behavior” but does not explicitly give Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure on the highest court — even though that’s become the norm.  

Term limits would prevent unelected justices from accumulating too much power over the course of their tenure — and would help defuse what has become an increasingly divisive confirmation process. 

Congress should limit Supreme Court terms to 18 years, after which justices move to lower courts.

3. Expand the court

The Constitution does not limit the Supreme Court to nine justices. In fact, Congress has changed the size of the court seven times. It should do so again in order to remedy the extreme partisanship of today’s Supreme Court.    

Some may decry this as “court packing,” but the real court packing occurred when Senate Republicans refused to even consider a Democratic nominee to the Supreme Court on the fake pretext that it was too close to the 2016 election but then confirmed a Republican nominee just days before the 2020 election. 

Rather than allow Republicans to continue exploiting the system, expanding the Supreme Court would actually unpack the court.

***

Enacting these reforms won’t be easy. Big monied interests will fight to keep their control of the Supreme Court.

But these three reforms have significant support from the American people, who have lost trust in the court.

The Supreme Court derives its strength not from the use of force or political power, but from the trust of the people. With neither the sword nor the purse, trust is all it has. 

***

[Today’s coffee klatch will be posted at 9 am PT, 12 pm ET.]

 

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Off the Top of My Head

Supreme Court Judgments Undermine the US as a Nation

by John Lawrence

So Harvard can't admit students based on race but can admit legacy student based on the fact that their parents gave money to Harvard. First of all Harvard is a private institution. Why can't it decide for itself how to admit students based on policies of their own making. Why is the government telling Harvard how to admit students. Harvard as a private entity within the United States is entitled to its own freedom without government interference as dictated by the Supreme Court. This conservative Supreme Court will not hesitate to tell government to get out of the affairs of private individuals as it did in the case of the web designer who didn't want to design web sites for gays. Yet it wants to dictate to Harvard what its admission policies should be. If I started a college and wanted to admit only blacks, I suppose the Supreme Court would have an issue with that, but then isn't my admission policy free speech? It seems that everything else is. Whatever anyone wants to do, providing the Supreme Court agrees with it, it declares that that is free speech. The principle is that it doesn't want the government to set any policies at all. According to their philosophy government should be policy neutral. Government should just set a level playing field and then get out of everyone's business. But in the Harvard case they declared just the opposite should hold. The government should be in the business of setting admission policies according to the Supreme Court.

According to conservative philosophy by which the Supreme Court is dominated, the Federal government should have no role in public policy whatsoever. So one of the techniques it uses is to refer everything back to the states. The states should set all policies, not the Federal government. So if a state wants to ban books, it has a perfect right to do so. If a state wants to ban trans males from female sports or bathrooms, its has a right to do so. But of course the Federal government has no right to weigh in on one side or the other. This is the philosophy for overturning Roe vs Wade. Each state should set its own abortion policy. The Federal government does not have a right to set this or any other policy for the country as a whole. Presumably the Supreme Court at some point will also weigh in on the illegality of the Federal government setting policies on the environment and in particular climate change. When all is said and done the only legitimate function of the Federal government will be to have the largest defense department and defense budget in the world. The function of the Federal government will be confined to waging war.

So according to the Supreme Court's philosophy, all social programs like Obamacare or Social Security or Medicare will be relegated to the states. All Federal programs will be deemed illegal. The United States will not even be a nation any more in the sense that France or Germany or China is a nation. The United States will not be capable of having a national policy regarding climate change or anything else. The United States as a nation will be totally weak when it comes to anything except war. There the nation will be all powerful. But when it comes to anything that actually benefits human beings whether here at home or abroad, the United States will be little more than a hollow shell. Other nations will look at the United States, as Nixon stated, as a "pitiful helpless giant." Other nations will not trust the United States since already they know that national policies can change every four years based on which party is in power. Now they also know that the United States has a Supreme Court which is determined to undermine national power at every step and refer everything back to the states.

The Supreme Court’s worst new ruling you never heard of

Standing to bring cases

Robert Reich

Jul 3, 2023

 

Friends,

One ruling hidden inside one of the Supreme Court’s horrendous decisions last week hasn’t got nearly the attention it deserves: the court’s radical expansion of who has standing to bring cases before the court.

 

When I argued cases before the Supreme Court in the 1970s, a challenger had to show they’d suffered a specific injury that could be remedied by relief from a federal court. If they failed to establish such standing, the high court would dismiss the case without considering the merits of their claim.

The necessity to establish standing to bring a case before the Supreme Court has been an important guardrail preventing the court from getting into matters the Constitution has reserved for the other branches of government.

But on Friday, in Biden v. Nebraska — striking down President Biden’s student loan program — the majority decided that Missouri had standing to challenge the program. Why? Because a quasi-independent state agency — the Missouri Higher Education Loan Authority (MOHELA) — might suffer financial losses from the loan program. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority:

“The … plan harms MOHELA in the performance of its public function and so directly harms the State that created and controls MOHELA. Missouri thus has suffered an injury in fact sufficient to give it standing to challenge the Secretary’s plan.”

Directly harms the state? Hello?

 

As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent, “In adjudicating Missouri’s claim, the majority reaches out to decide a matter it has no business deciding” — with a ruling that “blows through a constitutional guardrail intended to keep courts acting like courts.”

From now on, a state can challenge any action of the federal government merely by setting up a quasi-independent agency indirectly affected by it.

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Bad enough that the court’s majority is now making up its own laws — disregarding the Supreme Court’s own precedents it disagrees with, deciding Congress hasn’t authorized certain actions it disagrees with, and finding certain practices it disagrees with to be unconstitutional.

Bad enough that three of the justices now in the majority were appointed by a man who lost the popular vote, who was impeached twice, and who promoted an insurrection against the United States. And two others were appointed by a man who also lost the popular vote and led the nation into war in Iraq under false pretenses.

Now that the court has obliterated the guardrail on what it can consider, there are no limits to what this least democratic branch of government — and its extremist majority — might do.

Which is why it’s so important to reform the court — in ways I’ve suggested here.

What do you think?

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Off the Top of My Head

Bidenomics: The US Finally Gets an Industrial Policy

by John Lawrence

The Republican policy that the government should be hands off regarding the economy is out the window. Trickle down is a failed policy. Bidenomics gets the government involved in crucial areas of the economy. The export of jobs to parts of the world where labor is cheapest is replaced with a policy of creating jobs within the US. Deregulation is replaced with regulations to protect the environment and combat climate change. The traditional Democratic alliance with unions is back in vogue. Bidenomics is all about building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up instead of from the top down. Bidenomics is about shaping the economy in a way that is propitious for the middle class and the environment. Infrastructure building is more important than accelerating the consumer economy. Putting our house in order is more important than giving away fattening goodies to consumers. People are being put to work doing jobs which actually make US society a better place instead of encouraging jobs in frivolous pursuits. This is not necessarily what the American consumer wants.The American consumer wants more money in their pockets so they can buy more gadgets and aspire to making millions as a pro athlete or an entertainer. They don't actually want to work at the good jobs Biden is creating building infrastructure or making semiconductors. CNN reported:

Trickle-down economics, which was at the heart of President Ronald Reagan’s policies and continues to be the guiding light of Republican lawmakers, typically revolves around tax cuts for the wealthy and large companies. Supporters say the benefits flow down to middle-class and working Americans, boosting economic growth more broadly. But many experts dispute the effectiveness of this practice at lifting all boats.

Biden argues that supply-side, trickle-down economics has cost jobs and hollowed out the middle class. He has long focused on that group of Americans, serving as chair of the Middle Class Task Force when he was vice president in the Obama administration.

“Folks, let me say it as clearly as I can: (The) trickle-down approach failed the middle class and failed America,” said Biden.

To fund Bidenomics, the president once again calls for ensuring the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share of taxes.

The problem is that now that the American people have had  a good taste of Democratic programs, they want more: Republican tax cuts. They want their cake and eat it too. They know that Republicans will have no problem with the national deficits and debts as long as they come in the form of tax cuts. So from the American consumer's point of view they have got about all they can expect to get out of Bidenomics. Now they want a tax break to boot.

The Biden administration has focused on infrastructure, clean energy and semiconductors, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Inflation Reduction Act, and CHIPS Act each include direct funding and tax incentives for public and private manufacturing construction. Biden outlined how states will receive more than $42 billion in federal funding for high-speed internet service, which was part of the 2021 infrastructure law. It is aimed at bringing connectivity to more Americans and closing the digital divide. The administration is comparing it to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act, which brought electricity to homes throughout the country. And 35,000 new projects – including roads, bridges and ports – have received funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law, the White House said.

E.J. Dionne Jr. said in the Washington Post:

Bidenomics has also gone global. One indicator is the exceptional and ongoing debate Sullivan’s speech provoked in proposing a “new consensus” to replace “a set of ideas that championed tax cutting and deregulation, privatization over public action and trade liberalization as an end in itself.” The old formulas, Sullivan argued, not only failed to address new problems; they didn’t work on their own terms.

“In the name of oversimplified market efficiency,” he said, “entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that made them, moved overseas.” The idea that freer trade “would help America export goods, not jobs and capacity, was a promise made but not kept.” He stressed the need for “a modern American industrial strategy” and the benefits of “moving beyond traditional trade deals to innovative new international economic partnerships.”

Can the dumbed down and self seeking American people even understand much less appreciate the great things that Bidenomics has brought forth? Biden has changed the narrative on taxes by repeating ad nauseum that he wouldn't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. Big idea: raising taxes doesn't mean raising taxes on everyone and a tax break does nor mean lowering taxes on everyone. The meme about raising taxes which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to Democrats ("tax and spend") and tax breaks which Republicans have endeavored to attribute to themselves has been change by Biden. "Tax the rich" has become the Democrats' motto thanks to Bernie Sanders and AOC.The immense inequality that Reaganomics has resulted in is being addressed by Bidenomics. The American people say "Ho Hum". They are more interested in spectator sports which is exemplified by the fact that news programs on TV are routinely bounced in favor of sports events. In short the American people don't appreciate Biden because they don't take the time to understand Bidenomics.

Biden has done much good for America and Americans. He is the least appreciated great President in American history. It's a reflection on the American people themselves that all they're interested in is their own personal situation. If they are well off, they could care less about social programs that help the poor. If they have a good job, they could care less about the unemployed. American have been taught to be totally selfish and not to care about the wider world or about the improvement of society in general. Corporations by law are only supposed to consider the financial well being of their share holders and nothing else. These attitudes in and of themselves preclude the concerns of minorities, whether racial or economic, because the US is a majoritarian society. In politics the majority rules. Concern about the welfare of minorities and of the world in general and in particular the environment is not a consideration. Meanwhile, global warming is taking out individual families who are victims of tornadoes or other particular manifestations of global warming on a daily basis. It has yet to sink in that perhaps concerns for larger interests than just ourselves might be a paradigm change we might have to make.

For the American people, it's not abut how much Biden has done, it's about how much have you done for me lately, Mr Biden, and, more importantly, how much more are you going to do? If there are many more carrots, then maybe I'll vote for you. Otherwise, I'll take the tax break Republicans are offering. The American national character is selfishness personified. Ayn Rand would be proud.