California Free Press

New York passes first-in-nation law to ban natural gas and other fossil fuels

The state ban on gas in new buildings could face legal challenges, but it marks a milestone in the energy transition sought by climate activists

By Anna Phillips

May 3, 2023 at 8:57 a.m. EDT from the Washington Post

New York state has passed a law requiring most new buildings to be zero-emissions starting in 2026, with larger buildings to come into compliance in 2029. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

 

New York has become the first state in the nation to pass a law banning natural gas and other fossil fuels in most new buildings, a move that could inspire other states and further erode the residential future of the gas industry.

Late Tuesday night, the New York legislature approved a $229 billion state budget that included a prohibition on gas in most new homes and other construction. It was a major victory for climate activists but is likely to face a court challenge from fossil fuel interests.

The law effectively requires all-electric heating and cooking in new buildings shorter than seven stories by 2026, and in 2029 for taller buildings. And although it allows exemptions for manufacturing facilities, restaurants, hospitals and even carwashes, the measure does not do what some climate activists had feared: give cities and counties license to override the ban.

Since the beginning of this year, when a federal official suggested, and then quickly retracted, the idea that the national government might ban gas stoves, debate over the future of natural gas has flared. So it may seem surprising that as New York lawmakers headed into the final stretch of their budget talks this week, their plans to pass a statewide gas ban were essentially a foregone conclusion.

But Democrats, who control the New York Senate and Assembly, have faced pressure from environmentalists for several years to follow through on the state’s climate commitments. And, in the end, it was not negotiations over gas stoves that stirred controversy but a drawn-out fight over bail reform and housing policy that delayed approval of the budget by a month.

The law’s passage, and the approval of a measure that would require the state to build renewable energy when the private sector falls short, have fueled supporters’ hopes for New York to become a national model.

“I hear from local government and state folks frequently that they’re thinking of this sort of policy, and so I’m certain, as other policymakers look to a state that’s found a politically and technically feasible way to go about electrification, that others will be paying attention,” said Amy Turner, a senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

In Massachusetts, a law adopted last year has allowed 10 cities and towns to participate in a pilot program banning gas-burning stoves and furnaces from new construction. Environmentalists are eager to see the state go further, using a new building code written to discourage the use of fossil fuels. Advocates are also eyeing Chicago, where the heavily blue city recently elected a liberal mayor.

But the gas industry and its Republican supporters have raised doubts about whether New York’s gas ban can survive legal challenges. Some climate advocates worry that a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit that struck down the California city of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation gas ban could have a chilling effect on other cities and counties.

A fight brewing in Oregon could decide how we heat our homes and cook

Although the court’s decision is not legally binding in most of the United States, hesitation to adopt local gas bans could ripple outward, said Matt Vespa, a senior attorney with the nonprofit organization Earthjustice who noted that restrictions on gas use in buildings typically begin at the local level, then go statewide. In California and Washington state, major cities including San Francisco and Seattle banned gas hookups before the states enacted measures encouraging electrification through their building codes.

There are other routes to all-electric buildings besides the one Berkeley used, Vespa said, but “if you take away the local piece, that does chill upwards momentum, and people have to recalibrate.”

Opponents derided the New York bill’s passage as governmental overreach. Republican Robert Ortt, the minority leader of the New York Senate, issued a statement criticizing the law as a “first-in-the-nation, unconstitutional ban” that “will drive up utility bills and increase housing costs.”

New York’s law does not affect existing buildings, and it specifically exempts renovations. But, over time, it could chip away at the gas industry’s dominance in the state, where 3 in 5 households rely on natural gas for heating, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Only about 1 in 7 households heat with electricity.

The ban also extends to heating oil and propane, raising questions about the future of these fuels in New York state’s more rural communities.

Critics of the law have argued that it limits consumer choice and will increase utility bills by shifting more households to electricity, which is more expensive than gas in much of the state. Supporters counter that because the law affects only new construction, the transition will happen gradually and in tandem with the state’s plans to shift more of its electricity production to greener, and cheaper, sources.

Today, gas fuels 46 percent of New York’s electricity generation, but a landmark climate law passed in 2019 calls for a transition to renewable, emissions-free sources such as solar, wind and hydro power. It requires the state to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

World is on Brink of Catastrophic Warming, U.N. Climate Change Report Says

A dangerous climate threshold is near, but ‘it does not mean we are doomed’ if swift action is taken, scientists say

By Sarah Kaplan

Updated March 20, 2023 at 5:33 p.m. EDT|Published March 20, 2023 at 9:01 a.m. EDT, from the Washington Post

 

A Chinese state-owned coal-fired power plant under construction in 2017 in Huainan, Anhui province, China. (Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

The world is likely to pass a dangerous temperature threshold within the next 10 years, pushing the planet past the point of catastrophic warming — unless nations drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change.

The report released Monday by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that the world is likely to surpass its most ambitious climate target — limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures — by the early 2030s.

Beyond that threshold, scientists have found, climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end.

Human activities have already transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, the IPCC said, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and current carbon-cutting efforts are wildly insufficient to ward off climate catastrophe.

Monday’s assessment synthesizes years of studies on the causes and consequences of rising temperatures, leading U.N. Secretary General António Guterres to demand that developed countries such as the United States eliminate carbon emissions by 2040 — a decade earlier than the rest of the world.

With few nations on track to fulfill their climate commitments and with the developing world already suffering disproportionately from climate disasters, he said, rich countries have a responsibility to act faster than their low-income counterparts.

The IPCC report shows humanity has reached a “critical moment in history,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said. The world has all the knowledge, tools and financial resources needed to achieve its climate goals, but after decades of disregarding scientific warnings and delaying climate efforts, the window for action is rapidly closing.

Calling the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb,” Guterres announced on Monday an “acceleration agenda” that would speed up global actions on climate.

Emerging economies including China and India — which plan to reach net zero in 2060 and 2070, respectively — must hasten their emissions-cutting efforts alongside developed nations, Guterres said.

Both the U.N. chief and the IPCC also called for the world to phase out coal, oil and gas, which are responsible for more than three-quarters of global greenhouse gas emissions.

“This report offers hope, and it provides a warning,” Lee told reporters Monday. “The choices we make now and in the next few years will reverberate around the world for hundreds, even thousands, of years.”

A stark scientific outlook

Already, the IPCC’s synthesis report shows, humanity has fundamentally and irreversibly transformed the Earth system. Emissions from burning fossil fuels and other planet-warming activities have increased global average temperatures by at least 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the start of the industrial era. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hasn’t been this high since archaic humans carved the first stone tools.

These changes have caused irrevocable damage to communities and ecosystems, evidence shows: Fish populations are dwindling, farms are less productive, infectious diseases have multiplied, and weather disasters are escalating to unheard-of extremes. The risks from this relatively low level of warming are turning out to be greater than scientists anticipated — not because of any flaw in their research, but because human-built infrastructure, social networks and economic systems have proved exceptionally vulnerable to even small amounts of climate change, the report said.

The suffering is worst in the world’s poorest countries and low-lying island nations, which are home to roughly 1 billion people yet account for less than 1 percent of humanity’s total planet-warming pollution, the report says. But as climate disruption increases with rising temperatures, not even the wealthiest and most well-protected places will be immune.

Homes in Pakistan's southwestern Baluchistan province were inundated in August. (Zahid Hussain/AP)

In 2018, the IPCC found that a 1.5C world would be overwhelmingly safer than one that is 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than the preindustrial era. At the time, scientists said humanity would have to zero out carbon emissions by 2050 to meet the 1.5-degree target and by 2070 to avoid warming beyond 2 degrees.

Five years later, humanity isn’t anywhere close to reaching either goal. Unless nations adopt new environmental policies — and follow through on the ones already in place — global average temperatures could warm by 3.2 degrees Celsius (5.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, the synthesis report says. In that scenario, a child born today would live to see several feet of sea level rise, the extinction of hundreds of species and the migration of millions of people from places where they can no longer survive.

“We are not doing enough, and the poor and vulnerable are bearing the brunt of our collective failure to act,” said Madeleine Diouf Sarr, Senegal’s top climate official and the chair for a group of least-developed countries that negotiate together at the United Nations.

She pointed to the damage wrought by Cyclone Freddy, the longest-lasting and most energetic tropical storm on record, which has killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more after bombarding southern Africa and Madagascar for more than a month. The report shows that higher temperatures make storms more powerful and sea level rise makes flooding from these storms more intense. Meanwhile, the report says, the death toll from these kinds of disasters is 15 times as high in vulnerable nations as it is in wealthier parts of the world.

If the world stays on its current warming track, the IPCC says, global flood damage will be as much as four times as high as it will be if people limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.

“The world cannot ignore the human cost of inaction,” Sarr said.

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

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.

Off the Top of My Head

Joe Manchin Is Living in La La Land

by John Lawrence, April 8, 2021

Joe Manchin is not facing the reality that exists in the US today. He is nostalgic for a day when a bipartisan consensus was possible. Today it's not. The best we can do is to go ahead with Joe Biden's agenda with the slim majority Democrats possess in the Senate, but Manchin is essentially siding with Republicans, the Party of No. Manchin wants stability in American governing, but his vision of stability is one in which Republicans will negate every attempt Biden makes to bring the US into the 21st century and effectively compete with China. Yes, America will swerve back and forth policywise if Federal control switches between parties. But that's the best that American democracy is capable of at this point in time. The alternative that Manchin suggests is a stability of no progress. China has no such problem. Their society is basically all on the same long term wavelength. They will go full steam ahead with progress.

In his recent op-ed in the Washington Post, Manchin states: "The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground on the major policy debates facing our nation." Is he kidding? "usher a new era of bipartisanship where we find common ground" There is no way that is going to happen in the current political environment. There is very little to no common ground. Democrats want to get things done for the American people to improve their lot. Republicans only seek political power because their personal fortunes go up to the extent that they hold political power, and all they care about is their personal power and fortunes. Republicans have determined that their personal power increases to the extent that they make the Democratic agenda fail. Mitch McConnell actually stated this when Obama was President. McConnell was quoted as saying: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." That's pretty clear. It's not about helping the American people except for the wealthy class of which they themselves are members. It's about making the other party fail.

So Joe Manchin has his head up his ass if he thinks there is going to be a new age of bipartisan consensus. It's wishful thinking. It's not going to happen right now or any time in the near future. Maybe some day, but right now the best hope is for the Democrats to go ahead and make improvements in American society while they hold power. Any other course only dooms the US to fall further behind the rest of the world, doom earth to catastrophic climate change and lets China zoom ahead in making progress. Joe Manchin is incredibly naive or else he wants to be the main power broker in the US Senate. "Generations of senators who came before us put their heads down and their pride aside to solve the complex issues facing our country. We must do the same. The issues facing our democracy today are not insurmountable if we choose to tackle them together." Doesn't he realize that the only issue Republicans want to face is how to make themselves and the rich even richer? Doesn't he realize that the only thing Republicans are interested in is political power? They will lie and cheat, create conspiracy theories and do anything that's even quasi legal to achieve and maintain political power.

Manchin is playing his role as the skunk at the party which is too bad. Biden's job is not trying to form a bipartisan consensus with Republicans. It's trying to appease Joe Manchin in order to get anything done. The only hope for America is to go big when Democrats hold power which they do only by a miracle in the fact that two Democratic Senators were elected in runoffs in the state of Georgia. Somehow Biden will get Manchin to go along with most of his agenda that Republicans will not be able to undo if and when they control the Federal government again. The atmosphere has already set the record this year of 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide making it unlikely that our planet will not face the worst consequences of global warming. Only cooperation with China, not only on this but on future pandemicsand other issues, will give our grandchildren the slightest chance at a decent life. To the extent Republicans control the Federal government this chance will be reduced to zero.

 

 

Off the Top of My Head

Fareed Zakaria: The Pandemic Will Not End Unless Every Country Gets the Vaccine

by John Lawrence, February 4, 2021

Does this finally mean that we have to cooperate with all other countries in the world whether we like it or not or face the dire consequence that the pandemic will never end? War no more? Or will we so much not want to give up war, Hot or Cold, that we are willing to continue competitive rivalries with other nations? Will we have to settle or at least live with our differences in order for most of us to survive? Must petty grievances and bullying sanctions end? The US spends a trillion dollars a year on its war machine, while the real enemies are global warming, domestic terrorists and viruses. Will human beings ever learn or do we love competition and fighting so much that we will not cooperate on any terms and for any reason.

The longer the pandemic goes on anywhere in the world, the more time the virus has to mutate to deadlier and more transmissible forms. Yet some people even refuse to wear a mask. It seems that freedom is not having to do anything I don't want to do even if it protects others - especially if it protects others.Freedom is all about me - my rights, my prerogatives. Freedom is not what Kris Kristofferson thought: "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose". No freedom means that I don't have to love my neighbor as myself as the Bible says. Freedom means that I can do what I damn well please despite the consequences to anyone else.

Fareed Zakaria wrote in the Washington Post:

"Despite the amazing progress we’ve made with vaccines, the truth is that our current trajectory virtually guarantees that we will never really defeat the coronavirus. It will stay alive and keep mutating and surging across the globe. Years from now, countries could be facing new outbreaks that will force hard choices between new lockdowns or new waves of disease and death.

"The basic problem is in how the vaccine is being distributed around the world — not based on where there is the most need, but the most money. The richest countries have paid for hundreds of millions of doses, often far in excess of what they need. Canada, for example, has preordered enough to cover its 38 million residents five times over.

"Meanwhile, Nigeria’s 200 million people have not received a single dose of the vaccine. Rich countries make up 16 percent of the world’s population, yet they have locked up 60 percent of the world’s vaccine supply. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Thomas Bollyky and Chad Bown pointed out that Australia, Canada and Japan account for less than 1 percent of the world’s coronavirus cases but have secured more doses than all of Latin America and the Caribbean, which account for more than 17 percent of cases."

Both the pandemic and global warming put the human race in an interesting dilemma. We must help each other if any of us are to survive, and we must sacrifice if future generations are to survive. People that are all about "me" are in actuality a threat to lasting human civilization on planet earth, probably on any other planet as well. Yet as is well known many, if not all, humans elevate selfishness above communal values. Their enjoyment of what life has to offer in the present is more important than someone else's survival in the future. This isn't true of most mothers though who want their children to survive even if they have to die. So maybe men are the problem here. They value the present and their "toys" much more than they do the future. They want what they want and they want it now.

Billie holiday wrote the song, "God Bless the Child Who's Got His Own." "Rich relations give crusts of bread and such. You can help yourself but don't take too much." Billie Holiday died in a hospital with 74 cents in her bank account and $750 strapped to her leg. You might think that the fact that she died without a will would not have mattered yet her estate was valued at $14 million in 2014 and revenues from her reissued records are bringing in more money on an annual basis. By a quirk of fate most of that money, and the continuing revenue from royalties, is going to people she never even knew in life. Is people getting their just desserts really the issue here? Maybe perhaps other people getting just a little dessert is what's important.

Off the Top of My Head

Defund the Police ... Defund the Military

by John Lawrence, June 11, 2020

Police have been given jobs social workers should be doing. They've criminalized everything from homelessness to mental illness to drug addiction. That's what defunding the police is all about. They should hire more social workers and less police. The police are asked to do a lot more than what police work should be all about. So has the military. Every problem overseas, many of which could be solved by teachers, social workers and doctors has been looked at as a problem for the military to solve. Many of these problems derive from the fact that people are in dire poverty. They need help building schools, houses, sanitation systems. Instead we send the military in to bomb them just as we send the police in at home to take them to jail by any means necessary.

We glorify police work with all kinds of TV shows just as we glorify the military. No one ever glorifies the Peace Corps though, and, if they were sent in more often, there would be more positive results. Instead of helping people, the first thought of American leaders is to send in the police or the military. The Washington Post reported:

To fix policing, we must first recognize how much we have come to over-rely on law enforcement. We turn to the police in situations where years of experience and common sense tell us that their involvement is unnecessary, and can make things worse. We ask police to take accident reports, respond to people who have overdosed and arrest, rather than cite, people who might have intentionally or not passed a counterfeit $20 bill. We call police to roust homeless people from corners and doorsteps, resolve verbal squabbles between family members and strangers alike, and arrest children for behavior that once would have been handled as a school disciplinary issue.

Police themselves often complain about having to “do too much,” including handling social problems for which they are ill-equipped. Some have been vocal about the need to decriminalize social problems and take police out of the equation. It is clear that we must reimagine the role they play in public safety.

Everything that could be said about the police could be said about the military. Instead of helping people overseas to escape from the poverty they experience, we police them instead. What a novel idea to spend less on the military and more on the Peace Corps. Let's reimagine the role they play in public safety. Policing has been the primary vehicle for using violence to perpetuate the unjustified white control over the bodies and lives of black people that has been with us since slavery. The military has been the primary vehicle to perpetuate American control over black and brown bodies in other parts of the world.

The Peace Corps budget is $410.5 million. The military budget is $934 billion. The military budget covers the DoD, overseas contingency operations, the VA, Homeland Security, the State Department, and many others that involve national security. By contrast in 2003, the military budget was less than half that - $437.4 billion. The US spends more on its military than the next 10 countries combined. If the Soviet Union collapsed because of overspending on the Cold War, the US is in danger of collapse from overspending on its military when it is not even engaged in a major war. Overspending on the military is just a jobs program that Congress will not curtail. Trump for all his bluster about wanting our NATO allies to spend more on defense, nevertheless, authorized a $34 billion increase in military spending for 2020. Meanwhile, China, the world's second largest spender on its military is spending $178.2 billion in 2020 while Russia spends a mere $70 billion.

The U.S. spends some $100 billion annually on policing — most of it coming from local budgets — and an additional $80 billion on incarceration, according to a detailed 2017 report by the Center for Popular Democracy. In cities across the country, policing alone can take up anything between a third and 60 percent of the entire annual budget. Many major cities spend as much as 40 percent of their municipal budgets on policing, leaving a dwindling pool of resources for poverty prevention, infrastructure and everything else. The coronavirus pandemic exacerbated this dynamic: Cities facing steep revenue declines are trying to decide which services to cut to remain solvent, and mayors are often hesitant to cut law and order spending. Welfare spending has been on a long, uneven decline, while law and order spending ballooned almost unabated until about 2010, when it amounted to nearly 2.5 percent of national income. Since then, law and order spending has fallen to a hair under 2 percent, while welfare spending stands at about 0.8 percent of national income less than half what we spend on police.

The US domestic Peace Corps called AmeriCorps has a budget of $560 million. So the US spends a paltry $1 billion on its foreign and domestic Peace Corps while spending $180 billion on police and almost a trillion on its military. Without this spending the economy would surely collapse. Military and police jobs are jobs of last resort for non college educated youth. However, this could be turned around. This money could be spent on other pursuits like housing the homeless (Habitat for Humanity), social workers, teachers, sanitation systems in foreign countries lacking them, building green infrastructure (Green New Deal), eradicating poverty, education (giving "The Talk" as part of public school curriculum), sustainable agriculture, clean water, cleaning the oceans, cleaning the rivers and more.

While the US spends a huge amount of its budgets on police and military work, China is spending its budget building infrastructure all over the world with its Belt and Road initiative (BRI). Whatever you want to say about it, it represents peaceful development of countries outside of China while the US does nothing of the sort, preferring instead to police the world with its 800 military bases in more than 70 countries. So while the US presence outside the US is mainly military in nature, China's presence outside China is basically peaceful development. This development will also lead to economic advantages for China through increased trade.

China’s overall ambition for the BRI is staggering. To date, more than sixty countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so. Analysts estimate the largest so far to be the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a collection of projects connecting China to Pakistan’s Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. In total, China has already spent an estimated $200 billion on such efforts. Morgan Stanley has predicted China’s overall expenses over the life of the BRI could reach $1.2–1.3 trillion by 2027, though estimates on total investments vary.

The US has sought to demonize China's BRI and to create a second Cold War to justify its military expenditures. Throw Russia into the mix as well. The US wants to line up its group of allies in a potential contest versus China and its allies. However, many US purported allies are jumping ship as they read the tea leaves and realize that the US sees its role in the world and at home as mainly police work. Poverty alleviation is something the US doesn't do. This needs to change if we are ever to combat our common enemy, the coronavirus and climate change, and forget about creating a Second Cold War which will only drain US resources while China goes ahead building infrastructure and increasing trade.

 

Off the Top of My Head

President Trump: "We're All in This Together"

by John Lawrence, March 17, 2020

Does that include the homeless, Mr. Trump? Are the homeless over 65 being asked to shelter in place? Does that mean that they keep their same place on the sidewalk? Does it mean that they social distance 6 feet from the next homeless person? Or does it mean that gatherings of 10 or more in homeless shelters need to disperse? Does it mean we should close down the homeless shelters? Does it mean that NIMBYS who don't want parking lots open to homeless people living in their vehicles need to shut their mouths? We want to know, Mr. President. Youth wants to know.

There are 500,000 homeless Americans living on the streets. Are they being asked to shelter in place? It's ridiculous. Rather than have a crash program to put them into single room occupancy units (SROs), they are not even mentioned, not even considered in the President's speech, nor of those of his "team." The coronavirus should sound a clarion call to do something about the homneless situation. Where do you think a pandemic would spread? Probably among the dense crowding of homeless people in San Diego, Los Angeles and Seattle. Especially places where it has been raining a lot. I saw a policeman stop his squad car in the middle of traffic the other day, turn on his patrol lights and deliver a sandwich to a woman who was sitting alone on the sidewalk in the pouring rain. God bless him! My rider told me that his family were all police and they did that a lot. If so, good on them. I know the police are dealing with the homeless a large part of their time which costs money. Also the emergency rooms. Probably bbetween the police and the emergency rooms more money is spent on the homeless than it would cost to put them in SROs.

A few short years ago there was an outbreak  of hepatitus A among the homeless in San Diego and elsewhere. The Washington Post reported:

The hepatitis A outbreak in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz and San Diego, long considered a model of savvy urban redevelopment, is the extreme result of a booming state economy, now driving up home prices after years of government decisions that made low-cost housing more difficult to build.

Unlike in some other large U.S. cities, the homeless population in San Diego has been rising sharply, outstripping the local government's ability to manage its scope. State lawmakers passed more than a dozen measures in the recent legislative session to address the state's lack of affordable housing, none of which will help resolve the crisis in the short term.

Nowhere is the need more urgent than in this prospering city, where the number of people living on the streets rose 14 percent in the past year, tracing a hepatitis A outbreak that thrives in unsanitary conditions. Health officials believe an epidemic that has infected more than 500 people statewide since March began in San Diego County, where 19 people have died as a result of the disease, nearly all of them homeless.

So the hepatitis A outbreak was an epidemic, a few short steps from a pandemic. Washing stations were provided then, and washing stations are being provided now, but so far nothing much has been done about the homeless situation in San Diego and elsewhere. Measure C on the ballot recently, which would have provided $25 million a year to address various issues dealing with the homeless population, failed because it didn't quite achieve a two thirds majority. It garnered about 64% of the vote while it needed 67% to become law. So close but no cigar. So now what? More hand washing stations evidently.

Governor Newsom has moved hundreds of homeless people into hotel rooms “to get people out of these encampments.”. This was after a homeless person died from the coronavirus. The Mercury News reported:

Officials have also said they plan to distribute trailers around the state where homeless people can shelter or be quarantined. And on Monday Newsom said shelters were working to create distance between beds to help stop the spread of the virus.

California has more than 100,000 residents who sleep on the streets on any given night, including thousands of people in the Bay Area.

“We will overwhelm ourselves if we don’t move with real urgency in this space,” he said.

Newsom said his team had identified more than 900 hotels that could be suitable for housing the homeless. His team, he said, was in the process of negotiating to convert some of them into temporary living quarters for the homeless.

Now that there is some urgency in dealing with the homeless situation, you'd think that the state would move to a more permanent solution or are they waiting for the coronavirus to subside so they can just let the homeless go back to living on the street. By the way, "Officials also said that homeless people would be exempt from a Bay Area-wide order to shelter in place. But they urged homeless people to seek shelter and said local governments should work to make shelter available as soon as possible." Really??

UPDATE:

From Voice of San Diego:

Supervisor Nathan Fletcher also noted the county is working to secure at least 2,000 motel rooms for vulnerable San Diegans – whether they are homeless, nursing home residents or simply don’t have a safe place to stay – who may be awaiting a test result or showing symptoms of coronavirus but not require hospitalization.

As of Monday, Fletcher said, the county had secured 227 rooms and the Regional Task Force on the Homeless is working to obtain more motel rooms for homeless San Diegans who are at risk of coronavirus who have not been referred by a healthcare provider.

Russia, Turkey agree to jointly remove Kurdish fighters along Turkey’s border in northern Syria

 

Erdogan vows to 'crush the heads' of Kurdish fighters if cease-fire fails

 

 

 

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Oct. 19 he would continue an offensive if a deal on the withdrawal of Kurdish forces was not fully implemented. (Reuters)

By 

Kareem Fahim and 

Sarah Dadouch 

Oct. 22, 2019 at 11:14 a.m. PDT

ISTANBUL — Russia agreed on Tuesday to help remove Syrian Kurdish fighters from a large swath of Turkey’s southern border, giving its blessing to a Turkish military operation against a Kurdish-led force that had allied with the United States.

The agreement, reached after an hours-long meeting between Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Black Sea resort town of Sochi, addressed several of Turkey’s core security demands, including the establishment of a “safe zone” that would push the Kurdish-led force back from its frontier.

And it cemented Russia’s role as Syria’s central power broker, at a moment when the influence of the United States in the region is dissipating.

The agreement said Russia and the Syrian government, its ally, would start removing Kurdish militias from the border region beginning at noon Wednesday. That expanded on a previous agreement between the United States and Turkey, which had established a Turkish military zone along a narrower strip of the border.

After the Kurdish militias had withdrawn, Turkey and Russia would begin joint patrols in the border region.

The Erdogan government had earlier threatened to restart its military offensive if the Kurdish fighters did not fully withdraw from a predetermined area along Syria’s northern border with Turkey by Tuesday evening. If the withdrawal is completed, Ankara has agreed to permanently halt its offensive, which is aimed at creating a vast buffer zone for Turkey along much of its border with Syria. 

Erdogan’s meeting with Putin, the Syrian government’s most powerful supporter, had been widely expected to center on the thorny aftermath of Turkey’s military operation and the rapidly shifting Syrian map of control, as U.S. troops withdraw and competing factions rush to fill the void. 

 

Mapping out Turkey's invasion of northern Syria

 

 

Here's where chaos unfolded in northern Syria as Turkey launched an invasion following President Trump's Oct. 6 decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the area. (Joyce Lee, William Neff/The Washington Post)

Trump says a limited number of troops will remain in Syria after ordering a complete withdrawal

“These are very critical days in the region,” Erdogan said after being greeted by Putin in Sochi. “The Peace Spring operation and this meeting will create very important opportunities,” he added referring to the title Turkey has given its military operation. 

There were signs of trouble with the cease-fire even as the meeting in Russia got underway. The Kurdish-led militias, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces, said they had only partially completed their withdrawal from an area that stretches roughly 70 miles along Turkey’s border, and 20 miles deep into Syrian territory. 

A photo from the Syrian Arab News Agency shows Syrian army units deploying in Hasakah province, Syria, Oct. 22. (SANA shows Syrian army units deploying in Hasakah province, Syria, Oct. 22.)

Mervan Qamishlo, an SDF spokesman, blamed what he said were ongoing attacks by Turkey and allied forces for the delay and said Kurdish-led forces had withdrawn only from the Syrian town of Ras al-Ayn. 

Read More ...

World's largest Emitters Stop Short of Sweeping Climate Commitments at U.N.

BY DINO GRANDONI, Washington Post

with Paulina Firozi

THE LIGHTBULB

Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses the Climate Summit in the United Nations General Assembly. (AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

All eyes were on activist Greta Thunberg when she bluntly told world leaders: “You are failing us.” 

But what mattered most at Monday's U.N. climate summit was what China, India and the U.S. actually said — and what the three biggest emitters of greenhouse gases did not say. 

Countries "once again stopped short of committing to the sort of far-reaching new goals scientists say are needed to rein in emissions," as The Post's Brady Dennis and Juliet Eilperin report from the summit. 

“Greta Thunberg laid down a clear line in the sand, separating those countries and leaders who are united behind the science from those who continue to place the profits of fossil fuel polluters above the safety of their citizens,” Alden Meyer, director of strategy and policy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement. “Sadly, most leaders from the world’s largest emitting countries failed this litmus test, dodging their responsibility to step up action as is essential to address the climate emergency we now face.” 

Altogether, the top three emitters account for nearly half of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the World Resources Institute. Their national policies are what will have the biggest impact on whether the world can hold global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), which is the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement. 

The aim of the Paris accord was for nations to ratchet up their emissions cuts over time. But it relied on voluntary pledges. The Obama administration, which brokered the agreement in 2015, hoped that over time the United States could wield its soft power to press other nations to cut emissions.

President Trump's election upended that plan. And this week's climate summit brought into stark relief how countries are still grappling with the fallout of Trump's promise to withdraw from the climate accord: 

China: China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi took a veiled swing at Trump. He sought to reassure other countries that the promised U.S. withdrawal won't affect China's goals under the international accord.

• What he said: “China will faithfully fulfill its obligations … The withdrawal of certain parties will not shake the international community,” per the New York Times.
• What it means: The rub here is China, the world's top emitter, made no new promises to further cut emissions as worries there grow about its slowing economy. And China's original commitment for its emissions to peak no later than 2030 is not enough to begin with. Climate Action Tracker, a consortium of scientists that compares global climate pledges, has rated China's goal as “highly insufficient” for keeping warming below 2 degrees.

India: Prime Minister Narendra Modi committed to more than doubling India's renewable energy capacity by 2030.

• What he said: “India today has come not just to talk about the seriousness of this issue, but to present a practical approach and a road map. We believe an ounce of practice is worth more than a tonne of preaching,” per the Indian newspaper the Hindu.
• What it means: India's original Paris goals are compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees, according to Climate Action Tracker. Still, Modi made no promise to cut its use of coal-fired power generation as some hoped. India is looking to build out all the electricity generation it can as it tries to lift millions out of poverty. 

United States: After initially deciding to forgo the climate summit, Trump made a surprise, 14-minute appearance, listening to Modi's and German Chancellor Angela Merkel's remarks, according to The Post’s Seung Min Kim and Anne Gearan.

• What he said:  “I believe in clean air and clean water, very simple,” Trump said when asked why he decided to participate. “We have the cleanest air; we have the cleanest water.”
• What it means: The Trump administration's efforts to walk back regulations on coal plants and automobiles means the United States is set to fall far short of what it needs to do to meet the Paris temperature goal. Other than those off-the-cuff remarks, the United States was virtually invisible during the day.

Jane Fonda: Here’s what happened when I went door-knocking in Pennsylvania

Jane Fonda (Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images For Siriusxm)

 

By Jane Fonda

August 30, the Washington Post

Jane Fonda is an actress and activist.

I’m scared. I’m scared for our democracy, for our ability to live together in community across lines of race, class and religion. I’m scared for my grandchildren and for the planet. The country is contorted and polarized, with the flames of hate fanned by leaders at the highest level. But I saw a path forward recently in Scranton, Pa., where I spent a hot, humid evening knocking on doors with Working America. (By the way, when I do this, I only give my first name and am rarely recognized.)

Steve, in his 40s, had a bad day at work but was willing to speak with me. He said there’s no politician who will fight for him. He doesn’t trust any of them. That’s why he doesn’t pay attention to any news. He voted for the Green Party last time as a protest, but he also doesn’t like immigrants getting public benefits. We learned all of this because, like with every Working America conversation, we started the conversation by asking Steve what mattered to him, what was on his mind. At the end of our questions, Steve said, “Can I ask you something?  Why do you do this?” He wanted to keep talking.

Edith is in her 50s. She likes what President Trump has done but doesn’t like the way he talks sometimes. She thinks cutting government red tape is important, and she’s concerned about outside interference in our elections. As we were leaving, she told us, and maybe herself, “I don’t talk to anyone. Why did I just talk to you?”

Last year in San Diego, Sharon said she was 100 percent for Trump, but when I told her Trump’s health-care bill would allow her son’s insurance company to stop covering him because he has a serious preexisting condition, she seemed to stop breathing for a moment. “I had no idea,” she gasped. “I can’t let that happen.”

It’s voters like these we need to talk with — those who are dispirited and confused like Steve; ambivalent like Edith; and uninformed like Sharon. A respectful conversation that started with their concerns and opinions hooked each of them, so when Working America goes back, the door is open to information from a new trusted messenger, which can encourage them to take action on issues they care about and vote with that new information in mind.

 Authentic engagement works — it’s a no-brainer. For years now, the researchers measuring the most effective way to win votes have told us that face-to-face contact has the biggest impact. The results in 2018 show us there’s an important swingable segment of the electorate that will pull the lever for Democrats if we can reach them. And the science says voters are even more attentive to a canvasser conversation if they’re a member of the organization that’s delivering the message.

I’ve seen the power of face-to-face contact since I became an activist five decades ago. In Modesto, Calif., I met some of the 800 volunteers who knocked on doors for more than a year before the 2018 election, and in Scranton I met the professional organizers, many of whom are working-class people of color. They talk with people year-round, reaching out to those hungry for information and a connection.

As tangled as things seem right now, the way we get out of this mess is straightforward. We outsmart the Facebook algorithms and digital foreign meddling by holding face-to-face conversations. I've seen it. The process builds trust, and it sends a message: You matter enough that I'm here on your doorstep.

Fear can be so powerful, but what overcomes fear is connection. We don’t need to choose between Democratic base voters and swing voters. All working people, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, faith, or sexual orientation or gender identity, need a stake and a say in our society — and they all need to hear that they’re part of “We the People.” Talking with them, not at them, is the best way to do it.  Working America and other organizations are helping volunteers spend time in working-class communities around the country to have those conversations.

I’ve learned over my long life as an activist that people can change. That process starts with trust, best done through person-to-person organizing. People such as Steve are looking for someone to help them sort things out and to dare to care again. We can start the process of healing and winning back our country one conversation at a time.

2020 Democrats release climate plans that could be seen as less ambitious than Green New Deal

The Energy 202     BY DINO GRANDONI with Paulina Firozi THE LIGHTBULB,  Washington Post

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.). (AP Photo/John Locher)

A half dozen Democrats running for president in 2020 released sweeping climate change proposals in recent days that seek ways to totally eliminate carbon emissions from the economy in the next two to three decades.

But these Democrats' goals are not as ambitious as the 2030 deadline for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions that many people see as part of the Green New Deal proposal, which four of those candidates sponsored in the Senate. The GOP-led Senate rejected that proposal, but the nonbinding climate plan is still seen as a benchmark for climate activism by the party's progressive wing.

The 2020 proposals come ahead of a seven-hour CNN climate forum on Wednesday. Climate activists have urged an official Democratic debate be centered solely on climate change, but that has not been sanctioned by the Democratic National Committee. The plans by the White House aspirants — and their scope — signal the rising importance of climate change as a campaign issue in the 2020 race.

On Wednesday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) released a climate change plan calling for creating a “clean, carbon-neutral” economy by 2045. As The Post's Chelsea Janes reports, to get there Harris is calling for $10 trillion of public and private spending over the next 10 years in the energy, transportation and other sectors, 

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), similarly, wants the country to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2045 with $3 trillion in investments over the next 10 years. Klobuchar set a goal of net-zero emissions by the mid-century mark, 2050, with $1 trillion in investments.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), meanwhile, embraced Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s climate plan, calling for a series of intermediate goals, such as zero emissions for all new light-duty passenger vehicles and buses by 2030 and zero emission for electricity generation by 2035. Inslee, who cast himself as the climate change candidate, last month dropped out of the 2020 race.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the plans of the four senators seeking the White House and the Green New Deal, which had previously set the benchmark for Democratic climate proposals is the seemingly different dates they propose for decarbonizing the U.S. economy. The contrast shows how the 2020 climate debate has evolved from one setting high and perhaps unrealsic ambitions to one of articulating actual policy. 

According to some people's reading of the document, the nonbinding Green New Deal resolution calls for achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. 

But others read the document differently, saying the Green New Deal instead just calls for a surge of clean energy investment between now and 2030, as the four senators are proposing. The date for getting to net-zero emissions could be sometime later.

Here's what the Green New Deal text, released in February, actually says: It is the “duty” of the federal government “to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition.” That goal, it continues, “should be accomplished through a 10-year national mobilization.”

If interpreted as setting a 2030 goal for decarbonization, the Green New Deal “put out a very ambitious target. It’s laudable,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who specializes in climate issues. 

“But when it comes to meeting it,” she added, “it’s very hard.”

Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president for government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, which praised the four senators’ plans, said she does not see a “discrepancy” between the Green New Deal and the new plans.

“Everyone agrees, we need to get here as fast as we can,” she added. “It's clear that all these candidates agree that we need to transform the economy.”

Yet even hitting some of the candidates’ intermediate goals — such as Harris’s call for 100 percent carbon-neutral electricity by 2030 — would be monumentally difficult, given that nearly two-thirds of electricity generation currently comes from burning natural gas and coal. 

Whatever the deadline, the rush to cut the nation's climate-warming emissions has been driven by the conclusions of climate scientists — specifically, the release in October of a U.N. report that says the world needs to take “unprecedented” action over the next decade to cut emissions and forestall warming 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels.

Citing that report, some U.S. climate activists — including those with the group Sunrise Movement, which brought the idea of the Green New Deal to the fore with its protests — argue that since the United States had been a top carbon dioxide emitter for decades, the nation has an obligation to now lead in cutting emissions.

“The truth is, we don't know exactly what is possible, but it is by putting out an ambitious goal and doing everything in our power to achieve it that we will push what’s possible,” said Stephen O'Hanlon, the Sunrise Movement's communications director. “When JFK said we would be on the moon by the end of the decade, many smart people said that was unimaginable, but we came together and accomplished it.”

You are reading The Energy 202, our must-read tipsheet on energy and the environment.

EPA to loosen federal rules on methane, a powerful greenhouse gas linked to climate change, officials say

from the Washington Post, August 29, 2019

The proposed rule would reverse standards enacted under President Barack Obama that require oil and gas operations to install controls on their operations to curb the release of methane at the well head and in their transmission equipment, including pipelines and storage facilities.
Several of the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, including Exxon, Shell and BP, have opposed the rollback and urged the Trump administration to keep the current standards in place.

Read more »

Is there a middle road on Medicare-for-all? Kamala Harris thinks so

.     BY PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM with Paulina Firozi from the Washington Post THE PROGNOSIS Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) speaks at the 25th Essence Festival in New Orleans. (Gerald Herbert/AP) Is there a way to do Medicare-for-all without wiping out the country's private insurance system? Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) says there is. Here's her solution: Let people keep private plans, but have the government help pay for it. Harris aims to reach universal health coverage by expanding Medicare to everyone, but through private plans that are paid by the government to administer medical benefits. Harris released her proposal yesterday, adding to the proliferating pile of health policy proposals from the Democratic candidates, who are preparing for their second debate tonight and Wednesday. The 2020 presidential candidate has finally clarified where she stands on the perplexing issue, after months of confusing statements about whether or not she'd eliminate commercial health insurance. In the past, Harris signed onto the sweeping Medicare-for-all bill envisioned by her rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who wants the federal government to directly cover the health expenses of all Americans. Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris speak during the Democratic primary debate in June. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images) But what Harris is proposing now isn’t quite Medicare-for-all. It’s more like Medicare Advantage-for-all, a popular alternative version of Medicare that currently covers about 1 in 3 seniors. In Medicare Advantage, private plans bid for the rights to sponsor Medicare plans, in contrast to traditional Medicare, in which doctors and hospitals directly bill the federal government. The program is basically Republicans’ favorite flavor of Medicare, because it so heavily involves the private sector. So using Medicare Advantage as a starting point for health reform could be smart politics for Harris, especially if she eventually finds herself in the general election. Expanding coverage via private means is a more comfortable idea for many Americans. It certainly is for Tom Scully, former administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under GOP President George W. Bush, who called the idea a “brilliant masterstroke.” “There’s a hell of a big difference between Medicare-for-all and Medicare Advantage-for-all,” Scully told me. “I think [Harris] was brilliant to figure that out.” In her plan, laid out via a Medium post, Harris wants to give people the option of either enrolling in traditional Medicare or buying a Medicare Advantage-type plan while tacking on more benefits, such as mental health care. She’d let people immediately start buying into traditional Medicare and over a 10-year period would phase in privately run Medicare plans to cover newborns, the uninsured and, eventually, everyone who currently has workplace or Obamacare coverage. The approach allows Harris to embrace the most popular parts of Medicare-for-all — its generous set of medical benefits — while dodging its most controversial aspect of eliminating private health coverage. Harris had wavered on that question for months, on two separate occasions appearing to advocate banning private plans and each time walking back those remarks. “Essentially, we would allow private insurance to offer a plan in the Medicare system, but they will be subject to strict requirements to ensure it lowers costs and expands services,” Harris wrote. “If they want to play by our rules, they can be in the system. If not, they have to get out.” Andy Slavitt, who headed CMS under President Barack Obama, called her plan “an effort to balance idealism and pragmatism.” “The use of Medicare Advantage is a clever approach to getting there,” he told me. Indeed, Harris’s plan could be viewed as a middle ground between the dramatic health insurance overhaul suggested by Sanders and the incremental approach of a government-financed “public option” backed by former vice president Joe Biden. If you’re watching the debate, stay tuned for potential clashes between Biden and Harris on the subject when they share the stage Wednesday night. Harris’s rivals were already jumping all over her yesterday, slamming her for trying to have the best of both worlds and charging that it would instead lead to the worst of both worlds. “This new, have-it-every-which-way approach pushes the extremely challenging implementation of the Medicare for All part of this plan ten years into the future, meaning it would not occur on the watch of even a two-term administration,” said Biden spokeswoman Kate Bedingfield. “The result? A Bernie Sanders-lite Medicare for All and a refusal to be straight with the American middle class, who would have a large tax increase forced on them with this plan,” she added. Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir told Politico that Harris's plan “introduces more corporate greed and more profiteering within Medicare.” And the health-care industry, which has formally banded together to fight Medicare-for-all-like proposals, appears no more open to Harris’s proposal than to what Sanders or Biden have suggested. The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, a coalition that includes the major trade groups for health insurers, hospitals and other players, released a statement calling it a “one-size-fits-all government-run system.” “No matter how candidates try to thread the needle, Medicare for all, Medicare ‘buy-in’ and the ‘public option’ would all lead to the same harmful consequences — including unaffordable tax increases, the elimination of consumer choice, threats to patients’ access to their doctors and treatments and a diminished quality of care,” Lauren Crawford Shaver, the group’s executive director, said in a statement. Today the coalition is launching a six-figure ad campaign that includes digital ads in Detroit and Washington, and this national television ad: Harris’s proposal is too new for there to be polling data on it. But a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation underscores how Americans seem to prefer step-by-step approaches to getting everyone covered versus a system-wide transformation that might cost them their own coverage. Nearly two-third of respondents said they favor a public option that would compete with private plans and be available to all Americans. Just over half of respondents said they favor a national Medicare-for-all plan, slightly down from 56 percent who expressed support in April.

We asked every 2020 Democrat about climate change. Here are the most interesting answers.

BY DINO GRANDONI

with Paulina Firozi

THE LIGHTBULB

Here’s a change: Climate change is finally a major issue in the race for the White House.

With eight months still to go until Democrats begin picking their next presidential nominee, 96 percent of the party’s voters say it is very important the next president takes aggressive action to slow the effects of climate change, according to in a CNN poll from April.

And that means that Democratic candidates are talking a lot more about what they will do to curb global warming. To find out exactly where the candidates stand on climate-related issues, The Post’s John Muyskens and Kevin Uhrmacher waded through 23 candidates’ public statements and voting records, as well as sending climate-change questionnaires to every campaign.

The result is this comprehensive overview. They found each candidate agrees the issue of rising temperatures is something the next president needs to address. But differences abound between the candidates on how to rein in heat-trapping pollution being released by humans.

Here are the five most interesting answer from our survey:

Jay Inslee on nuclear energy: The Democratic field is split on whether nuclear power should be part of any solution to climate change. It's the largest source of low-carbon electricity in the country. But building more reactors has proven in most cases to be cost-prohibitive. And accidents like Three Mile Island still weigh heavily on the minds of many left-leaning Americans.

At one end of the debate are Sens. Michael Bennet (Colo.) and Cory Booker (N.J.), who led Congress in passing legislation easing the way for the construction of more reactors. At the other end is Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), whose campaign told The Post he would stop issuing nuclear power plant license renewals in an effort to phase out the energy source entirely.

Then there is Jay Inslee, who has launched a campaign devoted to the issue of climate change and is trying to find a middle ground on nuclear power.

“We must move to a carbon-free power sector, so I would not take any zero-emission sources of power generation off the table,” the Washington governor told The Post. “However, in order to support new development of nuclear energy, we would first have to solve critical challenges that do not yet have solutions.”

These issues include improving the safety and lowering the cost of construction of reactors. He also “most critically” wants to find “a stable long-term plan” for storing the thousands of tons of nuclear waste produced every year.

Bernie Sanders on a carbon tax: For years, the Vermont senator was one of the biggest proponents in Congress of a carbon tax — forcing polluters to pay for climate-warming emissions in a way many economists have praised as cost-effective.

He introduced legislation to place a fee on the emissions of carbon dioxide and methane, going so far as to write in the Huffington Post that a carbon tax “must be a central part” of any plan to address carbon pollution. The 2014 blog post was titled “Why We Need a Carbon Tax.”

Now as scientists for the United Nations warn the window for stopping the world from warming over 2 degree Celsius is closing, some left-wing activists have grown more skeptical of a carbon tax, arguing it is too little, too late.

Sanders, too, has changed his tune a bit, no longer casting a carbon tax as a linchpin to his climate plan. But he still isn’t entirely ruling it out either.

“[I]f we are to solve the issue of climate change, a price on carbon must be part of a larger strategy and it must be formulated in a way that actually transitions our economy away from fossil fuels and protects low-income families and communities of color,” a campaign spokesman told The Post.

Beto O’Rourke on banning fossil fuel exports: In 2015, congressional Republicans and President Obama made a deal to lift a 40-year-old ban on exporting oil in exchange for extending tax breaks for wind and solar energy.

A number of current candidates, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), voted in favor of the compromise. So too did Cory Booker, even as the New Jersey senator said at the time it was “disappointing and frustrating” to see the repeal of the oil export ban included in a broader $1.1 trillion spending package.

But it is Beto O’Rourke who is in the toughest position of all on this issue.

The former congressman from oil-rich Texas voted in favor of a standalone bill lifting that oil-export ban, at the time calling it an “outdated policy” that prevented U.S. allies from becoming "less dependent on energy from other volatile areas in the world.”

Now O’Rourke finds himself in the tricky position of defending that record. A campaign spokesman told The Post that O'Rourke “would take executive action on day one to require any federal permitting decision to fully account for climate costs and community impacts.”

But his campaign did not indicate where he currently stands on the export question.

Steve Bullock on banning fossil-fuel leasing: Between 2005 and 2014, nearly a quarter of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions came from the burning of oil, natural gas and coal harvested from federally controlled lands. With the stroke of a pen, the next president could stop issuing any new leases for the further extraction of fossil fuels.

With that realization, more than a dozen Democratic candidates have committed to putting in place such a moratorium should they become president. But Steve Bullock has distinguished himself as the only contender so far to publicly oppose such a ban.

“I believe other policy measures can be used to appropriately transition our current framework of federal leasing and to better reflect the social cost of greenhouse gases from extraction,” Bullock told The Post.

It’s a consistent position for the Democratic governor of the coal-producing state of Montana. In 2016, he opposed Barack Obama's half-step toward a fossil-fuel moratorium when the president stopped new coal leasing on federal lands.

Joe Biden on the Green New Deal: The single climate-related proposal that has animated — and divided — the 2020 field the most so far is the Green New Deal.

All but one of the seven U.S. senators running for president co-sponsored the non-binding resolution, which calls for a program to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions all while increasing access to healthcare and high-quality jobs. Other candidates, such O’Rourke and Wayne Messam, mayor of Miramar, Fla., have praised the ambitions of the Green New Deal while stopping short of formally endorsing the idea.

But Joe Biden remains the biggest enigma of them all. The former vice president has cast himself as an ardent environmentalist (“There’s been nothing middle of the road about my record dealing with the environment,” Biden told reporters in New Hampshire after Reuters reported he was seeking a "middle road" approach on climate.) But his campaign has not yet announced any concrete energy proposals.

The former vice president, who did not respond to our survey but is expected to announce his climate plan in the coming weeks, was the only 2020 Democratic candidate we put in the "unclear/no response" category on the question of the Green New Deal.

So far, the calculated silence appears to be paying off. At the moment, Biden sits atop most polls for the Democratic nomination.

Read the rest of the Post's report on where 2020 Democrats stand on climate change here.

Off the Top of My Head

Killing of Innocents Reprehensible Whether by Random Individuals or US Military

by John Lawrence, March 19, 2019

Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 50 innocent civilians in New Zealand, was fighting a war just as much as any nation that has murdered innocents anywhere. There is always an outpouring of emotion - candles, flowers and notes - and media coverage. When innocent civilians are killed by US bombs, however, there is no similar outpouring or media coverage. Such was the case for the wedding party on July 6, 2008 in Haska Meyna, Afghanistan when 47 innocents were killed. This was a similar tragic event but was just considered collateral damage by the US military. There is no similar outpouring as thousands of innocent children are killed and starved to death in Yemen either. Thank God, the US Democrat controlled House of Representatives has voted to end US involvement in that travesty. But it won't stop until the Democrats control the Senate as well.

White nationalist attacks like the one in New Zealand are terrorism pure and simple. However, they are not talked about in the same way as attacks by Muslims. President Trump is all too eager to talk about Muslim terrorists, but not so eager to talk about white supremacist terrorists like the one who carried out the attack in New Zealand even referring to Trump by name in his manifesto. The Washington Post reported:

The White House’s response to the New Zealand attack more broadly fits into a by-now expected pattern. When an apparent terrorist or hate attack has been committed by a Muslim, Trump is quick to draw attention to it. When it targets Muslims, however, Trump’s responses are slower and tonally different. That pattern itself helps bolster questions about Trump’s willingness to condemn violence against Muslims.

The murder of innocent civilians should be condemned wherever it happens and whoever is the perpetrator including the US military. It just can't be written off as collateral damage as Timothy McVeigh did after killing innocent children in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. That blast killed at least 168 people, injured more than 680 others, and destroyed one-third of the building. The blast destroyed or damaged 324 other buildings within a 16-block radius, shattered glass in 258 nearby buildings, and destroyed or burned 86 cars, causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.

It's obvious that terrorist attacks can occur anywhere and can be perpetrated by people with widely varying motives. However, since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners. The International Criminal Court also wants to look into US war crimes in Afghanistan, but the US is doing whatever it can to impede them. The Wall Street Journal reported that "Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. is imposing visa restrictions against International Criminal Court officials, citing investigations by the ICC into the activities of Americans and their allies in Afghanistan." The slaughtering of innocents by the US military is just as much a threat to peace and civility in the world as the random acts of terrorists like religious or ethnic bigots. Therefore, an investigation into US war crimes is completely warranted. Pompeo is not only threatening visa restrictions. He's threatening sanctions as well as the US ramps up the sanctions war against anyone and everyone who disagrees with it.

The Guardian reported:

“I’m announcing a policy of US visa restrictions on those individuals directly responsible for any ICC investigation of US personnel,” [Pompeo] said.

This would include anyone who takes, or has taken, action to request or further an investigation, he told reporters.

“If you’re responsible for the proposed ICC investigation of US personnel in connection with the situation in Afghanistan you should not assume that you still have, or will get, a visa or that you will permitted to enter the United States,” Pompeo added.

The secretary of state said visas could also be withheld from ICC personnel involved in conducting probes of US allies, specifically Israel.

Pompeo said “implementation” of the policy has already begun but he did not provide any details, citing confidentiality surrounding visa applications.

“These visa restrictions will not be the end of our efforts,” Pompeo said. “We’re prepared to take additional steps, including economic sanctions, if the ICC does not change its course.”

So the US isn't to be held accountable for its crimes including supporting the Saudi war effort that has killed and starved thousands of children in Yemen which is going on today. And the US needs to broaden its outlook on terrorism within the US to include white nationalist and white supremicist murderers. When innocents are murdered either by random individuals or by the US military, the perpetrators need to be held accountable. As for Brenton Tarrant, the New Zealand murderer, since New Zealand doesn't have the death penalty, perhaps he should be extradited to Saudi Arabia where he will rue the day he ever became a white supremicist.

New Zealand's prime minister has promised to change the gun laws. Let's hope she sets an example by outlawing military style weapons and instituting a strict licensing procedure that would make it 100 times more difficult to own a gun than to drive a car. In my opinion that would still be within Second Amendment rights in the US.

Ethiopia, China, Other Countries Ground Boeing Aircraft After Devastating Crash

From the Washington Post

Ethiopian Airlines flight crashes, all 157 on board killed

 

 

A new Ethio­pian airlines plane bound for Nairobi crashed March 10, killing all 157 people on board. (Reuters)

 

 

By Paul Schemm

March 11 at 11:31 AM

ADDIS ABABA, Ethi­o­pia — Ethi­o­pia, China and other countries announced Monday that they would ground the type of U.S. aircraft that was involved in a devastating Ethio­pian Airlines crash that killed everyone on board Sunday just minutes after takeoff.

But Boeing, the manufacturer of the 737 Max 8 airliner that crashed on a flight from Addis Ababa to the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, said Monday that it has no reason to recommend that airlines ground the plane.

“The investigation is in its early stages, but at this point, based on the information available, we do not have any basis to issue new guidance to operators,” Boeing said in a statement reported by CNN.

A national day of mourning has been declared in Ethio­pia, and investigators are sifting through the crash site to identify remains so they can be turned over to families. Ethi­o­pian Airlines reported that the “black box” voice and data recorders have been recovered from the plane.

Ethi­o­pian Airlines said its fleet of the planes would be grounded as an “extra safety precaution.”

China’s Civil Aviation Administration said in a statement early Monday that it has asked domestic airlines to temporarily ground all Boeing 737 Max 8 jets before 6 p.m. It was the first time China has taken the lead in ordering a model grounded before other national aviation agencies.

Cayman Airways and Indonesia’s airlines also suspended the use of the Boeing 737 Max 8 plane, the latest version of the industry’s most popular passenger airline. Indonesia’s director general of civil aviation, Polana B. Pramesti, said the move was to ensure flight safety and that the planes would be inspected. Indonesia has 11 Max 8 aircraft in service.

Officials are “conducting an inspection by temporarily grounding the planes to make sure that they’re airworthy,” Pramesti said in a statement.

Following a review, India’s aviation authority said crew members operating the 737 Max 8 must undergo specific training and that only pilots with 1,000 hours of flying experience would be allowed to fly the plane. There are 17 Max 8 aircraft operating in the country.

In Vietnam, meanwhile, the Civil Aviation Authority said it would not license the use of the Max plane in the country pending the results of investigations and remedial measures. While there are currently no Max 8 aircraft in use in Vietnam, budget airline VietJet Air ordered 100 Boeing 737 Max aircraft in February, including 20 of the Max 8 version, at the same time that President Trump was meeting with Vietnamese leaders in Hanoi.

In Morocco and Mongolia, authorities suspended operation of Boeing 737 Max 8 planes flying in each country, news agencies reported. Royal Air Maroc had two of the airlines in service and two others on order. Mongolia reportedly had one of the planes in service.

In the United States, Southwest Airlines and American Airlines expressed confidence in their Boeing planes and crew members. “Our fleet of Boeing 737 MAX 8 aircraft are operating as planned today and we plan to operate those aircraft going forward,” Southwest said in a statement. American said it has “full confidence in the aircraft and our crew members.”

In the aftermath of the Ethio­pian crash, Boeing stock plunged Monday morning, dragging down the Dow Jones industrial average.

Off the Top of My Head

Omar Accused of Being Anti-Semitic for Suggesting that the US Contributes Too Much Money to Israel?

by John Lawrence, March 11, 2019

Yes, Israel has a lobby called AIPAC. It's purpose is to get American lawmakers to contribute more money to Israel, already a very prosperous country. Omar tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins, baby," which some have taken to be anti-semitic. I thought the word "Benjamin" was an anti-semitic slur that I'd never heard of. But it turns out to be a reference to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill. Meanwhile, the US gives nothing to Israel's poor neighbors, the Palestinians having cut the relatively meager $200 million it had been giving out of the budget at the urging of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner. NPR reported: "The Trump administration announced Friday that it has cut nearly all the money the U.S. had planned to spend on aid projects for the Palestinians this year —including money to address a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip."

So why is the American media jumping all over Omar, a Muslim, for supporting her Muslim fellow religionists in Palestine which is suffering a humanitarian crisis? It seems that the slightest criticism of Israel will get the powers-that-be jumping all over you and calling you anti-semitic. Omar has a right to call out the US for giving a huge amount of foreign aid to a country that doesn't need it while totally neglecting its poorer neighbor. Her problem is that she and the other Muslim woman in Congress, Rashida Tlaib, will be attacked any time they take a pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel stand. This cuts off debate; it cuts off discussion about how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem and bring peace to that region. It shuts the mouths of anyone daring to be pro-Palestinian.

However, Rabbi Jill Jacobs writes in the Washington Post:

Despite what some pro-Israel organizations would have us believe, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. Like all countries, Israel has a duty to uphold international human rights laws and to protect the rights of those living under its control. One may protest the use of live fire on unarmed protesters, the closure of the Gaza border and the subsequent humanitarian crisis, the military occupation of the Palestinian territories, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on democracy and incitement against human rights leaders without invoking anti-Semitic tropes. Such policies would be wrong in any country, whether carried out by Jews or other people.

However, there is legitimate criticism of Israel, which the two Muslim Members of Congress should not suppress. The government of Israel has been criticized for issues regarding Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories, its treatment of Palestinian Arabs, the conduct of Israeli Defense Forces during conflicts and the blockade of the Gaza Strip.  Other historic issues with ongoing consequences have also been criticized including: the refusal to allow post-war Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, and the prolonged occupation of territories gained in war and the construction of settlements therein.

Among the most controversial policies enacted as part of its occupation, Israel has established numerous Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. The international community considers these settlements illegal under international law, though Israel disputes this. The United Nations Security Council has consistently reaffirmed that settlements in that territory are void of legality and are a "flagrant violation of international law", most recently with United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334. The creation and ongoing expansion of the settlements have led to Israel's policies being criticized as an example of colonialism.

Perhaps if Israel did something nice for the Palestinians like easing the humanitarian crisis, lifting the plight of those living in absolute poverty or reducing settlements in disputed lands, then the conflict between Palestine and Israel could start to be ameliorated. As long as both sides are intransigent, this area of the world will remain mired in conflict and war. The two Muslim women in Congress should continue to speak out on a more even handed approach to the Palestinian-Israeli situation. They are the only ones representing the Palestinian point of view.

Off the Top of My Head

The Sackler Family and the Koch Brothers: Wealthy Americans You Love to Hate

by John Lawrence, March 2, 2019

The Sackler family fortune comes from the production of OxyContin, the prescription drug that is now killing more than 100 people a day in America and has spawned millions of addicts. These addicts will not go to prison, however, like those found with a few ounces of marijuana in their pockets. They'll just die in increasing numbers. The Sackler family owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of the opioid, OxyContin. The family has given generously to arts institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, an effort Robert Reich maintains amounts to "reputation laundering."

The Guardian reported:

“The Sacklers have not been named as defendants but I know several of the firms working on these cases are doing a really deep dive to make that happen, working very hard to break through the corporate veil so they can name the owners,” Mike Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general told the Guardian. He’s one of the key attorneys in litigation brought by several states against Purdue and other pharmaceutical firms, collectively nicknamed Big Pharma.

“Greed is the main thing. The market for OxyContin should have been much, much smaller, but they wanted to have a $10bn drug and they didn’t tell the truth about their product,” he added.

The Koch brothers fuel another kind of addiction: the American addiction to fossil fuels. While opioid addiction may be killing 100 people a day, the addiction to fossil fuels has the potential to kill everyone on the planet by making it uninhabitable, at least uninhabitable for human beings. The cockroaches may survive. They survive anything.

The Koch brothers have given hundreds of millions of dollars to institutions such as Lincoln Center and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and also used their fortune to sow doubt about climate science and undermine the nation’s faith in basic science. Now arts institutions are wondering if they should pass up Koch brothers donations in the millions of dollars since the Koch brothers are the driving force behind the political movement that has pulled the United States out of the global fight against climate change.

The Washington Post reported:

“Unshackled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other related rulings,” the Times reports, “Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations.” This led directly to the situation we are in today, with the president of the United States repeating the Koch brothers’ talking points, and his supporters denying not just the science of climate change but the moral imperative of thinking globally about the planet’s survival.

It is impolite, in critical circles, to link the politics of major donors to the cultural institutions they support. Many of our cherished arts organizations were created by Gilded Age plutocrats, yet are no longer tethered to the Darwinian social views of their originators. But cultural organizations exist in a complicated moral world, in which every dollar they collect is a dollar that isn’t being used to ameliorate poverty or cure disease. Most of us tend to deal with this dilemma by arguing that the good done by cultural organizations can’t be quantified and thus it is unwise to place it crudely in the balance with other social needs.

So we are supposed to forgive these billionaire ne'er-do-wells because they give generously to arts institutions while contributing mightily to greenhouse gas emissions and opioid addiction? There is a movement afoot to make the Sacklers pay for their "morally abhorrent" promotion and aggressive advertising of OxyContin. But Purdue is sorry:

Purdue Pharma has made statements saying, in part: “We are deeply troubled by the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis” and described altering its marketing and putting resources into easing the crisis. This hasn’t stopped the lawsuits. New York City sued Purdue and other companies last month, claiming $500m and accusing Big Pharma of “deceptively peddling these dangerous drugs and hooking millions”.

Conservatives can’t stop obsessing over Ocasio-Cortez. Their latest target: her boyfriend.

From the Washington Post

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks in Washington on Jan. 30. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post)

 

 

By Reis Thebault

February 15 at 11:09 PM

First, it was her clothing. Then her dancing. Not to mention her credit score, her apartment, her hometown. Maybe it was only a matter of time before right-wing trolls went after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s love life.

On Friday — the day after Valentine’s Day, as some commenters dutifully noted — an accusation that the New York Democrat was employing her boyfriend as a member of her staff made its way around the Twitter pages of various conservative media magoos. Gleeful outrage ensued.

“While you were having a nice Valentine’s Day, @AOC decided to put her boyfriend on staff — drawing a salary on the taxpayer’s dime,” wrote Twitter user Luke Thompson in one viral post. “Nice to see her adapting to the swamp so quickly.”

The Ocasio-Cortez nude photo hoax is straight from the misogynists' harassment playbook

 

 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has become the latest target of an online smear campaign, which is harnessing common tactics used to attack women. (Elyse Samuels/The Washington Post)

“[email protected] is having a tough week,” wrote Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative group Turning Point USA.

Then, from Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump 2020 campaign: “Her jobs for everyone starts with her boyfriend. Pure socialism, government chooses the winners and losers.”

Fox News picked up on this chatter and published a story that asserted Ocasio-Cortez “faces questions” about her boyfriend. Similar stories in Breitbart and the Daily Caller followed.

The fast-growing conspiracy seems to have originated from a few would-be sleuths who found her boyfriend’s name, Riley Roberts, listed in online House directories with a “mail.house.gov” email address. Thus, he must be on her staff.

Well, they’re partly correct. Roberts does have a House email address, but, as a spokesperson for the chamber’s Office of the Chief Administrative Officer explained, that does not mean he’s an employee.

“From time to time, at the request of members, spouses and partners are provided House email accounts for the purposes of viewing the member’s calendar,” the spokesperson said.

On Twitter, Ocasio-Cortez made the same point — that allowing partners access to members’ schedules through House email accounts is commonplace and is not against any government rules — adding, that Thompson should “check your facts before you tweet nonsense.”

Her chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, told The Post that, “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s partner, Mr. Roberts, has no official position, paid or otherwise, with her congressional office. Members of Congress have very tightly scheduled calendars that their family members and partners are allowed to access to make personal plans around official schedules.”

[Ocasio-Cortez learned lobbyists pay people to avoid waiting in lines. She’s horrified.]

The attacks were the latest in a litany of ginned-up or exaggerated controversies that have been unrelenting since she began making political waves.

Merely one such example: In July 2018, John Cardillo, host of a Newsmax show, tweeted a photo of Ocasio-Cortez’s childhood home in Westchester County, N.Y. He wrote, “This is the Yorktown Heights (very nice area) home @Ocasio2018 grew up in” and added, erroneously, that she then went to Brown University, an Ivy League school.

Then-candidate Ocasio-Cortez responded forcefully, writing, “Hey John, 1. I didn’t go to Brown or the Ivy League. I went to BU. Try Google. 2. It is nice. Growing up, it was a good town for working people. My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here & I grew up seeing how the Zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity.”

In a January interview, responding to a phony “nude selfie” that the Daily Caller promoted (before walking back its headline), Ocasio-Cortez told The Post that her right wing detractors were “out of all their artillery.”

“The nude is supposed to be like the bazooka. You know, like, ‘We’re going to take her down,’" she said, possibly anticipating future provocations. “Dude, you’re all out of bullets, you’re all out of bombs, you’re all out of all this stuff. What have you got left?”

Jayapal to roll out sweeping Medicare-for-All bill by month's end

by PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM 

from The Washington Post

THE PROGNOSIS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) speaks at a rally in 2015. (Elaine Thompson/AP)

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) is seeking buy-in from more fellow Democrats for a sweeping Medicare-for-all bill she is poised to release near the end of the month.

It's a proposal that has become a rallying cry for progressives and 2020 presidential candidates, but it is also exposing deep rifts in the Democratic Party over exactly how to achieve universal health coverage in the United States.

The Medicare for All Act of 2019, which Jayapal had planned to roll out this week but delayed because she was seeking more co-sponsors, would create a government-run single-payer health system even more generous than the current Medicare program. Her office hasn’t publicly released the details of the upcoming measure, but Democratic members told me it would cover long-term care and mental health services, two areas where Medicare coverage is sparse.

The bill also proposes to add dental, vision, prescription drugs, women’s reproductive health services, maternity and newborn care coverage to plans that would be available to people of all ages and would require no out-of-pocket costs for any services, according to a letter Jayapal sent to colleagues on Tuesday asking them to consider co-sponsoring the effort.

“Medicare for All is the solution our country needs,” the letter said. “Patients, nurses, doctors, working families, people with disabilities and others have been telling us this for years, and it’s time that Congress listens.”

The 150-page bill had 93 co-sponsors as of Tuesday, although Jayapal spokesman Vedant Patel said more Democrats have signed on since then. That’s still fewer than the 124 Democrats who co-sponsored a much less detailed Medicare-for-all proposal from then-Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) last year. A strategist who has been working with Democrats on health-care ideas told me there have been some frustrations that more members haven’t yet signed on to Jayapal’s bill, despite the fact that there are 40 more Democrats in the House this year.

But Jayapal said she’s confident she’ll have 100 co-sponsors by the time of the bill’s planned Feb. 26 release, explaining she’s not surprised members would take more time to consider it given its length.

“It’s a 150-page bill … it’s not an eight-page resolution,” Jayapal told me yesterday. “Now we’re actually putting detail into it, and so we feel confident we will continue to add cosponsors even after introduction.”

Patel also noted it’s still early in the year, saying he “disagrees” with the notion that it’s taking a long time to bring Democrats on board.

“It’s the second week of February and we are at more than 95 co-sponsors,” he said. “Coalition building is a process, but we are on track to introduce this historic legislation with resounding support at the end of the month.”

Yet differences are emerging among Capitol Hill Democrats over how to expand coverage, part of a larger debate roiling the party as 2020 candidates, many of them senators, and a new class of freshmen House Democrats move the party left not only on health care but also on the environment.

The cracks were especially apparent yesterday, as a separate group of lawmakers gathered to re-introduce their own proposal to allow people to buy in to Medicare starting at age 50. That measure, offered by Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) and Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), would take a more incremental approach to expanding health coverage — one that could play better with voters who would stand to lose private coverage under a single-payer program.

Their bill, dubbed the “Medicare at 50 Act,” would allow people to buy Medicare plans instead of purchasing private coverage on the Obamacare marketplaces if they are uninsured or prefer it to coverage offered in their workplace.

And today, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) are reintroducing their State Public Option Act, which allows people to buy a Medicaid plan regardless of their income. That measure has broad backing from not just lawmakers (20 senators co-sponsored it last year) but also well-known health policy wonks including former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Andy Slavitt.

Higgins is one of several Democrats on the House Budget Committee who have proposed a total of three separate and contrasting bills to expand Medicare to more people. The others are Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who have a bill to expand Medicare to all ages while still preserving employer-sponsored coverage, and Jayapal.

Once Jayapal rolls out her legislation, the Congressional Budget Office is expected to release an analysis of how much it would cost by the end of March or the beginning of April, Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) told me. At that point, the committee will hold a hearing with the CBO to go over the cost and its potential impact on the federal budget.

That's where Jayapal could run into roadblocks. Given the extensive benefits she’s proposing, her bill would probably come at a steep cost to taxpayers — and paying for things is almost always Congress’s trickiest task. Of course, supporters of the legislation stress its benefits would fill in much-needed gaps in coverage under the current Medicare program.

“The biggest change I give her so much credit for is it has long-term care,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who is a co-sponsor of Jayapal's Medicare-for-all bill. “This is huge.”

And then there’s also the question of how voters might react if told they would lose their current coverage. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), who has gone the furthest of all the 2020 candidates in pushing for an overhaul of the U.S. health-care system, attracted widespread attention recently when she suggested she’d be fine with entirely eliminating private coverage in favor of government-run plans.

“We’re very aware that there is anxiety about — however imperfect — a system you know and doctors you know, and that is going to be all part of the hearing process, public input into: How do we build a system in this country that really cares about all Americans?” said Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), another co-sponsor of the Jayapal bill.

Why the National Enquirer’s Attempt to Extort Jeff Bezos Backfired

By John Cassidy

February 8, 2019 from the New Yorker

 

Memo to the honchos at the National Enquirer: if you are going to threaten one of the richest men in the world by saying that you have sexually explicit selfies of him and his girlfriend, don’t have your lawyer and top editor put the threats in writing. The rich guy might decide he can ride out a stolen dick pic or two, especially if he’s already announced that he’s getting divorced.

“Something unusual happened to me yesterday,” Jeff Bezos, the founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, writes in a piece that appeared on Medium on Thursday evening. “I was made an offer I couldn’t refuse. Or at least that’s what the top people at the National Enquirer thought.” Evidently, Bezos thought different. “Any personal embarrassment AMI could cause me takes a back seat because there’s a much more important matter involved here,” he writes, referring to American Media, Inc., which is the National Enquirer’s parent company. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?"

At some length, his article relates the recent dealings that his representatives have had with the National Enquirer, which in early January published intimate text messages that he had exchanged with his girlfriend, Lauren Sánchez, a former television anchor. Bezos also published three threatening e-mails sent, on Wednesday, by the supermarket tabloid’s top editor, Dylan Howard, and by Jon Fine, the deputy general counsel of A.M.I.

In Howard’s e-mail, he describes in graphic terms some of the “photos obtained during our newsgathering,” which he says include “a below the belt selfie” and a shot of “Ms. Sanchez wearing a plunging red neckline dress revealing her cleavage and a glimpse of her nether region.” He concludes, “It would give no editor pleasure to send this email. I hope common sense can prevail — and quickly.” One of Fine’s e-mails lays out the National Enquirer’s “proposed terms” for reaching an agreement between the two sides, which included Bezos publicly acknowledging that he and his representatives didn’t have any basis for their suggestion that the original story about him was politically motivated. In a statement released on Friday morning, the company said, “American Media believes fervently that it acted lawfully in the reporting of the story of Mr. Bezos. . . . Nonetheless, in light of the nature of the allegations published by Mr. Bezos, the Board has convened and determined that it should promptly and thoroughly investigate the claims.”

All credit to Bezos for refusing to submit to these intimidation tactics. He’s a ruthless plutocrat whose online behemoth crushes retailers big and small. He has run his company with all the transparency of the Politburo. And he has exploited his great riches to buy one of the most important and influential newspapers in the country, the Washington Post. But he’s just as entitled as the next person to a private life—and he has just performed an important public service, or maybe two.

Bezos has made transparent the bullying tactics employed by the National Enquirer and raised the question of how often they are directed at targets who are less well able to defend themselves. “On that point, numerous people have contacted our investigation team about their similar experiences with AMI, and how they needed to capitulate because, for example, their livelihoods were at stake,” Bezos writes. In addition, he has raised the intriguing question of how and why the tabloid went after him in the first place.

“Simply put, this was and is a news story,” Fine, the A.M.I. attorney, says in one of the e-mails. But there are grounds for wondering whether that was really all there was to it. As practically everybody now knows, David Pecker, the chief executive of A.M.I., is an old friend of Donald Trump. Late last year, A.M.I. entered a plea agreement with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, in which the company admitted that, in 2016, it bought and suppressed the story of Karen McDougal, an ex-Playboy model who claimed to have had an affair with Trump, “so as to prevent it from influencing the election.” At first glance, the Bezos story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Trump, but first glances can sometimes be deceiving.

On January 9th, two days after the National Enquirer informed him it had obtained intimate text messages he had exchanged with Sánchez, Bezos announced that he and his wife of twenty-five years, MacKenzie, were divorcing. After the National Enquirer published some of the texts, Bezos writes, “I engaged investigators to learn how those texts were obtained, and to determine the motives for the many unusual actions taken by the Enquirer.” The principal investigator he hired was Gavin de Becker, a well-known security expert who runs his own consulting firm. “I asked him to prioritize protecting my time since I have other things I prefer to work on and to proceed with whatever budget he needed to pursue the facts in this matter,” Bezos adds.

• Read reporting by Jeffrey Toobin on David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media, Inc., and his fervor for Donald Trump, and Ronan Farrow on how the National Enquirer protected Trump early in his Presidential campaign. *

According to a Washington Post story that was published on Tuesday, de Becker and his team “concluded that the billionaire was not hacked. Rather, de Becker said in an interview, the Enquirer’s scoop . . . began with a ‘politically motivated’ leak meant to embarrass the owner of The Post—an effort potentially involving several important figures in Trump’s 2016 campaign.” More specifically, de Becker came to focus his attention on Sánchez’s brother, Michael, a Hollywood talent agent who has ties to Roger Stone and Carter Page, two Trump associates who have been caught up in the Russia investigation. “Michael Sanchez has been among the people we’ve been speaking with and looking at,” de Becker told the Daily Beast.

Michael Sánchez is vigorously denying any involvement. In e-mails and texts that the Post obtained, he made the extraordinary claim to de Becker that he suspected the texts between Bezos and his sister may have been obtained by the National Security Agency, British intelligence, or the Mossad. The Post also reported that Michael Sánchez issued a statement in which he “said he believed de Becker, Bezos’s security chief for two decades, was involved in the leaks to the Enquirer ’to sabotage Mr. Bezos and Ms. Sanchez’s love affair.’ ”

Just how the National Enquirer obtained the photographs remains murky. What’s far clearer is that the publication tried to go gangster on the wrong person. “Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks and corruption,” Bezos writes. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over and see what crawls out.” He won’t be the only one watching.

Policymakers are realizing health is about a lot more than just care

From the Washington Post

BY PAIGE WINFIELD CUNNINGHAM with Paulina Firozi THE PROGNOSIS Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) is the top Republican on the Joint Economic Committee. (Alex Brandon/AP) A whole host of factors — such as friends, housing and transportation — affect a person’s health and how much they need the social safety net. It’s time the government’s big health insurance programs took this reality into account, some lawmakers and policymakers are starting to argue. Republicans on the Joint Economic Committee will release a report today finding that Americans have fewer people around to help provide care as they age compared with two decades ago. It says Medicare and Medicaid spending projections may be too low because they fail to take into account the declining social networks of aging baby boomers. The study found adults from ages 61 to 63 are now less likely to be in close geographical proximity to their loved ones. Seventy-five percent were married or cohabitating in 1994, compared with 69 percent in 1994. The share of adults attending church at least three times a month fell from 56 percent to 41 percent, and the share of those with a child living within 10 miles fell from 68 percent to 55 percent during the same time frame. The report also found declines in the share of adults with a good friend or a relative living in their neighborhood. This weakened network could translate to a heavier burden on Medicaid and Medicare if more adults seek formal paid rehabilitation, long-term care and hospice services as a result, the report says. “That generation is going to have many fewer friends and children and spouses and people from church to care for them as they get old,” said Robert Putnam, a professor of public policy at Harvard University who testified at a 2017 hearing on social capital convened by the committee’s top Republican, Sen. Mike Lee (Utah). “We’re not going to just leave them on the street, so more of them will have to be cared for through paid care,” Putnam added.

 

‘We are in trouble.’ Global carbon emissions reached a record high in 2018.

As nations assemble in Poland for climate talks, the figures suggest there is no clear end in sight to the growth of humanity’s contribution to climate change.

 

Poland hosts critical U.N. climate talks

 

 

As environmental activists protest in Brussels, the United Nations' climate change talks begin in Poland on Dec. 2. (Reuters)

 

 

 

 

By Brady Dennis and

Chris Mooney

Washington Post, December 5 at 1:00 PM

Global emissions of carbon dioxide are reaching the highest levels on record, scientists projected Wednesday, in the latest evidence of the chasm between international goals for combating climate change and what countries are doing.

Between 2014 and 2016, emissions remained largely flat, leading to hopes that the world was beginning to turn a corner. Those hopes appear to have been dashed. In 2017, global emissions grew 1.6 percent. The rise in 2018 is projected to be 2.7 percent.

The expected increase, which would bring fossil fuel and industrial emissions to a record high of 37.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year, is being driven by a nearly 5 percent growth of emissions in China and more than 6 percent in India, researchers estimated, along with growth in many other nations. Emissions by the United States grew 2.5 percent, while those of the European Union declined by just under 1 percent.

As nations continue climate talks in Poland, the message of Wednesday’s report was unambiguous: When it comes to promises to begin cutting the greenhouse gas emissions that fuel climate change, the world is well off target.

“We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said this week at the opening of the 24th annual U.N. climate conference, where countries will wrestle with the ambitious goals they need to meet to sharply reduce carbon emissions in the coming years.

“It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” he said. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption.”

The Energy 202: Hurricane Florence blows hole in Trump team's case for helping coal and nuclear power, critics say

From the Washington Post

BY DINO GRANDONI

THE LIGHTBULB

 

Duke Energy employees work on removing trees and restoring power to a road closed in Wilmington, N.C., after Hurricane Florence traveled through the area over the weekend. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

Hurricane Florence has blown a hole in the Trump administration's argument that bolstering nuclear and coal-fired power is essential to providing reliable electricity to homes and businesses, especially during times of crisis, according to energy experts long critical of the plan.

For months, the Department of Energy has considered throwing a lifeline to that sector of the power market to make the electric grid more resilient to natural and man-made disasters. The Trump administration has been preparing to use a Cold War-era law, once marshaled by President Harry S. Truman to secure U.S. steel production, to compel regional grid operators to buy electricity from nuclear and coal plants.

The rationale is that only these two types of generation regularly have enough fuel on site to run for when national security is threatened. Wind turbines and solar panels only generate electricity when the weather is right while natural gas stations often have their fuel pipelined in from afar.

But hours before the once powerful hurricane made landfall in North Carolina on Friday, Duke Energy shut down its two reactors at the Brunswick Nuclear Plant near Wilmington, N.C.​​​​ in anticipation of high winds. The temporary shutdown illustrates how many other factors beyond just fuel stored on site affect grid reliability. 

"There are so many flaws to their argument, we hardly need this to add," said David Hart, professor of public policy at George Mason University. "There are lots of better ways to get reliability than to stockpile a lot of fuel."

One cause of power outages is, of course, downed power lines. According to a 2012 Congressional Research Service report, trees falling on local distribution lines cause most storm-related power outages. Damage to transmission lines, the main arteries of the electric grid, tend to cause major outages.

The delivery system for electricity, rather than its source, tends to be what is most vulnerable during storms.

Christine Tezak, managing director of research at ClearView Energy Partners, said that "outages under these circumstances are more grid-related than generation-related, and don’t seem to provide compelling data for or against any generation resource."

In the case of the Brunswick plant, while floodwaters have not breached the facility, located 4 miles from the Atlantic, safety officials still do not want to run the plant after the storm until flooding subsided and roads are accessible, in case the facility and surrounding area needed to be evacuated in the unlikely event of severe disaster at the plant.

"Many of the roads leading to the plant are not passable," said Joey Ledford, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Over the weekend, that independent agency, which regulates nuclear safety, declared a “hazardous event” due to difficulty Duke Energy workers were having getting to the reactors. 

As of 11 p.m. Monday night, 223,000 Duke Energy customers remained without power. 

Other extreme weather events can hamper power generation at its source, no matter how they produce electricity. Strong winds can send solar panels flying. Cold snaps can freeze stockpiles of coal.

When it comes to hurricanes, the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association for the U.S. nuclear business, argued that the hulking concrete buildings that house reactors handle high winds particularly well, allowing them to usually restart more quickly than their competitors after hurricanes.

"The real question isn't whether you can run all the way through an event," said Matt Wald, a spokesman for the group. "The real question is, if you shut down, how fast can you come back."

He added that in Puerto Rico, for example, last year's Hurricane Maria "shredded everything, including wind turbines and solar panels." The territory does not have any nuclear power plants.

The Energy Department has yet to detail exactly what the plan to bolster coal and nuclear will look like after Trump ordered aid in June. The request comes as expensive coal and nuclear assets are retiring across the country in the face of competition from cheaper natural gas and renewable energy resources.

In a speech that month, Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggested that the slew of retirements, "if unchecked, will threaten our ability to recover from intentional attacks and natural disasters," according to the Associated Press.

Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser to the Bill Clinton White House, said it is particularly perverse to include coal power in the bailout plan given the contribution its emissions make to climate change, which in turn fuels fiercer storms like Florence. 

"Claiming that coal and nuclear, if only they were more dispatchable, they would prevent most blackouts is laughable if it weren't potentially tragic," Bledsoe said.

 

Climate conference shows divide among Democrats over how to counter global warming

From the Washington Post-The Energy 202:

Climate conference shows divide among Democrats over how to counter global warming

BY DINO GRANDONI

THE LIGHTBULB

Members of the group 1000 Grandmothers protest outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco where the Global Climate Action Summit is being held, on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018. The group, which says it is made up of elder women activists working to address the climate crisis, chanted "Listen to your Grandma, no more fracking!" (AP Photo/Juliet Williams)

SAN FRANCISCO — The organizers of a climate-change conference here in California wanted their three-day summit to be a repudiation of President Trump. And during many speeches, and commitments from cities and companies to reduce their impact on the environment, it was. 

But at other times both in and outside the convention center in San Francisco, activists protested against the current Democratic approach. The clash marked a high-profile schism between the middle- and far-left segments of the Democratic coalition about how forcefully to address climate change. 

The event was set up to show how the private sector and local governments are pressing ahead to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions even as the president promises to pull the United States out of the landmark Paris climate agreement.

The Global Climate Action Summit was organized by the state's Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, who just days earlier signed a bill committing California to getting 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. He followed that up with an even more ambitious mandate, outlined in an executive order, to decarbonize California's entire economy by that year too. And then on Thursday, he signed a bevy of 16 bills attempting to reduce the carbon footprint of California's many automobiles by putting more electric cars on the road.

The climate summit saw a scattershot of plans and commitments by other states, cities and companies eager to push ahead on problems they believe Trump has turned his back on. Groups and companies announced plans on everything from rain forests to electric car charging stations.

Twelve cities, including Tokyo and Seoul, joined an initiative to slash emissions in city centers, making room on the roads for electric car fleets. And New York City announced it will invest $4 billion in pension funds for climate change initiatives in the next three years, doubling current investments. On the industry side, LeasePlan, a Dutch company that is one of the biggest fleet providers in world with 1.8 million vehicles, will step up purchases of electric vehicles. So will the French electricity giant EDF Energy, which has about 30,000 vehicles, organizers said.

Many other consumer-facing brands outside of heavy industries like oil and autos made their own moves. Starbucks said it plans to build 10,000 “greener stories” by 2025, attempting to save $50 million in utility costs over the next decade. Food-and-drink giant Unilever said it will certify 150,000 acres of palm oil plantations in Malaysia as sustainable.

California Gov. Jerry Brown walks to the bow of the high-tech battery-operated San Francisco Bay sightseeing boat, Enhydra, for a cruise of San Francisco Bay, where he signed 16 new laws aimed at easing global warming on Thursday in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli)

It remains to be seem whether that constellation of commitments from cities and companies, none of which are legally binding, turns out to be just a wish list. But many of the more well-traveled attendees of climate conferences were encouraged.

"I've been to a lot of gatherings and conferences related to the climate crisis for many years now, and this is really top-notch," former vice president Al Gore said in an interview. "The nature of the commitments being announced is extremely heartening."

At times, the summit felt like a reunion of officials who served in the Barack Obama and Bill Clinton administrations. (Obama made an appearance, though only via prerecorded video.) 

Yet it was Brown, more than anyone, who cemented his place as one of Trump's chief foes on climate issues by hosting the summit and signing the carbon-free electricity bill. The California governor seemed to relish the role. When asked during a press conference how Trump will be remembered, Brown responded: "Liar, criminal, fool. Pick your choice." 

However, for the hundreds of activists outside George R. Moscone Convention Center, Brown was the antagonist. Waving signs addressed to Brown saying "Climate Leaders Don't Drill," many of the protestors wanted the governor to stop the expansion of oil production in California, which last year was the fourth largest producer of crude among U.S. states.

"You need keep-it-in-the-ground commitments," Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, said in an interview. "People don't know how big oil and gas development is in California."

Broadly, the progressive climate wing wants to see end to the cozy relationship many of elected Democrats have with corporations.

That message made its way on stage when protesters interrupted a speech by former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg by yelling “our air is not for sale."

Back in front of the microphone, Bloomberg quipped in reply: "Only in America could you have environmentalists protesting an environmental conference."

Steven Mufson contributed to this report.