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Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Urgently Need Improvement

The global assessment, two years in the making, is the first official gauge of progress under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

by Brad Plumer, September 8, 2023, from the New York Times

 

 

While many of the worst outcomes feared in the 2010s appear less likely today, the report said, current efforts are still not enough to avoid calamity.Credit...Sascha Steinbach/EPA, via Shutterstock

Eight years after world leaders approved a landmark agreement in Paris to fight climate change, countries have made only limited progress in staving off the most dangerous effects of global warming, according to the first official report card on the global climate treaty.

Many of the worst-case climate change scenarios that were much feared in the early 2010s look far less likely today, the report said. The authors partly credit the 2015 Paris Agreement, under which, for the first time, almost every country agreed to submit a voluntary plan to curb its own planet-warming emissions. Since then, the rise in global greenhouse gases has notably slowed.

Yet those efforts still aren’t enough to avoid calamity, according to the report, which was written by representatives from the United States and South Africa and based on contributions from hundreds of governments, scientists and civil society groups from around the world.

Under the Paris Agreement, countries vowed to limit the rise in average global temperatures to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels and make a good-faith effort to stay at 1.5 degrees Celsius. Past that level, the dangers from intense flooding, wildfires, drought, heat waves and species extinction could become unmanageable, scientists have said. Earth has already heated up roughly 1.2 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times.

Countries are far from meeting those goals. Current climate pledges would put the world on track for a significantly more hazardous 2.5 degrees Celsius or so of warming by 2100, assuming nations followed through on their plans. In order to keep global warming at safer levels, global emissions would need to plunge roughly 60 percent by 2035, which would most likely require a much faster expansion of energy sources like wind, solar or nuclear power and a sharp decrease in pollution from fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas.

The window for keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the report said, is “rapidly narrowing.”

The new report is part of what’s known as the global stocktake. When countries approved the Paris Agreement, they agreed to meet every five years, starting in 2023, to officially assess how the fight against climate change was going and see whether they should ratchet up their efforts.

The report, nearly two years in the making, is meant to serve as the foundation for the next round of United Nations climate negotiations, known as COP28, that will start in late November in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. There, countries will discuss how to respond to the global stocktake and what more they can do.

“I urge governments to carefully study the findings of the report and ultimately understand what it means for them and the ambitious action they must take next,” said Simon Stiell, the United Nations climate head. “The global stocktake is a critical moment for greater ambition and accelerating action.”

The report avoids singling out any individual countries for success or failure, underscoring one of the thorniest dynamics in global climate talks. Everyone agrees that the world as a whole should cut emissions faster, but nations sharply disagree over who, exactly, should do more. Developing countries like India say that wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe should curtail their fossil fuel use more rapidly. U.S. officials, in turn, often point out that China needs to do much more now that it has become the world’s largest emitter by far.

The man overseeing this year’s negotiations, Sultan al-Jaber, is the head of both the Emirates’ biggest renewable energy company and its national oil company, a dual role that has provoked criticism from many environmentalists, who say he is unlikely to be an impartial mediator.

 

Sultan Al-Jaber, president of the COP28 climate meeting in November, in Nairobi this week.Credit...Luis Tato/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. al-Jaber has said he wants countries to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030. He also wants nations to agree, for the first time, on a long-term goal of phasing out “unabated” fossil fuels. That phrasing would allow for the continued use of oil, coal or gas if companies can capture and bury the emissions those fuels produce — a technology that has struggled to gain traction because of high costs.

The new global stocktake report says those measures, and many others, are “urgently” needed.

“The United Nations’ polite prose glosses over what is a truly damning report card for global climate efforts,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute. “Carbon emissions? Still climbing. Rich countries’ finance commitments? Delinquent. Adaptation support? Lagging woefully behind.”

One perennial sticking point in global climate talks is that developing nations say they can’t afford to shift rapidly away from fossil fuels and adapt to fiercer heat waves and storms without outside help.

Under the Paris deal, wealthy emitters like the United States and Europe vowed to provide $100 billion per year from public and private sources by 2020 for this purpose. But they have yet to fulfill that promise. In 2020, industrialized countries provided $83.3 billion in climate finance. And only a small fraction of that money goes toward adaptation, such as building sea walls or helping farmers cope with drought, which is often the most pressing need.

The report notes that developing countries will ultimately need trillions of dollars to prepare for climate change and calls for wider systemic reforms, such as reforming lending practices at multilateral banks or aiding countries that are saddled with large debt burdens.

“There’s been so much focus on holding developed countries accountable for their $100 billion promise, which is absolutely important,” said Charlene Watson, a senior research associate at the Overseas Development Institute. “But the reality is we’ll need so much more.”

Countries have made some progress in adapting to climate threats by, for instance, building flood barriers or installing early-warning systems for tropical cyclones. But those efforts are often “incremental” and unequally distributed, the report warned. Preparing for future threats, like dwindling freshwater supplies or irreversible ecosystem damage, will require “transformational” changes in climate adaptation.

One obstacle, the report noted, is that many adaptation efforts “are failing to keep pace with increasing climate impacts and risks.”

“It’s a lot harder to track progress on adaptation than it is to track progress on finance or cutting emissions,” said Richard Klein of the Stockholm Environment Institute, who added that coming up with measurable global goals for adaptation would be a key challenge for future climate talks.

Some experts faulted the report for being too vague in many of its recommendations. “The opportunity was missed to make clear proposals on what countries could concretely implement, how much financial support should be provided and on what it should be spent,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climate scientist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute. “On these issues, the report often remains on the surface.”

The big question now is how countries will respond to the global stocktake.

“We’ve had lots of reports about lack of progress over the years, but what’s different about this one is that it isn’t a group of scientists or a single U.N. agency saying this,” said Rachel Kyte, a veteran climate diplomat and former dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. “This is something that all the countries have had a say in.”

“This is like sitting down with your doctor and agreeing that your liver could be better, you really need to be in better shape,” Ms. Kyte added. “Now are you going to get off the couch and do something about it, or just sit there and ignore it?”

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Brad Plumer is a climate reporter specializing in policy and technology efforts to cut carbon dioxide emissions. At The Times, he has also covered international climate talks and the changing energy landscape in the United States. More about Brad Plumer

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2023, Section A, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: Climate Report Card Says Countries Are Trying, but Progress Is Still Slow. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

The Worst People Run for Office. It’s Time for a Better Way.

 

Aug. 21, 2023, from the New York Times

 

Credit...Photo illustration by Boris Zhitkov/Getty Images

By Adam Grant

Dr. Grant, a contributing Opinion writer, is an organizational psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the author of “Think Again” and the host of the TED podcast “Re:Thinking.”

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On the eve of the first debate of the 2024 presidential race, trust in government is rivaling historic lows. Officials have been working hard to safeguard elections and assure citizens of their integrity. But if we want public office to have integrity, we might be better off eliminating elections altogether.

If you think that sounds anti-democratic, think again. The ancient Greeks invented democracy, and in Athens many government officials were selected through sortition — a random lottery from a pool of candidates. In the United States, we already use a version of a lottery to select jurors. What if we did the same with mayors, governors, legislators, justices and even presidents?

People expect leaders chosen at random to be less effective than those picked systematically. But in multiple experiments led by the psychologist Alexander Haslam, the opposite held true. Groups actually made smarter decisions when leaders were chosen at random than when they were elected by a group or chosen based on leadership skill.

Why were randomly chosen leaders more effective? They led more democratically. “Systematically selected leaders can undermine group goals,” Dr. Haslam and his colleagues suggest, because they have a tendency to “assert their personal superiority.” When you’re anointed by the group, it can quickly go to your head: I’m the chosen one.

When you know you’re picked at random, you don’t experience enough power to be corrupted by it. Instead, you feel a heightened sense of responsibility: I did nothing to earn this, so I need to make sure I represent the group well. And in one of the Haslam experiments, when a leader was picked at random, members were more likely to stand by the group’s decisions.

Over the past year I’ve floated the idea of sortition with a number of current members of Congress. Their immediate concern is ability: How do we make sure that citizens chosen randomly are capable of governing?

In ancient Athens, people had a choice about whether to participate in the lottery. They also had to pass an examination of their capacity to exercise public rights and duties. In America, imagine that anyone who wants to enter the pool has to pass a civics test — the same standard as immigrants applying for citizenship. We might wind up with leaders who understand the Constitution.

A lottery would also improve our odds of avoiding the worst candidates in the first place. When it comes to character, our elected officials aren’t exactly crushing it. To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., I’d rather be governed by the first 535 people in the phone book. That’s because the people most drawn to power are usually the least fit to wield it.

The most dangerous traits in a leader are what psychologists call the dark triad of personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. What these traits share is a willingness to exploit others for personal gain. People with dark triad traits tend to be more politically ambitious — they’re attracted to authority for its own sake. But we often fall under their spell. Is that you, George Santos?

In a study of elections worldwide, candidates who were rated by experts as having high psychopathy scores actually did better at the ballot box. In the United States, presidents assessed as having psychopathic and narcissistic tendencies were more persuasive with the public than their peers. A common explanation is that they’re masters of fearless dominance and superficial charm, and we mistake their confidence for competence. Sadly, it starts early: Even kids who display narcissistic personality traits get more leadership nominations and claim to be better leaders. (They aren’t.)

If the dark triad wins an election, we all lose. When psychologists rated the first 42 American presidents, the narcissists were more likely to take reckless risks, make unethical decisions and get impeached. Add a dash of Machiavellianism and a pinch of psychopathy, and you get autocrats like Putin, Erdogan, Orban and Duterte.

Eliminate voting, and candidates with dark triad traits would be less likely than they are now to rise to the top. Of course, there’s also a risk that a lottery would deprive us of the chance to select a leader with distinctive skills. At this point, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. As lucky as America was to have Lincoln at the helm, it’s more important to limit our exposure to bad character than to roll the dice on the hopes of finding the best.

Besides, if Lincoln were alive now, it’s hard to imagine that he’d even put his top hat in the ring. In a world filled with divisiveness and derision, evidence shows that members of Congress are increasingly rewarded for incivility. And they know it.

A lottery would give a fair shot to people who aren’t tall enough or male enough to win. It would also open the door to people who aren’t connected or wealthy enough to run. Our broken campaign finance system lets the rich and powerful buy their way into races while preventing people without money or influence from getting on the ballot. They’re probably better candidates: Research suggests that on average, people who grow up in low-income families tend to be more effective leaders and less likely to cheat — they’re less prone to narcissism and entitlement.

Switching to sortition would save a lot of money too. The 2020 elections alone cost upward of $14 billion. And if there’s no campaign, there are no special interests offering to help pay for it.

Finally, no voting also means no boundaries to gerrymander and no Electoral College to dispute. Instead of questioning whether millions of ballots were counted accurately, we could watch the lottery live, just as we do with teams getting their lottery picks in the N.B.A. draft.

Other countries have begun to see the promise of sortition. Two decades ago, Canadian provinces and the Dutch government started using sortition to create citizens’ assemblies that generated ideas for improving democracy. In the past few years, the French, British and German governments have run lotteries to select citizens to work on climate change policies. Ireland tried a hybrid model, gathering 33 politicians and 66 randomly chosen citizens for its 2012 constitutional convention. In Bolivia, the nonprofit Democracy in Practice works with schools to replace student council elections with lotteries. Instead of elevating the usual suspects, it welcomes a wider range of students to lead and solve real problems in their schools and their communities.

As we prepare for America to turn 250 years old, it may be time to rethink and renew our approach to choosing officials. The lifeblood of a democracy is the active participation of the people. There is nothing more democratic than offering each and every citizen an equal opportunity to lead.

Judge Rules in Favor of Montana Youths in Landmark Climate Case

The court found that young people have a constitutional right to a healthful environment and that regulators must be allowed to consider climate impact.

Youth plaintiffs in Held v. State of Montana gathered in June at Pioneer Park in Helena, Mont.Credit...Janie Osborne for The New York Times

 

By Mike Baker

Aug. 14, 2023, 1:48 p.m. ET, from the New York Times

 

A judge in Montana ruled on Monday that young people in the state have a constitutional right to a healthful environment, finding in a landmark case that the state’s failure to consider climate change when evaluating new projects was causing harm.

The case, brought by a group of young Montana residents ranging in age from 5 to 22, is the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States. While the state has contended that Montana’s emissions are minuscule when considered against the rest of the globe’s, the plaintiffs argued that the state must do more to consider how emissions are contributing to droughts, wildfires and other growing risks to a state that cherishes a pristine outdoors.

In her ruling, Kathy Seeley, a district court judge, found that the state’s emissions “have been proven to be a substantial factor” in affecting the climate. Laws that limited the ability of regulators to consider climate effects were unconstitutional, she ruled.

“This is a huge win for Montana, for youth, for democracy and for our climate,” said Julia Olson, the executive director of Our Children’s Trust, which brought the case.

U.N. Chief Warns of ‘Catastrophe’ With Continued Use of Fossil Fuels

António Guterres, the United Nations secretary general, said instead of replacing Russian oil, gas and coal, nations must pivot to clean energy.

António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, at the organization’s headquarters in New York City this month.Credit...Andrew Kelly/Reuters

By Lisa Friedman

March 21, 2022, from the New York Times

WASHINGTON — Countries are “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe” if they continue to rely on fossil fuels, and nations racing to replace Russian oil, gas and coal with their own dirty energy are making matters worse, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres warned on Monday.

The ambitious promises world leaders made last year at a climate summit in Glasgow were “naïve optimism,” Mr. Guterres said. Nations are nowhere near the goal of limiting the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century. That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic impacts increases significantly. The planet has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

And the pollution that is dangerously heating the planet is continuing to increase. Global emissions are set to rise by 14 percent in the 2020s, and emissions from coal continue to surge, he said.

“The 1.5 degree goal is on life support. It is in intensive care,” Mr. Guterres said in remarks delivered to a summit The Economist is hosting on sustainability via video address.

“We are sleepwalking to climate catastrophe,” he said. “If we continue with more of the same, we can kiss 1.5 goodbye. Even 2 degrees may be out of reach. And that would be catastrophe.”

Mr. Guterres’s speech comes as the European Union is trying to find ways to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas, and countries like the United States are scrambling to increase fossil fuel production to stabilize energy markets. President Biden and European leaders have said that the short-term needs will not upend their longer-term vision of shifting to wind, solar and other renewable sources that do not produce dangerous greenhouse gas emissions.

But the U.N. secretary general said he fears that strategy endangers the goal of rapid reduction of fossil fuel burning. Keeping the planet at safe levels means slashing emissions worldwide 45 percent by 2050, scientists have said.

In Glasgow in November world leaders promised to stave off climate change and, for the first time, planned to “phase down” coal — the dirtiest fossil fuel. Leaders from 100 countries also pledged to stop deforestation by 2030, a move considered vital since trees absorb carbon dioxide. The United States, Europe and about 100 other nations also said they would cut methane emissions 30 percent by 2030. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas produced from oil and gas operations.

But there has been almost no progress, Mr. Guterres said. In addition, rich countries most responsible for polluting the planet have not met their obligation to help the poorest countries — already “slammed” by high inflation, rising interest rates and debt — to develop clean energy, he said.

At the same time, he warned, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is upending global energy markets, further undermining climate goals.

“As major economies pursue an ‘all-of-the-above’ strategy to replace Russian fossil fuels, short-term measures might create long-term fossil fuel dependence and close the window to 1.5 degrees,” Mr. Guterres said.

He cautioned countries could become so focused on the immediate need to fill the oil, gas and coal gap “that they neglect or kneecap policies to cut fossil fuel use.”

“This is madness,” he said. “Addiction to fossil fuels is mutually assured destruction.”

Last week the International Energy Agency warned that the world faced its first global energy crisis, and recommended that major economies conserve energy by implementing 10 strategies, from carpooling to traveling by train instead of airplane.

In his speech, Mr. Guterres said wealthy nations should be dismantling coal infrastructure to phase it out completely by 2030, with other nations doing so by 2040. He called for an end to fossil fuel subsidies and a halt to new oil and gas exploration. Mr. Guterres also said private sector financing for coal must end.

“Their support for coal not only could cost the world its climate goals,” he said. “It’s a stupid investment — leading to billions in stranded assets.”

The American Petroleum Institute, which represents oil and gas companies, said in a statement that the industry “can responsibly develop America’s vast resources while at the same time reducing emissions to address climate change.”

President Biden has promised a rapid clean energy transition in the United States but it has not started yet. Legislation he has championed to hasten the shift to renewable energy, the Build Back Better Act, is stalled in Congress. Meanwhile, his plans to stop new oil and gas leasing have faced challenges in the courts.

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Lisa Friedman reports on federal climate and environmental policy from Washington. She has broken multiple stories about the Trump administration’s efforts to repeal climate change regulations and limit the use of science in policymaking. More about Lisa Friedman

Gazing into the future should really make us sweat

 

Ibrahim Rayintakath

 

By David Wallace-Wells Opinion Writer, New York Times, August 2, 2023

On the last day of July, Phoenix finally registered a temperature high below 110 degrees Fahrenheit — the first time that had happened in 31 days. The temperature of pavement in the city measured up to 180 degrees, and local burn units are full of patients who simply fell to the ground and were burned, as though Maricopa County’s whole surface were a skillet on the stove. The I.C.U.s are filling up, too, and the region’s iconic saguaro cactuses are crumpling and collapsing in the heat. On the same day last week that President Biden offered only a few meek remarks about extreme heat and just a few million dollars in new funding for heat forecasting, the U.N. secretary general, António Guterres, leaned into a typically vehement formulation. “The era of global warming has ended,” he said. “The era of global boiling has arrived.”

It was, worldwide, the hottest month on record. June was the hottest June on record. August appears poised to be the hottest August. Every single day for four straight weeks, as Canada burned and Sicily burned and Algeria burned, global temperatures surpassed the daily record set in 2016 and matched last summer, when 61,000 Europeans are estimated to have died as a result of the heat.

But what else do you expect as greenhouse gas emissions continue? On opposite ends of the planet, temperatures recorded in the North Atlantic and sea ice measured near the South Pole, tracked so far from recent trends that you might embarrass yourself simply stating the size of the anomaly — a four sigma event in the temperatures of the North Atlantic, meaning that, given a stable climate and a normal distribution of chance, it should be expected about once every few hundred years and perhaps a six sigma event for Antarctic sea ice, meaning we should expect to see it, at least according to the simplified math, only once every 7.5 million years.

At a certain point, that math just gets silly, telling you perhaps more about the improper way you might have structured the comparison than about the size of the anomaly itself. But you can measure the anomalies in other ways, such as by noting the hot-tub ocean temperatures off the Florida Keys, a year’s worth of rain falling in 36 hours in parts of Beijing or 100-degree temperatures in the mountains of Chile or that there is an Argentina-size gap between this year’s Antarctic sea ice and the typical extent. And the fact that we are seeing these gob-smacking anomalies at all is a sign that the historical framework implied by terms like “seven sigma” and “500-year storm,” imperfect in the best of times, no longer applies to the world we live in now.

The environmental journalist Juliet Eilperin called the ocean temperatures “beyond belief”; The Washington Post reported that they had “baffled scientists.” Contemplating the trajectory of Arctic sea ice, the atmospheric scientist Zack Labe wrote memorably about how often he finds himself answering questions about the state of the science these days by saying, “I don’t know.” And for all the uncertainty, many of those watching the changes unfold have a queasy intuition that we may be entering a new climatic regime — and perhaps inching closer to some quite concerning tipping points.

“Shocking but not really surprising,” is how NASA’s Gavin Schmidt put it. “Even the things that are unprecedented are not surprising.” That is where we are all living now, in a climate that is both shocking and unsurprising. For several decades, those anxious about global warming have lived in fear of climate prophecies. We are beginning to simply live within them, a process that looks from some vantages like a horror story and from others surprisingly normal.

There are different ways to measure the changes, some less hair-raising than others. In a report published July 25, the World Weather Attribution network examined recent heat waves in the United States, Europe and China, finding that all but the Chinese event would have been impossible without climate change. In a stable, prewarming climate, the heat wave that baked China would have happened once every 250 years; now, the network said, it should be expected every five years. The episodes in Europe and North America, once impossible, should be expected once every 10 to 15 years. I’d bet on these frequencies being underestimates. Last summer there were 100 million Americans under heat advisories, and heat across Europe was called record-breaking then, as well. (On British television, a broadcaster complained that her meteorologist guest was being too gloomy about the heat; “I want us to be happy about the weather,” she said. In the weeks that followed, several thousand Britons died in the heat.)

But the World Weather Attribution report also characterized the heat waves in another way, incorporating a critique made by Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute last summer to measure the simple size of the temperature anomaly attributable to climate change, too. By this metric, the network found, warming had added just one degree Celsius to the temperatures in China, two degrees to the heat waves in North America and two and a half degrees to southern Europe’s.

The coolheaded climate scientist Zeke Hausfather tried to quickly contextualize the recent string of anomalies to show that, in fact, they were, while alarming, nevertheless within the range of expected outcomes, given the present level of global warming. Well, at least two of the three anomalies he examined — the Antarctic sea ice was still quite off the charts. (About those, one scientist told The Guardian that “something weird is going on”; another said that the abrupt changes were “very much outside our understanding of this system.”)

But even if, in most cases, the science is vindicated by this summer’s extremes, that isn’t ultimately all that reassuring. Forecasts for warming have long scared many of those who really looked at them, and so it’s not exactly comfortable to know that we are merely coasting along the high end of those forecasts today. As the climate stalwart Bill McKibben put it to me recently, when it comes to global warming, “‘I told you so’ are the four least satisfying words in the language.”

“The speed of us passing limits is mind-bending,” wrote the Texas A&M atmospheric scientist Andrew Dessler, with whom Hausfather shares a Substack, in a short reflection on why climate impacts seemed to be escalating so quickly. “When the Earth warms the next 0.1 degrees Celsius, an entirely new group of thresholds will be passed, bringing great harms to entirely different groups of people,” he wrote. “Many of them will not expect it, having been lulled into complacency by the fact that they hadn’t been negatively impacted by warming up to then. Is that you?”

As the extreme events have piled up this summer, I keep returning to a conversation I had last fall with the Texas Tech atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead author of several U.S. National Climate Assessments and the chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy.

“The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” she said, describing a suite of projections now showing expected temperature rise this century of two to three degrees Celsius rather than four to five. But the bad news was that we had been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she said, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”

In a long essay I published soon after that conversation, I emphasized that good news — that thanks to the technological and economic miracle of renewables, a global political awakening and an understanding that some earlier assumptions about future energy use were too pessimistic, we had about cut in half our expectations of warming in less than a decade.

This summer, I’ve been thinking more about her bad news — that even accounting for rapid global decarbonization and a drastic cut in expected global temperature rise, we may still end up in a world defined by impacts long called catastrophic. For now, it seems scary enough to say, we don’t really know.

 

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.”

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

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

I Know How Nuclear War Is Waged, So I’m Calling for Peace With North Korea

By Dan Leaf, from the New York Times

March 29, 2023

 

Mr. Leaf is a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant general and a former deputy commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command

 

A rally for unification of the Korean Peninsula in Paju, South Korea, near the border with North Korea, last year.Credit...Ahn Young-joon/Associated Press

Not many people know how to wage nuclear war. I’m one of them.

As a young U.S. Air Force fighter pilot in the late 1970s, I was trained to carry out nuclear strikes in a rigorous process designed to ensure that no contingencies — mechanical or ethical — deter your mission. Certain things remain burned into my memory: maps and photos of my target and the realization of the Armageddon I would leave in my wake. Training culminated with a sworn pledge to vaporize that target without hesitation.

Much of my 33-year career was spent as a nuclear warrior — I later oversaw the U.S. intercontinental ballistic missile fleet and served as deputy commander of American military forces in the Pacific — experience that informs my deep alarm over the growing risk of nuclear conflict with North Korea.

The United States has tried for decades to prevent the country from becoming a nuclear threat, veering from diplomacy to pressure to patience. None of these approaches have worked.

Here’s something that might: End the Korean War.

On July 27, 1953, an armistice was signed that halted combat, but the United States and South Korea technically remain at war with the North. This is no longer acceptable.

North Korea has nuclear weapons. It has conducted missile tests at a record pace since last year, including powerful ICBMs believed to be capable of delivering a warhead anywhere in the continental United States. In January, Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, ordered an “exponential” expansion of the country’s nuclear arsenal, and last year his government passed a law authorizing a pre-emptive nuclear strike. In response, President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea has said his country may consider developing nuclear weapons.

In this hair-trigger environment, one bad decision or misunderstanding could kill millions.

I spent four years in South Korea, including in high-level positions at the headquarters of combined U.S., South Korean and U.N. forces, overseeing the vast destructive forces amassed for a war that was no longer being fought. In my time in the region, I went from scratching my head to pulling my hair out. The standoff is one of the great absurdities in global geopolitics.

You must be aggressive to win wars but assertive to make peace. No matter how challenging the negotiations and politics of securing peace on the Korean Peninsula may prove, they are nothing compared with nuclear war.

A permanent peace agreement would undermine Mr. Kim’s portrayal of the United States as an existential threat and his justification for building up his conventional and nuclear arsenal. It could also short-circuit the siege mentality underlying his repressive regime. Sanctions relief and economic development could follow, leading to long-hoped-for improvements in the quality of life and human rights for North Korea’s 25 million people.

The United States, North Korea and South Korea have all pledged in recent years to pursue a lasting peace agreement. Separate meetings that President Donald Trump and then-President Moon Jae-in of South Korea held with Mr. Kim in 2018 committed to that goal. It brought an immediate easing of tensions. Land mines were removed from portions of the Korean Demilitarized Zone, Korean families held reunions, Mr. Kim declared a moratorium on long-range missile and nuclear tests, the North returned remains of U.S. servicemen and released three detained Americans. Even after Mr. Trump’s outreach to Mr. Kim collapsed in 2019, Mr. Kim indicated he was still open to diplomacy.

There is currently a bill in the House of Representatives calling for a peace deal. The Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act would require the secretary of state to submit a “clear road map for achieving a permanent peace agreement”; pursue “serious, urgent” diplomacy in pursuit of a binding agreement; and begin to address America’s lack of diplomatic relations with North Korea by establishing liaison offices on each other’s soil.

The bill is imperfect. Much of it focuses on creating the conditions for Korean Americans to visit relatives in the North. (U.S. law currently bars travel by Americans to North Korea unless it serves an ill-defined “national interest.”) It also lacks other steps necessary to entrench peace, such as a process for U.S.-North Korean reconciliation, normalization of disputed maritime boundaries and a framework for talks between the opposing military forces.

There is an urgent need for progress. After the diplomatic overtures of recent years fell apart, Mr. Kim has only become more belligerent and the risk of conflict is more acute. Passage of a strengthened Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act is essential to securing a lasting solution, yet the current bill has not advanced since it was introduced in 2021.

Critics argue that a peace agreement may actually increase the risk of war by undermining safeguards put in place by the armistice nearly 70 years ago. These include specific demarcation lines and protocols for communications, movement and other actions within the DMZ. But there is nothing foolproof about the armistice. President Bill Clinton considered bombing North Korea in 1994, and Mr. Trump reportedly discussed using nuclear weapons in 2017. North Korea occasionally carries out provocations, and the North and South have exchanged artillery fire on several occasions.

There are other risks: Pyongyang may use a peace agreement as a pretext to demand the removal of U.S. troops from South Korea, which is a matter between Seoul and Washington.

But the hardest part of ending the war might be building the political will for it in Washington. Accommodating North Korea would inevitably lead to accusations that we are rewarding bad behavior and legitimizing a totalitarian regime. But the Kim family has ruled for 75 years; it’s time to accept that this is unlikely to change anytime soon.

At this moment, the next generation of men and women north and south of the DMZ are preparing for nuclear war. May they never have to put their training to use.

---

Lt. Gen. Dan Leaf (@figleaf31) is a retired three-star general, a former Air Force fighter pilot, a former deputy commander of the U.S. Pacific Command and a former director of the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. He is the managing director of Phase Minus 1, a security and conflict resolution consultancy.

A Yacht By Any Other Name …

by Paul Krugman, New York Times

April 11, 2023

Inequality Ahoy! On the Meaning of the Superyacht.

Recently ProPublica, a nonprofit, independent newsroom that has partnered with The New York Times on occasion, released a remarkable report about the relationship between Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court and the conservative billionaire Harlan Crow. It turns out that over the years Thomas, who has portrayed himself as a man of modest tastes who likes to hang out in Walmart parking lots, has taken many lavish — and previously undisclosed — vacations at Crow’s expense. The ethical questions seem obvious.

Still, The Wall Street Journal lashed out at ProPublica, with an editorial headlined “The Smearing of Clarence Thomas.” The article accused ProPublica of using loaded language to create the appearance of a scandal. For example, the paper complained, ProPublica’s report called Crow’s 162-foot private boat, which has been featured in places like the website Superyacht Fan, a “superyacht.” Smear tactics!

Actually, according to a 2022 article in The New Yorker, any yacht over 98 feet long is considered a superyacht within the yachting community.

Which got me thinking about big yachts and what they tell us about the state of society.

When rich people can afford to buy and operate big yachts, they do. Indeed, yachts are a highly visible indicator of inequality, the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the few. The Gilded Age was marked by a proliferation of ever bigger, ever more elaborately furnished yachts; when J.P. Morgan built a large steam yacht, its 1898 launch was featured in The New York Times.

Conversely, the Great Compression of income disparities that took place during the 1940s and made America a relatively middle-class society for the next four decades put an end to the first golden era of superyachts. In 1955 Fortune published a remarkable essay, “How Top Executives Live,” which stressed how modest their standard of living had become compared with prewar norms. Among other things, large yachts had “foundered in the sea of progressive taxation. … Today, 75 feet is considered a lot of yacht.”

Now superyachts are back. Indeed, according to that New Yorker article, we’re living through “the greatest boom in the yacht business that has ever existed.”

I’ve spent a lot of time over the years following debates over income and wealth inequality. Ever since inequality began rising in the 1980s, there’s been a sort of intellectual industry devoted to what one might call inequality denial, questioning the data showing a drastic rise in incomes and wealth at the top. Indeed, measuring things at the top can be technically tricky — the very rich are such a small group that they can be missed by random surveys, and their ability to engage in tax avoidance makes it hard to track them with tax data, too.

But if you had any doubts about whether we’re living in an era of extreme wealth concentration, comparable to or even surpassing the Gilded Age, the superyacht boom should quell those doubts.

The rise of superyachts also tells us some important things about the motivations and consequences of spending by the very rich.

First, why do the rich buy superyachts?

Boating — being out on the open water, experiencing nature up close — can be a source of great joy to many people. (Not me — I’m so prone to seasickness that I’ve been known to return my breakfast to the ecosystem while snorkeling.) But really big yachts, which amount to floating mansions, would seem to defeat the purpose, insulating their passengers from much of the maritime experience.

Indeed, that 1955 Fortune article suggested that top executives were just as satisfied with the downsized vessels of their day as a previous generation had been with huge yachts. “The specifications of the boat that interests the great majority of seagoing executives today are ‘forty feet, four people, $40,000.’ In this tidy vessel the businessman of 1955 is quite happily sea-borne.” (For the record, $40,000 in 1955 would be about $450,000 in 2022 dollars.)

Owning and operating a really big yacht is, however, as clear an example as you’re likely to find of Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption — spending intended to demonstrate one’s wealth and status, rather than for the direct satisfaction it yields. Indeed, the New Yorker article suggests that demand for superyachts really took off once owning your own plane stopped being an effective status symbol: “Once it seemed that every plutocrat had a plane, the thrill was gone.”

Yachts, however, can always be made bigger, so there’s no obvious limit to the game. The status competition isn’t even purely implicit: Every year Boat International hands out the World Superyacht Awards, which supposedly honor “ingenuity and craftsmanship” — but obviously, size also matters.

In a way, it’s quite sad: Rarely in the course of modern history has so much wealth been concentrated in the hands of so few, yet much of that wealth is being expended on zero-sum games of one-upsmanship.

The other point, emphasized in a guest essay this week in The Times, is that superyachts are immensely destructive to the environment. To be fair, it’s not entirely obvious whether billionaires do more environmental damage with their superyachts than they would if they spent the same amount of money in other ways. But it’s possible: Shipping and aviation — presumably including superyachts and private planes — are notoriously hard to decarbonize.

And in general, while I’m not a degrowther who believes that we must shrink the economy to save the planet, curbing extravagant and destructive spending by the very rich could be part of the solution to climate change.

In any case, the rise of superyachts — regardless of whether they carry Supreme Court justices — is a highly visible indicator of the extreme economic polarization that is certainly a factor in the extreme political polarization that is tearing our democracy apart. And if you’re the kind of person who insists that calling superyachts by their name is somehow a vile smear, you’re part of the problem.

Off the Top of My Head

Chump Towers: Why the Worst is Yet to Come

by John Lawrence

Yesterday the Attorney General of New York sued Trump for bank fraud. But that is only the half of it. The other half is tax fraud. The referral to the IRS will take care of that. Trump's dilemma is that he overestimated his assets to get cheap bank loans and then turned around and underestimated his income to reduce his taxes. Most banks refused to deal with Trump. Even Deutsche bank, which is a sprawling behemoth in which the right division doesn't know what the left division is doing, refused to deal with Trump except for one enabler - Rosemary Vrablic.She oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in loans to President Trump’s company. She resigned in 2021. According to the New York Times:

"Ms. Vrablic ... joined Deutsche Bank in 2006 from Bank of America.  Ms. Vrablic quickly made a name for herself as one of her division’s leading rainmakers. In 2011, she landed a prominent new client: Mr. Trump, who for decades had been mostly off limits to the mainstream banking world because of his tendency to default on loans. With her bosses’ approval, Ms. Vrablic agreed to a series of loans, totaling well over $300 million, for his newly acquired Doral golf resort in Florida, for his troubled Chicago skyscraper and for the transformation of the Old Post Office building in Washington into a luxury hotel."

Rosemary was a V.I.P. guest at Trump's inauguration. She was Trump's personal banker at Deutshe at a time when no other bank and most divisions of Deutsche would not even do business with him. Trump had a history of defaulting on loans and stiffing contractors. The article continues:

"Mr. Trump’s key contacts at his biggest financial backer are leaving at a perilous time for the departing president. He owes Deutsche Bank about $330 million, and the loans come due in 2023 and 2024. Mr. Trump provided a personal guarantee to get the loans, meaning that if he fails to pay them back, the bank can pursue his personal assets."

Attorney General, Letitia James, is suing Trump for $250 million for bank fraud in addition to essentially shutting down all his operations in the state of New York. But this might be a small amount when the IRS comes forth with its own accounting and accusations. A few hundred million here, a few hundred million there, pretty soon you're talking about real money. With Rosemary Vrablic gone, Trump has lost probably the last banker even willing to do business with him.

Deutsche bank is cooperating with the investigation. Stay tuned.

Off the Top of My Head

"A Yearlong Wild Goose Chase That Produced Nothing as the Earth Warms to Dangerous Levels"

by John Lawrence

That's how the New York Times characterized the Biden administration's courting of West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin. He and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema are the 2 Democrats standing in the way of the significant Biden plan to do something about global warming. Of course no Republican Senator will do anything to help even though it's their planet too. Now the Supreme Court has chimed in to the effect that the EPA is not able to do anything either. Meanwhile earth is burning up. I regretted in another post that all the climate disasters so far have been one offs, and nothing would be done about climate change until one event affects at least half the country. Not enough people care if a tornado wipes out a whole city or a whole town burns in a wild fire. But when a climate event affects half the country, people sit up and take notice. In other words enough people have to have their own personal ox gored before anything significant will get done. Now we have that event. This summer's heat has seen temperatures above 100 degrees F affect more than half the country simultaneously. Despite the misery this is causing, I am cheering because this is not a one off affecting a relative minority of people. People will sit up and take notice.

The NY Times reported:

Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, who took more campaign cash from the oil and gas industry than any other senator, and who became a millionaire from his family coal business, independently blew up the Democratic Party’s legislative plans to fight climate change. The swing Democratic vote in an evenly divided Senate, Mr. Manchin led his party through months of tortured negotiations that collapsed on Thursday night, a yearlong wild goose chase that produced nothing as the Earth warms to dangerous levels.

“It seems odd that Manchin would choose as his legacy to be the one man who single-handedly doomed humanity,” said John Podesta, a former senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation to Mr. Manchin’s exact specifications, only to have it rejected inches from the finish line.

But alas and alack, Mancin has seized on inflation as the perfect excuse to justify his torpedoing of Biden's climate plan. The war in Ukraine which resulted in raising gas prices hasn't helped either. Yet there are things that could be done which would not exacerbate inflation. To subdue inflation, money has to be extracted from the economy. One way to do this is to increase taxes on the rich, something that was part of Biden's plan. But rich man Manchin says No Sir to that aspect. He's not going to put the kibosh on the very industry that made him rich and that would be coal mining. So what would Biden's plan consist of? Giving tax incentives to get more electric vehicles on the road and transformations of key industries to rely more on renewable energy. Sounds pretty basic, doesn't it? The climate problem is like a ship taking on water. If you wait to start bailing long enough no amount of fast and furious bailing is going to save the ship from sinking.

The Washington Post reported that if we had stuck with Biden's plan and it had passed Congress, we might have just about reached our climate goal to slash U.S. emissions by 50 to 52 percent by the end of 2030 which would have maintained consistency with 2015’s Paris climate agreement, in which nations agreed to take significant measures to avoid the levels of global warming associated with severe climate impact. It would have kept total planetary warming to 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. This level of warming would still have produced unimaginable levels of global distress. Anything beyond that would create hell on earth.

In the documentary Polar Extremes, it is pointed out that at 410 ppm of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere, there is already enough to melt ice completely at both poles. If this happens sea levels would rise over 200 feet wiping out about 80 miles of US shoreline on the east coast as well as the entire state of Florida. So it is not enough to stop putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere which of course we're still doing. A huge amount would have to be taken out to bring the atmospheric concentration down to about 300 ppm, the level at which polar ice can be maintained. Even at 350 ppm scientific data shows that in previous geological eras polar ice had entirely disappeared. Technological solutions to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so far have entirely failed or been cost prohibitive. The only natural solution is to plant 1 to 3 trillion trees. This is entirely feasible if we would only collectively get off our asses and do it. But we dither and hesitate, and we're fiddling while earth burns.

One very intelligent observer of the climate scene is Fareed Zakaria. Fareed has some good ideas about what should be done to alleviate the worst consequences of climate disaster. He wrote in the Washington Post:

"“It was getting hotter.” So opens “The Ministry for the Future,” the disturbing novel by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson. The opening chapter, set in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, depicts a heat wave that kills millions across the subcontinent and galvanizes people to radical action.

"Such dire warnings may seem far-fetched today. But the heat waves we are now experiencing are going to get worse. That, of course, will have dire consequences. More likely than mass death is mass migration. As Bill Gates points out, the area around the equator could become too hot for people to work outdoors; that could mean a decline in farming, the most common occupation in low-income countries. Stressed by heat, lack of water and no jobs, millions of people could start moving from these areas to more temperate climates mostly in the north: Europe and the United States.

"Many climate activists are often focused on pledges to get to net zero emissions by some distant date or insist that every new energy source must be entirely green.

"But the reality is that we need to cut emissions now, not promise to do so by 2030. And the only way to do it now, and at scale, is to make some tough choices and trade-offs. We do not have green technology, like clean nuclear fusion and long-duration battery storage, that can fully replace fossil fuels today. We may get them — in 10 or 15 years, perhaps, if we are very lucky. ...

'Let me suggest a few practical ways to make progress in the next five years with technologies we already have.

"We could start by converting the most polluting coal-fired power plants to natural gas, which emits half as much carbon dioxide as coal when combusted. A study surveyed 29,000 power plants around the world and found that 5 percent generate 73 percent of all emissions in the electricity-generation sector. In other words, replacing around 1,500 coal-burning plants would make a huge dent in emissions, a giant cut on par with the boldest plans being discussed today.If the West wants to compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative, why not put together a coalition that would finance this effort across the planet?

"Then there is the problem of methane leakage from natural gas extraction, agriculture and landfills. This can be solved technically and just needs smart, tough regulations.

"We should extend the life of nuclear power plants and start building smaller and safer ones. Nuclear energy evokes grim images, but the facts speak for themselves. In the 21st century, just a handful of people have died from nuclear accidents around the world, while more than 1,500 people died in oil and gas extraction in the United States alone from 2008 to 2017. Far more people die each year from lung diseases caused by coal pollution, with some estimates running into the millions — and that’s without even factoring in the climate impacts. We should also keep working on developing new modular reactors that have much safer designs and are far less likely to have the same kind of meltdown problems that others have had in the past. And let me remind you, nuclear power plants produce nearly zero emissions.

"Plant 1 trillion trees. The science is simple: Trees absorb carbon dioxide. We are all impressed by Greta Thunberg, but what about Felix Finkbeiner? He’s a young German environmentalist who, at the age of 9, proposed that every country commit to planting 1 million trees and then, at 13, upped the ante and suggested at the United Nations that we target 1 trillion by 2050. Let’s start by curbing deforestation and planting as many trees as we can, as fast as we can."

It is something so simple and natural that it will probably be entirely ignored by the powers that be and the global citizenry. Plant 1 trillion trees or 2 trillion or 3 trillion. It would be a sad outcome for the human race if we neglected to do such a simple thing that would have saved the planet for future generations but instead sat around prognosticating about how to provide a high tech solution. Maybe Ted Kaczynski was right. "In his Manifesto he wrote: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." "He writes that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling, and has caused widespread psychological suffering. Kaczynski argues that most people spend their time engaged in useless pursuits because of technological advances; he calls these "surrogate activities", wherein people strive toward artificial goals, including scientific work, consumption of entertainment, political activism and following sports teams." Yes, the Industrial Revolution has been a disaster for the human race, and Kaczynski did not even mention fossil fuels or global warming. Prescient!

Off the Top of My Head

According to Biden's BBB Plan, Buyers of Electric Vehicles Would Receive up to $12,500 in Tax Credits

by John Lawrence

So where is this incentive to buy electric vehicles now that gas (in CA) is about $6 a gallon? Now is the time when we need this subsidy, but, alas, the Democrats couldn't even stick together to pass this and other incentives and measures to get off fossil fuels. How about this as an incentive: preventing daily tornadoes in the heartland of the US? As extreme weather gets more extreme, Congress can't even pass programs to combat global warming and the consequent damage that's being done to people's lives and the economy in general. Not to mention the fact that major portions of the population will not be able to get property insurance which is happening right now and will only get worse. If you have a lot of brush around your house, you're an insurance liability. If you live in a flood plain, you're an insurance liability. We are told by people who know that we only have a few years to do something before we can expect catastrophic consequences from climate change and global warming. Yet we are taking our time getting off fossil fuels. There is even regret that we didn't go ahead with the Keystone pipeline.

The New York Times reported:

"In the coming decades, as global temperatures continue to rise, hundreds of millions of people could struggle against floods, deadly heat waves and water scarcity from severe drought, the report said. Mosquitoes carrying diseases like dengue and malaria will spread to new parts of the globe. Crop failures could become more widespread, putting families in places like Africa and Asia at far greater risk of hunger and malnutrition. People unable to adapt to the enormous environmental shifts will end up suffering unavoidable loss or fleeing their homes, creating dislocation on a global scale,[according to a recent UN report]."

We do know the things we need to be doing. It's just that we're not doing them or doing them at such a slow pace that we will still experience the worst effects of climate change. If you think the refugee problem is bad now, climate change will exacerbate and accelerate the refugee problem. People will be fleeing their homes and homelands when it becomes apparent that they can't make a living there. They will be coming to parts of the world where countries are wealthy enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Basically, that means that people will flee poor countries and attempt at all costs to enter rich countries. That's why the US, as the richest country in the world, should be going full speed ahead to transition away from fossil fuels and into a new era that consists of renewable energy production and more environment friendly lifestyles. Instead, Americans are determined to lead lifestyles of maximum consumption right up to the hilt of their financial resources and beyond in a last gasp of over consumption.

Common Dreams reported:

In the wake of a United Nations report that activists said showed the "bleak and brutal truth" about the climate emergency, a leading economist on Friday highlighted a step that supporters argue could be incredibly effective at combating the global crisis: nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry.

Writing for The American Prospect, Robert Pollin, an economics professor and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and high gas prices exacerbated by Russia's war on Ukraine.

"If we are finally going to start taking the IPCC's findings seriously," Pollin wrote, "it follows that we must begin advancing far more aggressive climate stabilization solutions than anything that has been undertaken thus far, both within the U.S. and globally. Within the U.S., such measures should include at least putting on the table the idea of nationalizing the U.S. fossil fuel industry."

Asserting that "at least in the U.S., the private oil companies stand as the single greatest obstacle to successfully implementing" a viable climate stabilization program, Pollin made the case that fossil fuel giants should not make any more money from wrecking the planet, nationalization would not be an unprecedented move in the United States, and doing so could help build clean energy infrastructure at the pace that scientists warn is necessary.

The expert proposed starting with "the federal government purchasing controlling ownership of at least the three dominant U.S. oil and gas corporations: ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips."

"They are far larger and more powerful than all the U.S. coal companies combined, as well as all of the smaller U.S. oil and gas companies," he wrote. "The cost to the government to purchase majority ownership of these three oil giants would be about $420 billion at current stock market prices."

So for roughly half of the defense budget, the US taxpayers could own the oil industry and phase it out at the speed required to save the planet from the worst effects of global warming. Instead we're treated to the Big Oil CEO's defiance that they are not price gouging because prices are set by the world market. Does anyone question why prices have to be set by the world market? No. Obviously, the world market exists to serve the interests of the oil producers, not oil consumers. Maybe the US should get off the world market because we produce enough oil to meet all current consumer demands. So why do we even need the world market? The world market exists to serve the interests of the OPEC nations who won't even open their spigots in a time of crisis, and it exists to serve the interests of the western Big Oil corporations like ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell.

Americans would like to have one more blast of consumption rather than buckle down and do what's necessary to combat climate change, an effort that would be at least as great as the effort and sacrifice put forth to fight World War II. Billionaire's would rather blast off into space than use their money to fight climate change. Their lifestyles are major contributors to the emission of greenhouse gasses. They don't want to be told that they can't overconsume with numerous 27,000 square foot mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. That's the American Dream, or is it. It's soon going to turn into the American Nightmare but probably not for them. They have the resources to escape the worst effects of global warming. Instead the nightmare will be mostly visited on the least among us as well as randomly due to tornadoes, floods and fires.

Stopping Climate Change Is Doable, but Time Is Short, U.N. Panel Warns

Gas and flares emitted from the oil fields of Umm Qasr port near Iraq’s southern port city of Basra, in February.Credit...Hussein Faleh/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By Brad Plumer and Raymond Zhong

April 4, 2022, 11:00 a.m. ET from New York Times

Nations need to move away much faster from fossil fuels to retain any hope of preventing a perilous future on an overheated planet, according to a major new report on climate change released on Monday, although they have made some progress because of the falling costs of clean energy.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of experts convened by the United Nations, warns that unless countries drastically accelerate efforts over the next few years to slash their emissions from coal, oil and natural gas, the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, will likely be out of reach by the end of this decade.

That’s the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming — including worsening floods, droughts, wildfires and ecosystem collapse — grow considerably. Humans have already heated the planet by an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius since the 19th century, largely by burning fossil fuels for energy.

But the task is daunting: Holding warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius would require nations to collectively reduce their planet-warming emissions roughly 43 percent by 2030 and to stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s, the report found. By contrast, current policies by governments are only expected to reduce global emissions by a few percentage points this decade. Last year, fossil fuel emissions worldwide rebounded to near-record highs after a brief dip as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

The report, which was approved by 195 governments and lays out strategies that countries could pursue to halt global warming, comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket, diverting political attention from climate change. In the United States and Europe, leaders are focused on shoring up domestic fossil fuel supplies to avoid painful price spikes and energy shortages, even if that means increasing emissions in the short term.

Yet climate scientists say there is little margin for delay if the world wants to hold global warming to relatively tolerable levels.

“Every year that you let pass without going for these urgent emissions reductions makes it more and more difficult,” said Jim Skea, an energy researcher at Imperial College London who helped lead the report, which was compiled by 278 experts from 65 countries. “Unless we really do it immediately, it will not be possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.”

The report, which was approved by 195 governments and lays out strategies that countries could pursue to halt global warming, comes as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused oil and gas prices to skyrocket, diverting political attention from climate change. In the United States and Europe, leaders are focused on shoring up domestic fossil fuel supplies to avoid painful price spikes and energy shortages, even if that means increasing emissions in the short term.

Yet climate scientists say there is little margin for delay if the world wants to hold global warming to relatively tolerable levels.

“Every year that you let pass without going for these urgent emissions reductions makes it more and more difficult,” said Jim Skea, an energy researcher at Imperial College London who helped lead the report, which was compiled by 278 experts from 65 countries. “Unless we really do it immediately, it will not be possible to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.”

But even if that goal becomes unattainable, scientists said, it will still be worthwhile for countries to slash emissions as quickly as possible to prevent as much warming as they can. Every additional rise in global temperatures increases the perils that people face around the world, such as water scarcity, malnutrition and life-threatening heat waves, the U.N. panel has found.

“Every fraction of a degree matters,” Dr. Skea said. “Even if we go beyond 1.5, that doesn’t mean we throw up our hands and despair.”

Scientists say that global warming will largely come to a halt once humans stop adding heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, a concept known as “net zero” emissions. If, for instance, nations reach net zero emissions by the early 2070s, the report says, they could likely stop global average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, above preindustrial levels.

The new report contains glimmers of optimism. Over the past decade, many nations have adopted more ambitious climate policies, scaled back plans for new coal plants and expanded their use of renewable energy through subsidies and regulations. Although emissions from fossil fuels are still growing worldwide, the rate of growth slowed in the 2010s, compared with the 2000s, the report said, and humanity now has a much better shot at avoiding some of the worst-case global warming scenarios once widely feared by scientists.

Clean energy technology has advanced far more quickly than expected, the report said. Since 2010, the costs of solar panels and lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles have plunged by 85 percent, while the cost of wind turbines has fallen by more than half.

Rapidly shifting away from the fossil fuels that have underpinned economies for more than a century will require nations to do much more, however. Over the next decade, governments and companies would need to invest three to six times the roughly $600 billion they currently spend annually on encouraging clean energy and cutting emissions, the report said.

But the cost of inaction is also substantial, in terms of deaths, displacement and damage. In the United States last year, damages from floods, wildfires, drought and other disasters related to weather and climate totaled approximately $145 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency said that “extremely high” levels of disasters were becoming “the new normal.”

“Reducing emissions substantially is much less painful than you would think, and probably beneficial in the short term,” said Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway, who contributed to the report.

The new report examines dozens of strategies proposed by scientists and energy experts to help nations make the transition.

First, countries would need to clean up virtually all of the power plants worldwide that generate electricity for homes and factories. That means relying more on energy sources such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal or hydropower. Most of the world’s coal and natural gas plants would either need to shut down or install carbon capture technology that can trap emissions and bury them underground. Such technology has been slow to take off because of its high costs.

The next step would be to reconfigure transportation, industry and other segments of the global economy to run on clean electricity rather than fossil fuels. Cars powered by gasoline could be replaced with electric vehicles charged by low-carbon grids. Gas-burning furnaces in homes could be swapped out for electric heat pumps. Instead of burning coal, steel mills could shift to electric furnaces that melt scrap.

At the same time, nations could take steps to reduce their total energy demand. That could entail expanding public transit, upgrading insulation so homes consume less energy, recycling more raw materials and making factories more energy efficient. At the high end, such demand-side policies could help cut emissions in key sectors as much as 40 to 70 percent by 2050, the report notes.

But many economic activities can’t be easily electrified. Batteries are still too heavy for most airplanes. Many industries, like cement and glass, require extreme heat and currently burn coal or gas. For those emissions, governments and businesses will have to develop new fuels and industrial processes, the report said.

Off the Top of My Head

The Good Things the Biden Administration is Doing That You Never Hear About

by John Lawrence

Even CNN goes on and on trying to create excitement over the differences withing the Democratic Party between the Moderates and the Progressives without talking about 3 great things the Biden Administration has done recently. They are

(1) EPA will slash the use and production of hydrofluorocarbons which one of the most toxic of greenhouse gasses — often found to be leaking from U.S. supermarket freezers — by 85 percent over the next 15 years; (2) the US will end its involvement in the war in Yemen and (3) the US has recently exchanged prisoners with China involving Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou. Instead of touting these very significant accomplishments, CNN goes on and on trying to create excitement over the divisions within the Democratic party and Biden's lowering approval ratings. So I say to CNN: so what, who cares? Approval ratings mean Nada. Any President is presented with situations not of his own making and the government agencies tasked with responding to said situations don't always do it in the best possible fashion. Case in point: the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The significant point is that he ended it. Let's move on.

The New York Times reported:

A top executive and daughter of the founder of the Chinese tech giant Huawei was arrested on Saturday in Canada at the request of the United States, in a move likely to escalate tensions between the two countries at a delicate moment.

The arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer, unfolded on the same night that President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China dined together in Buenos Aires and agreed to a 90-day trade truce. The two countries are set to begin tense negotiations in hopes of ending a trade war that has been pummeling both economies.

So Biden is still unwinding some of Trump's self-inflicted messes. At a time when cooperation with China is imperative in order to prevent the worst exigencies of global warming, arresting a top Chinese executive was not likely to help. Releasing her is.

The Washington Post reported:

The Biden administration finalized its first new climate rule Thursday, slashing the use of powerful greenhouse gases widely used in home refrigerators and air conditioners and often found to be leaking from U.S. supermarket freezers.

The regulation from the Environmental Protection Agency establishes a program to cut the use and production of chemicals known as hydrofluorocarbons by 85 percent over the next 15 years.

Curbing these super-pollutants is a rare climate issue with broad bipartisan support. When emitted, the chemicals can warm the planet at a rate hundreds to thousands of times higher than carbon dioxide. The new rule implements a law passed by Congress last year.

White House officials said the new rule tackles global warming while supporting jobs to manufacture new alternatives.

The Biden administration is committed to doing good work on precventing and mitigating cimate cange. This is just another example the likes of which frequently go unbreported in the mass media because it doesn't creat the necessary excitement to support all their advertisers of which CNN has tons who come on the tube for 4 and a half minutes after every few minutes of "news." CNN must be making a forune and it show since they have money to support the making of CNN "films" on a weekly basis.

Common Dreams reported:

Anti-war groups on Thursday welcomed the U.S. House's passage of an amendment to the annual defense bill that would cut off the flow to Saudi Arabia of U.S. logistical support and weapons "that are bombing civilians" in Yemen. "This is BIG," tweeted the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL) following the afternoon 219-207 vote, which fell largely along party lines, with just 11 Democrats voting "no." At issue was Rep. Ro Khanna's (D-Calif.) amendment to H.R. 4350, the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). It's one of dozens of amendments to the NDAA under consideration by the House this week. According to Khanna, the vote "sent a clear message to the Saudis: end the bombing in Yemen and lift the blockade." Speaking on the House floor Wednesday, he made a succinct case for why the measure is so needed.  Khanna said his amendment "would end all U.S. logistical support and transfer of spare parts for Saudi warplanes that are bombing Yemen, that are bombing schools, that are killing children, that are bombing civilians in the largest humanitarian crisis around the world."

Back in February Biden had ended at least some of the support for that war as reported by the New York Times:

It didn’t happen in 2016, after a Saudi jet had dropped American-made bombs on a funeral in the Yemeni capital, Sana, killing more than 140 people. It didn’t happen in 2018, after a Saudi jet hit a Yemeni school bus with an American-made bomb, killing 44 boys on a field trip. But on Thursday, nearly six years after Saudi Arabia and its Arab allies launched a punishing military intervention in the Arab world’s poorest country, President Biden announced that he was ending U.S. support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, including some arms sales. “This war has to end,” Mr. Biden said, calling it a “humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”

Now the Democrat controlled Congress has finalized this. Trump, of course, was excited about the prospect of sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia. He welcomed the influx of dollars into the US Treasury without caring a hoot about innocent Yemeni victims of the bombing with US made bombs. As an Uber driver I picked up once a Saudi pilot who was being trained over here. Now the Biden administration along with Democrats in Congress has put the kibosh on aiding and abeting Saudi Arabia in their nasty war. Bien has shown his dedication to peace and has made efforts to bring peace to the world in the recent prisoner exchange with China and with doing what he can to end war in Yemen.

The Neoliberal Looting of America

from the New York Times:

The private equity industry, which has led to more than 1.3 million job losses over the last decade, reveals the truth about free markets.

By Mehrsa Baradaran

Ms. Baradaran is the author of “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”

July 2, 2020

George Etheredge for The New York Times

“It’s hard to separate what’s good for the United States and what’s good for Bank of America,” said its former chief executive, Ken Lewis, in 2009. That was hardly true at the time, but the current crisis has revealed that the health of the finance industry and stock market is completely disconnected from the actual financial health of the American people. As inequality, unemployment and evictions climb, the Dow Jones surges right alongside them — one line compounding suffering, the other compounding returns for investors.

One reason is that an ideological coup quietly transformed our society over the last 50 years, raising the fortunes of the financial economy — and its agents like private equity firms — at the expense of the real economy experienced by most Americans.

The roots of this intellectual takeover can be traced to a backlash against socialism in Cold War Europe. The Austrian School economist Friedrich A. Hayek was perhaps the most influential leader of that movement, denouncing governments that chased “the mirage of social justice.” Only free markets can allocate resources fairly and reward individuals based on what they deserve, reasoned Hayek. The ideology — known as neoliberalism — was especially potent because it disguised itself as a neutral statement of economics rather than just another theory. Only unfettered markets, the theory argued, could ensure justice and freedom because only the profit motive could dispassionately pick winners and losers based on their contribution to the economy.

Neoliberalism leapt from economics departments into American politics in the 1960s, where it fused with conservative anti-communist ideas and then quickly spread throughout universities, law schools, legislatures and courts. By the 1980s, neoliberalism was triumphant in policy, leading to tax cuts, deregulation and privatization of public functions including schools, pensions and infrastructure. The governing logic held that corporations could do just about everything better than the government could. The result, as President Ronald Reagan said, was to unleash “the magic of the marketplace.”

The magic of the market did in fact turn everything into gold — for wealthy investors. Neoliberalism led to deregulation in every sector, a winner-take-all, debt-fueled market and a growing cultural acceptance of purely profit-driven corporate managers. These conditions were a perfect breeding ground for the private equity industry, then known as “leveraged buyout” firms. Such firms took advantage of the new market for high-yield debt (better known as junk bonds) to buy and break up American conglomerates, capturing unprecedented wealth in fewer hands. The private equity industry embodies the neoliberal movement’s values, while exposing its inherent logic.

Private equity firms use money provided by institutional investors like pension funds and university endowments to take over and restructure companies or industries. Private equity touches practically every sector, from housing to health care to retail. In pursuit of maximum returns, such firms have squeezed businesses for every last drop of profit, cutting jobs, pensions and salaries where possible. The debt-laden buyouts privatize gains when they work, and socialize losses when they don’t, driving previously healthy firms to bankruptcy and leaving many others permanently hobbled. The list of private equity’s victims has grown even longer in the past year, adding J. Crew, Toys ‘R’ Us, Hertz and more.

In the last decade, private equity management has led to approximately 1.3 million job losses due to retail bankruptcies and liquidation. Beyond the companies directly controlled by private equity, the threat of being the next takeover target has most likely led other companies to pre-emptively cut wages and jobs to avoid being the weakest prey. Amid the outbreak of street protests in June, a satirical headline in The Onion put it best: “Protesters Criticized for Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First.” Yet the private equity takeover is not technically looting because it has been made perfectly legal, and even encouraged, by policymakers.

According to industry experts, 2019 was one of the most successful years for private equity to date, with $919 billion in funds raised. The private equity executives themselves can also garner tremendous riches. Their standard fee structure involves collecting around 2 percent of the investor money they manage annually, and then 20 percent of any profits above an agreed-upon level. This lucrative arrangement also lets them tap into the very favorable “carried interest” tax loophole, allowing them to pay much lower capital gains tax rates on their earnings, rather than normal income taxes like most people.

An examination of the recent history of private equity disproves the neoliberal myth that profit incentives produce the best outcomes for society. The passage of time has debunked another such myth: that deregulating industries would generate more vibrant competition and benefit consumers. Unregulated market competition actually led to market consolidation instead. Would-be monopolies squeezed competitors, accrued political power, lobbied for even more deregulation and ultimately drove out any rivals, leading inexorably to entrenched political power. Instead of a thriving market of small-firm competition, free market ideology led to a few big winners dominating the rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Is the US a Democracy or a Gridlocracy?

by John Lawrence, June 9, 2020

How is the US a democracy when one man can vote against an antilynching law so that it never gets passed? The law that would make lynching a Federal hate crime passed the House almost unanimously, but failed to get passed in the Senate due to one man - Rand Paul. It only takes one Senator to quash a bill and prevent it from becoming law because of the filibuster. This is what makes the US not a democracy but a gridlocracy. There is another way that legislation passed by the House which is the people's chamber never sees the light of day and that is Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate. It is up to him whether legislation passed by the House even gets considered in the Senate. That is the antidemocratic power that one man has. How can you say that the US is a democracy when one man has the power to say which legislation is even considered? Even if it passes both Houses, the President can always veto it which makes the US system much more antidemocratic than a parliamentary system.

The bill called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It comes to pass as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement. But you see the US political system for what it is when one man can prevent anything from becoming law. That's precisely the reason there is no gun control legislation even though opinion polls show that a majority of the American people want it. In March 2018, 67% of Americans supported stricter regulation of firearms sales, according to a Gallup poll with a margin of sampling error of

+/- 4% at the 95% confidence level, the highest in any Gallup survey since 1993. We'd have it IF the US were a democracy. It's not. The gun control industry has bought the votes of at least one Senator, and that Senator or Senators will always filibuster. The US political system is archaic and needs to be changed. It's not that big a deal. You don't need a revolution to change a Constitution. Most advanced western democracies have done it to bring their political systems up to date. Instead, the US Constitution is treated as sancrosanct and must never be changed sort of like the Bible. Meanwhile, time marches on and other nations march past the antiquated United States.

The New York Times reported:

As Congress prepares to wade into a contentious debate over legislation to address police brutality and systemic racial bias, a long-simmering dispute in the Senate over a far less controversial bill that would for the first time explicitly make lynching a federal crime has burst into public view.

The bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after the 14-year-old black boy who was tortured and killed in 1955 in Mississippi, predates the recent high-profile deaths of three black men and women at the hands of white police and civilians that have inspired protests across the country. It passed the House this year by a vote of 410 to 4, and has the backing of 99 senators, who have urged support for belated federal recognition of a crime that once terrorized black Americans.

So the American political system is not only undemocratic, it's racist. It's the main reason that hardly any progressive legislation was passed during President Obama's 8 year term in office. Corporations lobby Senators - it's basically legalized bribery - to pay them off so that no meaningful legislation ever gets passed except if it's in their interests, and their interests are always about money. The article continued:

Kamala Harris rose to object, delivering a seething broadside against Mr. Paul as she noted that even as they debated, mourners were gathering to honor George Floyd, the African-American man who died last week after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

“The idea that we would not be taking the issue of lynching seriously is an insult — an insult to Senator Booker and Senator Tim Scott and myself,” she said from across the chamber floor, referring to the South Carolina Republican who helped write the bill and is the party’s lone black senator.

“To suggest that lynching would only be a lynching if someone’s heart was pulled out and displayed to someone else is ridiculous,” she added. “It should not require a maiming or torture for us to recognize a lynching when we see it and recognize it by federal law and call it what it is, which is that it is a crime that should be punishable with accountability and consequence.”

American democracy has been hijacked by monied interests who can afford to pay off Senators and Congressmen and women as well for that matter. Legalized bribery insures that nothing of any consequence will ever get done in America whether it is racial justice, economic justice or political justice. Can this system be reformed? Perhaps it can, but the reform should start with the Senate and the role that the leader plays in deciding what legislation even gets considered and to the elimination of the filibuster.

Where Does California’s Homeless Population Come From?

from the New York Times ([email protected]), November 6, 2019

A homeless man camps next to the high-speed rail project in downtown Fresno.Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Today, we have a dispatch from our colleague Marie Tae McDermott, who tackled the latest installment of our series answering readers’ questions about inequality in California:

Christine Kroger, a reader from Stockton, wrote: “Where are the homeless people from? If they are transplants, when did they come to California, what brought them here, and how did they end up in their current circumstances?”

Another reader, Jim, from Santa Cruz, wrote that he believed “many, if not most” of the homeless people he saw were not native Californians. He asked: “Why is California bearing the brunt of this national crisis?”

Elizabeth Erickson, a reader in Seattle, echoed his sentiments, saying: “Do many homeless or near-homeless move to politically liberal areas, making the assumption that they will receive more assistance?”

As the data shows us, most of the homeless people you pass on the streets every day are in fact Californians. Some may have rented an apartment or once owned a home in your neighborhood. Now they sleep in an encampment near the freeway you take to work each morning.

“This is a local crisis and a homegrown problem,” said Peter Lynn, the executive director of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, the agency that conducts the largest homeless census count in the country.

Several years ago, L.A.H.S.A. added a question to its homeless survey that captured how long a person had been in Los Angeles and where they became homeless. The resulting data dispelled the idea that the homeless population was largely made up of people from out of state.

“The vast majority fell into homelessness in L.A. County,” Mr. Lynn said.

L.A.H.S.A.’s 2019 homeless count found that 64 percent of the 58,936 Los Angeles County residents experiencing homelessness had lived in the city for more than 10 years. Less than a fifth (18 percent) said they had lived out of state before becoming homeless.

In San Francisco, 43 percent of the homeless said they had lived in the city for more than 10 years.

The path to becoming homeless can start with a large medical bill that causes someone to fall behind on their rent payments, which leads to eventual eviction. More than half of the people surveyed in Los Angeles cited economic hardship as the primary reason that they fell into homelessness. In San Francisco, 26 percent of the homeless surveyed cited the loss of a job as the primary cause.

The survey also found that nearly a quarter (23 percent) of unsheltered adults lost their housing in 2018 and were experiencing homelessness for the first time. In Los Angeles, a renter earning minimum wage ($13.25 an hour) would need to work 79 hours per week to afford a one-bedroom apartment.

Data about migration to California from other states among the housed population showed that the largest group of transplants to the state were actually college-educated professionals, ranging from 20 to 29, from Illinois, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. Over the past five years, California has gained 162,000 more college graduates from other states than it has lost.

“I hear a lot of people complain that the homeless people are all from ‘somewhere else,’” wrote Ms. Kroger of Stockton, a lifelong Californian. “I think it might raise empathy and compassion if it turns out that the majority of the people who have been displaced are from the very communities in which they are now trying to survive on the streets.”

California Labor Bill, Near Passage, Is Blow to Uber and Lyft

from NY Times

Drivers for ride-hailing services demonstrating outside Uber headquarters in San Francisco last month. The protest was organized in support of a bill in the State Legislature that would extend employee status to many gig-economy workers. CreditCreditJustin Sullivan/Getty Images

 

 

 

By Kate Conger and Noam Scheiber

September 9, 2019

SACRAMENTO — A pack of Teamsters fanned out through California’s Capitol building last week, marching into legislators’ offices and pressing them to pass a bill that would force Uber and Lyft to treat their drivers as employees. The measure, Assembly Bill 5, would entitle gig workers to protections like a minimum wage and unemployment benefits. “Yes on A.B. 5! Yes on A.B. 5!” they chorused.

The push was one of several door-knocking campaigns coordinated by labor groups that can now taste success after battling the ride-hailing companies for years.

The bill is intended to codify and extend a 2018 California Supreme Court ruling that put forth a new test for classifying workers.

Under that test, workers are far more likely to be deemed employees if they perform a function central to a company’s business.

Legislators are expected to pass the bill before their session ends this week, presenting the strongest challenge yet to Uber and Lyft’s business model, which relies on a corps of drivers who can be enlisted and deployed essentially as freelancers.

The measure could affect millions of Californians beyond ride-hail drivers, including janitors, nail salon workers and cable-television installers. And it would give momentum to an emerging consensus on the center-left that workers are entitled to a basic level of economic security that many Americans now live without. Several candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination have endorsed the bill, including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg.

“It’s hugely important because California is the birthplace and the center of app-based work, and because California has traditionally been a bellwether for the country around a lot of different progressive policies,” said Rebecca Smith, an expert on worker misclassification at the National Employment Law Project, which is part of a coalition seeking to enact a similar law in New York.

Banners showing support for Assembly Bill 5, which would expand the ranks of workers considered company employees rather than contractors. In addition to drivers for ride-hailing services, the bill could affect janitors, nail salon workers, cable-television installers and others.CreditRich Pedroncelli/Associated Press

Industry officials have estimated that on-demand companies like Uber and the delivery service DoorDash see their costs rise 20 to 30 percent when they rely on employees rather than contractors, and Uber and Lyft have said in statements to prospective investors that being forced to make drivers employees could significantly affect their financial outlook. Since the prospect of a deal started to fade in late July, the stock prices of both Uber and Lyft have declined about 30 percent.

Analysts said the stock decline was due in part to concerns about A.B. 5, among other worries about the businesses. “Probably the No. 1 question we get from investors right now is about the risks here, qualitatively and quantitatively,” said Lloyd Walmsley, an equity research analyst at Deutsche Bank. “There’s obviously the risk that California is just the beginning, that other states could follow suit.”

Ride-hailing companies contend that A.B. 5 would force them to set rigid schedules, depriving drivers of flexibility, and raise fares to cover the cost of employment benefits. The companies say that about 90 percent of their drivers nationwide do not work a full-time schedule.

But Tyler Sandness, a Lyft driver who is an organizer for a group called Rideshare Drivers United in Los Angeles, said the bill was needed because “things have gone from bad to worse” for drivers. As independent contractors, drivers must cover the costs of vehicle ownership and payroll taxes, and lack much of the safety net afforded to employees, including workers’ compensation and paid sick leave.

That California has come to the brink of fundamentally threatening such marquee companies is the culmination of miscalculations by Uber and Lyft, a strong show of force from organized labor, and legislators’ resistance to the intervention of the new governor, Gavin Newsom.

The ride-hailing companies sought an amendment to the bill that would create a special category for their drivers, between contractor and employee. Mr. Newsom’s office would not comment for this article, but three people familiar with the discussions said the governor gave the companies clear advice: Get labor to bless such an arrangement, or face insurmountable opposition in Sacramento.

Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s sponsor, at a ride-hailing pickup location at San Diego International Airport. “I wasn’t looking to sell out workers,” she said of compromise efforts.CreditJohn Francis Peters for The New York Times

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Trump, Tax Cuts and Terrorism

Why do Republicans enable right-wing extremism?

by Paul Krugman, New York Times, August 5, 2019

President Trump, flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, spoke Monday about the weekend’s mass shootings.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

Why has the Republican Party become a systematic enabler of terrorism?

Don’t pretend to be shocked. Just look at G.O.P. responses to the massacre in El Paso. They have ranged from the ludicrous (blame video games!) to the almost honest (who would have expected Ted Cruz, of all people, to speak out against white supremacy?). But as far as I can tell, not one prominent Republican has even hinted at the obvious link between Donald Trump’s repeated incitements to violence and the upsurge in hate crimes.

So the party remains in lock step behind a man who has arguably done more to promote racial violence than any American since Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan, a terrorist organization if there ever was one — and who was recently honored by the Republican governor of Tennessee.

Anyway, the party’s complicity started long before Trump came on the scene. More than a decade ago, the Department of Homeland Security issued a report warning about a surge of right-wing extremism. The report was prescient, to say the least. But when congressional Republicans learned about it, they went on a rampage, demanding the resignation of Janet Napolitano, who headed the agency, and insisted that even using the term “right-wing extremism” was unacceptable.

This backlash was effective: Homeland Security drastically scaled back its efforts to monitor and head off what was already becoming a major threat. In effect, Republicans bullied law enforcement into creating a safe space for potential terrorists, as long as their violent impulses were motivated by the right kind of hatred.

But why did they do that? Is the G.O.P. now a party of white nationalists?

No, not exactly. No doubt some members of Congress, and a significant number of Trump administration officials, very much including the tweeter in chief, really are white supremacists. And a much larger fraction — almost surely bigger than anyone wants to admit — are racists. (Recently released tapes of conversations between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon reveal that the modern G.O.P.’s patron saint was, in fact, a crude racist who called Africans “monkeys.”)

But racism isn’t what drives the Republican establishment, and my guess is that a majority of the party’s elected officials find it a little bit repugnant — just not repugnant enough to induce them to repudiate its political exploitation. And their exploitation of racism has led them inexorably to where they are today: de facto enablers of a wave of white supremacist terrorism.

The central story of U.S. politics since the 1970s is the takeover of the Republican Party by economic radicals, determined to slash taxes for the wealthy while undermining the social safety net.

With the arguable exception of George H.W. Bush, every Republican president since 1980 has pushed through tax cuts that disproportionately benefited the 1 percent while trying to defund and/or privatize key social programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act.

This agenda is, however, unpopular. Most voters believe that the rich should pay more, not less, in taxes, and want spending on social programs to rise, not fall.

So how do Republicans win elections? By appealing to racial animus. This is such an obvious fact of American political life that you have to be willfully blind not to see it.

For a long time, the G.O.P. establishment was able to keep this game under control. It would campaign using implicit appeals to racial hostility (welfare queens! Willie Horton!) but turn postelection to privatization and tax cuts.

But for some reason this bait-and-switch started getting less effective in the 2000s. Maybe it was the reality of America’s growing racial diversity; maybe it was the fact that American society as a whole was becoming less racist, leaving the hard-core racists feeling isolated and frustrated. And the election of our first black president really kicked hatred into overdrive.

The result is that there are more and more angry white people out there willing to commit mayhem — and able to do so because those same Republicans have blocked any effective control over sales of assault weapons.

A different, better G.O.P. might have been willing to acknowledge the growing threat and supported a crackdown on violent right-wing extremism, comparable to the F.B.I.’s successful campaign against the modern K.K.K. in the 1960s. A lot of innocent victims would be alive today if Republicans had done so.

But they didn’t, because admitting that right-wing extremism was a threat, or even a phrase law enforcement should be allowed to use, might have threatened the party’s exploitation of racial hostility to achieve its economic goals.

In effect, then, the Republican Party decided that a few massacres were an acceptable price to pay in return for tax cuts. I wish that were hyperbole, but the continuing refusal of G.O.P. figures to criticize Trump even after El Paso shows that it’s the literal truth.

So as I said at the beginning, the G.O.P. has become a systematic enabler of terrorism. Why? Follow the money.

 

Off the Top of My Head

The Democrat Elected President in 2020 should Undo Everything Trump Has Done

by John Lawrence, September 5, 2018

Trump is worried that if the US elects a Democratic President in 2020, he or she will undo everything that he has done. Or a Democratic Congress might do it too. The New York Times reported:

WASHINGTON — President Trump warned evangelical leaders Monday night that Democrats “will overturn everything that we’ve done and they’ll do it quickly and violently” if Republicans lose control of Congress in the midterm elections.

Speaking to the group in the State Dining Room of the White House, Mr. Trump painted a stark picture of what losing the majority would mean for the administration’s conservative agenda, according to an audiotape of his remarks provided to The New York Times by someone who attended the event.

“They will end everything immediately,” Mr. Trump said. “When you look at antifa,” he added, a term that describes militant leftist groups, “and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”

Well, yes, Democrats either Congressional or Presidential should do everything they can to reverse Trump's "progress" which is really regress. Trump has set the US back years with his cockamamie policies most of which have been accomplished by Presidential fiat without Congressional help. He did his best to reverse everything that was accomplished during the Obama administration. Thanks to John McCain he wasn't able to overturn Obamacare though.

So the Dems should get back into the Iran deal ASAP and also the Paris climate accords. Those two things set the world back by decades. They should be overturned once Democrats regain power.

Trump has effectively thrown a monkey wrench into the cooperation of the US with our allies and every other country of the world while running up the national debt with his egregious tax cuts for the rich. He has run up the debt by increasing the already bloated defense budget. Ha has overturned every environmental protection. He has unregulated every industry and corporation that should be regulated.

Trump is a nut case who has set the US back decades. Hopefully Democrats can undo everything he has done and redo most of what the Obama administration did.

 

 

The Tax-Cut Con Goes On

Why Social Security and Medicare are on the ballot.

By Paul Krugman

Opinion Columnist, New York Times

• Aug. 23, 2018
• • 570

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CreditStephen Maturen/Getty Images

What will happen if the blue wave in the midterm elections falls short? Clearly, at this point it still might: Democrats will surely receive more votes than Republicans, but thanks to gerrymandering and population geography, the U.S. electoral system gives excess weight to rural, white voters who still have faith in President Trump. What if, thanks to that excess weight, the minority prevails?

One answer, obviously, is that the unindicted co-conspirator in chief will continue to be protected from the law. And for those concerned with the survival of American democracy, that has to be the most important issue at stake in November. But if the G.O.P. hangs on, there will also be other, bread-and-butter consequences for ordinary Americans.

First of all, there is every reason to believe that a Republican Congress, freed from the immediate threat of elections, would do what it narrowly failed to do last year, and repeal the Affordable Care Act. This would cause tens of millions of Americans to lose health insurance and would in particular hit those with pre-existing conditions. There’s a reason health care, not Trump, is the central theme of Democratic campaigns this year.

But the attack on the social safety net probably wouldn’t stop with a rollback of Obama-era expansion: Longstanding programs, very much including Social Security and Medicare, would also be on the chopping block. Who says so? Republicans themselves.

In a recent interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, Representative Steve Stivers, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee — in effect, the man charged with containing the blue wave — declared that, given the size of the budget deficit, the federal government needs to save money by cutting spending on social programs. When pressed about whether that included Social Security and Medicare, he admitted that it did.

And he’s not alone in seeing major cuts in core programs for older Americans as the next step if Republicans win in November. Many major figures in the G.O.P., including the departing speaker of the House, Paul Ryan, and multiple senators, have said the same thing. (Meanwhile, groups tied to Ryan have been running attack ads accusing Democrats of planning to cut Medicare funding — but hey, consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. So, apparently, is honesty.)

 Now, Republicans who call for cuts in social spending to balance the budget are showing extraordinary chutzpah, which is traditionally defined as what you exhibit when you kill your parents, then plead for mercy because you’re an orphan. After all, the same Republicans now wringing their hands over budget deficits just blew up that same deficit by enacting a huge tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.

So it might seem shocking that only a few months later they’re once again posing as deficit hawks and calling for spending cuts. That is, it might seem shocking if it weren’t for the fact that this has been the G.O.P.’s budget strategy for decades. First, cut taxes. Then, bemoan the deficit created by those tax cuts and demand cuts in social spending. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This strategy, known as “starve the beast,” has been around since the 1970s, when Republican economists like Alan Greenspan and Milton Friedman began declaring that the role of tax cuts in worsening budget deficits was a feature, not a bug. As Greenspan openly put it in 1978, the goal was to rein in spending with tax cuts that reduce revenue, then “trust that there is a political limit to deficit spending.”

It’s true that when tax cuts are on the table their proponents tend to deny that they’ll increase the deficit, claiming that they’ll provide a miraculous boost to the economy and that tax receipts will actually rise. But there’s not a shred of evidence to support this claim, and it has never been clear whether anyone with real political power has ever believed it. For the most part it’s just a smoke screen to help conceal the G.O.P.’s true intentions.

The puzzle is why Republicans keep getting away with this bait-and-switch.

Fifteen years ago I wrote a long piece titled “The Tax-Cut Con,” describing what was even then a time-honored scam; it reads almost word for word as a description of Republican strategy in 2017-18. Yet I keep reading news analyses expressing puzzlement that men who were strident deficit hawks in the Obama years so cheerfully signed on to a budget-busting tax cut under Trump. To say the obvious: These men were never deficit hawks; it was always a pose.

And the gullibility both of the news media and self-proclaimed centrists remains a remarkable story. Remember, Ryan, who was utterly orthodox in his determination to cut taxes on the rich while savaging programs for the poor and the middle class, even received an award for fiscal responsibility.

Which brings us back to the midterm elections. Rule of law is definitely on the ballot. So is health care. But voters should realize that the threat to programs they count on is much broader: If the G.O.P. holds its majority, Social Security and Medicare as we know them will be very much in danger.

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Paul Krugman has been an Opinion columnist since 2000 and is also a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York Graduate Center. He won the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade and economic geography. @PaulKrugman