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To make it more difficult to challenge the law in court, especially before it went into effect, the Texas law turns to private individuals, rather than government officials, to enforce the ban, deputizing them to bring lawsuits against anyone who either provides or “aids or abets” an abortion. The law also establishes an award of $10,000 for a successful lawsuit.

By a vote of 5-4, in a one-paragraph order issued late at night, the court said that the providers had “raised serious questions regarding the constitutionality of the Texas law.” But the majority nonetheless refused to stop the law from going into effect because, the court wrote, it wasn’t clear whether the state officials whom the abortion providers had named as defendants in the case “can or will seek to enforce the Texas law” in a way that would allow the court to get involved in the dispute at that stage.

In a 39-page filing on Monday, Fletcher asked the justices to wipe away the 5th Circuit’s stay of Pitman’s order. That relief would reinstate Pitman’s decision blocking the law while the litigation continues.

take up the case on its merits docket and definitively resolve the legality of Texas’ unusual enforcement scheme without waiting for a final ruling from the 5th Circuit — a maneuver known as a petition for certiorari before judgment. On Monday afternoon, the court granted the providers’ request to fast-track the justices’ consideration of their petition, directing the defendants in the case to file their response to the petition by noon on Thursday, Oct. 21.

In a 113-page ruling on Oct. 6, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman granted the administration’s request to put the law on hold. Observing that the right to obtain an abortion before the fetus becomes viable is “well established,

Texas was “[f]ully aware that depriving its citizens of this right” directly would be “flagrantly unconstitutional”

The majority’s refusal to intervene on an emergency basis sent the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which is scheduled to hear oral argument in early December.

The Biden administration’s request went to Justice Samuel Alito, who fields emergency requests from the 5th Circuit. Alito acted quickly, ordering the state to file its response by noon on Thursday, Oct. 21, and — with the order later on Monday directing a response in the providers’ case — setting up the possibility that the court could act on both S.B. 8 cases at the same time.

Sometimes caged behind lock and key, the new gear linked back to a command center in Moscow, giving authorities startling new powers to block, filter and slow down websites that they did not want the Russian public to see.

Under President Vladimir V. Putin, who once called the internet a “C.I.A. project” and views the web as a threat to his power, the Russian government is attempting to bring the country’s once open and freewheeling internet to heel.

It affects the vast majority of the country’s more than 120 million wireless and home internet users, according to researchers and activists.

The world got its first glimpse of Russia’s new tools in action when Twitter was slowed to a crawl in the country this spring. It was the first time the filtering system had been put to work, researchers and activists said. Other sites have since been blocked, including several linked to the jailed opposition leader Alexei A. Navalny.

“Russia’s censorship model can quickly and easily be replicated by other authoritarian governments.”

Surveillance systems monitor people’s online activities, and some bloggers have been arrested. In 2012, the country passed a law requiring internet service providers to block thousands of banned websites, but it was hard to enforce and many sites remained available.

It has threatened to take down YouTube, Facebook and Instagram if they do not block certain content on their own. After authorities slowed down Twitter this year, the company agreed to remove dozens of posts deemed illegal by the government.

“It’s striking that this hasn’t gotten the attention of the Biden administration,”

Google, which owns YouTube, and Twitter declined to comment. Apple did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, Facebook did not address Russia specifically but said it was “committed to respecting the human rights of all those who use our products.”

Many see YouTube as a future target because of its use by independent media and critics of the Kremlin, which could cause a backlash.

In recent years, governments in India, Myanmar, Ethiopia and elsewhere have used internet blackouts to stifle pockets of dissent. Russia had internet shutdowns during anti-government protests in the southern region of Ingushetia in 2018 and Moscow in 2019.

In September, after the government threatened to arrest local employees for Google and Apple, the companies removed apps run by supporters of Mr. Navalny ahead of national elections.

equipment loaded with software for the government to track, filter and reroute internet traffic without any involvement or knowledge from the companies.

Some German states already operate so-called 2G policies, and these will now become nationwide - 2G stands for genesen (recovered in the past six months) or geimpft (vaccinated).

Under the measures agreed by Germany's 16 states and federal leaders:Unvaccinated people will be limited to meetings with their own household and two other peopleThe 2G rule will be enforced at restaurants and cultural venues and non-essential shopsClubs will shut in areas where 350 cases have been recorded per 100,000 people in the past seven days - the national rate is over 400Up to 30 million vaccinations will be carried out by Christmas - first, second or boostersOutdoor events, including Bundesliga football, will have limited crowds of 15,000 and 2G rulesFireworks on New Year's Eve will be banned

that’s particularly true on the I.R.A., which has to build all these things in the real world.

we’re trying to do industrial physical transformation at a speed and scale unheralded in American history. This is bigger than anything we have done at this speed ever.

The money is beginning to move out the door now, but we’re on a clock. Climate change is not like some other issues where if you don’t solve it this year, it is exactly the same to solve it next year. This is an issue where every year you don’t solve it, the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere builds, warming builds, the effects compound

Solve, frankly, isn’t the right word there because all we can do is abate, a lot of the problems now baked in. So how is it going, and who can actually walk us through that?

Robinson Meyer is the founding executive editor of heatmap.news

why do all these numbers differ so much? How big is this thing?

in electric vehicles and in the effort, kind of this dual effort in the law, to both encourage Americans to buy and use electric vehicles and then also to build a domestic manufacturing base for electric vehicles.

on both counts, the data’s really good on electric vehicles. And that’s where we’re getting the fastest response from industry and the clearest response from industry to the law.

ROBINSON MEYER: Factories are getting planned. Steel’s going in the ground. The financing for those factories is locked down. It seems like they’re definitely going to happen. They’re permitted. Companies are excited about them. Large Fortune 500 automakers are confidently and with certainty planning for an electric vehicle future, and they’re building the factories to do that in the United States. They’re also building the factories to do that not just in blue states. And so to some degree, we can see the political certainty for electric vehicles going forward.

in other parts of the law, partially due to just vagaries of how the law is being implemented, tax credits where the fine print hasn’t worked out yet, it’s too early to say whether the law is working and how it’s going and whether it’s going to accomplish its goal

EZRA KLEIN: I always find this very funny in a way. The Congressional Budget Office scored it. They thought it would make about $380 billion in climate investments over a decade. So then you have all these other analyses coming out.

But there’s actually this huge range of outcomes in between where the thing passes, and maybe what you wanted to have happen happens. Maybe it doesn’t. Implementation is where all this rubber meets the road

the Rhodium Group, which is a consulting firm, they think it could be as high as $522 billion, which is a big difference. Then there’s this Goldman Sachs estimate, which the administration loves, where they say they’re projecting $1.2 trillion in incentives —

ROBINSON MEYER: All the numbers differ because most of the important incentives, most of the important tax credits and subsidies in the I.R.A., are uncapped. There’s no limit to how much the government might spend on them. All that matters is that some private citizen or firm or organization come to the government and is like, hey, we did this. You said you’d give us money for it. Give us the money.

because of that, different banks have their own energy system models, their own models of the economy. Different research groups have their own models.

we know it’s going to be wrong because the Congressional Budget Office is actually quite constrained in how it can predict how these tax credits are taken up. And it’s constrained by the technology that’s out there in the country right now.

The C.B.O. can only look at the number of electrolyzers, kind of the existing hydrogen infrastructure in the country, and be like, well, they’re probably all going to use these tax credits. And so I think they said that there would be about $5 billion of take up for the hydrogen tax credits.

But sometimes money gets allocated, and then costs overrun, and there delays, and you can’t get the permits, and so on, and the thing never gets built

the fact that the estimates are going up is to them early evidence that this is going well. There is a lot of applications. People want the tax credits. They want to build these new factories, et cetera.

a huge fallacy that we make in policy all the time is assuming that once money is allocated for something, you get the thing you’re allocating the money for. Noah Smith, the economics writer, likes to call this checkism, that money equals stuff.

EZRA KLEIN: They do not want that, and not wanting that and putting every application through a level of scrutiny high enough to try and make sure you don’t have another one

I don’t think people think a lot about who is cutting these checks, but a lot of it is happening in this very obscure office of the Department of Energy, the Loan Program Office, which has gone from having $40 billion in lending authority, which is already a big boost over it not existing a couple decades ago, to $400 billion in loan authority,

the Loan Program Office as one of the best places we have data on how this is going right now and one of the offices that’s responded fastest to the I.R.A.

the Loan Program Office is basically the Department of Energy’s in-house bank, and it’s kind of the closest thing we have in the US to what exists in other countries, like Germany, which is a State development bank that funds projects that are eventually going to be profitable.

It has existed for some time. I mean, at first, it kind of was first to play after the Recovery Act of 2009. And in fact, early in its life, it gave a very important loan to Tesla. It gave this almost bridge loan to Tesla that helped Tesla build up manufacturing capacity, and it got Tesla to where it is today.

EZRA KLEIN: It’s because one of the questions I have about that office and that you see in some of the coverage of them is they’re very afraid of having another Solyndra.

Now, depending on other numbers, including the D.O.E., it’s potentially as high as $100 billion, but that’s because the whole thing about the I.R.A. is it’s meant to encourage the build-out of this hydrogen infrastructure.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m never that excited when I see a government loans program turning a profit because I think that tends to mean they’re not making risky enough loans. The point of the government should be to bear quite a bit of risk —

And to some degree, Ford now has to compete, and US automakers are trying to catch up with Chinese EV automakers. And its firms have EV battery technology especially, but just have kind of comprehensive understanding of the EV supply chain that no other countries’ companies have

ROBINSON MEYER: You’re absolutely right that this is the key question. They gave this $9.2 billion loan to Ford to build these EV battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee. It’s the largest loan in the office’s history. It actually means that the investment in these factories is going to be entirely covered by the government, which is great for Ford and great for our build-out of EVs

And to some degree, I should say, one of the roles of L.P.O. and one of the roles of any kind of State development bank, right, is to loan to these big factory projects that, yes, may eventually be profitable, may, in fact, assuredly be profitable, but just aren’t there yet or need financing that the private market can’t provide. That being said, they have moved very slowly, I think.

And they feel like they’re moving quickly. They just got out new guidelines that are supposed to streamline a lot of this. Their core programs, they just redefined and streamlined in the name of speeding them up

However, so far, L.P.O. has been quite slow in getting out new loans

I want to say that the pressure they’re under is very real. Solyndra was a disaster for the Department of Energy. Whether that was fair or not fair, there’s a real fear that if you make a couple bad loans that go bad in a big way, you will destroy the political support for this program, and the money will be clawed back, a future Republican administration will wreck the office, whatever it might be. So this is not an easy call.

when you tell me they just made the biggest loan in their history to Ford, I’m not saying you shouldn’t lend any money to Ford, but when I think of what is the kind of company that cannot raise money on the capital markets, the one that comes to mind is not Ford

They have made loans to a number of more risky companies than Ford, but in addition to speed, do you think they are taking bets on the kinds of companies that need bets? It’s a little bit hard for me to believe that it would have been impossible for Ford to figure out how to finance factorie

ROBINSON MEYER: Now, I guess what I would say about that is that Ford is — let’s go back to why Solyndra failed, right? Solyndra failed because Chinese solar deluged the market. Now, why did Chinese solar deluge the market? Because there’s such support of Chinese financing from the state for massive solar factories and massive scale.

EZRA KLEIN: — the private market can’t. So that’s the meta question I’m asking here. In your view, because you’re tracking this much closer than I am, are they too much under the shadow of Solyndra? Are they being too cautious? Are they getting money out fast enough?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s right; that basically, if we think the US should stay competitive and stay as close as it can and not even stay competitive, but catch up with Chinese companies, it is going to require large-scale state support of manufacturing.

EZRA KLEIN: OK, that’s fair. I will say, in general, there’s a constant thing you find reporting on government that people in government feel like they are moving very quickly

EZRA KLEIN: — given the procedural work they have to go through. And they often are moving very quickly compared to what has been done in that respect before, compared to what they have to get over. They are working weekends, they are working nights, and they are still not actually moving that quickly compared to what a VC firm can do or an investment bank or someone else who doesn’t have the weight of congressional oversight committees potentially calling you in and government procurement rules and all the rest of it.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think that’s a theme across the government’s implementation of the I.R.A. right now, is that generally the government feels like it’s moving as fast as it can. And if you look at the Department of Treasury, they feel like we are publishing — basically, the way that most of the I.R.A. subsidies work is that they will eventually be administered by the I.R.S., but first the Department of the Treasury has to write the guidebook for all these subsidies, right?

the law says there’s a very general kind of “here’s thousands of dollars for EVs under this circumstance.” Someone still has to go in and write all the fine print. The Department of Treasury is doing that right now for each tax credit, and they have to do that before anyone can claim that tax credit to the I.R.S. Treasury feels like it’s moving extremely quickly. It basically feels like it’s completely at capacity with these, and it’s sequenced these so it feels like it’s getting out the most important tax credits first.

Private industry feels like we need certainty. It’s almost a year since the law passed, and you haven’t gotten us the domestic content bonus. You haven’t gotten us the community solar bonus. You haven’t gotten us all these things yet.

a theme across the government right now is that the I.R.A. passed. Agencies have to write the regulations for all these tax credits. They feel like they’re moving very quickly, and yet companies feel like they’re not moving fast enough.

that’s how we get to this point where we’re 311 days out from the I.R.A. passing, and you’re like, well, has it made a big difference? And I’m like, well, frankly, wind and solar developers broadly don’t feel like they have the full understanding of all the subsidies they need yet to begin making the massive investments

I think it’s fair to say maybe the biggest bet on that is green hydrogen, if you’re looking in the bill.

We think it’s going to be an important tool in industry. It may be an important tool for storing energy in the power grid. It may be an important tool for anything that needs combustion.

ROBINSON MEYER: Yeah, absolutely. So green hydrogen — and let’s just actually talk about hydrogen broadly as this potential tool in the decarbonization tool kit.

It’s a molecule. It is a very light element, and you can burn it, but it’s not a fossil fuel. And a lot of the importance of hydrogen kind of comes back to that attribute of it.

So when we look at sectors of the economy that are going to be quite hard to decarbonize — and that’s because there is something about fossil fuels chemically that is essential to how that sector works either because they provide combustion heat and steelmaking or because fossil fuels are actually a chemical feedstock where the molecules in the fossil fuel are going into the product or because fossil fuels are so energy dense that you can carry a lot of energy while actually not carrying that much mass — any of those places, that’s where we look at hydrogen as going.

green hydrogen is something new, and the size of the bet is huge. So can you talk about first just what is green hydrogen? Because my understanding of it is spotty.

The I.R.A. is extremely generous — like extremely, extremely generous — in its hydrogen subsidies

The first is for what’s called blue hydrogen, which is hydrogen made from natural gas, where we then capture the carbon dioxide that was released from that process and pump it back into the ground. That’s one thing that’s subsidized. It’s basically subsidized as part of this broader set of packages targeted at carbon capture

green hydrogen, which is where we take water, use electrolyzers on it, basically zap it apart, take the hydrogen from the water, and then use that as a fue

The I.R.A. subsidies for green hydrogen specifically, which is the one with water and electricity, are so generous that relatively immediately, it’s going to have a negative cost to make green hydrogen. It will cost less than $0 to make green hydrogen. The government’s going to fully cover the cost of producing it.

That is intentional because what needs to happen now is that green hydrogen moves into places where we’re using natural gas, other places in the industrial economy, and it needs to be price competitive with those things, with natural gas, for instance. And so as it kind of is transported, it’s going to cost money

As you make the investment to replace the technology, it’s going to cost money. And so as the hydrogen moves through the system, it’s going to wind up being price competitive with natural gas, but the subsidies in the bill are so generous that hydrogen will cost less than $0 to make a kilogram of it

There seems to be a sense that hydrogen, green hydrogen, is something we sort of know how to make, but we don’t know how to make it cost competitive yet. We don’t know how to infuse it into all the processes that we need to be infused into. And so a place where the I.R.A. is trying to create a reality that does not yet exist is a reality where green hydrogen is widely used, we have to know how to use it, et cetera.

And they just seem to think we don’t. And so you need all these factories. You need all this innovation. Like, they have to create a whole innovation and supply chain almost from scratch. Is that right?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s exactly right. There’s a great Department of Energy report that I would actually recommend anyone interested in this read called “The Liftoff Report for Clean Hydrogen.” They made it for a few other technologies. It’s a hundred-page book that’s basically how the D.O.E. believes we’re going to build out a clean hydrogen economy.

And, of course, that is policy in its own right because the D.O.E. is saying, here is the years we’re going to invest to have certain infrastructure come online. Here’s what we think we need. That’s kind of a signal to industry that everyone should plan around those years as well.

It’s a great book. It’s like the best piece of industrial policy I’ve actually seen from the government at all. But one of the points it makes is that you’re going to make green hydrogen. You’re then going to need to move it. You’re going to need to move it in a pipeline or maybe a truck or maybe in storage tanks that you then cart around.

Once it gets to a facility that uses green hydrogen, you’re going to need to store some green hydrogen there in storage tanks on site because you basically need kind of a backup supply in case your main supply fails. All of those things are going to add cost to hydrogen. And not only are they going to add cost, we don’t really know how to do them. We have very few pipelines that are hydrogen ready.

All of that investment needs to happen as a result to make the green hydrogen economy come alive. And why it’s so lavishly subsidized is to kind of fund all that downstream investment that’s eventually going to make the economy come true.

But a lot of what has to happen here, including once the money is given out, is that things we do know how to build get built, and they get built really fast, and they get built at this crazy scale.

So I’ve been reading this paper on what they call “The Greens’ Dilemma” by J.B. Ruhl and James Salzman, who also wrote this paper called “Old Green Laws, New Green Deal,” or something like that. And I think they get at the scale problem here really well.

“The largest solar facility currently online in the US is capable of generating 585 megawatts. To meet even a middle-road renewable energy scenario would require bringing online two new 400-megawatt solar power facilities, each taking up at least 2,000 acres of land every week for the next 30 years.”

And that’s just solar. We’re not talking wind there. We’re not talking any of the other stuff we’ve discussed here, transmission lines. Can we do that? Do we have that capacity?

ROBINSON MEYER: No, we do not. We absolutely do not. I think we’re going to build a ton of wind and solar. We do not right now have the system set up to use that much land to build that much new solar and wind by the time that we need to build it. I think it is partially because of permitting laws, and I think it’s also partially because right now there is no master plan

There’s no overarching strategic entity in the government that’s saying, how do we get from all these subsidies in the I.R.A. to net zero? What is our actual plan to get from where we are right now to where we’re emitting zero carbon as an economy? And without that function, no project is essential. No activity that we do absolutely needs to happen, and so therefore everything just kind of proceeds along at a convenient pace.

given the scale of what’s being attempted here, you might think that something the I.R.A. does is to have some entity in the government, as you’re saying, say, OK, we need this many solar farms. This is where we think we should put them. Let’s find some people to build them, or let’s build them ourselves.

what it actually does is there’s an office somewhere waiting for private companies to send in an application for a tax credit for solar that they say they’re going to build, and then we hope they build it

it’s an almost entirely passive process on the part of the government. Entirely would be going too far because I do think they talk to people, and they’re having conversations

the builder applies, not the government plans. Is that accurate?

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s correct. Yes.

ROBINSON MEYER: I think here’s what I would say, and this gets back to what do we want the I.R.A. to do and what are our expectations for the I.R.A

If the I.R.A. exists to build out a ton of green capacity and shift the political economy of the country toward being less dominated by fossil fuels and more dominated by the clean energy industry, frankly, then it is working

If the I.R.A. is meant to get us all the way to net zero, then it is not capable of that.

in 2022, right, we had no way to see how we were going to reduce emissions. We did not know if we were going to get a climate bill at all. Now, we have this really aggressive climate bill, and we’re like, oh, is this going to get us to net zero?

But getting to net zero was not even a possibility in 2022.

The issue is that the I.R.A. requires, ultimately, private actors to come forward and do these things. And as more and more renewables get onto the grid, almost mechanically, there’s going to be less interest in bringing the final pieces of decarbonized electricity infrastructure onto the grid as well.

EZRA KLEIN: Because the first things that get applied for are the ones that are more obviously profitable

The issue is when you talk to solar developers, they don’t see it like, “Am I going to make a ton of money, yes or no?” They see it like they have a capital stack, and they have certain incentives and certain ways to make money based off certain things they can do. And as more and more solar gets on the grid, building solar at all becomes less profitable

also, just generally, there’s less people willing to buy the solar.

as we get closer to a zero-carbon grid, there is this risk that basically less and less gets built because it will become less and less profitable

EZRA KLEIN: Let’s call that the last 20 percent risk

EZRA KLEIN: — or the last 40 percent. I mean, you can probably attach different numbers to that

ROBINSON MEYER: Permitting is the primary thing that is going to hold back any construction basically, especially out West,

right now permitting fights, the process under the National Environmental Policy Act just at the federal level, can take 4.5 years

let’s say every single project we need to do was applied for today, which is not true — those projects have not yet been applied for — they would be approved under the current permitting schedule in 2027.

ROBINSON MEYER: That’s before they get built.

Basically nobody on the left talked about permitting five years ago. I don’t want to say literally nobody, but you weren’t hearing it, including in the climate discussion.

people have moved to saying we do not have the laws, right, the permitting laws, the procurement laws to do this at the speed we’re promising, and we need to fix that. And then what you’re seeing them propose is kind of tweak oriented,

Permitting reform could mean a lot of different things, and Democrats and Republicans have different ideas about what it could mean. Environmental groups, within themselves, have different ideas about what it could mean.

for many environmental groups, the permitting process is their main tool. It is how they do the good that they see themselves doing in the world. They use the permitting process to slow down fossil fuel projects, to slow down projects that they see as harming local communities or the local environment.

ROBINSON MEYER: So we talk about the National Environmental Policy Act or NEPA. Let’s just start calling it NEPA. We talk about the NEPA process

NEPA requires the government basically study any environmental impact from a project or from a decision or from a big rule that could occur.

Any giant project in the United States goes through this NEPA process. The federal government studies what the environmental impact of the project will be. Then it makes a decision about whether to approve the project. That decision has nothing to do with the study. Now, notionally, the study is supposed to inform the project.

the decision the federal government makes, the actual “can you build this, yes or no,” legally has no connection to the study. But it must conduct the study in order to make that decision.

that permitting reform is so tough for the Democratic coalition specifically is that this process of forcing the government to amend its studies of the environmental impact of various decisions is the main tool that environmental litigation groups like Earthjustice use to slow down fossil fuel projects and use to slow down large-scale chemical or industrial projects that they don’t think should happen.

when we talk about making this program faster, and when we talk about making it more immune to litigation, they see it as we’re going to take away their main tools to fight fossil fuel infrastructure

why there’s this gap between rhetoric and what’s actually being proposed is that the same tool that is slowing down the green build-out is also what’s slowing down the fossil fuel build-out

ROBINSON MEYER: They’re the classic conflict here between the environmental movement classic, let’s call it, which was “think globally, act locally,” which said “we’re going to do everything we can to preserve the local environment,” and what the environmental movement and the climate movement, let’s say, needs to do today, which is think globally, act with an eye to what we need globally as well, which is, in some cases, maybe welcome projects that may slightly reduce local environmental quality or may seem to reduce local environmental quality in the name of a decarbonized world.

Because if we fill the atmosphere with carbon, nobody’s going to get a good environment.

Michael Gerrard, who is professor at Columbia Law School. He’s a founder of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law there. It’s called “A Time for Triage,” and he has this sort of interesting argument that the environmental movement in general, in his view, is engaged in something he calls trade-off denial.

his view and the view of some people is that, look, the climate crisis is so bad that we just have to make those choices. We have to do things we would not have wanted to do to preserve something like the climate in which not just human civilization, but this sort of animal ecosystem, has emerged. But that’s hard, and who gets to decide which trade-offs to make?

what you’re not really seeing — not really, I would say, from the administration, even though they have some principles now; not really from California, though Gavin Newsom has a set of early things — is “this is what we think we need to make the I.R.A. happen on time, and this is how we’re going to decide what is a kind of project that gets this speedway through,” w

there’s a failure on the part of, let’s say, the environmental coalition writ large to have the courage to have this conversation and to sit down at a table and be like, “OK, we know that certain projects aren’t happening fast enough. We know that we need to build out faster. What could we actually do to the laws to be able to construct things faster and to meet our net-zero targets and to let the I.R.A. kind achieve what it could achieve?”

part of the issue is that we’re in this environment where Democrats control the Senate, Republicans control the House, and it feels very unlikely that you could just get “we are going to accelerate projects, but only those that are good for climate change,” into the law given that Republicans control the House.

part of the progressive fear here is that the right solutions must recognize climate change. Progressives are very skeptical that there are reforms that are neutral on the existence of climate change and whether we need to build faster to meet those demands that can pass through a Republican-controlled House.

one of the implications of that piece was it was maybe a huge mistake for progressives not to have figured out what they wanted here and could accept here, back when the negotiating partner was Joe Manchin.

Manchin’s bill is basically a set of moderate NEPA reforms and transmission reforms. Democrats, progressives refuse to move on it. Now, I do want to be fair here because I think Democrats absolutely should have seized on that opportunity, because it was the only moment when — we could tell already that Democrats — I mean, Democrats actually, by that moment, had lost the House.

I do want to be fair here that Manchin’s own account of what happened with this bill is that Senate Republicans killed it and that once McConnell failed to negotiate on the bill in December, Manchin’s bill was dead.

EZRA KLEIN: It died in both places.ROBINSON MEYER: It died in both places. I think that’s right.

Republicans already knew they were going to get the House, too, so they had less incentive to play along. Probably the time for this was October.

EZRA KLEIN: But it wasn’t like Democrats were trying to get this one done.

EZRA KLEIN: To your point about this was all coming down to the wire, Manchin could have let the I.R.A. pass many months before this, and they would have had more time to negotiate together, right? The fact that it was associated with Manchin in the way it was was also what made it toxic to progressives, who didn’t want to be held up by him anymore.

What becomes clear by the winter of this year, February, March of this year, is that as Democrats and Republicans begin to talk through this debt-ceiling process where, again, permitting was not the main focus. It was the federal budget. It was an entirely separate political process, basically.

EZRA KLEIN: I would say the core weirdness of the debt-ceiling fight was there was no main focus to it.

EZRA KLEIN: It wasn’t like past ones where it was about the debt. Republicans did some stuff to cut spending. They also wanted to cut spending on the I.R.S., which would increase the debt, right? It was a total mishmash of stuff happening in there.

That alchemy goes into the final debt-ceiling negotiations, which are between principals in Congress and the White House, and what we get is a set of basically the NEPA reforms in Joe Manchin’s bill from last year and the Mountain Valley pipeline, the thing that environmentalists were focused on blocking, and effectively no transmission reforms.

the set of NEPA reforms that were just enacted, that are now in the law, include — basically, the word reasonable has been inserted many times into NEPA. [LAUGHS] So the law, instead of saying the government has to study all environmental impacts, now it has to study reasonable environmental impacts.

this is a kind of climate win — has to study the environmental impacts that could result from not doing a project. The kind of average NEPA environmental impact study today is 500 pages and takes 4.5 years to produce. Under the law now, the government is supposed to hit a page limit of 150 to 300 pages.

there’s a study that’s very well cited by progressives from three professors in Utah who basically say, well, when you look at the National Forest Service, and you look at this 40,000 NEPA decisions, what mostly holds up these NEPA decisions is not like, oh, there’s too many requirements or they had to study too many things that don’t matter. It’s just there wasn’t enough staff and that staffing is primarily the big impediment. And so on the one hand, I think that’s probably accurate in that these are, in some cases — the beast has been starved, and these are very poorly staffed departments

The main progressive demand was just “we must staff it better.”

But if it’s taking you this much staffing and that much time to say something doesn’t apply to you, maybe you have a process problem —ROBINSON MEYER: Yes.EZRA KLEIN: — and you shouldn’t just throw endless resources at a broken process, which brings me — because, again, you can fall into this and never get out — I think, to the bigger critique her

these bills are almost symbolic because there’s so much else happening, and it’s really the way all this interlocks and the number of possible choke points, that if you touch one of them or even you streamline one of them, it doesn’t necessarily get you that f

“All told, over 60 federal permitting programs operate in the infrastructure approval regime, and that is just the federal system. State and local approvals and impact assessments could also apply to any project.”

their view is that under this system, it’s simply not possible to build the amount of decarbonization infrastructure we need at the pace we need it; that no amount of streamlining NEPA or streamlining, in California, CEQA will get you there; that we basically have been operating under what they call an environmental grand bargain dating back to the ’70s, where we built all of these processes to slow things down and to clean up the air and clean up the water.

we accepted this trade-off of slower building, quite a bit slower building, for a cleaner environment. And that was a good trade. It was addressing the problems of that era

now we have the problems of this era, which is we need to unbelievably, rapidly build out decarbonization infrastructure to keep the climate from warming more than we can handle and that we just don’t have a legal regime or anything.

You would need to do a whole new grand bargain for this era. And I’ve not seen that many people say that, but it seems true to me

the role that America had played in the global economy in the ’50s and ’60s where we had a ton of manufacturing, where we were kind of the factory to a world rebuilding from World War II, was no longer tenable and that, also, we wanted to focus on more of these kind of high-wage, what we would now call knowledge economy jobs.That was a large economic transition happening in the ’70s and ’80s, and it dovetailed really nicely with the environmental grand bargain.

At some point, the I.R.A. recognizes that that environmental grand bargain is no longer operative, right, because it says, we’re going to build all this big fiscal fixed infrastructure in the United States, we’re going to become a manufacturing giant again, but there has not been a recognition among either party of what exactly that will mean and what will be required to have it take hold.

It must require a form of on-the-ground, inside-the-fenceline, “at the site of the power plant” pollution control technology. The only way to do that, really, is by requiring carbon capture and requiring the large construction of major industrial infrastructure at many, many coal plants and natural gas plants around the country in order to capture carbon so it doesn’t enter the atmosphere, and so we don’t contribute to climate change. That is what the Supreme Court has ruled. Until that body changes, that is going to be the law.

So the E.P.A. has now, last month, proposed a new rule under the Clean Air Act that is going to require coal plants and some natural gas plants to install carbon capture technology to do basically what the Supreme Court has all but kind of required the E.P.A. to do

the E.P.A. has to demonstrate, in order to kind of make this rule the law and in order to make this rule pass muster with the Supreme Court, that this is tenable, that this is the best available and technologically feasible option

that means you actually have to allow carbon capture facilities to get built and you have to create a legal process that will allow carbon capture facilities to get built. And that means you need to be able to tell a power plant operator that if they capture carbon, there’s a way they can inject it back into the ground, the thing that they’re supposed to do with it.

Well, E.P.A. simultaneously has only approved the kind of well that you need to inject carbon that you’ve captured from a coal factory or a natural gas line back into the ground. It’s called a Class 6 well. The E.P.A. has only ever approved two Class 6 wells. It takes years for the E.P.A. to approve a Class 6 well.

And environmental justice groups really, really oppose these Class 6 wells because they see any carbon capture as an effort to extend the life of the fossil fuel infrastructure

The issue here is that it seems like C.C.S., carbon capture, is going to be essential to how the U.S. decarbonizes. Legally, we have no other choice because of the constraints the Supreme Court has placed on the E.P.A.. At the same time, environmental justice groups, and big green groups to some extent, oppose building out any C.C.S.

to be fair to them, right, they would say there are other ways to decarbonize. That may not be the way we’ve chosen because the politics weren’t there for it, but there are a lot of these groups that believe you could have 100 percent renewables, do not use all that much carbon capture, right? They would have liked to see a different decarbonization path taken too. I’m not sure that path is realistic.

what you do see are environmental groups opposing making it possible to build C.C.S. anywhere in the country at all.

EZRA KLEIN: The only point I’m making here is I think this is where you see a compromise a lot of them didn’t want to make —ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly, yeah.EZRA KLEIN: — which is a decarbonization strategy that actually does extend the life cycle of a lot of fossil fuel infrastructure using carbon capture. And because they never bought onto it, they’re still using the pathway they have to try to block it. The problem is that’s part of the path that’s now been chosen. So if you block it, you just don’t decarbonize. It’s not like you get the 100 percent renewable strategy.

ROBINSON MEYER: Exactly. The bargain that will emerge from that set of actions and that set of coalitional trade-offs is we will simply keep running this, and we will not cap it.

What could be possible is that progressives and Democrats and the E.P.A. turns around and says, “Oh, that’s fine. You can do C.C.S. You just have to cap every single stationary source in the country.” Like, “You want to do C.C.S.? We totally agree. Essential. You must put CSS infrastructure on every power plant, on every factory that burns fossil fuels, on everything.”

If progressives were to do that and were to get it into the law — and there’s nothing the Supreme Court has said, by the way, that would limit progressives from doing that — the upshot would be we shut down a ton more stationary sources and a ton more petrochemical refineries and these bad facilities that groups don’t want than we would under the current plan.

what is effectively going to happen is that way more factories and power plants stay open and uncapped than would be otherwise.

EZRA KLEIN: So Republican-controlled states are just on track to get a lot more of it. So the Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that red states will get $623 billion in investments by 2030 compared to $354 billion for blue states.

why are red states getting so much more of this money?

ROBINSON MEYER: I think there’s two reasons. I think, first of all, red states have been more enthusiastic about getting the money. They’re the ones giving away the tax credits. They have a business-friendly environment. And ultimately, the way many, many of these red-state governors see it is that these are just businesses.

I think the other thing is that these states, many of them, are right-to-work states. And so they might pay their workers less. They certainly face much less risk financially from a unionization campaign in their state.

regardless of the I.R.A., that’s where manufacturing and industrial investment goes in the first place. And that’s where it’s been going for 20 years because of the set of business-friendly and local subsidies and right-to-work policies.

I think the administration would say, we want this to be a big union-led effort. We want it to go to the Great Lakes states that are our political firewall.

and it would go to red states, because that’s where private industry has been locating since the ’70s and ’80s, and it would go to the Southeast, right, and the Sunbelt, and that that wouldn’t be so bad because then you would get a dynamic where red-state senators, red-state representatives, red-state governors would want to support the transition further and would certainly not support the repeal of the I.R.A. provisions and the repeal of climate provisions, and that you’d get this kind of nice vortex of the investment goes to red states, red states feel less antagonistic toward climate policies, more investment goes to red states. Red-state governors might even begin to support environmental regulation because that basically locks in benefits and advantages to the companies located in their states already.

I think what you see is that Republicans are increasingly warming to EV investment, and it’s actually building out renewables and actually building out clean electricity generation, where you see them fighting harder.

The other way that permitting matters — and this gets into the broader reason why private investment was generally going to red states and generally going to the Sunbelt — is that the Sunbelt states — Georgia, Texas — it’s easier to be there as a company because housing costs are lower and because the cost of living is lower in those states.

it’s also partially because the Sunbelt and the Southeast, it was like the last part of the country to develop, frankly, and there’s just a ton more land around all the cities, and so you can get away with the sprawling suburban growth model in those citie

It’s just cheaper to keep building suburbs there.

EZRA KLEIN: So how are you seeing the fights over these rare-earth metals and the effort to build a safe and, if not domestic, kind of friend-shored supply chain there?

Are we going to be able to source some of these minerals from the U.S.? That process seems to be proceeding but going slowly. There are some minerals we’re not going to be able to get from the United States at all and are going to have to get from our allies and partners across the world.

The kind of open question there is what exactly is the bargain we’re going to strike with countries that have these critical minerals, and will it be fair to those countries?

it isn’t to say that I think the I.R.A. on net is going to be bad for other countries. I just think we haven’t really figured out what deal and even what mechanisms we can use across the government to strike deals with other countries to mine the minerals in those countries while being fair and just and creating the kind of economic arrangement that those countries want.

, let’s say we get the minerals. Let’s say we learn how to refine them. There is many parts of the battery and many parts of EVs and many, many subcomponents in these green systems that there’s not as strong incentive to produce in the U.S.

at the same time, there’s a ton of technology. One answer to that might be to say, OK, well, what the federal government should do is just make it illegal for any of these battery makers or any of these EV companies to work with Chinese companies, so then we’ll definitely establish this parallel supply chain. We’ll learn how to make cathodes and anodes. We’ll figure it out

The issue is that there’s technology on the frontier that only Chinese companies have, and U.S. automakers need to work with those companies in order to be able to compete with them eventually.

EZRA KLEIN: How much easier would it be to achieve the I.R.A.’s goals if America’s relationship with China was more like its relationship with Germany?

ROBINSON MEYER: It would be significantly easier, and I think we’d view this entire challenge very differently, because China, as you said, not only is a leader in renewable energy. It actually made a lot of the important technological gains over the past 15 years to reducing the cost of solar and wind. It really did play a huge role on the supply side of reducing the cost of these technologies.

If we could approach that, if China were like Germany, if China were like Japan, and we could say, “Oh, this is great. China’s just going to make all these things. Our friend, China, is just going to make all these technologies, and we’re going to import them.

So it refines 75 percent of the polysilicon that you need for solar, but the machines that do the refining, 99 percent of them are made in China. I think it would be reckless for the U.S. to kind of rely on a single country and for the world to rely on a single country to produce the technologies that we need for decarbonization and unwise, regardless of our relationship with that country.

We want to geographically diversify the supply chain more, but it would be significantly easier if we did not have to also factor into this the possibility that the US is going to need to have an entirely separate supply chain to make use of for EVs, solar panels, wind turbines, batteries potentially in the near-term future.

, what are three other books they should read?

The first book is called “The End of the World” by Peter Brannen. It’s a book that’s a history of mass extinctions, the Earth’s five mass extinctions, and, actually, why he doesn’t think we’re currently in a mass extinction or why, at least, things would need to go just as bad as they are right now for thousands and thousands of years for us to be in basically the sixth extinction.

The book’s amazing for two reasons. The first is that it is the first that really got me to understand deep time.

he explains how one kind of triggered the next one. It is also an amazing book for understanding the centrality of carbon to Earth’s geological history going as far back as, basically, we can track.

“Climate Shock” by Gernot Wagner and Marty Weitzman. It’s about the economics of climate change

Marty Weitzman, who I think, until recently, was kind of the also-ran important economist of climate change. Nordhaus was the famous economist. He was the one who got all attention. He’s the one who won the Nobel.

He focuses on risk and that climate change is specifically bad because it will damage the environment, because it will make our lives worse, but it’s really specifically bad because we don’t know how bad it will be

it imposes all these huge, high end-tail risks and that blocking those tail risks is actually the main thing we want to do with climate policy.

That is I think, in some ways, what has become the U.S. approach to climate change and, to some degree, to the underlying economic thinking that drives even the I.R.A., where we want to just cut off these high-end mega warming scenarios. And this is a fantastic explanation of that particular way of thinking and of how to apply that way of thinking to climate change and also to geoengineerin

The third book, a little controversial, is called “Shorting the Grid” by Meredith Angwin

her argument is basically that electricity markets are not the right structure to organize our electricity system, and because we have chosen markets as a structured, organized electricity system in many states, we’re giving preferential treatment to natural gas and renewables, two fuels that I think climate activists may feel very different ways about, instead of coal, which she does think we should phase out, and, really, nuclear

By making it easier for renewables and natural gas to kind of accept these side payments, we made them much more profitable and therefore encouraged people to build more of them and therefore underinvested in the forms of generation, such as nuclear, that actually make most of their money by selling electrons to the grid, where they go to people’s homes.

does not allow "anyone" to travel to the US — travellers from the seven majority-Muslim countries

must still hold valid visas or green cards

. The State Department also announced on Saturday that it would allow people with valid visas into the country, and would reinstate visas that had been revoked

"In our country, no one is above the law and that includes the president,"

"When a country is no longer able to say who can, and who cannot, come in & out, especially for reasons of safety &. security - big trouble!" Trump tweeted. The president also leveled attacks at the "FAKE NEWS @nytimes" and tweeted out his campaign slogan, "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!" as part of his Saturday morning barrage.

President Donald Trump on Saturday blasted the federal judge who issued a nationwide hold on the executive order

"The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!" Trump tweeted.

Trump continued his tirade into the afternoon,

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Opponents of Mr. Obama’s climate policy called the court’s action historic.“We are thrilled that the Supreme Court realized the rule’s immediate impact and froze its implementation, protecting workers and saving countless dollars as our fight against its legality continues,” said Patrick Morrisey, the attorney general of West Virginia, which has led the 29-state legal challenge.

The challenged regulation, which was issued last summer by the Environmental Protection Agency, requires states to make major cuts to greenhouse gas pollution created by electric power plants, the nation’s largest source of such emissions. The plan could transform the nation’s electricity system, cutting emissions from existing power plants by a third by 2030, from a 2005 baseline, by closing hundreds of heavily polluting coal-fired plants and increasing production of wind and solar power. Continue reading the main story

“Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of our day, and it is already affecting national public health, welfare and the environment,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. wrote in a brief urging the Supreme Court to reject a request for a stay while the case moves forward.

The regulation calls for states to submit compliance plans by September, though they may seek a two-year extension. The first deadline for power plants to reduce their emissions is in 2022, with full compliance not required until 2030.The states challenging the regulation, led mostly by Republicans and many with economies that rely on coal mining or coal-fired power, sued to stop what they called “the most far-reaching and burdensome rule the E.P.A. has ever forced onto the states.”

The states urged the Supreme Court to take immediate action to block what they called a “power grab” under which “the federal environmental regulator seeks to reorganize the energy grids in nearly every state in the nation.” Though the first emission reduction obligations do not take effect until 2022, the states said they had already started to spend money and shift resources.

a celebration of aggressive masculinity,

the best people of the world.”

Wallace was a noxious segregationist, but his racism was bound up in a local and regional chauvinism, a skepticism of centralized power and far-off Washington elites. Not so Trump:

One could even go a little further. A great deal has been written on the question of why America didn’t produce an enduring socialist or Communist mass movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

as opposed to the “fascism” that liberals see lurking in every Republican president) is equally striking.

that inoculated our politics against fascism’s appeal.

nd while he has a number of obvious similarities to past right-populist candidates, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the Alabama governor George Wallace,

e fascist temptations can creep in.

He plainly regards his semi-professed Christianity purely instrumentally and has little time for the religious right’s causes.

Not so Trump: He clearly doesn’t care a whit for limited government or libertarianism, and he’s delighted

“beat” by other nations and need to start beating them instead, his surprisingly deft exploitation of blue-collar economic anxieties, his dark references to Mexican “rapists”

he can do things better, that centralization is fine and dandy so long as you have the right Duce

“proto-fascist” zone on the political spectrum than either the average American conservative

Should Trump’s rivals imitate the “fascism” whisperers in their party and start attacking Trump as a

Trump may indeed be a little fascistic, but that sinister resemblance is just one part of his reality-

He isn’t actually building a fascist mass movement (he hasn’t won a primary yet!)

still several degrees of ugly away from the actual fascist move,

precisely because Trump doesn’t have many of the core commitments that have tended to inoculate conservatives against fascism, it’s still quite likely that the Republican Party is inoculated against him

but they should make it awfully difficult for him to get to 40 or 50 percent. And a somewhat fascist-looking candidate who

Finally, freaking out over Trump-the-fascist is a good way for the political class to ignore the legitimate reasons he’s gotten this far —

the reasonable skepticism about the bipartisan consensus favoring ever more mass low-skilled immigration

then tarring his supporters with the brush of Mussolini and Der Führer right now seems like a shortsighted step

The best way to stop a proto-fascist, in the long run, is not to scream “Hitler!” on a crowded debate stage. It’s to make sure that he never has a point.

The outcome undermined one of the few areas of international cooperation in seeking accountability for atrocities committed in the Syria war and cast fresh doubt on whether users of chemical weapons in the conflict will ever be held to account.

“Let’s not pretend we don’t understand what’s taking place here,” Mr. Nebenzia told the council on Tuesday shortly before the vote was held. “It’s intended, once again, to show up and dishonor Russia.”

“Russia has made it clear that it does not care about stopping the use of chemical weapons in the world.”

The Russians had argued that the panel’s methods were faulty.

The auction was but a chapter, albeit a devastating chapter, in their long history extending backwards to the African continent and forward to the present. The auction block neither erased that history nor eradicated their future.

In my study of census records, birth and death certificates, I found 15 percent of the original group sold on the auction block in the historical record. I also found several of their living descendants. Some moved West or during the Great Migration of the 1920’s, moved North in an attempt to make a new life.

ass incarceration and its disproportionate effect on Black and brown populations, in particular, is a legacy of this past. From the perspective of prisoners, perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of incarceration is the separation of families.

In the 21st century, they are still making strides towards that city called Freedom. They have not reached there yet, as many of today’s sports heroes on bended knee are daring to say, but they are determined to get there on this side of heaven or the other.And as they press toward that mark, they inspire us with their gift of resilience.

Google’s product managers told me in an interview that Chrome prioritizes privacy choices and controls, and they’re working on new ones for cookies. But they also said they have to get the right balance with a “healthy Web ecosystem” (read: ad business).

Firefox’s product managers told me they don’t see privacy as an “option” relegated to controls. They’ve launched a war on surveillance, starting this month with “enhanced tracking protection” that blocks nosy cookies by default on new Firefox installations.

They’re everywhere — one study found third-party tracking cookies on 92 percent of websites.

what responsibility does a browser have in protecting us from code that isn’t doing much more than spying?

In 2015, Mozilla debuted a version of Firefox that included anti-tracking tec

that’s what it activated this month on all websites. This isn’t about blocking ads — those still come through. Rather, Firefox is parsing cookies to decide which ones to keep for critical site functions and which ones to block for spying

Apple’s Safari browser, used on iPhones, also began applying “intelligent tracking protection” to cookies in 2017, using an algorithm to decide which ones were bad.

Google itself, through its Doubleclick and other ad businesses, is the No. 1 cookie maker — the Mrs. Fields of the Web

“Our viewpoint is to deal with the biggest problem first, but anticipate where the ecosystem will shift and work on protecting against those things as well,” said Peter Dolanjski, Firefox’s product lead.

Google quietly began signing Gmail users into Chrome last fall. Google says the Chrome shift didn’t cause anybody’s browsing history to be “synced” unless they specifically opted in — but I found mine was being sent to Google and don’t recall ever asking for extra surveillance. (You can turn off the Gmail auto-login by searching “Gmail” in Chrome settings and switching off “Allow Chrome sign-in.”)

And as a nonprofit, it earns money when people make searches in the browser and click on ads — which means its biggest source of income is Google. Mozilla’s chief executive says the company is exploring new paid privacy services to diversify its income.

Its biggest risk is that Firefox might someday run out of steam in its battle with the Chrome behemoth. Even though it’s the No. 2 desktop browser, with about 10 percent of the market, major sites could decide to drop support, leaving Firefox scrambling.

Concannon said it was “shameful” the UN couldn’t come up with even a tenth of the amount originally promised. “The underspend idea wasn’t supposed to be the end result, but low-hanging fruit.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokesperson said: “The UK recognises the devastating impact that cholera has had on the Haitian people, and we welcome the crucial role the UN is playing to eradicate it. The UK is the fourth largest donor to the UN trust fund, in addition to other contributions to tackling cholera in Haiti.“It is for each UN member state to decide how to use returned unspent peacekeeping funds. We call on all countries to volunteer contributions to the UN trust fund from whatever source is appropriate for them.”

The statement by the former president came shortly before President Joe Biden publicly commented on the shooting

The attack, which came days after another shooting rampage in Georgia that left eight dead, has renewed calls from lawmakers for federal gun control reform. close dialogSign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Sign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.Please enter aboveSign me upNo thanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.By subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN What Matters NewsletterEvery day we summarize What Matters and deliver it straight to your inbox.bx-row bx-row-image bx-row-image-d

During his time in the White House, Obama urged Congress to take up gun control legislation following several mass shootings around the country, though no significant congressional action was ever taken.

Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday called the shooting "absolutely tragic," but ignored a question about the future of gun control during a swearing-in ceremony for William Burns as CIA director.

Earlier this month, the House passed H.R. 8 that would expand background checks on all commercial gun sales and H.R. 1146 to try and close what's known as the "Charleston Loophole," which allows some firearms to be transferred by licensed gun dealers before the required background checks are completed.