Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged scale

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
pier-paolo

Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire - mrdowling.com - 0 views

www.mrdowling.com/703-charlemagne.html

shared by pier-paolo on 04 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • After the fall of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, Charlemagne built an empire that extended more than 800 miles from east to west. Though he ruled in an era many scholars describe as a “Dark Age," Charlemagne made the capital of his vast kingdom a center of learning.
  • Charlemagne was a Frank. The Franks were a Germanic tribe that developed in present-day France.
  • For many years after assuming the throne in 768, Charlemagne led his army on military campaigns throughout Western Europe, expanding the Frankish kingdom as he vanquished his foes. During his reign, Charlemagne doubled the size of Frankish territory to include present-day France, northern Spain, Germany, and Italy.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The Frankish kingdom eventually included people of diverse cultures who spoke many languages, so Charlemagne appointed native members of the lands he conquered to administer the provinces in his name.
  • he set up schools throughout his empire, and invited scholars from throughout Europe to establish a palace school in Aachen, the German city where he moved his capital.
  • In 800, Charlemagne traveled to Rome to celebrate Christmas with Pope Leo III. As Charlemagne rose from prayer, Leo placed a crown on Charlemagne’s head and proclaimed him “Augustus,” emperor of the “Holy Roman Empire.” The coronation united Christendom under Charlemagne’s rule, but it also troubled the newly crowned emperor. If the Pope had the power to proclaim Charlemagne as King, the Pope might also have the right to remove his power.
  • The empire Charlemagne created crumbled soon after his death and the promise of returning the glory of Rome to Western Europe soon faded
  • Francis II, who ruled until the early nineteenth century, was the last monarch to call himself the Holy Roman Emperor. But after a defeat by Napoleon’s army, Francis renounced his title
katherineharron

Georgia's new law suppressing the vote is a victory for Trump - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

georgia

shared by katherineharron on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy that raged through Trump's presidency and during the insurrection he incited against the US Capitol -- and now threatens to taint future elections as Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden said at the first news conference of his presidency that afternoon. The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • ...31 more annotations...
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • The Georgia bill is only one example of GOP efforts in multiple states -- including many crucial electoral battlegrounds -- to hold back a diverse demographic tide in cities that favor Democrats, which critics see as an attempt to cement minority rule in the United States.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1245919 *//* custom css from creative 47804 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1245919-spin { from {
  • "This should be marked as Exhibit A in making the case that discriminatory voter suppression is alive and well, and makes clear why we need federal voting rights legislation to stop these laws in their tracks," Hewitt said. "We stand ready to take action and protect the fundamental right to vote through the courts."
  • as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber. But Biden declined to reveal his strategy for getting the voting rights bill into law.
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • In a statement to CNN, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican who defied Trump's pleas in a telephone call to find votes to overturn Biden's victory, said he would still stand up for voter freedoms but did not criticize the law."In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • Black voters hampered by the restrictions of voting in urban areas have often found themselves lining up for hours to vote in inclement weather. The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • Former President Donald Trump's campaign of lies about a stolen election just delivered a huge victory with a new Georgia law that could suppress the votes of many of the citizens who helped eject him from the White House.
  • Republican state lawmakers rushed through a broad law Thursday making it harder to vote that disproportionately targets Democratic and Black voters
  • The move confirms the Peach State as the epicenter of the fight for American democracy
  • The Georgia law raises the question of whether election safeguards that prevented Trump's energetic efforts to rig the 2020 White House race after the fact in the state will stand firm in future elections amid false claims of electoral fraud by a president.
  • "What I'm worried about is how un-American this whole initiative is. It's sick. It's sick," President Joe Biden
  • Republicans in multiple states pursue new laws to limit voting.
  • Georgia Republicans also lost two US Senate seats that handed Democrats control of the 50-50 chamber on the basis of huge Black turnout in runoff elections in January.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.//assets.bounceexchang
  • After leaving office, Trump demanded that Republican state legislatures pass laws to ban mail-in voting and to prevent courts from weighing in on electoral disputes.
  • the former President has made the acceptance of his false conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 2020 a litmus test for Republican candidates
  • Iowa has already passed a measure to limit absentee balloting and voting hours. Texas is taking steps to cut voting hours and absentee balloting in big Democratic cities like Houston. New voting laws are being pushed by Republicans in another swing state Trump lost, Arizona.
  • GOP leaders justify the voter suppression measures by arguing that they are needed to crack down on fraud and to restore the public's faith that US elections are fair. But multiple courts and Trump's own Justice Department found there was no widespread electoral fraud in 2020.
  • voter mistrust was largely fueled by Trump's blatantly false claims
  • Georgia's action threw a political grenade into the debate over a Washington campaign by many Democrats to abolish Senate supermajority rules that Republicans could use to block their sweeping election bill, known as the For the People Act.
  • The drama in the Georgia Legislature unfolded as Biden condemned restrictive state legislation as a remnant of the Jim Crow era that institutionalized racism and hinted that he could ultimately back abolishing the Senate filibuster to get the Democrats' House-passed bill through the chamber.
  • The law allows any Georgian to make unlimited challenges to voter registrations, and, incredibly, makes it a misdemeanor crime for anyone to offer food and water to voters stuck in long lines to cast ballots.
  • The clear targeting of African American voters in Georgia and elsewhere recalls some of the ugliest racial episodes of America's past, and is fueling claims of open Republican racism.
  • The Georgia law was quickly signed by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who incurred the wrath of Trump last year for refusing to play along with his attempt to override Biden's victory by 12,000 votes in the state, which was confirmed by several audits.
  • "In implementing this law, I will ensure that no eligible Georgia voter is hindered in exercising their right to vote, and I will continue to further secure our elections so that every Georgian can have confidence in the results of our elections," Raffensperger said.
  • Kemp is up for reelection in 2022 and could face Democrat Stacey Abrams, a former state lawmaker and prominent voting rights advocate
  • "As the FBI continue to round up seditionists who spilled blood to defend a lie about our elections, Republican state leaders willfully undermine democracy by giving themselves authority to overturn results they do not like," Abrams said in a statement. "Now, more than ever, Americans must demand federal action to protect voting rights as we continue to fight against these blatantly unconstitutional efforts that are nothing less than Jim Crow 2.0."
  • the measure directly targeted voters of color who took part in record numbers in the 2020 election.
  • The For the People Act awaiting action in the Senate would create automatic voter registration nationwide and restore portions of the Voting Rights Act that were gutted by the Supreme Court. It would also strengthen mail-in voting and permit early voting across the country, while taking steps to cut wait times at the polls.
Javier E

Opinion | The Unsettling Truth About Trump's First Great Victory - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cial-resentment-2016-2020.html

trump appeal support demographics racism resentment GOP trumpism

shared by Javier E on 30 Mar 23 - No Cached
  • The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level
  • We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups
  • however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • How could these two seemingly contradictory statements both be true?
  • respondents in 2016 and 2020 reported more moderate views, on average, than in previous elections. As a result, Trump improved the most over previous Republicans by capturing the votes of a larger number of people who report racially moderate views
  • the number of people scoring at moderate levels of racial resentment increased. Trump was not as popular among this voting bloc, compared to those with high racial resentment. But because this group is larger, whites with moderate racial resentment scores ended up contributing more net votes to Trump.
  • The point about Trump voters being less racially resentful on average than voters for previous Republican candidates, while likely true, should, I think, be interpreted as a statement about why it’s important to be mindful of over-time changes in groups’ sizes in the population,
  • Trump’s supporters were less xenophobic than prior Republican candidates’, less sexist, had lower animus to minority groups, and lower levels of racial resentment. Far from deplorables, Trump voters were, on average, more tolerant and understanding than voters for prior Republican candidates.
  • The data, Grimmer continued,point to two important and undeniable facts. First, analyses focused on vote choice alone cannot tell us where candidates receive support. We must know the size of groups and who turns out to vote. And we cannot confuse candidates’ rhetoric with the voters who support them, because voters might support the candidate despite the rhetoric, not because of it.
  • Several pieces of research into the 2016 election, including our book, “Identity Crisis,” and this interesting paper by Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau, find that people’s vote choices in that election were more strongly related to their views on “identity-inflected issues” than they had been in prior elections. That is why our book argues that these issues are central to how we interpret the outcome in 2016.
  • the Grimmer paper in fact provides a key corrective to the debate over the 2016 election. In an email, Kane pointed to a key section that reads:
  • election-night pundits and even some academics have claimed that Trump’s victory was the result of appealing to white Americans’ racist and xenophobic attitudes. We show this conventional wisdom is (at best) incomplete
  • The Grimmer paper, Engelhardt continued, “encourages us to take a step back and focus on the big picture for understanding elections: where do most votes come from and are these patterns consistent across elections?”
  • understanding election outcomes requires not just understanding what contributes to vote choice (e.g., racial group attachments, racial prejudice), but also how many people with that particular attitude turned out to vote and what share of the electorate that group makes up.
  • Trump, Westwood concluded, “found support from both racists and moderates, but with the pool of racist voters shrinking, it is clear this is not a path to future victory.”
  • Discussion of racial resentment driving support for Trump could miss how folks low in racial resentment were actually critical to the election outcome. The paper makes just this clarifying point, noting, for instance, that White Democrats low in racial resentment were even more influential in contributing votes to Clinton in 2016 than to Obama in 2012. Change between 2012 and 2016 is not exclusively due to the behavior of the most prejudiced.
  • “It is a nice reminder for scholars and, especially, the media, that it is important to think carefully about base rates.”
  • Donald Trump’s candidacy in 2016 was a stress test for Republican partisanship, and Republican partisanship passed with flying colors
  • The election was close enough for Trump to win because the vast majority of G.O.P. voters found the idea of either sitting it out or voting for a Democrat they had spent 20+ years disliking so distasteful that Trump’s limitations, liabilities and overt racism and misogyny were not a deal-breaker.
  • Theodoridis noted that his oneminor methodological and measurement critique is that this sort of analysis has to take seriously what the racial resentment scale actually means
  • It may be that race is actually quite salient for those in the middle part of the scale, but they are just less overtly racist than those at the top of the scale.
  • and NOT as a statement about Trump being successful in attracting racially liberal voters (indeed, those lowest in racial resentment turned away from him, per Grimmer-Marble-Tanigawa-Lau’s own findings).
  • It is an interesting academic exercise to predict who will win the vote within a specific group, but it is more fundamental to elections to understand how many voters candidates will gain from each group
  • the important contribution from Grimmer et al is that there was a big change in the attitudes of the white electorate. A small number of whites with high levels of racial resentment did support Trump in 2016 at a higher rate than in prior elections, but the bulk of support for Trump came from more moderate whites. Trump managed to pull in support from racists, but he was able to pull in much more support from economically disadvantaged whites.
  • The Grimmer paper, according to Westwood, has significant implications for those making “general claims about the future Republican Party,” specifically challenging those who believe
  • that Republicans can continue to win by appealing to white Americans’ worst attitudes and instincts. While it is true Trump support is largest for the most racist voters, this group is a shrinking part of the electorate
  • Republicans, as Grimmer et al. show, must figure out how to appeal to moderate whites who hold more moderate attitudes in order to win
  • Also, the meaning of the racial resentment scale changes over time in ways that are not independent of politics, and especially of presidential politics. Position on the scale is not immutable in the way some descriptive characteristics may be.
  • it’s critical to avoid the idea that there is a single skeleton key that can explain all the varied undercurrents that led to Trump’s 2016 victory, or that any one paper will provide a definitive explanation
  • One clear benefit emerging from the continuing study of Trump’s 2016 victory is a better understanding of the complexity and nuance of what brought it about.
  • the presence of racial resentment among Republican voters emerged long before Trump ran for president, while such resentment among Democratic voters has been sharply declining
  • racial resentment didn’t do more for Trump than it did for Romney. The highly racially resentful have, with reason, been voting for Republicans for a long time
  • Trump’s more explicit use of race didn’t make supporters more racially resentful. Levels of racial resentment among Republicans are no higher now than they were before Trump. In fact, they are slightly lower
  • And the highly racially resentful already knew full well that their home was in the G.O.P.
  • While the focus of attention has been on those who fall at the high end of the distribution on racial resentment
  • Almost all the change has taken place among Democrats, as they moved to lower and lower levels of resentment
  • In a statistical sense, the fact that there are now so many more people at the low end of the distribution than before will produce a larger coefficient for the effect of racial resentment on voting behavior.
  • that does not mean that those high in racial resentment are now even more likely to vote for Republicans or that there are more people high in resentment
  • there are more people low in resentment than before and that they are even less likely to vote for Republicans than before. So the low end of the scale is doing the work.
  • my own view is that Grimmer, Marble and Tanigawa-Lau have made a significant contribution to understanding the Trump phenomenon.
  • Most important, they make the case that explanations of Trump’s victory pointing to the role of those at the extremes on measures of racial resentment and sexism, while informative, are in their own way too comforting, fostering the belief that Trump’s triumph was the product of voters who have drifted far from the American mainstream.
  • In fact, the new analysis suggests that Trumpism has found fertile ground across a broad swath of the electorate, including many firmly in the mainstream. That Trump could capture the hearts and minds of these voters suggests that whatever he represents beyond racial resentment — anger, chaos, nihilism, hostility — is more powerful than many recognize or acknowledge
Javier E

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Robinson Meyer - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...transcript-robinson-meyer.html

transition energy policy history environmentalism us IRA implementation

shared by Javier E on 08 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • Implementation matters, but it’s harder to cover because it’s happening in all parts of the country simultaneously. There isn’t a huge Republican-Democratic fight over it, so there isn’t the conflict that draws the attention to it
  • we sort of implicitly treat policy like it’s this binary one-zero condition. One, you pass a bill, and the thing is going to happen. Zero, you didn’t, and it won’t.
  • ROBINSON MEYER: You can almost divide the law up into different kind of sectors, right? You have the renewable build-out. You have EVs. You have carbon capture. You have all these other decarbonizing technologies the law is trying to encourage
  • ...184 more annotations...
  • 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.
katherineharron

US coronavirus: America is at a crossroads in this pandemic as Covid-19 deaths near 500... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 22 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • On the brink of a devastating milestone -- 500,000 US Covid-19 deaths -- the US is at a crossroads in the course of this pandemic.
  • And while vaccinations slowly increase, some Americans say they won't get a Covid-19 vaccine -- hurting the chances of herd immunity and hindering a return to normal life.
  • More than 43.6 million Americans have received at least one dose of their two-dose vaccines, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. close dialogCovid-19Your local resource.Set your location and log in to find local resources and information on Covid-19 in your area.Please enter aboveSet Locationclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1191325 *//* custom css from creative 50769 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-input {border-color: white !important;border-width: 1px !important;background-color: white !important;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12) !important;}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { color: #e53841 !important; font-size: 11px !important; position: absolute !important; bottom: -1.8em !important;} @media screen and (max-width:736px) { .bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-vtext {font-size: 10px !important; }}.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-row-validation .bx-el::-webkit-input-placeholder { color: #e53841 !important;}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1191325 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 270px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: white;background-size: contain;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(213, 213, 213);border-width: 1px 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 200px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-image: url(//assets.bounceexchange.com/assets/uploads/clients/340/creatives/79b9f84d1816b04c777d4e02a8d21b2d.jpg);background-position: 95% 15%;background-size: 140px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 8px 5px 5px 8px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 25px 15px 20px 15px;vertical-align: middle;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 24px;height: 24px;stroke-width: 3px;stroke: #d3d2d2;stroke-linecap: round;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 22px;height: 22px;top: 3px;right: 3px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-group-1191325-YCHCmvQ {width: 60%;text-align: left;padding: 0 0 0 25px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-group-1191325-YCHCmvQ {width: 100%;padding: 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO {width: 100%;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;color: #e53841;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: .3px;font-size: 34px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-G5NQCjO> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG {width: 100%;padding: 3px 0 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG {width: 280px;padding: 4px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 700;color: #39373a;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: .3px;font-size: 34px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-ACplpBG> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT {padding: 18px 0 22px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT {width: 100%;padding: 12px 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 16.5px;color: #818287;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-yrLQsfT> *:first-child {font-size: 14px;line-height: 1.25;letter-spacing: -.45px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 10px 14px;border-width: 1px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 500;font-size: 19px;color: #818287;border-color: #f4f4f4;border-radius: 8px 0 0 8px;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.12);background-color: #f4f4f4;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-has-text.bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 10px 14px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el::-webkit-input-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:-moz-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el::-moz-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:-ms-input-placeholder {color: #818287;font-weight: 500;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el:focus {border-color: white;background-color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 9px;font-size: 15px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-has-text.bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD .bx-el {padding: 9px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD {width: 255px;padding: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-nn3P7SD {width: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS {width: 150px;padding: 0;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS {width: 140px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 17px;letter-spacing: .3px;border-color: #e53841;background-color: #e53841;padding: 15px;border-radius: 0 8px 8px 0;box-shadow: 0px 2px 8px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.22);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1191325 .bx-element-1191325-wKqQsjS
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • About 18.8 million have been fully vaccinated. That's about 5.7% of the US population -- far less than the estimated 70% to 85% of Americans who would need to be immune to reach herd immunity.
  • To speed up vaccinations, some experts have suggested delaying second vaccine doses to get more first doses into people's arms.
  • Both vaccines on the US market -- developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna -- require two doses, the second of which are intended to be administered 21 days and 28 days after the first, respectively.
  • Nationwide, the rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths are declining.The number of patients hospitalized with Covid-19 has fallen for the 40th day in a row, according to the COVID Tracking Project.
  • Fauci hopes that doesn't happen, he said, adding it's "possible" people may be wearing masks in 2022.
  • And daily new cases have dropped 23% over the same time period, according to Johns Hopkins. (But testing is also down by 17%, according to the COVID Tracking Project.)
  • Daily deaths have declined 24% this past week compared to the previous week
  • Experts with the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation said over the weekend that while the B.1.1.7 strain likely accounts for less than 20% of current infections in the US, that number will likely soar to 80% by late April.
  • "Managing the epidemic in the next four months depends critically on scaling up vaccination, trying to increase the fraction of adults willing to be vaccinated above three-quarters, and strongly encouraging continued mask use and avoiding situations where transmission is likely, such as indoor dining, going to bars, or indoor gatherings with individuals outside the household," the team wrote.
  • "With new, more contagious variants of the virus circulating throughout the U.S., now is not the time to let your guard down and scale back on the measures that we know will work to prevent further illness and deaths -- wearing masks, practicing physical distancing, and washing hands," a joint statement said.
  • About 1,700 cases of variant strains first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
  • "I do think we're looking at some new normals. I think the handshake, for example, is probably going away," she said."I do think masks in the cough/cold/flu season in the winter months would make a lot of sense. That clearly, really insulated the Southeast Asian countries from some of the worst of this, understanding the importance of wearing masks."
  • "It's estimated that about 70% of Americans must be vaccinated before we get to herd immunity through vaccination," CNN medical analyst Dr. Leana Wen said. "That's the point where enough people have the immune protection that the virus won't spread anymore."
  • "The evidence was pretty compelling by last March or April that uniform wearing of masks would reduce transmission of this disease," National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins told Axios on HBO on Sunday.
  • "A mask is nothing more than a life-saving medical device, and yet it got categorized in all sorts of other ways that were not factual, not scientific and frankly, dangerous," he added. "And I think you can make a case that tens of thousands of people died as a result."
Emilio Ergueta

Ukraine's president warns army to be ready to repel 'full scale' Russian invasion - Tel... - 0 views

www.telegraph.co.uk/...ll-scale-Russian-invasion.html

ukraine russia war politics history

shared by Emilio Ergueta on 04 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Ukraine’s president has warned his army to be ready to repel a “full scale” Russian invasion, as fears mount of a return to all out warfare in eastern Ukraine.
  • At least 26 people were killed and dozens wounded on Wednesday when Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists fought a fierce battle on the outskirts of the separatist stronghold of Donetsk on Wednesday, in the most serious bout of fighting since a haphazardly observed ceasefire came into force in February.
  • Mr Poroshenko claimed there were already 9,000 Russian troops in separatist-held territory inside Ukraine, and said their was a “colossal threat” that Russian-backed forces would launch large scale operations in the near future. Russia denies deploying troops to east Ukraine.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • ens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretary general, voiced alarm at “increased unpredictability, increased insecurity, increased nervousness,” in the region
  • John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, issued new calls for Minsk to be implemented last month.
  • At least 6,400 people have died in the conflict and hundreds of thousands have been internally displaced or fled abroad as refugees.
Javier E

Andy Grove's Warning to Silicon Valley - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...warning-to-silicon-valley.html

market fundamentalism job silicon valley employment policy economic

shared by Javier E on 26 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Lost in the lore is Mr. Grove’s critique of Silicon Valley in an essay he wrote in 2010 in Bloomberg Businessweek. According to Mr. Grove, Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by failing to propel strong job growth in the United States.
  • Mr. Grove acknowledged that it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But in his view, those lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”
  • Mr. Grove contrasted the start-up phase of a business, when uses for new technologies are identified, with the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototype to mass production. Both are important. But only scale-up is an engine for job growth — and scale-up, in general, no longer occurs in the United States. “Without scaling,” he wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • And yet, an all-out commitment to American-based manufacturing has not been on the business agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, that belief was flawed.
  • The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, he said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable.
  • There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”
  • Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs, many now do so by shifting profits overseas through tax-avoidance maneuvers.
  • The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.”
Javier E

On Grand Strategy (John Lewis Gaddis) - 0 views

DIIGO_FILE_HOME/7ui9/3028833c73b2e927c8f85f94900f2391

grand strategy history decision-making

shared by Javier E on 18 Dec 18 - No Cached
  • minds. Ordinary experience, he pointed out, is filled with “ends equally ultimate . . . , the realization of some of which must inevitably involve the sacrifice of others.” The choices facing us are less often between stark alternatives—good versus evil, for instance—than between good things we can’t have simultaneously. “One can save one’s soul, or one can found or maintain or serve a great and glorious State,” Berlin wrote, “but not always both at once.”
  • We resolve these dilemmas by stretching them over time. We seek certain things now, put off others until later, and regard still others as unattainable. We select what fits where, and then decide which we can achieve when. The process can be difficult: Berlin emphasized the “necessity and agony of choice.” But if such choices were to disappear, he added, so too would “the freedom to choose,” and hence liberty itself.24
  • only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.
  • ...74 more annotations...
  • When Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) asks the president how he can reconcile so noble an aim with such malodorous methods, Lincoln recalls what his youthful years as a surveyor taught him: [A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you’re standing, but it’s got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms
  • chasms that you’ll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what’s the use of knowing true north?
  • The real Lincoln, as far as I know, never said any of this, and the real Berlin, sadly, never got to see Spielberg’s film. But Tony Kushner’s screenplay shows Fitzgerald’s linkage of intelligence, opposing ideas, and the ability to function: Lincoln keeps long-term aspirations and immediate necessities in mind at the same time. It reconciles Berlin’s foxes and hedgehogs with his insistence on the inevitability—and the unpredictability—of choice:
  • Whether we approach reality from the top down or the bottom up, Tolstoy seems to be saying, an infinite number of possibilities exist at an indeterminate number of levels, all simultaneously. Some are predictable, most aren’t, and only dramatization—free from the scholar’s enslavement to theory and archives—can begin to represent them.
  • what is “training,” as Clausewitz understands it? It’s being able to draw upon principles extending across time and space, so that you’ll have a sense of what’s worked before and what hasn’t. You then apply these to the situation at hand: that’s the role of scale. The result is a plan, informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal.
  • I think he’s describing here an ecological sensitivity that equally respects time, space, and scale. Xerxes never had it, despite Artabanus’ efforts. Tolstoy approximated it, if only in a novel. But Lincoln—who lacked an Artabanus and who didn’t live to read War and Peace—seems somehow to have achieved it, by way of a common sense that’s uncommon among great leaders.
  • It’s worth remembering also that Lincoln—and Shakespeare—had a lifetime to become who they were. Young people today don’t, because society so sharply segregates general education, professional training, ascent within an organization, responsibility for it, and then retirement.
  • This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the “intellectual capital” leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they’ll be able to draw on while at the top.37 There’s less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.
  • A gap has opened between the study of history and the construction of theory, both of which are needed if ends are to be aligned with means. Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations
  • Theorists, keen to be seen as social “scientists,” seek “reproducibility” in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability. Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.
  • concrete events in time and space—the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment—this alone contained the truth,
  • Collaboration, in theory, could have secured the sea and the land from all future dangers. That would have required, though, the extension of trust, a quality with strikingly shallow roots in the character of all Greeks.
  • The only solution then is to improvise, but this is not just making it up as you go along. Maybe you’ll stick to the plan, maybe you’ll modify it, maybe you’ll scrap it altogether. Like Lincoln, though, you’ll know your compass heading, whatever the unknowns that lie between you and your destination. You’ll have in your mind a range of options for dealing with these, based—as if from Machiavelli—upon hard-won lessons from those who’ve gone before.
  • The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected.
  • The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can’t know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it. Thucydides’ distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers. Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.
  • Insufficiency demands indirection, and that, Sun Tzu insists, requires maneuver: [W]hen capable, feign incapacity; when active, inactivity. When near, make it appear that you are far; when far away, that you are near. Offer an enemy a bait to lure him; feign disorder and strike him. . . . When he concentrates, prepare against him; where he is strong, avoid him. . . . Pretend inferiority and encourage his arrogance. . . . Keep him under a strain and wear him down. Opposites held in mind simultaneously, thus, are “the strategist’s keys to victory.”
  • it was Pericles who, more than anyone else, unleashed the Peloponnesian War—the unintended result of constructing a culture to support a strategy.
  • By the mid-450s Pericles, who agreed, had finished the walls around Athens and Piraeus, allowing total reliance on the sea in any future war. The new strategy made sense, but it made the Athenians, as Thucydides saw, a different people. Farmers, traditionally, had sustained Athens: their fields and vineyards supplied the city in peacetime, and their bodies filled the ranks of its infantry and cavalry when wars came. Now, though, their properties were expendable and their influence diminished.
  • If Athens were to rely upon the ardor of individuals, then it would have to inspire classes within the city and peoples throughout the empire—even as it retained the cohesiveness of its rival Sparta, still in many ways a small town.
  • Pericles used his “funeral oration,” delivered in Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War’s first year, to explain what he hoped for. The dead had given their lives, he told the mourners, for the universality of Athenian distinctiveness: Athens imitated no one, but was a pattern for everyone. How, though, to reconcile these apparent opposites? Pericles’ solution was to connect scale, space, and time: Athenian culture would appeal to the city, the empire, and the ages.
  • The city had acquired its “friends,” Pericles acknowledged, by granting favors, “in order by continued kindness to keep the recipient in [its] debt; while the debtor [knows] that the return he makes will be a payment, not a free gift.” Nevertheless, the Athenians had provided these benefits “not from calculations of expediency, but in the confidence of liberality.” What he meant was that Athens would make its empire at once more powerful and more reassuring than that of any rival.
  • It could in this way project democracy across cultures because insecure states, fearing worse, would freely align with Athens.22 Self-interest would become comfort and then affinity.
  • The Athenians’ strategy of walling their cities, however, had reshaped their character, obliging them restlessly to roam the world. Because they had changed, they would have to change others—that’s what having an empire means—but how many, to what extent, and by what means? No one, not even Pericles, could easily say.
  • Equality, then, was the loop in Pericles’ logic. He saw both it and empire as admirable, but was slow to sense that encouraging one would diminish the other.
  • Like Lincoln, Pericles looked ahead to the ages. He even left them monuments and sent them messages. But he didn’t leave behind a functional state: it would take well over two millennia for democracy again to become a model with mass appeal.
  • as Thucydides grimly observes, war “brings most men’s character to a level with their fortunes.”
  • “Island” strategies require steady nerves. You have to be able to watch smoke rise on horizons you once controlled without losing your own self-confidence, or shaking that of allies, or strengthening that of adversaries.
  • For the abstractions of strategy and the emotions of strategists can never be separated: they can only be balanced. The weight attached to each, however, will vary with circumstances. And the heat of emotions requires only an instant to melt abstractions drawn from years of cool reflection.
  • if credibility is always in doubt, then capabilities must become infinite or bluffs must become routine. Neither approach is sustainable: that’s why walls exist in the first place.
  • he encouraged his readers to seek “knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.
  • But to know the past only in static terms—as moments frozen in time and space—would be almost as disabling, because we’re the progeny of progressions across time and space that shift from small scales to big ones and back again. We know these through narratives, whether historical or fictional or a combination of both.
  • No one can anticipate everything that might happen. Sensing possibilities, though, is better than having no sense at all of what to expect. Sun Tzu seeks sense—even common sense—by tethering principles, which are few, to practices, which are many.
  • Clausewitz’s concept of training, however, retains its relevance. It’s the best protection we have against strategies getting stupider as they become grander, a recurring problem in peace as well as war. It’s the only way to combine the apparent opposites of planning and improvisation: to teach the common sense that comes from knowing when to be a hedgehog and when a fox.
  • Victories must connect: otherwise they won’t lead anywhere. They can’t be foreseen, though, because they arise from unforeseen opportunities. Maneuvering, thus, requires planning, but also improvisation. Small triumphs in a single arena set up larger ones elsewhere, allowing weaker contenders to become stronger.
  • The actions of man, Kennan concluded, “are governed not so much by what he intellectually believes as by what he vividly realizes.”
  • Nor is it clear, even now, whether Christianity caused Rome’s “fall”—as Gibbon believed—or—as the legacies of Augustus suggest—secured Rome’s institutional immortalities. These opposites have shaped “western” civilization ever since. Not least by giving rise to two truly grand strategies, parallel in their purposes but devised a thousand years apart
  • Augustine shows that reality always falls short of the ideal: one can strive toward it, but never expect to achieve it. Seeking, therefore, is the best man can manage in a fallen world, and what he seeks is his choice. Nevertheless, not all ends are legitimate; not all means are appropriate. Augustine seeks, therefore, to guide choice by respecting choice. He does this through an appeal to reason: one might even say to common sense.
  • A peaceful faith—the only source of justice for Christians—can’t flourish without protection, whether through toleration, as in pre-Constantine Rome, or by formal edict, as afterward.20 The City of God is a fragile structure within the sinful City of Man. It’s this that leads Christians to entrust authority to selected sinners—we call it “politics”—and Augustine, for all his piety, is a political philosopher.
  • Augustine concluded that war, if necessary to save the state, could be a lesser evil than peace—and that the procedural prerequisites for necessity could be stated. Had provocation occurred? Had competent authority exhausted peaceful alternatives? Would the resort to violence be a means chosen, not an end in itself? Was the expenditure of force proportionate to its purposes, so that it wouldn’t destroy what it was meant to defend?
  • No one before Augustine, however, had set standards to be met by states in choosing war. This could be done only within an inclusionary monotheism, for only a God claiming universal authority could judge the souls of earthly rulers. And only Augustine, in his era, spoke so self-confidently for Him. The
  • Augustine’s great uncertainty was the status of souls in the City of Man, for only the fittest could hope to enter the City of God. Pre-Christian deities had rarely made such distinctions: the pagan afterlife was equally grim for heroes, scoundrels, and all in between.25 Not so, though, with the Christian God: behavior in life would make a huge difference in death. It was vital, then, to fight wars within rules. The stakes could hardly be higher.
  • Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.
  • a more revealing distinction may lie in temperament: to borrow from Milan Kundera,37 Machiavelli found “lightness of being” bearable. For Augustine—perhaps because traumatized as a youth by a pear tree—it was unendurable.
  • “I judge that it might be true that fortune is arbiter of half our actions, but also that she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Fifty percent fortune, fifty percent man—but zero percent God. Man is, however precariously, on his own.
  • States, Machiavelli suggests, operate similarly. If governed badly, men’s rapacity will soon overwhelm them, whether through internal rebellion or external war. But if run with virtù—his untranslatable term for planning without praying40—states can constrain, if not in all ways control, the workings of fortune, or chance. The skills needed are those of imitation, adaptation, and approximation.
  • Machiavelli commends the study of history, “for since men almost always walk on paths beaten by others and proceed in their actions by imitation . . . , a prudent man should always enter upon the paths beaten by great men, and imitate those who have been most excellent, so that if his own virtue does not reach that far, it is at least in the odor of it.”
  • What, then, to do? It helped that Machiavelli and Berlin had lightness of being, for their answer is the same: don’t sweat it. Learn to live with the contradictions. Machiavelli shows “no trace of agony,” Berlin points out, and he doesn’t either:
  • Eternal truths have little to do with any of this, beyond the assurance that circumstances will change. Machiavelli knows, as did Augustine, that what makes sense in one situation may not in the next. They differ, though, in that Machiavelli, expecting to go to Hell, doesn’t attempt to resolve such disparities. Augustine, hoping for Heaven, feels personally responsible for them. Despite his afflictions, Machiavelli often sees comedy.42 Despite his privileges, Augustine carries a tragic burden of guilt. Machiavelli sweats, but not all the time. Augustine never stops.
  • “Lightness of being,” then, is the ability, if not to find the good in bad things, then at least to remain afloat among them, perhaps to swim or to sail through them, possibly even to take precautions that can keep you dry. It’s not to locate logic in misfortunes, or to show that they’re for the best because they reflect God’s will.
  • Augustine and Machiavelli agree that wars should be fought—indeed that states should be run—by pre-specifiable procedures. Both know that aspirations aren’t capabilities. Both prefer to connect them through checklists, not commandments.43
  • Augustine admits, which is why good men may have to seek peace by shedding blood. The greater privilege, however, is to avert “that calamity which others are under the necessity of producing.” Machiavelli agrees, but notes that a prince so infrequently has this privilege that if he wishes to remain in power he must “learn to be able not to be good,” and to use this proficiency or not use it “according to necessity.”51 As fits man’s fallen state, Augustine sighs. As befits man, Machiavelli simplifies.
  • As Machiavelli’s finest translator has put it: “[J]ustice is no more reasonable than what a person’s prudence tells him he must acquire for himself, or must submit to, because men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation.”53
  • princes need advisers. The adviser can’t tell the prince what to do, but he can suggest what the prince should know. For Machiavelli this means seeking patterns—across time, space, and status—by shifting perspectives. “[J]ust as those who sketch landscapes place themselves down in the plain to consider the nature of mountains . . . and to consider the nature of low places place themselves high atop mountains,
  • Machiavelli embraces, then, a utilitarian morality: you proportion your actions to your objective, not to progress from one nebulous city to another, but because some things have been shown to work and others haven’t.60
  • Who, then, will oversee them? They’ll do it themselves, Machiavelli replies, by balancing power. First, there’ll be a balance among states, unlike older Roman and Catholic traditions of universality. Machiavelli anticipates the statecraft of Richelieu, Metternich, Bismarck,
  • But Machiavelli understands balancing in a second and subtler sense, conveyed more explicitly in The Discourses than in The Prince: [I]t is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out; and, however much this or that private person may be the loser on this account, there are so many who benefit thereby that the common good can be realized in spite of those few who suffer in consequence.64 This idea of an internal equilibrium within which competition strengthens community wouldn’t appear again until Adam Smith unveiled an “invisible hand” in The Wealth of Nations (1776), until the American Founding Fathers drafted and in The Federalist justified constitutional checks and balances (1787–88), and until Immanuel Kant linked republics, however distantly, with Perpetual Peace (1795).
  • Machiavelli’s great transgression, Berlin concluded, was to confirm what everyone knows but no one will admit: that ideals “cannot be attained.” Statecraft, therefore, can never balance realism against idealism: there are only competing realisms. There is no contest, in governing, between politics and morality: there is only politics. And no state respects Christian teaching on saving souls. The incompatibilities are irreconcilable. To deny this is, in Berlin’s words but in Machiavelli’s mind, to “vacillate, fall between two stools, and end in weakness and failure.”
  • And approximation? “[P]rudent archers,” Machiavelli points out, knowing the strength of their bow, “set their aim much higher than the place intended, not to reach such height with their arrow, but to be able with the aid of so high an aim to achieve their plan.”41 For there will be deflection—certainly from gravity, perhaps from wind, who knows from what else? And the target itself will probably be moving.
  • Augustine’s City of God no longer exists on earth. The City of Man, which survives, has no single path to salvation. “[T]he belief that the correct, objectively valid solution to the question of how men should live can in principle be discovered,” Berlin finds, “is itself in principle not true.” Machiavelli thus split open the rock “upon which Western beliefs and lives had been founded.” It was he “who lit the fatal fuse.”
  • Machiavelli’s blood ran colder than was ordinary: he praised Cesare Borgia, for example, and he refused to condemn torture despite having suffered it (Augustine, never tortured, took a similar position).75 Machiavelli was careful, however, to apportion enormities: they should only forestall greater horrors—violent revolution, defeat in war, descent into anarchy, mass killing, or what we would today call “genocide.”
  • Berlin sees in this an “economy of violence,” by which he means holding a “reserve of force always in the background to keep things going in such a way that the virtues admired by [Machiavelli] and by the classical thinkers to whom he appeals can be protected and allowed to flower.”76 It’s no accident that Berlin uses the plural. For it comes closer than the singular, in English, to Machiavelli’s virtù, implying no single standard by which men must live.
  • “[T]here are many different ends that men may seek and still be fully rational,” Berlin insists, “capable of understanding . . . and deriving light from each other.” Otherwise, civilizations would exist in “impenetrable bubble[s],” incomprehensible to anyone on the outside. “Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs.”
  • Perhaps there are other worlds in which all principles are harmonized, but “it is on earth that we live, and it is here that we must believe and act.”77 By shattering certainty, Machiavelli showed how. “[T]he dilemma has never given men peace since it came to light,” Berlin lightly concludes, “but we have learnt to live with it.”
  • Posterity has long regarded Augustine and Machiavelli as pivots in the history of “western” thought because each, with enduring effects, shifted long-standing relationships between souls and states.
  • Philip promises obedience to God, not his subjects. Elizabeth serves her subjects, fitting God to their interests. The king, looking to Heaven, venerates. The queen, feet on earth, calculates. The differences test the ideas of Augustine and Machiavelli against the demands of statecraft at the dawn of the modern age.
  • Relishing opposites, the queen was constant only in her patriotism, her insistence on keeping ends within means, and her determination—a requirement for pivoting—never to be pinned down.
  • Pivoting requires gyroscopes, and Elizabeth’s were the best of her era. She balanced purposefulness with imagination, guile, humor, timing, and an economy in movement that, however extravagant her display, kept her steady on the tightrope she walked.
  • Machiavelli, thinking gyroscopically, advised his prince to be a lion and a fox, the former to frighten wolves, the latter to detect snares. Elizabeth went him one better by being lion, fox, and female, a combination the crafty Italian might have learned to appreciate. Philip was a grand lion, but he was only a lion.
  • princes can through conscientiousness, Machiavelli warned, become trapped. For a wise ruler “cannot observe faith, nor should he, when such observance turns against him, and the causes that made him promise have been eliminated. . . . Nor does a prince ever lack legitimate causes to color his failure to observe faith.”46
  • What we like to recall as the Elizabethan “golden age” survived only through surveillance and terror: that was another of its contradictions, maintained regretfully with resignation.
  • The queen’s instincts were more humane than those of her predecessors, but too many contemporaries were trying to kill her. “Unlike her sister, Elizabeth never burned men for their faith,” her recent biographer Lisa Hilton has written. “She tortured and hanged them for treason.”60 Toleration, Machiavelli might have said, had turned against Elizabeth. She wanted to be loved—who wouldn’t? It was definitely safer for princes, though, to be feared.
  • “The failure of the Spanish Armada,” Geoffrey Parker has argued, “laid the American continent open to invasion and colonization by northern Europeans, and thus made possible the creation of the United States.” If that’s right, then the future pivoted on a single evening—August 7, 1588—owing to a favorable wind, a clever lord admiral, and a few fiery ships. Had he succeeded, Philip would have required Elizabeth to end all English voyages to America.4
  • In contrast to Spain’s “new world” colonies—and to the territories that France, more recently, had claimed (but barely settled) along the banks of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Ohio and Mississippi rivers—British America “was a society whose political and administrative institutions were more likely to evolve from below than to be imposed from above.”10 That made it a hodgepodge, but also a complex adaptive system.
  • The principles seem at odds—how can supremacies share?—but within that puzzle, the modern historian Robert Tombs has suggested, lay the foundations of England’s post-Stuart political culture: [S]uspicion of Utopias and zealots; trust in common sense and experience; respect for tradition; preference for gradual change; and the view that “compromise” is victory, not betrayal. These things stem from the failure of both royal absolutism and of godly republicanism: costly failures, and fruitful ones.
Javier E

The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-business-climate-change.html

climate change tech

shared by Javier E on 13 Feb 19 - No Cached
  • The scientist and historian Vaclav Smil called Haber-Bosch “the most important technical invention of the 20th century.” Bosch had effectively removed the historical bounds on crop yields, so much so that he was widely credited with making “bread from air.” By some estimates, Bosch’s work made possible the lives of more than two billion human beings over the last 100 years.
  • They depend on electric fans to pull air into the ducts and over a special material, known as a sorbent, laced with granules that chemically bind with CO₂; periodic blasts of heat then release the captured gas from the sorbent, with customized software managing the whole catch-and-release cycle.
  • “The first thing they said was: ‘This will never work technically.’ And finally in 2017 we convinced them it works technically, since we built the big plant in Hinwil. But once we convinced them that it works technically, they would say, ‘Well, it will never work economically.’ ”For the moment, skeptics of Climeworks’s business plan are correct: The company is not turning a profit.
  • ...50 more annotations...
  • it faces the same daunting task that confronted Carl Bosch a century ago: How much can it bring costs down? And how fast can it scale up
  • They believe that over the next seven years they can bring expenses down to a level that would enable them to sell CO₂ into more lucrative markets. Air-captured CO₂ can be combined with hydrogen and then fashioned into any kind of fossil-fuel substitute you want. Instead of making bread from air, you can make fuels from air.
  • What Gebald and Wurzbacher really want to do is to pull vast amounts of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it, forever, deep underground, and sell that service as an offset
  • companies like Climeworks face a quandary: How do you sell something that never existed before, something that may never be cheap, into a market that is not yet real?
  • It’s arguably the case, in fact, that when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions, direct air capture will be seen as an option that’s too expensive and too modest in impact. “The only way that direct air capture becomes meaningful is if we do all the other things we need to do promptly,” Hal Harvey, a California energy analyst who studies climate-friendly technologies and policies, told me
  • In short, the best way to start making progress toward a decarbonized world is not to rev up millions of air capture machines right now. It’s to stop putting CO₂ in the atmosphere in the first place.
  • If the nations of the world were to continue on the current track, it would be impossible to meet the objectives of the 2016 Paris Agreement, which set a goal limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius or, ideally, 1.5 degrees. And it would usher in a world of misery and economic hardship. Already, temperatures in some regions have climbed more than 1 degree Celsius, as a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted last October. These temperature increases have led to an increase in droughts, heat waves, floods and biodiversity losses and make the chaos of 2 or 3 degrees’ additional warming seem inconceivable
  • A further problem is that maintaining today’s emissions path for too long runs the risk of doing irreparable damage to the earth’s ecosystems — causing harm that no amount of technological innovation can make right. “There is no reverse gear for natural systems,” Harvey says. “If they go, they go. If we defrost the tundra, it’s game over.” The same might be said for the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, or our coral reefs. Such resources have an asymmetry in their natural architectures: They can take thousands or millions of years to form, but could reach conditions of catastrophic decline in just a few decades.
  • To have a shot at maintaining a climate suitable for humans, the world’s nations most likely have to reduce CO₂ emissions drastically from the current level — to perhaps 15 billion or 20 billion metric tons per year by 2030; then, through some kind of unprecedented political and industrial effort, we need to bring carbon emissions to zero by around 2050
  • To preserve a livable environment we may also need to extract CO₂ from the atmosphere. As Wurzbacher put it, “if you take all these numbers from the I.P.C.C., you end up with something like eight to 10 billion tons — gigatons — of CO₂ that need to be removed from the air every year, if we are serious about 1.5 or 2 degrees.
  • Through photosynthesis, our forests take extraordinary amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and if we were to magnify efforts to reforest clear-cut areas — or plant new groves, a process known as afforestation — we could absorb billions more metric tons of carbon in future years.
  • we could grow crops specifically to absorb CO₂ and then burn them for power generation, with the intention of capturing the power-plant emissions and pumping them underground, a process known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS
  • Ever since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have produced an excess of CO₂, by taking carbon stores from deep inside the earth — in the form of coal, oil and gas — and from stores aboveground (mostly wood), then putting it into the atmosphere by burning it. It has become imperative to reverse the process — that is, take CO₂ out of the air and either restore it deep inside the earth or contain it within new surface ecosystems.
  • “It’s not about saying, ‘I want to plant a tree.’ It’s about saying, ‘We want to plant a billion trees.’
  • “We have to come to grips with the fact that we waited too long and that we took some options off the table,” Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton scientist who studies climate and policy, told me. As a result, NETs no longer seem to be just interesting ideas; they look like necessities. And as it happens, the Climeworks machines on the rooftop do the work each year of about 36,000 trees.
  • air capture could likewise help counter the impact of several vital industries. “There are process emissions that come from producing iron and steel, cement and glass,” she says, “and any time you make these materials, there’s a chemical reaction that emits CO₂.” Direct air capture could even lessen the impacts of the Haber-Bosch processes for making fertilizer; by some estimates, that industry now accounts for 3 percent of all CO₂ emissions.
  • Wind and solar are now the cheapest forms of energy in the right locations,” Pacala says. “The return on those investments, if you calculated it, would blow the doors off anything in your portfolio. It’s like investing in early Apple. So it’s a spectacular story of success. And direct air capture is precisely the same kind of problem, in which the only barrier is that it’s too costly.”
  • what all the founders have in common is a belief that the cost of capturing a ton of carbon will soon drop sharply.
  • M.I.T.’s Howard Herzog, for instance, an engineer who has spent years looking at the potential for these machines, told me that he thinks the costs will remain between $600 and $1,000 per metric ton
  • He points out that because direct-air-capture machines have to move tremendous amounts of air through a filter or solution to glean a ton of CO₂ — the gas, for all its global impact, makes up only about 0.04 percent of our atmosphere — the process necessitates large expenditures for energy and big equipment. What he has likewise observed, in analyzing similar industries that separate gases, suggests that translating spreadsheet projections for capturing CO₂ into real-world applications will reveal hidden costs. “I think there has been a lot of hype about this, and it’s not going to revolutionize anything,
  • Climeworks’s current goal is to remove 1 percent of the world’s annual CO₂ emissions by the mid 2020s.
  • “Basically, we have a road map — $600, down to $400, down to $300 and $200 a ton,” Wurzbacher said. “This is over the next five years. Down to $200 we know quite well what we’re doing.” And beyond $200, Wurzbacher suggested, things get murkier.
  • To actually capture 1 percent of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025 would, by Gebald’s calculations, require that Climeworks build 250,000 carbon-capture plants like the ones on the roof at Hinwil. That adds up to about 4.5 million carbon collectors
  • The Climeworks founders therefore try to think of their product as the automotive industry might — a piece of mass-produced technology and metal, not the carbon they hope to sequester.
  • “Every CO₂ collector has about the same weight and dimensions of a car — roughly two tons, and roughly 2 meters by 2 meters by 2 meters,” Gebald said. “And all the methods used to produce the CO₂ collectors could be well automated. So we have the automotive industry as a model for how to produce things in large quantities for low cost.
  • n 1954, the economist Paul Samuelson put forward a theory that made a distinction between “private-consumption goods” — bread, cars, houses and the like — and commodities that existed apart from the usual laws of supply and demand.
  • the other type of commodity Samuelson was describing is something now known as a “public good,” which benefits everyone but is not bought, sold or consumed the same way
  • direct air capture’s success would be limited to the size of the market for private goods — soda fizz, greenhouse gas — unless governments decided to intervene and help fund the equivalent of several million (or more) lighthouses.
  • An intervention could take a variety of forms. It could be large grants for research to find better sorbent materials, for instance, which would be similar to government investments that long ago helped nurture the solar- and wind-power industries. But help could also come by expanding regulations that already exist.
  • The Climeworks founders told me they don’t believe their company will succeed on what they call “climate impact” scales unless the world puts significant prices on emissions, in the form of a carbon tax or carbon fee.
  • “Our goal is to make it possible to capture CO₂ from the air for below $100 per ton,” Wurzbacher says. “No one owns a crystal ball, but we think — and we’re quite confident — that by something like 2030 we’ll have a global average price on carbon in the range of $100 to $150 a ton.” There is optimism in this thinking
  • A company that sells a product or uses a process that creates high emissions — an airline, for instance, or a steel maker — could be required to pay carbon-removal companies $100 per metric ton or more to offset their CO₂ output. Or a government might use carbon-tax proceeds to directly pay businesses to collect and bury CO₂.
  • “It doesn’t cost too much to pump CO₂ underground,” Stanford’s Sally Benson says. Companies already sequester about 34 million metric tons of CO₂ in the ground every year, at a number of sites around the world, usually to enhance the oil-drilling process. “The costs range from $2 to $15 per ton. So the bigger cost in all of this is the cost of carbon capture.”
  • The weekend before, Gutknecht told me, he received 900 unsolicited inquiries by email. Many were from potential customers who wanted to know how soon Climeworks could bury their CO₂ emissions, or how much a machine might cost them.
  • A Climeworks app could be installed on my smartphone, he explained. It could then be activated by my handset’s location services. “You fly over here to Europe,” he explained, “and the app tells you that you have just burned 1.7 tons of CO₂. Do you want to remove that? Well, Climeworks can remove it for you. Click here. We’ll charge your credit card.
  • The vast and constant market demand for fuel is why Carbon Engineering has staked its future on synthetics. The world currently burns about 100 million barrels of oil a day.
  • “So let’s say you’d have to supply something like 50 million barrels a day in 2050 of fuels,” he said. “That’s still a monster market.”
  • Carbon Engineering’s chief executive, added that direct-air-capture synthetics have an advantage over traditional fossil fuels: They won’t have to spend a dime on exploration
  • our plants, you can build it right in the middle of California, wherever you have air and water.” He told me that the company’s first large-scale facility should be up and running by 2022, and will turn out at least 500 barrels a day of fuel feedstock — the raw material sent to refineries.
  • Climeworks recently joined a consortium of European countries to produce synthetic methane that will be used by a local trucking fleet. With different tweaks and refinements, the process could be adapted for diesel, gasoline, jet fuel — or it could be piped directly to local neighborhoods as fuel for home furnaces.
  • the new fuels are not necessarily cheaper. Carbon Engineering aspires to deliver its product at an ultimate retail price of about $1 per liter, or $3.75 per gallon. What would make the product competitive are regulations in California that now require fuel sellers to produce fuels of lower “carbon intensity.” To date this has meant blending gas and diesel with biofuels like ethanol, but it could soon mean carbon-capture synthetics too.
  • Since they’re made from airborne CO₂ and hydrogen and could be manufactured just about anywhere, they could rearrange the geopolitical order — tempering the power of a handful of countries that now control natural-gas and oil markets.
  • From an environmental standpoint, air-capture fuels are not a utopian solution. Such fuels are carbon neutral, not carbon negative. They can’t take CO₂ from our industrial past and put it back into the earth
  • Even so, these fuels could present an enormous improvement. Transportation — currently the most significant source of emissions by sector in the United States — could cease to be a net emitter of CO₂
  • “If you can do one carbon-capture facility, where Carbon Engineering or Climeworks can build a big plant, great. You need to do that 5,000 times. And to capture a million tons of CO₂ with direct air capture, you need a small power plant just to run that facility. So if you’re going to build one direct-air-capture facility every day for the next 30 years to get to some of these scenarios, then in addition, we have to build a new mini power plant every day as well.
  • It’s also the case that you have to address two extraordinary problems at the same time, Peters added. “To reach 1.5 degrees, we need to halve emissions every decade,” he said. That would mean persuading entire nations, like China and the United States, to switch from burning coal to using renewables at precisely the same time that we make immense investments in negative-emission technologies.
  • this would need to be done even as governments choose among competing priorities:
  • “The idea of bringing direct air capture up to 10 billion tons by the middle or later part of the century is such a herculean task it would require an industrial scale-up the likes of which the world has never seen,”
  • Pacala wasn’t pessimistic about making a start. He seemed to think it was necessary for the federal government to begin with significant research and investments in the technology — to see how far and fast it could move forward, so that it’s ready as soon as possible
  • Gebald and Wurzbacher seemed to regard the climate challenge in mathematical terms. How many gigatons needed to be removed? How much would it cost per ton? How many Climeworks machines were required? Even if the figures were enormous, even if they appeared impossible, to see the future their way was to redefine the problem, to move away from the narrative of loss, to forget the multiplying stories of dying reefs and threatened coastlines — and to begin to imagine other possibilities.
Javier E

More College Students Seem to Be Majoring in Perfectionism - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...majoring-in-perfectionism.html

students perfectionism anxiety social media psychology culture

shared by Javier E on 20 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • New data from American, Canadian and British college students indicates that perfectionism, especially when influenced by social media, has increased by 33 percent since 1989.
  • Perfectionism is a personality trait or characteristic that is innate in many people. It is nurtured in some environments, notably in families where personal accomplishment, academic or otherwise, is rewarded:
  • “Meritocracy places a strong need for young people to strive, perform and achieve,” he said. They have “increasingly unrealistic educational and professional expectations for themselves.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Parents in my practice say they’re noticing how often their kids come away from Facebook and Instagram feeling depressed, ashamed and anxious, and how vulnerable they are to criticism and judgment, even from strangers, on their social media feeds.
  • Thinking that others in their social network expect a lot of them is even more important to young adults than the expectations of parents and professors.
  • The researchers looked at more than 41,000 students’ responses on the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, which not only measures degrees of perfectionism but also distinguishes among its three aspects: self-oriented, other-oriented and socially prescribed
  • the questions posed by the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale, used in the study, may be informative. Among its 44 items, scaled from 1 (disagree) to 7 (agree), are statements like these: When I am working on something, I can’t relax unless it’s perfect; The people around me expect me to succeed at everything I do; The better I do, the better I am expected to do. The scale is not a clinical instrument, but the questions might be a good starting point for discussion.
  • It’s hard to tell how much social media is affecting your child’s self-image; many feel enormous pressure to be perfect off line, too. And it’s difficult to know what, if anything, parents can do about it, beyond offering empathy, reassurance and emotional support.
urickni

How Cold War anxieties still shape our world today - 0 views

theconversation.com/ll-shape-our-world-today-65612

shared by urickni on 04 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • This was total war on a global scale, producing a new sense among nations that their fates were interconnected.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      How the war shaped global atmosphere...this is relevant today in many ways
  • The sheer scale of the war and the complex administrative and strategic systems required to manage these global operations led to, during the Cold War that followed, a growing interdependency of a network of institutions, attitudes and ways of working.
  • the Cold War redrew geopolitical notions of time, space and scale.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Huge nuclear arsenals made it necessary to consider both the instantaneous and the endless: the decisive moment when mutually assured destruction is potentially set in motion, the frozen stalemate of the superpower stand-off, and the long catastrophe of a post-nuclear future.
  • The power of an individual decision was now outrageously amplified – the finger on the nuclear button – yet, at the same time, radically diminished in the face of unfathomable forces,
  • The world had become too complex and too dangerous
  • During the second half of the 20th century, many fields of enquiry from anthropology, political theory and analytical philosophy to art, music and literature were influenced by the explosion in interdisciplinary thinking that emerged from developments in cybernetics and its relationship with Cold War military research and development.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      How different domains connect to the relevancy of the war and the ways that it is analyzed today.
  • The practice of engaging with the connections and interactions between disparate elements of a problem or entity conceived as a system, and between such systems, is now commonplace in areas such as corporate strategy, town planning and environmental policy.
  • The pervasiveness of a systems approach also influenced the arts.
  • attempts to grasp the complex interconnectedness of society, and often the effects of technology and progress upon it.
  • Systems thinking offered a means of conceptualising and understanding a world that had grown hugely more complex and dangerous.
  • Nuclear weapons demanded radical new ways of thinking about time, scale, power, death, responsibility and, most of all, control – control of technology, people, information and ideas.
  • We are now accustomed to thinking about the current moment in global terms – globalisation, global warming, global communications, global security.
    • urickni
      urickni on 04 Oct 19
       
      Ultimate idea in terms of the ways that the cold war has shaped society and ways of thinking
  • Everyday life is firewalled and password-protected. We move under a canopy of invisible cameras and sensors, where our personal details and likenesses, our associations, preferences and transactions lie waiting to be called upon – by friends, strangers, employers or snoops. And so what? We all do it – we are already conscripted
  • This is a world produced by the Cold War, by the anxieties and energies that found expression in the laboratories, boardrooms, government offices, think-tanks and universities tasked with managing a permanent state of emergency. The geopolitics may be different, but the technology, infrastructure, and worldview that built up and hardened during the Cold War era are still with us, embodied in the everyday devices we take for granted, and the precarious identities they suggest.
  • Normalised surveillance, generalised anxiety, an obsession with security, nationalised identities, pervasive suspicion and secrecy, spectacular military technology and proxy wars, spies, whistleblowers, and the enemy within.
  • Cold War marked the “end of history” – the great ideological struggles were over and Western liberal democracy had won, according to his thesis.
  • The world we are in is, in many ways, the world the Cold War made for us.
  • New technologies of war, such as heavy bombers and long-range missiles like the V-2 rocket, reduced distances of time and space. In recognition of this new state of affairs, in 1942 the
Javier E

How to evaluate and eventually ease coronavirus restrictions - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...onavirus-strategy-economy-plan

restrictions pandemic strategies trump policy response

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • In recent days, epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists, as well as former top agency officials, have rushed to put out their own plans — by publishing preprint papers online and sharing ideas on Twitter and in op-eds
  • a consensus of sorts has begun to coalesce around several key ingredients for an American strategy to move forward while minimizing human and economic casualties. They include mounting a large-scale contact tracing effort, widespread testing, building up health care capacity before easing restrictions, making future quarantines more targeted, and allowing those who have recovered and have some immunity to go back to work.
  • While overall the peak of the epidemic may occur in late April or early May, the timing may be different in different states.
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The plan was published Sunday by the American Enterprise Institute. Its lead author — Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner in the Trump administration
  • “The goal is to outline a plan that will allow a gradual return to a more normal way of life without increasing the risk” that the epidemic will resurge.
  • Most economists and health experts say there is no way to restart the economy without addressing the underlying problem of the coronavirus. As long as the pandemic continues to spread, the markets will be in turmoil and any businesses will struggle to stay open, they say.
  • instead of giving false reassurances and deadlines, the White House should tell people the hard truth about the current situation and a coherent strategy they can work toward. “The social distancing, being stuck at home, the deaths we’re going to be seeing. People want to know what it’s for. That there’s a plan.”
  • the road map Gottlieb’s group outlined stresses the need to move away from the current decentralized system and “toward more coordinated execution of response.”
  • The plan divides coming months into four phases and sets “triggers” for states to move from one phase to the next.
  • The latest proposal is a 19-page plan with a step-by-step timeline, with clear benchmarks states and regions would need to meet to safely move forward to the next step
  • With most of the nation now in phase one of the epidemic, the goal should be a sharp increase in hospital critical care beds and an increase of testing to 750,000 people a week to track the epidemic — a number Gottlieb said could be achieved in the next week or two.
  • For a state to move to phase two, it should see a sustained reduction in new cases for at least 14 days, and its hospitals need to be able to provide care without being overwhelmed.
  • “The reason we set it at 14 days is that’s the incubation period of the virus,” said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “That way you know the downward trend is certain and not because of a holiday or blip or some other delay in reported cases.”
  • States that have moved into phase two would begin gradually lifting social distancing measures and opening schools and businesses, while increasing surveillance.
  • The key goals thereafter would be accelerating the development of new treatments and deploying tests to determine who has recovered from infection with some immunity and could rejoin the workforce.
  • Phase 3 occurs when the nation has a vaccine or drugs to treat covid-19 in place and the government launches mass vaccinations
  • For weeks, World Health Organization officials have stressed such lockdowns are only helpful for slowing down the virus and buying time to deploy more targeted and comprehensive measures, which the U.S. has not yet done.
  • Trump has repeatedly returned to strategies of bans and movement restriction
  • Phase 4 involves rebuilding the nation’s capacity to deal with the next pandemic by building up its scientific and public health infrastructure.
  • Mike Ryan, WHO head of emergency programs, recently urged countries to focus on finding and isolating infected people and their contacts. “It’s not just about physical distancing, it’s not just about locking down,”
  • Many experts’ recent proposals for a U.S. strategy have similar stressed the importance of large-scale contact tracing — because it was a cornerstone for successful efforts like South Korea and Singapore.
  • as countries have shown success with it against this coronavirus, that thinking has changed.
  • such contact tracing is “impractical now in many places but more practical once case numbers have been reduced and testing scaled up” and “could alleviate the need for stringent social distancing to maintain control of the epidemic.”
  • Rapidly building up that capacity — either with community volunteers or short-term hires — will be crucial in coming months, said Rivers of Johns Hopkins. “If you build capacity up and bring cases down, it starts looking a lot more possible.”
  • Many proposals tackle the problem of the tanking economy.
  • Gottlieb-Johns Hopkins plan, for example, calls for widespread use of blood tests to identify people who have had the infection and now are immune — called serology testing
  • People who are immune could return to work, or take on high-risk roles in the health care system and help people, especially the elderly, who are still quarantined at home.
  • Such serology tests have not been deployed before like this on such a large scale
  • during Ebola outbreaks in Africa, survivors were often the ones who provided care, watched over the children of sick patients and buried the dead.
  • One challenge unaddressed by most proposals and op-eds, however, is how to get such detailed plans adopted by the White House, whose response has weighed down by infighting and unclear leadership ping-ponging in recent weeks among Trump, Pence and health advisers like Anthony S. Fauci and Deborah Birx and others.
  • Health officials and scientists involved in the federal response, especially from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have fought to be heard while straining to avoid offending Trump, who bristles at being publicly contradicted, undercut or overshadowed by praise for ideas or people beside himself, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity about sensitive deliberations.
  • On Thursday, Trump unveiled a plan of his own, though scarce in detail. He said he planned to help communities ease their restrictions and reopen for business by using on “robust” surveillance and categorizing counties across America into three “risk levels” — low, medium and high. More details are likely in coming days, White House officials said.
katherineharron

90% of people are biased against women. That's the challenge we face - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 10 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Almost 90% of the world's men, and women, are biased in some way against women, according to the Gender Social Norms Index. Half of men and women feel that men make better political leaders. More than 56% feel that men have more right to a job and/or make better business executives. Read Moreclose dialogGet the strongest, smartest opinion takes of the weekSign up for CNN Opinion’s Provoke/Persuade weekly newsletter.Please enter aboveProvoke/Persuade MeBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy. Thanks For SubscribingContinue Readingclose dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1118904 *//* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1118904 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 38px 40px 30px 40px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 400px;padding: 20px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 737px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 285px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {background-color: #1a1a1a;border-style: none;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 170px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 20px;stroke: rgb(169, 169, 169);}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 100%;padding: 0px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-f4RmyBG {width: 90%;padding: 0px;text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {width: 80px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa {text-align: center;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: absolute;left: 30;top: 20px;width: 80px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-AvMDwAa> *:first-child {position: relative;left: 0;top: -10px;width: 80px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {width: 100%;padding: 20px 0 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX {padding: 0 0 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 28px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 25px;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-width: 1024px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-wb2hGrX> *:first-child {font-size: 30px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {padding: 0px 0px 20px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO {width: auto;padding: 0px 0px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 17px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;color: white;letter-spacing: 0.01em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-HZChuZO> *:first-child {font-size: 13px;padding: 0px 20px ;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 100%;padding: 0px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-group-1118904-AjvDVXy {width: 300px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {padding: 15px;font-size: 12px;font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Verdana,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;border-style: solid;border-color: rgb(220, 220, 220);}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-KUTn3wM .bx-el {font-size: 12px;padding: 12px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1118904 .bx-element-1118904-
  • Around the world, women are equally likely to vote, but only 10% out of 193 heads of government are female, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are overrepresented in low-wage employment, but represent only 21% of employers and 12% of billionaires. They are about equally represented in jobs at S&P Fortune 500 companies, but represent only 5.8% of the total CEOs, the index found.
  • People's reactions to a woman's pregnancy at work is a good example of how much bias still exists. In the United States, as recently as 2011, some employers still fired employees on the spot who had become pregnant, according to a report by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California's Hastings College of the Law. (That's illegal.) More subtly, women announcing a pregnancy may be taken off the partner track or denied raises and bonuses. (Also illegal.) A pregnancy can easily reset the course of a woman's career. Pregnancy discrimination is widespread and difficult to police.
katherineharron

Trump's new strategy on coronavirus is already being undermined by his own actions - CN... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 19 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • It's a stunning reversal President Donald Trump would like Americans to forget.Only days after dismissing the coronavirus threat as a distraction, he's now assumed the title of a resolute war time president fighting an "invisible enemy" while promising to rally the nation behind him in pursuit of "total victory.
  • And it is already being undermined by his own actions. He's casting doubt over whether he will actually implement a move to invoke the Defense Production Act -- that he signed on Wednesday and that gives him authority to order industry to work towards homeland defense and national goals. In this case, it could speed the production of badly needed ventilators, masks and other supplies for hospital workers.
  • Trump's initial decision was welcomed by state governors and representatives for frontline medical workers who fear being exposed to the virus due to shortages of protective equipment.Read Moreclose dialogSign up for CNN's Meanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's Meanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sMeanwhile In America A daily analysis of US politics for global readers. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1109534 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1109534 *//* custom css from creative 46373 */@-ms-keyframes bx-anim-1109534-spin { from { -ms-transform: rotate(0deg); } to { -ms-transform: rotate(360deg); } } @-moz-keyframes bx-anim-1109534-spin { from {
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Only days after dismissing the coronavirus threat as a distraction, he's now assumed the title of a resolute war time president fighting an "invisible enemy" while promising to rally the nation behind him in pursuit of "total victory."
Javier E

Getting Down to Planning the Next Year and the Interim New Normal | Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ear-and-the-interim-new-normal

pandemic strategies response planning

shared by Javier E on 11 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Put simply, we won’t be able to get back to even a semi-normal social and economic life until we have a system in place that will prevent us from rapidly falling right back into a cycle of more outbreaks, lockdowns, deaths in the tens of thousands and economic shocks.
  • We will need a system of mass surveillance testing to give us real time visibility into the current prevalence of the disease and keep numbers low enough to make contact tracing at a vast scale possible.
  • Without this kind of data and early warning system our society will be like a plane flying in a cloud bank with all the instruments on the blink.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • we need to see the course of this crisis in three parts.
  • First is the initial outbreak which we hope we’re getting some handle on. But there won’t be a return to a real normal until there’s a widely available vaccine or very effective treatments for COVID-19
  • in the best case scenario we face what I’ll call Phase Two of the crisis – a lengthy period after the initial outbreak in which the challenge will be to get back to an Interim New Normal until vaccines or treatments come online
  • The third phase will be the arrival of an effective vaccine that can finally in some sense end at least the epidemiological crisis.
  • So Phase One: Initial Outbreak. Phase Two: Sustaining an Interim New Normal. Phase Three: Vaccines and/or robust Treatments arrive and the crisis ends.
  • Another key concept: Testing isn’t all the same. One form of testing is diagnostic, tests you give to a particular person to guide their treatment.
  • The other is surveillance testing, testing to measure and manage the prevalence of the diseas
  • You can’t go back to even a semblance of normal economic and social life until you have an integrated, national system of surveillance testing in place that will give us a good shot at avoiding a rolling series of outbreaks and lockdowns for another year.
  • A great system in one state and a crappy one next door won’t cut it.
  • some building blocks are clear. The first is building a robust and vast system of testing across the country, both testing for infection and testing for antibodies
  • You also need a system of data collection and analysis that allows all those tests to be analyzed to granularly measure the prevalence and possible spread of the disease, both nationally and on the local level
  • You also need to keep the scale of infection low enough that contact tracing of new infections is at all possible.
  • Conventional contact tracing alone with armies of disease detectives probably isn’t up to the challenge, at least not on its own. That is why there’s already extensive discussions of using big data and geolocation tracking on cell phones to do some of this work at scale
  • A lot of that discussion has focused on taking something China did with mobile applications and adapting it to our social mores and laws. Put simply, you download an app. You say you’re healthy. If you get sick and test positive you tell the app. The app has recorded your movements over the last two weeks and a lot of other peoples. Once I test positive, the people who’ve been in close proximity to me get alerted and told they should get tested.
  • This is a very blunt instrument version of contact tracing. But unlike conventional contact tracing which operates with disease detectives, phone calls and interviews it can potentially be done at scale and almost instantaneously.
  • Ezra Klein published a look at a number of the proposed plans for this Phase Two/Interim New Normal and he found all of them almost totally unworkable. They all involve levels of technical capacity, privacy intrusion and political will that seem almost fantastical
  • we’ll either do one of these plans or all stay in our houses for a year or engage in the truly fantastical approach of going about life as usual while hundreds of thousands of Americans are dying and our national health care system collapsing around us.
  • The reality is that we’ll likely get some mix of all three. But knowing the alternatives helps focus our attention not on the seeming impossibility of these strategies but the fact that we need to get down to the business of planning and implementing them.
  • Phase Two is much more complicated. It is what everyone involved in any sort of public policy needs to be focusing on right now. Unfortunately the federal government has shown very, very little ability to mount any kind of coherent, national response.
  • And the President is focused on finding a date and calling an all clear as soon as possible.
katherineharron

Barack Obama calls for stricter gun laws following Colorado shooting to prevent more 'r... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

obama

shared by katherineharron on 23 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday called for stricter gun laws following the mass shooting in Colorado, bemoaning what he called a national tolerance for "these kinds of random, senseless acts."
  • they "are also feeling a deep, familiar outrage" for these types of tragedies.
  • "It is long past time for those with the power to fight this epidemic of gun violence to do so. It will take time to root out the disaffection, racism and misogyny that fuels so many of these senseless acts of violence," Obama said. "But we can make it harder for those with hate in their hearts to buy weapons of war."
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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.
aidenborst

Wall Street Journal: Trump pressured Georgia investigator to find 'the right answer' in... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics US Trump history Culture gop Biden election election-overview post-election

shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In a phone call to the Georgia secretary of state's office in December, then-President Donald Trump urged a top investigator to find fraud in the 2020 presidential election, telling her that she would be "praised" for overturning results that were in favor of Joe Biden, according to newly reported audio of the call obtained by The Wall Street Journal.
  • "When the right answer comes out, you'll be praised," Trump tells Frances Watson, the chief investigator at the Georgia secretary of state's office, in a six-minute conversation on December 23, according to the Journal.
  • "I won everything but Georgia. And I won Georgia, I know that. By a lot. And the people know it. And something happened there. Something bad happened," Trump reportedly told Watson during the phone call.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • At the time, Watson was investigating the secretary of state's office and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's audit of more than 15,000 signatures in Cobb County, outside Atlanta. Results of the audit found no evidence of fraudulent mail-in ballots and Biden was declared winner of Georgia in the election.close dialogSign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.Sign up for CNN's CNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. Please enter above Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing, you agree to ourprivacy policy.You're on the list for CNN'sCNN's Chris Cillizza cuts through the political spin and tells you what you need to know. close dialog/* effects for .bx-campai
  • "I hope you are going back two years as opposed to checking one against the other," Trump can be heard saying on the call. "Because that would just be a signature check that didn't mean anything."
  • "But if you go back two years, and if you can get to Fulton, you are going to find things that are going to be unbelievable," the then-President said. "The dishonesty that we've heard from. But Fulton is the mother lode."
  • Investigators in both probes are interested in Trump's call to Watson, according to sources familiar with the probes.
  • One is the January phone call where Trump pushed Raffensperger to "find" votes to overturn the election results after his loss to Biden. The other involves the call Trump made on December 23 to Watson.
  • "If Mr. Raffensperger didn't want to receive calls about the election, he shouldn't have run for secretary of state," Miller said in the statement.
kaylynfreeman

Meghan and Harry interview: Prince William says royals are 'very much not a racist fami... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Politics

shared by kaylynfreeman on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • London (CNN)Prince William has denied the royal family is racist in his first public remarks since his brother Prince Harry, and his wife Meghan, made explosive claims in a TV interview.
  • Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, made a series of damning accusations against the royal family in an interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired in the UK on Monday night.
  • In the interview, Meghan said that the skin tone of the couple's child, Archie, was discussed as a potential issue before he was born. The couple would not reveal who had made the remarks, but said it wasn't Queen Elizabeth II or her husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. close dialogDo you want the news summarized each morning?We've got you.Please enter aboveSign me upBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success!See you in your inbox.close dialog/* effects for .bx-campaign-1271788 *//* custom css .bx-campaign-1271788 *//* custom css from creative 53617 */.bx-custom.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-row-input.bx-row-validation .bx-vtext { font-size: 11px; color: #ee2924;}@keyframes bx-anim-1271788-spin { 100% { transform: rotate(360deg); }}/* rendered styles .bx-campaign-1271788 */.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative:before {min-height: 185px;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative {border-color: #c1c1c1;border-style: solid;background-size: contain;background-color: white;border-width: 1px 0;border-radius: 0;}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 780px;padding: 10px;vertical-align: middle;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-creative> *:first-child {width: 340px;padding: 15px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {stroke: rgb(193, 193, 193);stroke-width: 2px;width: 24px;height: 24px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788.bx-active-step-1 .bx-close {width: 30px;height: 30px;padding: 0 0 10px 10px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-PGhroUO {width: 135px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-PGhroUO {text-align: center;display: none;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-LHjAYNs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-LHjAYNs {width: 45px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-eWRqNk4 {width: 505px;padding: 2px 0 0 25px;text-align: left;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-eWRqNk4 {width: 100%;padding: 5px 0 0;text-align: left;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs {width: 100%;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 21px;color: #282828;line-height: 1em;letter-spacing: -.015em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Sk3p2Hs> *:first-child {font-size: 22px;min-width: auto;padding: 0;line-height: 1.1m;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 100%;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 100%;}}@media all and (min-width: 1025px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY {width: 500px;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY> *:first-child {font-family: CNN,Helvetica Neue,Helvetica,Arial,Utkal,sans-serif;font-weight: 400;font-size: 21px;padding: 6px 0 0;color: #ee2924;line-height: 1.1em;letter-spacing: -.015em;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-element-1271788-Gs3ScAY> *:first-child {font-size: 18px;padding: 8px 0 0;}}.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-kw4VbV5 {width: 640px;padding: 10px 0 0;min-width: 550px;}@media all and (max-width: 736px) {.bxc.bx-campaign-1271788 .bx-group-1271788-kw4VbV5 {min-width: auto;width: 100%;padding: 10px 0 0;}}@media all and (min-width: 737px) and (max-wi
katherineharron

Cuomo, Newsom and Trump's early pandemic praise vanished - CNNPolitics - 0 views

edition.cnn.com/...index.html

covid

shared by katherineharron on 13 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Nearly a year ago, New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that all nonessential workers in the state would have to stay home. The announcement was one of many that marked the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • But, just as history has shown us time and time again, a year turned out to be a lifetime in their political careers
  • Cuomo, Newsom and Trump all experienced classic examples of a rally-around-the-flag event. When a crisis hits, constituents give their leading politicians bumps in the polls. These bumps rarely ever last -- a lesson all three of these politicians have now learned. Cuomo was probably seen as the biggest hero of the early days of the pandemic. He gave daily news conferences that became must-see television for many. He even wrote a book about leadership.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Cuomo's favorable rating jumped to 77%. Just two months earlier, his favorable rating had been 44% -- a paltry figure for a Democrat from a blue state. close dialogThe world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Sign Me UpNo ThanksBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.The world is watching as the Biden administration takes office.Get updates on US politics delivered to your inbox daily. Please enter aboveSign Me UpBy subscribing you agree to ourprivacy policy.Success! See you in your inbox.</
  • California was one of the earliest states hit in the pandemic, and most voters applauded Newsom's response. His approval rating among likely voters in Public Policy Institute of California polling topped out at 64% in May 2020. That was up from 52% in February 2020 and 49% in January 2020. Newsom, though, has been criticized for how he handled lockdowns and business and school reopenings during the last year
  • His favorable rating is down to 44% and a mere 36% of voters want him to run for reelection, according to a March Quinnipiac University poll. The one piece of good news for Cuomo is that most Democrats (60%) have a favorable view of the governor, a slim majority (50%) want him to run again in 2022 and just 21% want him to resign.
  • More prominently, Cuomo is dealing with multiple allegations of inappropriate behavior toward women. The attorney general's office is investigating the claims, and the state Assembly speaker has allowed an impeachment investigation to begin. Many state and federal officials are calling on Cuomo to resign.
  • Still, the fact that Newsom is facing a recall and that his approval rating is averaging only about 50% right now is not a great position for a Democrat in California. Of course, both Cuomo and Newsom are in better political shape than Trump. While Trump ended up losing the election, at least in part to his response to the pandemic, voters actually had rallied around him early.
  • By the summer, Trump's overall approval rating dropped into the low 40s. He consistently low on who would better handle the pandemic compared with Democrat Joe Biden, who's now president. Indeed, Trump may very well have won the election without the pandemic. His approval rating on the economy was better than that of any of the incumbents who had lost in the last 45 years before him.
katherineharron

Russia-Ukraine: US considering sending warships to Black Sea amid tensions - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

russia

shared by katherineharron on 12 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • The United States is considering sending warships into the Black Sea in the next few weeks in a show of support for Ukraine amid Russia's increased military presence on Ukraine's eastern border
  • The US Navy routinely operates in the Black Sea, but a deployment of warships now would send a specific message to Moscow
  • The US is required to give 14 days notice of its intention to enter the Black Sea under a 1936 treaty giving Turkey control of the straits to enter the sea.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • On Wednesday, two US B-1 bombers conducted missions over the Aegean Sea.Read More
  • Although the US does not see the amassing of Russian forces as posturing for an offensive action, the official told CNN that "if something changes we will be ready to respond."
  • On Thursday White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Russia's actions are "deeply concerning."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.//assets.bounceexchange.com/assets/uploads/clients/340/creatives/ac22162ccde0493f3e08745fedbf
  • The Biden administration and the international community have expressed concerns about mounting tensions between Ukraine and Russia
  • "The United States is increasingly concerned by recently escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including Russia's movements on Ukraine's border. Russia now has more troops on the border of Ukraine than any time since 2014. Five Ukrainian soldiers have been killed this week alone. These are all deeply concerning signs," Psaki said.
  • "We are concerned by recent escalating Russian aggressions in eastern Ukraine, including the credible reports that have been emanating about Russian troop movements on Ukraine's borders and occupied Crimea," State Department spokesperson Ned Price said this week.
  • Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said this week that it was important "for all sides to comply with the Minsk Agreement" and "for the territorial integrity and the sovereignty of Ukraine to be respected by Russia."
1 - 20 of 817 Next › Last »
Showing 20▼ items per page